Twelve year old Sheena hid in the dark, damp corner of the smithy's basement. She hugged her younger brother Talon protectively close to her. They could hear the voices of the warriors coming down the stairs.
The pair trembled as the door opened. A glowing curved rod with three tines on the end was pushed through the door, a dwarfish warrior following it. The tine closest to Sheena pulsed a sickly red color. The warrior turned toward Sheena and Talon. Sheena briefly considered shifting into her wolf form, but knew that would do them little good. She could hear at least a dozen others up the stairs. Then the warrior spotted the two of them cowering in the corner in the dim light.
"Here they are!" the dwarf shouted in his strange accent. Sheena worried for her brother; she worried for her mother; she worried briefly that her kin would not survive the week. But she did not worry for long, as two more dwarfs came in the room and deftly sent crossbow bolts through both her heart and her brother's.
For nearly 80 years
shifters throughout the world were hunted and killed. The purge was lead by the xenophobic
Ujajoxoro and their charismatic leader
Devon Brightstone. They drove the masses into a fearful frenzy. In the end, very few of the shifters were left alive and the remainder of the world's populations remained terrified that the shifters would rise again and silently take over their governments.
The Conflict
Prelude
In 475 CT, members of the Ujajoxoro clan of dwarfs were discovered to be shifters. The Ujajoxoro were (and still are) the most xenophobic of all dwarfs. They are tasked with protecting the secrets of mining and forging fonujajo and are very zealous in those protections. They immediately executed those shifters found among them.
When rumors of the shifters started to emerge among the Ujajoxoro, they had just begun to experiment with the potential of fire-steel. During a course of experiments, it was discovered that fire-steel could be imbued with basic detection magic to detect magical elements. When a detection was turned toward one of the research assistants, it indicated the presence of magic. That assistant was later revealed to be a shifter. The research team quickly adjusted the enchantments on a forged piece of fonujajo and fine-tuned it to only reveal shifters. The physical design was adjusted, through many trials, to enhance the guidance of the magic. Eventually devices were able to detect the general presence of a shifter within a 20 ft radius, as well as provide a means to triangulate the location of the shifter.
The research assistant who had triggered the change in direction was rewarded for their contributions by being forced to witness the execution of dozens of their fellow shifters.
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