Editing Sigil:Seylandri (section)

== The Broken Land ==

The ruins left by Tar Aerchel were unlike the ruins of a Rhone city.

Stone walls may remain standing long after their builders vanish.

Living architecture dies.

Canopies burned or collapsed. Bridges rotted. Paths disappeared beneath new growth. Groves once maintained by generations became wild. Other places remained scarred by workings whose purposes had been forgotten. Standing stones survived without the songs that explained them. Rivers flowed differently through landscapes altered by war.

What had once been connected became fragmentary.

That fragmentation profoundly shaped how later peoples understood the elder age.

The Wraeth of the far north had survived the catastrophe largely because they had possessed little the great powers considered worth destroying. In the generations after the Wrath, some bands began moving southward.

They found lands strangely empty.

They also found them rich.

Ash and decay returned their substance to the earth. Abandoned clearings and former cultivated lands became fertile. Game moved into country from which people had vanished. River valleys offered easier living than the colder northern margins.

The movement south was not a conquest or a single migration.

Families wandered. Bands followed game. Some remained. Settlements appeared. Other groups followed generations later.

The newcomers understood almost nothing of what they found.

A standing stone in one valley, a blackened ruin beneath another forest, an inexplicable hollow, a strange grove, a broken causeway, or a place where animals refused to drink might all have been remnants of the same civilization.

The Wraeth had no reason to know this.

Stories grew around them.

Unknown builders became vanished kings. Dangerous workings became sleeping horrors. Ruined places acquired taboos whose original purposes had been forgotten. Practical warnings passed from parent to child until their origins disappeared into tale.

Over centuries, Tar Aerchel ceased to exist in Rhone memory as one comprehensible ancient realm.

Its fragments became folklore.