Following is the prologue to "World of Kos," the final volume in Skirmisher Publishing LLC's nearly-completed Swords of Kos Fantasy Campaign Setting. It is illustrated with a beautiful image by artist Bob Greyvenstein that will appear on the cover of the volume and possibly the overall sourcebook. This opening piece provides a background for the world of which Kos is part and introduces some of the iconic characters that appear in the fiction, adventures, places, and events associated with the milieu. 

Following is the prologue to "World of Kos," the final volume in the nearly-completed Swords of Kos Fantasy Campaign Setting. It is illustrated with a beautiful image by artist Bob Greyvenstein that will appear on the cover of the volume and possibly the overall sourcebook. This opening piece provides a background for the world of which Kos is part and introduces some of the iconic characters that appear in the fiction, adventures, places, and events associated with the milieu. 

Shovelless stepped up to the top of the ridge and, as he did, the expanse of the eastern Aegean opened up before him. Scattered across the broad surface of wine-dark sea he could see a number of other islands rising up out of the haze and two or three distant sails moving through the waters around Kos, the island he stood upon. From the bluff upon which he was situated the sharp-eyed ranger could see the far horizon more than ten leagues to the west. Another twenty leagues beyond that lay what remained of Thera, onetime center of the world, which had blown itself to pieces a century before. 

Shovelless knew that had he been standing on this spot when that cataclysm occurred he would have seen a massive plume of smoke, perhaps the largest anyone had ever seen, miles wide and stretching all the way up into the heavens. He also knew that he likely would have died soon afterward. 

Moving to the very edge of the promontory, Shovelless peered down toward where the sea smashed against the rocks below and could see the smooth, glazed, multicolored face of the cliff and the innumerable bubbles and spiderwork of fine fractures that marked its surface. At the near edge of the glassy crust, where it was evident that it adhered to an underlying limestone face, the Half-Elf could see spots where people had broken off chunks of it as souvenirs or charms. 

This was the Aegis, the great bulwark that had protected the island of Kos from the disaster that obliterated every other coastal community in the Aegean when the Gods and Titans had battled each other around Kalyste, the island long known as “Most Beautiful.” When the Titanomachia had ended, the shattered remnant of the island was renamed “Fear” by the awestruck people who beheld it and known thereafter as Thera. So powerful had been the divine and profane forces that clashed over the island that much of it had literally been vaporized and driven out in a great cloud of gasified rock, obliterating almost everything it touched for well over a hundred miles in every direction. People who came to the cliff at the western end of Kos to watch the distant column of black smoke would have first seen a red glow along the horizon and, within seconds, it would have solidified into a thin crimson line. That line would have widened steadily, turning into a ribbon, and then a runner, and finally into a great rolling, crimson sheet that flickered with internal light like some living elemental thing.

By the time anyone who saw that much felt the heat of the pyroclastic cloud hurtling toward them, even if they had the forethought to begin moving away from the seacoast it would have been too late. Right afterward, the increasingly hot air would have become difficult to breath and, seconds later, incapacitating; those who tried to crawl away would have felt their eyes boil and then explode and their lungs bake just before they died. And when the cloud struck it would have incinerated them, flesh and bone alike, and then scattered their ashes to the four winds.

But the great mountainous headland that projected from the western end of Kos had served as a great shield and saved the rest of the island from the conflagration that had consumed a thousand other villages, towns, and cities. Every living thing on the seaward side of the broad peninsula had been exterminated, horrific fires had been ignited and then raged through its forests of live oak and groves of oranges, almonds, and olives, and the age-old village of Kefalos had been obliterated along with all the souls who dwelled within it. The high seaside cliffs and the peak that rose up behind them, however, had absorbed the brunt of the superheated blast, and when they did the rock, sand, and other minerals they contained had melted into a bubbling liquid mass and then eventually coalesced into the massive glass face that was now known as the Aegis. Some people actually believed it to be the earthly incarnation of lady Athena’s great shield, which was its namesake.

The centuries leading up to the disaster had been an age of trade and progress and Greek-speaking peoples had commercially dominated the Mediterranean, established outposts in every corner of the known world, and plied sea and sky alike with great vessels. The ancient races and monsters had receded into the shadows of both the world and peoples’ consciousness and progressively become the stuff of just myth and legend, little believed in or feared anymore. But the Great Cataclysm had shaken the planet to its core and tilted it on its axis in every sense and, when it did, beings only vaguely remembered by humanity were awakened from their ancient slumbers and driven out of their remote forests, trackless mountains, and hidden subterranean realms. Magic was reinvigorated and once again surpassed technology in potency and, while some believed that the Gods themselves had been destroyed, their divine power had certainly once again been scattered across the earth.

In the wake of the apocalypse, barbaric folk from the edges of the civilized world, hordes of folk from the hidden races, and all manner of fell beast swarmed into the void that had been created and overran communities that survived but were left fatally weakened. Kos had suffered from famine, plague, invasion, and every other calamity and its inhabitants had suffered immeasurably. But it had survived and, with the blessings of the gods and the benefits it enjoyed as a fertile island, recovered and prospered faster and more than most. Fifty years after Thera had died and taken much of the world with it, Kos had become one of the most prosperous nations in the region and a bastion against the forces that would threaten it.

Shovelless had spent almost the entirety of his life learning to battle those forces — the ones, at least, that had menaced the land around his village, among them giant vermin, Goblinoid raiders from the mainland, and even the walking dead — and was said to have been born to do so. His mother loved to tell the story of how a yard-long centipede had gotten into his room one night when he was an infant and coiled around him but how, by the time she and her horrified husband discovered this, he had already crushed the monster’s head with his tiny hands. Shovelless did not really believe the story, although his mother swore it was true, and suspected that the monster would have poisoned and killed him had his parents not arrived when they did and slain it themselves.

His father had been an Elf, one of the ancient folk who had returned to the world at large, and had helped to rebuild sundered Kefalos, and there he had met and married the Human woman who had become Shovelless’s mother. Shovelless could still remember him, before the fearless monster hunter went off on his final fatal quest, and carried with him the first few training sessions they had shared together. And, in the leather bracer he wore on his sword arm, he oddly felt he retained some of the father who had symbolically bound it to his infant arm so many years before.

Shovelless turned from the seascape and moved back toward the trail that led down toward the village where he had spent the entirety of his life. A few dozen shrines and memorials, ranging in size from obelisks not much larger than a man to small columned temples, were clustered around the inner slope of the hill. Some had been erected by inland communities that had been saved by the Aegis, others were consecrated to the various great Olympians in their guises as preservers, and one was even dedicated by a particularly strange cult to Medusa herself, whose visage they believed gave the Aegis its power. He stopped at the shrine devoted to Herakles, patron of monster hunters, and uttered a brief prayer as he poured out an offering of wine from the flask in his haversack.

When Shovelless reached the fork in the path that led down the hill, his friends Zoltar the wizard, Loleda the rogue, and Kord the priest were waiting for him. Each of them rubbed the primitive herm that marked the spot for luck and then turned toward the great city, some two days walk to the northeast, that shared with the island the name of Kos. There they would continue to hone their skills, seek adventures in which to use them, and fulfill their destiny — whatever it ultimately might be.