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The Long Summer

“We did not plant the first forest. We were welcomed beneath it.” — attributed to the Seylandri Elder Aerethiel

The Long Summer is the name given by the Seylandri to the immense span of history between their exile from Aervallon and the Great Wrath. It began more than five thousand years before the coronation of Brannais and endured for millennia.

Later Seylandri remember it as the great age of Tar Aerchel, when their people inhabited a vast forest country stretching from the red coasts of the southlands almost to the chilly northern steppes. In song and memory it is an age of immense forests, living cities, deep Craft and a closeness between living things that the later world has never recovered.

How much of this represents the world as it truly was, and how much represents the longing of a people remembering everything they lost, cannot now be known.

The Exiles of Aervallon

The oldest Seylandri traditions say that their ancestors came from Aervallon, a chain of wooded islands associated with the Sunrise Sea. They did not leave willingly. They were exiles.

Why they were exiled is no longer known.

Even the location of Aervallon presents difficulties. The oldest songs describe a real country of wooded shores, hills, streams and islands, yet no mariner has found it and no surviving chart places it upon the known seas. Seylandri tradition holds that Aervallon is no longer wholly within the mortal world, if indeed it ever was.

The exiles eventually came to the lands that would become Tar Aerchel. They found much of the country already forested.

They also found the Monarchs.

The Monarch Trees

The Monarch Trees, commonly called simply Monarchs, were immense trees of a kind found nowhere in the present world. The greatest rose thousands of feet above the surrounding forest. Their lives were measured not in centuries but in tens of thousands of years.

Some were already unimaginably old when the Seylandri first entered Tar Aerchel.

The Seylandri believe awareness exists in all living things, though most life does not communicate in ways readily understood by speaking peoples. The Monarchs were different. They possessed minds and memories of their own, and the Seylandri gradually learned to perceive and answer them.

The relationship was neither mastery nor worship. A Monarch could not be commanded to become the center of a Seylandri settlement, nor could the forest surrounding it simply be reshaped according to Seylandri desire. Such relationships developed over centuries of accommodation between people, tree and country.

To the Seylandri, the Monarchs were ancient dignitaries rather than resources. Some had lived through ages that preceded Seylandri memory altogether. What the Monarchs remembered of that deeper world is now largely unknowable, for their memories died with them.

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.

Life in the Long Summer

Later histories sometimes make the Long Summer appear strangely uneventful. Kings do not rise and fall every generation. Borders do not constantly move. The familiar sequence of wars, dynasties and conquests by which Rhone historians divide the past often seems absent.

The Seylandri do not consider the age empty.

Their own histories remember different things: the joining of forests, the first conversation with a Monarch, the cultivation of a valley over several generations, disputes that lasted centuries, the creation of songs and works of Craft, the movement of peoples and animals, and changes in relationships between distant communities.

An event that occupies a sentence in a Rhone history might have unfolded over three hundred years.

This difference has made the Long Summer difficult for later scholars to describe. Much of what mattered to its inhabitants fits poorly into the categories by which the succeeding world understands history.

Nor was the Long Summer an age without conflict. The Seylandri encountered other peoples already living in or around the lands into which Tar Aerchel expanded. Relations ranged from friendship and exchange to rivalry and war.

The greatest of those conflicts became the Numberless Wars.

The Numberless Wars

Long before the Rhone entered recorded history, relations between the Seylandri and the Gholibin erupted into the conflicts remembered as the Numberless Wars.

The name itself comes from Seylandri tradition and should not be mistaken for a neutral description. The Gholibin preserve their own memories of the age, including traditions carried through song rather than writing.

The wars lasted long enough, and occurred far enough in the past, that no single surviving account can be treated as complete. The expansion of Tar Aerchel may have brought the Seylandri into lands already used or claimed by Gholibin peoples, but later memories of cause, blame and sequence differ.

The wars ended. Neither people disappeared, and neither forgot.

Their detailed history belongs to the Numberless Wars.

The Hirsute Ones

The Rhone appear only very late in the history of the Long Summer.

Roughly a thousand years before the Great Wrath, scattered references begin to mention human tribes in the northern lands. The Rhone themselves possessed no writing, and whatever history they had already lived survives only in later songs, sagas and oral traditions.

The older peoples paid them little attention.

Seylandri and Gholibin references characterize them, in various translations, as hairy or hirsute northern people from beyond the familiar country. They appear occasionally as hunters, wanderers, traders, trespassers or troublesome neighbors. Their distant origins interested almost nobody who could write them down.

Nothing in the surviving records suggests that the Seylandri or Gholibin considered their arrival historically important.

Only in hindsight does it appear otherwise.

Was the World Different?

Descriptions of the Long Summer sometimes make Tar Aerchel sound less like a vanished civilization than a vanished world.

The sunlight is remembered as warmer. Forests seem deeper. Accounts describe colors, sounds and sensations that later Seylandri struggle to explain. Craft appears to have worked with an ease and intimacy difficult to reproduce. Even surviving Elders disagree about whether these descriptions should be understood literally.

Some insist that the world itself changed in the Great Wrath.

Others say that the world remains what it always was and that what disappeared was Tar Aerchel: the vast network of relationships among Seylandri, Monarchs, forests and Craft through which their ancestors experienced it.

Still others see no distinction between the two explanations.

No answer has ever been established, and perhaps none can be.

The End of Summer

The Long Summer did not slowly fade away.

It was broken.

The Great Wrath, or War of Leaf and Scale, devastated Tar Aerchel. The airborne Dragha recognized the Monarchs for what they were: centers of settlement, Craft, memory and life. They hunted them systematically.

One by one the Monarchs died.

The destruction of a Monarch did not necessarily destroy the surrounding realm in a single day. Instead, systems that had endured for centuries began to fail. Food became scarce. Waterworks ceased functioning. Living structures could no longer be maintained. Knowledge preserved within the forest vanished. Refugees moved toward places where the old life still survived, burdening those places in turn.

The collapse continued across generations.

By the time of the Battle of Aryemar, c. 500 BB, the last Monarchs were dead and most surviving Seylandri had already begun the long movement southward toward Seylannon. The world of Tar Aerchel could not be rebuilt.

No living Seylandri has ever stood beneath a Monarch as their ancestors knew them.

Yet the Long Summer remains present throughout the modern Sigil Lands. Its ruins lie beneath Rhone towns and fields. Its learning survives in later traditions. Ancient Seylandri remains a language of scholarship. Timber salvaged from the dead Monarchs still endures in a handful of structures and treasured objects.

Most of all, the Long Summer survives in Seylandri memory.

A thousand years after the Breaking, they still sing its songs.

Sigil:Long Summer