Editing Sigil:Seylandri (section)

== Tar Aerchel ==

Before the Great Wrath, much of the Sigil Lands belonged to '''Tar Aerchel''', the ancient realm of the Seylandri.

It extended from the mountains to the sea and northward as far as the country of the present [[Sigil:Ais River|Ais River]], though the Ais itself was smaller then.

Tar Aerchel was not a kingdom in the later Rhone sense.

Nor was it simply a great forest containing Seylandri cities.

Land, forest, settlement, and civilization formed an integrated whole.

The Seylandri shaped living trees into dwellings, halls, galleries, bridges, platforms, workshops, and gathering places. Great inhabited canopies rose where generations had guided the growth of enormous trees. Between them lay smaller communities, cultivated groves, waterways, forest paths, places of memory, and stretches of woodland tended by hands whose work might have begun centuries before.

There were places of dense settlement and places where few Seylandri lived, but the distinction between ''city'' and ''wilderness'' familiar to later Rhone was far less meaningful.

To travel through Tar Aerchel was not to pass repeatedly from settlement into empty forest and back again.

One remained within the living country of the Seylandri.

Its forests provided food, medicine, material, shelter, beauty, and pathways. Its waterways joined distant communities. Canopy routes passed through country almost invisible to travelers upon the ground. Songs, standing stones, remembered places, and workings of the Saël bound generations to the landscape around them.

Tar Aerchel had grown together with its people.

That made what followed far worse than the destruction of cities.