Histories

“The years behind us always seem warmer than the years in which we live.” — Seylandri saying

The history of the Sigil Lands reaches back thousands of years before the first Rhone kingdoms. Every people remembers that past differently, and the divisions historians draw between one age and another are matters of convention. Some Ages overlap: the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms describes the political development of the Rhone realms, while the Age of the Triad describes a religious and cultural transformation within them.

The further one travels into the past, the less certain the record becomes. Ancient dates are estimates, old accounts contradict one another, and much that was once remembered vanished during the Great Wrath.

Reckoning the Years

The Rhone traditionally date events by the reign of the local sovereign: the fourth year of King Garrovic III, for example. Scholars comparing events across different kingdoms instead use the Brannais Reckoning. The coronation of Brannais is 1 BR; earlier dates are given as BB, or Before Brannais. There is no year zero.

The present year is 501 BR. Dates assigned to the ancient world are retrospective estimates and are usually given approximately.

The Long Summer

The earliest historical age is the Long Summer, which began with the exile of the Seylandri from Aervallon and endured for thousands of years. Across Tar Aerchel, the Seylandri cultivated a vast forest civilization centered upon the ancient Monarch Trees, living beings around which settlements, Craft and memory grew.

The Seylandri remember the Long Summer as a golden age when the world itself seemed younger and warmer. Whether this is memory, poetry or something more cannot now be known.

The Numberless Wars

Long before the Rhone entered recorded history, the Long Summer was scarred by the Numberless Wars, the great conflicts between the Seylandri and the Gholibin. Their causes and course survive differently in the traditions of the two peoples, and even their name reflects Seylandri memory rather than a universally accepted account.

The wars ended, but both peoples carried their consequences into the ages that followed.

The First Rhone

Only much later, roughly a thousand years before the Great Wrath, do the Rhone begin to appear in the records of the older peoples. They were northern tribal peoples without writing, and their own earlier history survives only in oral tradition.

The Seylandri and Gholibin appear to have regarded them as little more than obscure, hirsute peoples from beyond the familiar lands. Nothing in these scattered references suggests that anyone imagined their descendants would eventually become the most numerous people of the Sigil Lands.

The Great Wrath

The Great Wrath, remembered by the Seylandri also as the War of Leaf and Scale, ended the Long Summer. The Dragha systematically destroyed the Monarchs while war consumed Tar Aerchel and shattered the living systems upon which Seylandri civilization depended.

The collapse came one realm at a time. Seylandri survivors gradually withdrew toward lands where their people and living infrastructure remained, while Rhone peoples moving south settled among the devastated and increasingly abandoned territories. The Wrath conventionally ends with the Battle of Aryemar, c. 500 BB, although its consequences continued for centuries.

The Seylandri still sing of what was lost.

The Age of the Thousand Kingdoms

From c. 500 BB to 1 BR, innumerable petty Rhone realms spread across much of the former Tar Aerchel. This was the Age of the Thousand Kingdoms, also remembered as the Warg Years, when rulers called wargs or wolves carved out domains that often vanished with them.

It was also the formative age of Rhone civilization. The Rhone borrowed, adapted and combined knowledge from the older peoples around them, gradually developing the towns, writing, agriculture, trade and institutions from which their later kingdoms grew.

The Age of the Hundred Kingdoms

The coronation of Brannais in 1 BR conventionally begins the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms. The name describes the long consolidation of innumerable petty realms into larger and more durable states rather than a literal count of kingdoms.

Brannais's creation of Tael Neydra, and its survival under his son Caelric, demonstrated that a Rhone kingdom could endure beyond the life of its founder. The founding generations of Tael Neydra are also commonly remembered as the Age of Brannais.

The Temple Wars and the Age of the Triad

The Temple Wars, which reached their height around c. 351 BR, accompanied the rise of the Triad to predominance among the Rhone. They were not one war but a generation of religious, political and social conflicts involving temples, rulers and communities throughout the Rhone lands.

The older traditions survived, but Triadic worship became increasingly intertwined with Rhone law, kingship, education and public life. Later historians sometimes call the resulting period the Age of the Triad, an overlapping cultural age whose precise beginning remains disputed.

The Fall of Tael Neydra

Around 391 BR, Tael Neydra fell after decades of subversion by Malivare. The creation of the Shroud by Xoth freed the Vorghol from their former dependence upon the hours of darkness and transformed the war.

The old kingdom became the heart of the Mastery. For more than a century the Deathless Masters have ruled beneath the Shroud, appropriating and mocking the traditions of the realm they destroyed.

The Age of the Comet

Around 490 BR, the Comet appeared in the heavens at approximately the same time that Henrick became King of Angharais. After several years of coalition-building, the Third Crusade against the Mastery began around 493 BR.

The war has now continued for approximately eight years. The name Age of the Comet has spread beyond the Rhone because the Comet belongs to no kingdom or faith: every people of the Sigil Lands can look upward and see the same light.

Whether future generations will truly regard its appearance as the beginning of a new age remains for history to decide.

Sigil:Histories