(3x19) Rising of the Darklight: Part 1, Episode 1
Ages after the Great War, the Human conquest of the West, a child of unique heritage, named Murdock, is raised by the Elven royal family as one of their own children, though in truth he is a bastard child of the Elven queen and an absent human father, reckoned a "wizard" as half-elves are known among humans, though he has always been different from the other wizards, far less elven both physically and mentally. His unusually unruly human passions have been quelled his entire childhood by the power of the Gem of Ice, still borne by the Elven King since the Great War, until he reaches adulthood and is released from its sway so as to freely choose his own fate. He chooses to venture out into the Human world, to the homeland of his father, in Esplanadia, in search of his heritage.
There in Esplanadia he finds ongoing turmoil among the feudal states of the East, accelerating as they undergo the midst of an industrial revolution, inventing weapons of destruction that seem oddly familiar to Murdock, as if from a dream. He learns that the Chalman empire, which once united all of humanity in the Great War against the Orcs, has long since fractured after the Gem of Fire, which the Chalman prince used to inspire and intimidate his subordinates, was lost at the climax of the Great War. Those subordinates in the East almost immediately rebelled and turned back to their own national interests, and thus the East fractured back into, more or less, what it had been before the war, with nations like Esplanadia becoming independent again. But the commanders of their united armies in the West, now ruling over the conquered Orcish lands, were hesitant to so quickly abandon the unified army that still held the Orcs in thrall, and so when their support from their homelands was withdrawn, they turned to each other and the Orcish labor at their command to build a new empire greater than any of their original homelands.
So while Orcs remain the slaves of Humanity, they have grown rarer in the East over time, while the West retains prodigious numbers of them. The Western empire has since grown idle and inattentive to matters outside its borders, turning inward toward building itself up on the backs of Orcish slave labor. Meanwhile in the East, the feudal states into which it has again fractured remain only loosely affiliated to each other through a shared allegiance to an organization called the Church of the Eldest. The Church was founded by a human, John, a veteran of the war, in honor of the "Eldest Wizard" Thomas, a wizard claimed to be older than even the Elves, who died during the war in service of a god more ancient than even the goddesses Fire and Ice, the very Sun and Moon themselves, a god remembered as the Eldest.