"War has always been a part of Granate. The world was founded on war and will probably end in it too.

To some, it is liberation, revolution, power. To most, it's starvation, desperation, grief. And if you were from the Old Carmesi, it was just another business day.

Carmesi, or Old Carmesi, as it is known now, is a small territory at the center of its continent. Since ancient times it had two curious characteristics: It is located at a specially big and active opening to the Carcass, and it is surrounded by a bunch of warring countries. At that time, its people were composed of a group of tribes known as Eerilumea, or Lumea's grave keepers, in their old language.

The Eerilumea were quiet and melancholic people, but they took great pleasure in fighting. Their skin was light red, and they carved markings with Great Hriths bile, which glowed red when they used the power in their blood. They had to be strong enough to fight the monsters that came out and the armies that sought to take their land. The unfertile land also meant that they had to survive with the products that came out of the labyrinth, so they also had to be creative and smart.

This situation meant that they also had to be one of the leading forces in creating new ways to kill people and things. They came up with the first techniques to use the divine core, the center of the power of the gods inside every creature, to creature weapons. They were simple at first, but it soon became an art in which they were unrivaled. The legends tell that their greatest artisans made arrows that could pierce castles and swords that could burn villages with a swing.

But this was also their undoing. The Eerilumea techniques showed the world the power of the divine cores and the resources harvested from the Carcass. Their low number was enough to win minor battles, but not a full scale war against their neighbors. In a single year, one after the other, 5 armies came to attack Old Carmesi. The Eerilumea, defeated, vanished inside the Carcass, never to be seen again.

 For 150 years the wars over Carmesi continued, changing owners countless times. The modern Carmesians barely have allegiance to any king. The population is made of people who, after fighting so much for this piece of land, curiously, live in a very similar way to the Eerilumeans, killing people and things, as mercenaries of war or harvesters of cores of monsters around and inside the Carcass.

The most famous of them are the mercenary-mages families of Carmesi, families who developed their own casting techniques in secret. 

Among those families, the greatest of the were the Syngenia of Blood Hill. Their motto, "Blood in power, Power in blood" was more than a simple phrase. Their casting technique was famously based on it, being able to use the blood spilled on the battlefield against their enemies.

As most readers will know, to cast is to act as a god, for lack of a better word, imposing a certain visualization inside a set territory. But even "gods" have limits. Certain things have to bend reality too much and will require an exponential amount of energy from one's own core. A caster that merely wants to burn a tree will find it much easier than one that tries to make the same tree play chess. It is possible, but it would take such an unreasonable amount of energy that you might as well dress someone in a tree costume. That is to say, things that go against the law of nature are much harder to do (and some things are so hard that even gods supposedly failed to do, like resurrecting Lumea (or anything, by that matter)).

The terrifying thing in the Syngenia's techniques was its simplicity. A Syngenia caster expanded their territory by using the power contained in the blood of fallen soldiers. A tendril of the caster's blood was sent through the battlefield's floor, mixing with all sorts of dead and dying soldiers and taking away their power (which we still don't know how they did). After gathering enough blood, their territory would expand so much that they were able to raise whole armies to the ground with a single cast. 

Their influence became so big that they transferred a whole biome from under the Carcass, the Blood forest, to their home grounds at Blood Hill, in which they were almost invincible.

Ultimately, their power was their downfall. They got too powerful to be considered simple mercenaries. Legend says one of their sons betrayed the house and lured the casters outside of the Hill. The Syngenia were unmatched on a battlefield, but not so much when they had no access to blood or soldiers to protect them at close quarters. In the end, they were slaughtered by the House of Iron, a rival mercenary-mage family."

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