The Old Ones

The forgotten progenitors

Despite what the Eternal Empire wants you to believe, it was not the first civilisation on this world. In fact, none of the current kingdoms and nations can honestly claim that title.
The truth is that eons ago, long before the current mortals walked this earth, there was a civilisation that spanned the globe. They had blended magic and technology into an art form, had learned how to fuse souls into items to create a permanent form of magic. They looked into the cosmos, the past, the future, even into other realms. Then one day, they simply disappeared and took nearly everything in their civilisation with them.
Who or even what they were, none alive can say. They may not even have been human. The little they left behind was only recently discovered deep beneath the earth, locked away in great cellars and dungeons. No one knows the original purposes of these locked away vaults, but to the modern peoples they are treasure troves of knowledge, tools and weapons.
From what scholars and mages can tell, the Old Ones were masters of the soul, and perfected the technique of fusing part (or all) of a soul into an object, thereby allowing it to keep a single spell powered for as long as necessary. By reverse-enineering this process, the mages of the Dominion unlocked the creation process of our modern enchanted (or magical) items. Without he knowledge gained from the Old Ones, we would never have been able to achieve this, but it is still not their greatest gift to us.
The Old Ones discovered, just as we quickly did, that pouring your whole soul into an item is a mistake you can never undo. If you put everything of yourself into an item, that is precisely what happens. Everything that is you goes into the object, your soul, your conscioussness and your mind. At first this might not seem too bad, after all, a talking sword has its uses, but as so many found out, that isn't quite what happens. Without ears, you cannot hear. Without eyes you cannot see. Put yourself into something ill-equipped to hold it and the only sense you will have is the sense of the soul: you will feel the living around you, but nothing else.
It is an eternal torment, but the Old Ones found wisdom in even this, and some sages speculate that this is also how they found their end. Rather than try and avoid entombing themselves in inanimate objects, they put their civilisation to the singular purpose of creating immortal mechanical bodies for themselves. We do not know how long it took them, but in the end, they completed their ultimate task. They had their immortal bodies and, from the little we know of them, they disappeared soon after.
Some of their automatons still remain in their great vaults, and from these we have found ways to take them apart and use their parts as enchanted prosthetics for those that have lost limbs. The most intelligent men in the world have put their minds to unlocking exactly how to create such automatons, but none have yet succeeded. The closest we have come to the Old Ones are the few fools who have poured their souls into the machines and become automatons themselves.

The Sole Survivor

To most in the world, the Old Ones have gone entirely from this world, leaving behind only their vaults with their strange tools and weapons. And this is true for every single Old One bar one, if you could call it just one.
More than a century ago, the Crimson Wight found an intact automaton head that somehow still had a soul within it. This soul called itself Vyshid and claimed to have been left behind when the Old Ones left this earth. He would never speak directly of the Old Ones or their secrets (no matter what the Crimson Wight threatened to do to him), but he had a vast amount of knowledge about the world throughout the eons that he has shared with the Crimson Wight. The sole survivor of the Old Ones now hang on the belt of the Crimson Wight, telling him the secrets of the world.