In the distant past of the Uncharted Seas two great races vied for power: the Dragon Lords and the Ancients. At the head of the Ancients army was a people called the Griffons, a proud race of warriors from a region known as Sancerac, or what is now known as The Shifting Shores. Several hundred years ago the Ancients decided to finish the Dragon Lords once and for all. They assembled a massive fleet of transport ships, and recruited hundreds of thousands of auxiliaries from among the various allies they had. At the head of this force was the Griffons and they had one objective: march into the nesting grounds of the Ancestor Dragons, and with the assistance of the Ancients sorcerers, slay them all. It was hoped that the loss of these highly revered creatures would dismay the Dragon Lords, and even put fear into the small minds of the lesser dragons that their enemies were famed for riding. The Griffons were not convinced of this outcome, but they accepted the task regardless, in order to make the Dragon Lords suffer. The Dragon Lords recovered quickly from their initial defeats and were not dismayed or cowed by the death of the Ancestor Dragons. Instead, their mages summoned forth a torrent of raw magical energy, within which they sealed the foul air of wasting sickness, disease and plague, and spread it on the winds to infect their enemies. This foul torrent washed across all the lands of the region, infecting friends and enemies alike. It was a dark time for all. This magical sickness came to be known as the Withering, as its victims became weak, their bones atrophied and their flesh rotted. Those who were closest to the nesting grounds suffered the worst effects, and all of the Griffons became sick and disheartened. They fled to Sancerac where all of their people were also infected, some died horrible deaths, and others slowly became undead, unable to pass over into the land of the spirits. What little magic that the nobles of Sancerac had was used to halt the effects of the Withering, but they could not save their mortal lives. The magic of the Griffons melded with the energy of the Withering, creating a new energy that stabilized its effects and killed its host in the process. The victims of this process lived on in undeath, so that the people of Sancerac became the Bone Griffons. To add to their torment, the Dragon Lord mages cast another great spell, this time on the land of Sancerac itself, calling it the Curse of the Sands. The spell ripped the land from its foundations and caused the kingdom to sink beneath the waves and disappear for centuries. The Bone Griffons lived on in their watery grave, walking the halls of their palaces, barracks and plazas amid shoals of fish and forests of seaweed.