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 400 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.