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Prelude

For thousands of years, humankind has been led by great men, terrible men, mediocre men, and all those that lay in between whose names we'll never know. For those thousands of years, the species that would come to dominate the planet was also growing more united, more interconnected, the simple forces of luck, skill and the passage of accumulated knowledge being the driving forces behind this march towards the centralization of a species, those great, aforementioned leaders slowly being moulded from simple chieftains to powerful proto-monarchs. Slowly, slowly; the march of time continued unabated and soon small settlements, based off of farming and agriculture began to spring up across the planet as cities began to form (more commonly among the banks of rivers and streams than any other place on Earth). Here, we saw the first states rise, under the first 'modern' iterations of what would come to be called 'kings'; the great men of history finally beginning to leave their names in stone as places such as the banks of the Yangtze, Tigris, Indus and Euphrates began to support greater and greater civilizations.

In one such civilization (that of the Sumerians), on no particular day, something changed, something the likes the world would never recover from. In one of the small cities that had for hundreds of years seen growth (as men settled in or near it), in one house that had seen a number of generations pass through, a small child was born; deformed, mangled, unable to breath properly - not an entirely uncommon event during this age of history. Nevertheless, his parents were mortified; he was their fifth child to be born in such a fashion in only five years, however it simply another fact of life, a fact that they had to come to terms with; they could never support a child with the needs that this one would have to face, especially with the culture and world that they had lived their lives in. So they had to do what they had to do.

Wading out to the currents of the river Euphrates like she had done five times previous, the mother of the disabled child wept as she forced her new born son into the cool waters, holding him their as he gave little struggle. Before to long, the child was dead, another nameless soul that would simply pass out of all knowledge with the passage of time. Such was life.

In a thousand other worlds, such a child would barely make his mark on history, even if he was born under different stars. However, there was one particular world in which this small, almost insignificant child made a difference; a world in which he may have rose to powers never before attained by one of his meagre class, where he may have claimed to be guided by the gods to such heights. In this world, he could have even been a king, a great man, or perhaps even greater still, and today he could have been remembered for his great and terrible deeds that accompany any man so note worthy to history. In this other world, the male child who died that on that non-particular day was born with the name of Sharukkin, but would forever be remembered by another, far more imposing name; Sargon the Great, the first emperor of civilizations, and his memory would forever serve a guide to each and every one of those who followed in his wake.

But this was not that world; this was a world in which one small boy with a name no-one would ever remember, died on a single day that no-one would ever recall...

...and history would never be the same again.
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