Histories

“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 Age of the Thousand Kingdoms and Age of the Hundred Kingdoms belong particularly to Rhone history. The later centuries are sometimes called the Age of the Triad, while people now living increasingly speak of an Age of the Comet. These names overlap because they describe different things, and historians do not always agree about where one age ends and another begins.

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

Reckoning the Years

Rhone ordinarily reckon dates by the reign of a king. A charter might therefore be dated in the fourth year of the reign of Garrovic III, rather than by a universal calendar. This remains the usual practice of courts, governments, and chroniclers throughout the Rhone kingdoms.

For comparing events across different reigns and kingdoms, however, scholars use the Brannais Reckoning. It begins with the coronation of Brannais, reckoned as 1 BR. The present year is 501 BR.

Years before his coronation are designated BB, or Before Brannais. There is no year zero: 1 BB is followed by 1 BR.

The farther back such dates are carried, the less precise they become. The Brannais Reckoning did not exist during the Long Summer, nor did the Seylandri and Gholibin ordinarily reckon their past in Rhone fashion. A date such as c. 1500 BB is therefore a later scholar's attempt to correlate ancient traditions, songs, genealogies, and surviving records. Ancient dates should be understood accordingly.

The Great Ages and Turning Points

The Long Summer • The Great Wrath • The Thousand Kingdoms • The Hundred Kingdoms • The Temple Wars • The Fall of Tael Neydra • The Age of the Comet

The Long Summer

Before c. 500 BB; beginning several thousand years earlier

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 found much of the country already covered by ancient woodland. There began the several thousand years they remember as the Long Summer, an extraordinary period of growth and comparative peace remembered by later Seylandri as a Golden Age.

Memory has been generous to it.

Across the centuries, the Seylandri extended the forests of Tar Aerchel until its wooded country reached from the red coasts of the southlands almost to the chilly northern steppes. They encountered the immense and ancient Monarch Trees, living intelligences already old when the Seylandri arrived, and built relationships with them. Through the Craft, houses, furnishings, implements, and eventually whole tree-cities were grown rather than constructed from felled timber.

About c. 3500 BB, the Vulkah emerged from the deep places of the world. Their appearance was a momentous event to the Seylandri, although little reliable chronology survives from so remote a period.

The Rhone also existed during the Long Summer, but scarcely entered Seylandri or Gholibin history. Their own origins are unknown. Their earliest history belongs to oral tradition: sagas of wanderings, tribal divisions, lost homelands, feuds, hunts, marriages, and migrations whose locations and chronology can seldom be established with confidence.

By the later Long Summer, Rhone peoples lived in scattered tribes across the northern lands around the Sea of Mists and toward the Polar Lands. They were hunters, gatherers, herders, and pastoralists, preserving their history in song rather than writing. The ancestors of the modern Northerlings retained much of this old northern way of life even after other Rhone peoples moved south.

To the great civilizations of the Long Summer, the Rhone were peripheral people from beyond the lands that mattered. Seylandri and Gholibin traditions contain occasional references to northern peoples sometimes rendered in later Rhone translations as the Hirsute Ones or the Hairy Ones from Over There. Such references tell modern Rhone historians considerably less than they would like.

Late in the Long Summer, expanding Seylandri woodlands increasingly came into contact with lands used or claimed by the Gholibin. By approximately c. 1500 BB, this and other grievances had contributed to the Numberless Wars against the Gholibin, whom the Seylandri called the Numberless Horde.

These were not one continuous war but many smaller conflicts fought over decades. Groves, valleys, hunting grounds, waterways, and approaches to Gholibin Hollowholds might change hands repeatedly. Eventually the two peoples reached a truce. Neither had truly won, and neither forgot.

For all its troubles, however, the Long Summer endured for millennia. Later Seylandri would remember it as a world in which even the air and sunlight seemed different.

Whether they actually were is another matter.

The Great Wrath

Ending c. 500 BB

The Great Wrath, sometimes called the Breaking by the Seylandri, 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, eventually departed from the world.

The destruction of Tar Aerchel was more than the burning of a forest. Seylandri civilization depended upon a living infrastructure accumulated over thousands of years. Monarch Trees, cultivated groves, tree-cities, sources of clean water, food, shelter, Craft, and memory were destroyed together.

The Seylandri did not abandon these lands all at once.

One realm failed, then another. Refugees moved toward places where the living systems of Tar Aerchel still functioned and where other Seylandri could support them. Those surviving communities were placed under greater strain in turn. Food became scarce. Water failed. Shelter could no longer be maintained. Places that had sustained thousands could sustain hundreds, and eventually only dozens.

The loss included memories as well as lives. Knowledge had been preserved not only in individual minds and songs but in living places, cultivated relationships, and ancient beings. When those died, things were forgotten that could never be recovered.

Thus the long movement toward Seylannon happened family by family and settlement by settlement, continuing even after the worst fighting had passed.

At the same time, Rhone peoples from the north were moving south. Their reasons were often considerably more ordinary: warmer country, better grazing, fertile land, and opportunities for permanent settlement. They entered a landscape that had been devastated and increasingly depopulated, but it was not truly empty. Isolated Seylandri communities remained, along with Gholibin, Vulkah, and others who had survived the catastrophe.

The newcomers fought some of these peoples, traded with others, and learned from many of them. Vulkah knowledge contributed to Rhone stoneworking and building. Gholibin traditions influenced music and the preservation of knowledge through song. Seylandri survivors taught newcomers elements of calendars, writing, the Craft, and older learning. Ancient Seylandri would eventually become a language of scholarship among educated Rhone, surviving in learned use long after the spoken languages of the Seylandri themselves had changed.

Much of later Rhone civilization was built from such borrowings, adaptations, survivals, and inventions.

The Great Wrath is conventionally considered to have ended with the Battle of Aryemar around c. 500 BB. By then the old order had largely collapsed. Aryemar marked an ending more than a victory.

The world that followed seemed less enchanted than the one remembered in Seylandri song. Whether something fundamental had truly changed, whether the destruction of Tar Aerchel had broken an extraordinary living ecology of Craft and memory, or whether the survivors simply remembered their lost world through grief cannot now be known.

The Seylandri still sing of the Wrath.

The Age of the Thousand Kingdoms

c. 500 BB–1 BR

The five centuries following the Great Wrath are known in Rhone histories as the Age of the Thousand Kingdoms. They are also commonly called the Warg Years.

There were never necessarily a thousand kingdoms. The name expresses the political character of the age rather than an exact count.

Rhone migrants found burned forests, abandoned settlements, ruins, scattered survivors, and immense stretches of country where no authority remained capable of enforcing its claims. Settlements became villages, villages became towns, and local leaders accumulated whatever territory they could protect or seize.

Such rulers became known as wargs, or wolves.

A kingdom in this period might consist of a river valley, a fortified town and its surrounding farms, a collection of villages, or the country controlled by a particularly successful warlord. Alliances were made and broken, boundaries shifted constantly, and a realm assembled during one ruler's lifetime might vanish immediately after his death.

The Thousand Kingdoms were also the great formative centuries of southern Rhone civilization. The migrants did not begin anew in an empty wilderness. They lived among older peoples and the remains of older civilizations. They borrowed techniques, words, beliefs, stories, institutions, and knowledge, adapting them to their own needs until what had once been foreign became recognizably Rhone.

Writing spread. Agriculture expanded. Roads and markets connected settlements. Stone fortifications rose. Trade grew. The first substantial Rhone towns appeared, and increasingly elaborate forms of kingship developed.

Yet political authority remained intensely personal. A realm belonged to the person strong enough to hold it.

Then came Brannais.

The Age of the Hundred Kingdoms

Beginning 1 BR

In 1 BR, Brannais, a Neydrai war-thane, united three realms into Tael Neydra and created the first sizeable Rhone kingdom whose institutions proved stronger than the man who founded it.

His coronation later became the foundation of the Brannais Reckoning and the conventional beginning of the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms.

As with the Thousand Kingdoms, the number was never intended as an exact census. The name describes a world in which innumerable petty sovereignties were gradually being replaced by fewer, larger, and more durable realms.

Brannais was a warrior, and his achievements rested partly upon strength of arms. But the lesson later Rhone drew from his life was that strength meant more than defeating one's enemies. Laws, loyalties, institutions, and ideals could bind a kingdom together after the hand that created it 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 died fighting Kon Darkeye, the First of the Fallen, and Yvain bore his body home.

For a warg of the Thousand Kingdoms, 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. His long reign demonstrated that his father's achievement had not depended upon Brannais alone. Other Rhone rulers imitated Tael Neydra. Kingdoms absorbed neighbors through conquest, inheritance, alliance, and marriage. Some collapsed and divided again, but the general movement was toward larger and more persistent states.

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

The Temple Wars and the Age of the Triad

Primarily 4th century BR; height c. 351 BR

The struggles later remembered collectively as the Temple Wars reached their height around c. 351 BR.

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.

Some Rhone historians call the centuries shaped by this religious transformation the Age of the Triad. Its beginning is disputed. Some place it with the early spread of Triadic worship, others with the Temple Wars themselves, and still others with the point at which the Triad became embedded in royal ceremony, law, education, and ordinary public life.

The Age of the Triad therefore overlaps the later Age of the Hundred Kingdoms rather than replacing it. One name describes a political transformation; the other a religious and cultural one.

The Fall of Tael Neydra

c. 391 BR

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.

Around 391 BR, 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

c. 490 BR–present (501 BR)

For roughly a century the Mastery endured.

Around 490 BR, Henrick was crowned King of Angharais and the Comet rose, becoming the strange celestial road now called the Comet Road. The two events occurred near enough to one another that both belong to the beginning of the present historical moment, although few serious scholars claim that one caused the other.

Henrick spent the next three or four 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.

Around 493 BR, the Third Crusade began in earnest.

It has continued for approximately eight years.

The present year is 501 BR.

People increasingly call these years the Age of the Comet. Whether future historians will preserve that name remains to be seen. The older Age of the Hundred Kingdoms and Age of the Triad have not necessarily ended; historical ages seldom arrange themselves as neatly as the chapters of a chronicle.

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, forgotten strongholds of the Thousand Kingdoms, kingdoms descended from Brannais's example, temples and customs transformed during the rise of the Triad, and the shadowed realm that was once Tael Neydra.

History is not behind them.

They are living through it.

Sigil:Histories