Thassilion

Thassilion was an empire of staggering antiquity whose shadow falls across Varisia in the most literal sense — its monuments still stand, its ruins still whisper, and the ground beneath every city and road in the region is threaded through with the remnants of a civilisation so powerful that what it left behind after thousands of years of decay still surpasses most of what the current age has managed to build. It was a human empire, ruled by powerful wizard-kings called Runelords, each governing a domain defined by and devoted to one of the seven virtues of rule.
The details of Thassilion's history, its practices and the specific nature of what its Runelords were doing in the years before the empire's fall are subjects that scholars in the current age approach with a mixture of fascination and careful unease. The ruins they left behind are enormous, their magic was of a sophistication that modern practitioners study with humility, and the questions those ruins raise about what was being attempted and why tend to produce answers that range from the merely troubling to the genuinely alarming. Varisia sits on top of Thassilion's bones and has been doing so long enough that most of its residents have made a comfortable peace with that fact, which does not make the bones any less present or any less worth being careful around.