It is a Time of Legends
It is a Time for Heroes
It is Time for Last Stands
To speak of a time before the Summer of Fire, a time truly before the cacophony of events that chose to confluence in those short months, is to speak of a time more than four hundred years gone by. Very few have a genuine understanding of what lead to the time known as the Summer of Fire, of the rising powers that had grown with the patience of mountains, over centuries.
Only in looking back could scholars completely understand the full scale of events that preceded it. It is particularly difficult to distinguish what came 'before', as this is a relative term. Each individual will have a point in time that they consider to be the time 'before', after which their life will have irrevocably changed.
General consensus suggests that by 1099 AC it was already too late. But for some, it started long before that. For some of them will live, some of them will die, and some of them will last forever.