Since there's wild speculation abound, allow me to toss my own flavour of it into the ring:
Consider, for a moment, the state of the world.
The Dwarves are ground down year on year, as surely as granite is shorn to sand in the face of an unrelenting storm, as their grand mountain halls echo only with the silence of space that should be filled. The Elves are split and diminished, locked in a forever war against their own traitorous kin as they cling to memories of empire. In the face of four and a half thousand years of decline, the greatest bulwarks of order look much more fragile than they once did. Their past glories are more myth than memory, and the great works of cooperation that exceeded either individually lay buried and forgotten, lest they stand as reminders of what was lost after four hundred years of bitter war and shattered trust.
As the story goes, when Pandora opened the box and unleashed all the evils of the world, the last thing left inside was hope, frail and small.
Hope is not putting the world on your back and stuffing all the evils back into the box; it's not miraculously solving all the problems of the setting with gumption and virtue alone. No, hope is waking up one morning and finding the halls of your ancestors slightly less quiet than the day before, moments of shared laughter that defy the looming spectre of solitude and doubt. Hope is a rekindling of old, withered alliances, that quiet confidence that today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better still.
Hope is an ember, faintly glowing and sputtering beneath layers of ash that must be coaxed and tended to, rekindled into a roaring flame that grants warmth and light to all those near.
The birth of an Age of Hope is a task beyond any man, elf or dwarf, no matter how great – and certainly, greater individuals than Mathilde have tried, and failed. But Mathilde finds herself in a unique position to bring people together, that they might succeed united where all had failed alone.
The last time the great races trusted and worked together as one, it birthed the Golden Age, a time of wonders and legend, of glittering spires and works of runecraft and magic that exceeded all that came before.
An Age of Hope wouldn't be the Golden Age. Too much has been lost, too much has been forgotten. But it could be a golden age, a golden age built not by the ossified, shattered titans of old, but by the cooperation of all, spearheaded by the gall, the audacity of the young race of Man to say 'perhaps we can make it better?'. Such a thing would be beyond Mathilde, beyond the scope of the Waystone Project. But perhaps, just perhaps, she could be the catalyst, the nudge that births an avalanche, the whimsical wind that breathes life into the dying ember and sparks an inferno.
Perhaps such a thing would not be so bad.
, but in the process learns a bunch of phat elven magical secrets created by renegade archmages who delved too deeply and too greedily 
