Editing Sigil:Long Summer (section)

== Tar Aerchel ==

Over thousands of years the Seylandri cultivated the forest outward. Existing woodlands were joined, extended and transformed through generations of patient Craft until Tar Aerchel covered much of what is now divided among the kingdoms of the Sigil Lands.

This was not wilderness in the later Rhone sense, nor was it a forest with cities imposed upon it. Tar Aerchel itself was the Seylandri civilization.

Settlements grew around and among living trees. Houses, halls, bridges, furniture and implements were grown rather than cut from dead timber. Groves produced food. Water was guided through living systems. Paths followed the contours of the forest rather than forcing straight roads through it. The distinction between cultivated country and wild country was often meaningless.

At the heart of many regions stood a Monarch. Around it might grow settlements that endured for centuries or millennia, each generation altering them only gradually. The oldest places became intricate works produced by countless Seylandri who had never met one another but had participated in the same continuing act of cultivation.

The forest also preserved memory. Knowledge could be embodied in living things, maintained through Craft and passed through relationships whose exact nature is poorly understood by later peoples. Tar Aerchel remembered alongside its inhabitants.

This made its eventual destruction all the more complete.