Sigil:Histories

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

The history of the Sigil Lands is not a single tale written by a single hand. Kingdoms have risen and vanished, peoples have wandered across the world, libraries have burned, songs have changed in the singing, and those who survived great catastrophes did not always agree about what caused them. Much that was once known has simply been lost.

Nor do the peoples of the Sigil Lands remember the past in the same way. Rhone chroniclers preserve the deeds of kings and the foundations of realms. The Seylandri remember events that occurred before many Rhone kingdoms had names. The Gholibin preserve histories in memory-songs passed from generation to generation. Other peoples keep genealogies, monuments, temple records, oral traditions, and stories whose boundaries with history cannot always be found.

Even the familiar divisions of history are matters of convention. The Long Summer is a Seylandri name. The Warg Years belong particularly to Rhone memory. Events that transformed the southern Rhone kingdoms may have meant considerably less to peoples living beyond them. Dates become uncertain as the centuries recede, and the same person may be remembered as hero, tyrant, or fool depending upon who tells the story.

Nevertheless, the broad course of history can still be traced.

The Great Ages and Turning Points

The Long Summer • The Great Wrath • The Warg Years • The Age of Brannais • The Temple Wars • The Fall of Tael Neydra • The Age of the Comet

The Long Summer

The Long Summer began with an exile.

The Seylandri came originally from Aervallon, a chain of wooded isles whose location can no longer be placed upon any certain map. Tradition associates Aervallon with the Sunrise Sea, but no sailor can reach it now, for Aervallon is no longer truly a part of this world. Why the Seylandri were exiled from their first homeland is unknown.

They came instead to the Sigil Lands, and there began the several thousand years they remember as the Long Summer. It was an extraordinary period of growth and comparative peace, remembered by later Seylandri as a Golden Age.

Memory has been generous to it.

The Long Summer was never without conflict, suffering, ambition, or folly. Late in the age, about two thousand years ago, the Seylandri fought the Numberless Wars against the Gholibin, whom they called the Numberless Horde. These were not a single great war but many smaller battles and conflicts between the two peoples. They did not cause the Great Wrath, but the grievances and mistrust they left behind would matter when a far greater conflict began.

For all its troubles, however, the Long Summer endured for millennia. Later generations would remember what followed far more vividly than everything that had gone before.

The Great Wrath

The Great Wrath destroyed the world of the Long Summer.

Its terrible centerpiece was the War of Leaf and Scale, whose surviving histories and songs preserve names such as Aelorin Thaelion, Ceanor, Elohil and Caeloran Miravel, Aeginar the Auld Wyrm, Khaeris, and Kon Darkeye. Ancient grievances returned in new forms, old friendships failed, and peoples who had lived beside one another for generations were drawn into an escalating catastrophe.

The Vorghol were first created during the latter part of the conflict. Some of the first Rhone to undergo the transformation did so willingly. The Dragha, who had fought alongside the Gholibin, would eventually depart from the world.

Long before the fighting ended, the lands in which much of it had been fought were already dying. Woodlands had burned, food had become scarce, armies had been destroyed, and royal leadership had become increasingly ineffective. Seylandri had been fleeing south for decades.

At the same time, nomadic Rhone from the north, particularly the country near the Sea of Mists, were also moving southward. Their reasons were considerably more ordinary. The southern lands were warmer. They offered places where the Rhone might farm, build permanent settlements, and escape the bitter cold of their old country.

Thus one people was leaving lands even as another was entering them.

The Great Wrath is generally considered to have ended with the Battle of Aryemar, about a thousand years ago. By then the old order had largely collapsed. Aryemar marked an ending more than a victory.

The Warg Years

The Rhone who settled the former Seylandri lands did not inherit a green and waiting paradise. They found burned forests, abandoned country, ruins, and territory that could be claimed by anyone strong enough to hold it. Life was hard, authority uncertain, and opportunity everywhere.

The centuries that followed became known as the Warg Years, or the Time of the Hundred Kingdoms.

The hundred kingdoms were seldom kingdoms in the later sense. They were small principalities, settlements, valleys, strongholds, and territories gathered under local strongmen. Such rulers became known as wargs, or wolves. Some protected the people who followed them; others preyed upon them. Alliances were made and broken, boundaries shifted constantly, and the petty realms fought one another with weary regularity.

It was a great land-grab across the country the Seylandri had relinquished. A successful warg might conquer his neighbors and rule a considerable territory, only to see it divided or destroyed after his death. Power belonged to the person strong enough to seize it, and political institutions seldom proved stronger than the individual who commanded them.

Then came Brannais.

The Age of Brannais

About five centuries ago, Brannais, a Neydrai war-thane, accomplished something no warg had managed before him. He united three realms into Tael Neydra, creating the first sizeable and stable Rhone kingdom.

Brannais was a warrior, and his achievements rested in part upon strength of arms. But the lesson later Rhone drew from his life was that strength meant more than the ability to defeat one's enemies. A ruler could build something greater than himself. Laws, loyalties, institutions, and ideals could bind people together after the hand that created them was gone.

Brannais was crowned by the Crannog according to the Old Faith. His sword Winterblue, the Blue Flame, and companions such as Yvain the Tall and Khurn Deep-Hand entered legend. In the end Brannais himself died fighting Kon Darkeye, the First of the Fallen, and Yvain bore his body home.

For an earlier warg, death might have meant the death of his realm as well.

Tael Neydra endured.

Brannais's son Caelric I succeeded him and ruled with intelligence, justice, and courage. He lived to old age, demonstrating by the simple fact of his long and successful reign that his father's achievement had not depended upon Brannais alone. Other Rhone rulers took inspiration from Tael Neydra, and the political world of the Hundred Kingdoms gradually gave way to larger and more enduring realms.

More than four centuries later, Rhone kings still invoke the ideals of Brannais, even when their conduct bears little resemblance to them.

The Temple Wars

Centuries passed between the Age of Brannais and the struggles later remembered collectively as the Temple Wars, which reached their height about a century and a half ago.

The name is misleading if it suggests armies continuously marching beneath rival religious banners. The Temple Wars were a generation or so of religious, social, and political struggle accompanying the rise of the Triadic faith as the predominant faith of the Rhone. There was violence, sometimes severe, but there were also disputes over temples and lands, contests for royal patronage, preaching and conversion, political maneuvering, local feuds, compromise, and accommodation.

Before this period, older religious traditions remained prominent throughout much of the Rhone world. These were the old heathen ways in the original sense of the word: beliefs of heath and woodland, countryside and wild places, deeply entwined with local custom and the natural world.

They did not disappear after the Temple Wars. They simply ceased to stand at the center of southern Rhone life.

The same change affected the Craft. In former times rulers had commonly looked to those versed in the Craft for guidance, inspiration, knowledge, and workings. As the old traditions lost their former prominence, the Craft gradually withdrew from courts and centers of political power and returned toward the places from which much of it had come: woodlands, remote countryside, and communities where the older ways endured.

To many modern Rhone city folk, such practices now seem rustic and faintly disreputable: smelly herbs and unguents, shaking rattles, strange words in old languages, rain dances, and tangled-haired woodland folk performing rites that respectable people regard as superstition.

Respectable people are not necessarily right.

The political landscape changed as well. New kingdoms arose amid the broader transformation. Corwin united many of the central baronies to establish Angharais, while Ganelon became the first king of Sarrivel. Other realms were likewise shaped by the changing religious and political order of the period.

By the end of the Temple Wars, the Triadic faith had become deeply rooted in the life of most southern Rhone kingdoms. The old ways survived, but increasingly away from the great roads, cities, temples, and courts.

The Fall of Tael Neydra

The Vorghol had an old grievance against Tael Neydra.

Brannais had died fighting Kon Darkeye. The Palladian Knights of Tael Neydra had become implacable enemies of the Vorghol, and long before the fall of their homeland they had destroyed an earlier attempt by Malivare and other Vorghol to establish a realm of their own.

Malivare remembered.

His eventual conquest of Tael Neydra was not a sudden invasion but the culmination of a plan pursued over decades. Minions infiltrated the kingdom. Officials were bribed. Weaknesses were cultivated and patiently exploited. Malivare waited until a weak king occupied the throne.

Yet intrigue alone could not overcome the fundamental weakness of the Vorghol. For centuries their enemies had possessed one advantage that no amount of cunning could remove: daylight.

That changed through the Art of Xoth.

Xoth created the Shroud, beneath which the Vorghol could operate at any hour. No longer were they forced into helpless sleep through the day. Centuries of experience in fighting them became dangerously obsolete. There was no longer a safe dawn.

About 110 years ago, the Shroud descended and Tael Neydra fell. The realm that had produced the Palladians and resisted the Vorghol for centuries became the seat of their power. The old kingdom was transformed into the Mastery, ruled by the Deathless Masters from Dolgur.

The enemy had not merely destroyed Tael Neydra.

They had taken it.

The Age of the Comet

For roughly a century the Mastery endured.

Then, about ten to twelve years ago, Henrick was crowned King of Angharais and the Comet rose, becoming the strange celestial road now called the Comet Road. Whatever future generations may decide these events meant, those living through them already recognize the appearance of the Comet as the beginning of a new age.

Henrick spent the next several years assembling a coalition against the Mastery. Diplomacy, preparation, old rivalries, and the difficulty of persuading independent rulers to commit themselves delayed the great effort for three or four years.

Then the Third Crusade began in earnest.

It has now continued for approximately eight years.

This is the Age of the Comet, and unlike the histories that precede it, its ending has not yet been written. The Mastery still holds Tael Neydra. The armies raised against it remain in the field. Old faiths endure beneath newer ones, ancient grievances remain alive, and people still inhabit a landscape shaped by decisions made centuries before they were born.

The people of the Sigil Lands live among the remains of many worlds: Seylandri ruins from the Long Summer, lands claimed by forgotten wargs, kingdoms descended from Brannais's example, temples and customs transformed by the religious struggles of later centuries, and the shadowed realm that was once Tael Neydra.

History is not behind them.

They are living through it.