The Great Wrath

“Blood calls to blood.”
— Elohil Miravel

The Great Wrath was the catastrophe that ended the Long Summer and destroyed the old Seylandri civilization of Tar Aerchel. Its central conflict, remembered as the War of Leaf and Scale, began with the accidental death of Sianor during an attempt to make peace with the Dragha.

What followed lasted for generations. Reprisal answered reprisal, old grievances were drawn into the fighting, alliances shifted, and peoples who had lived beside one another for centuries were consumed by an expanding war. Forests burned, the Monarch Trees were systematically slain, living works of Craft failed, memories vanished with the things that had carried them, and Tar Aerchel collapsed one realm at a time.

The Seylandri also call the age the Breaking.

Later historians conventionally end the Wrath with the Battle of Aryemar, c. 500 BB. By then much of the world the battle might once have saved had already disappeared.

The Death of Sianor

The War of Leaf and Scale did not begin as an inevitable struggle between two peoples.

Sianor sought peace with the Dragha.

The surviving traditions place the crucial meeting beneath the Standing Stones of Aryemar, where Sianor and the Dragha met in an attempt to settle the growing conflict between them. Something went terribly wrong.

Sianor was killed.

His death was accidental.

Exactly how the accident occurred is less certain. The surviving accounts do not agree upon every detail, and later generations embroidered the event according to their own loyalties and grief. What mattered was what those present believed had happened.

The Dragha believed Sianor had been murdered through Seylandri treachery.

Among the Seylandri, grief rapidly hardened into anger.

Elohil Miravel, Sianor's daughter, abandoned the cause of peace and turned toward vengeance. Aelorin Thaelion warned against answering blood with blood, understanding that retaliation would invite another retaliation in turn.

He was right.

It did not matter.

The first acts of vengeance were answered. Those answers demanded answers of their own. Within a world already carrying old suspicions and unresolved grievances, the death of one man became the spark for a catastrophe neither side had intended when Sianor went to Aryemar.

The War of Leaf and Scale

The conflict that followed became known as the War of Leaf and Scale.

It was never a single orderly campaign fought along a stable frontier. Violence spread across enormous territories. Local disputes became part of the larger war. Ancient grievances resurfaced. Alliances formed and failed. Communities that had little connection to Sianor's death were eventually forced to choose sides or simply endure whatever armies passed through their lands.

The older hostility between Seylandri and Gholibin, inherited from the Numberless Wars, did not cause the Wrath, but it helped shape the world in which the new conflict spread. Gholibin fought beside the Dragha during portions of the war, though neither people can be reduced to the other's cause.

Later histories preserve the names of figures who came to embody the struggle: Sianor, Aelorin Thaelion, Elohil Miravel, Caeloran Miravel, Aeginar the Auld Wyrm, Khaeris, and Kon Darkeye.

Their stories survive unevenly. Some remain in histories, others principally in song, and the order of many events can no longer be established with certainty.

Caeloran Miravel died at Aesaren. Elohil survived into the bitter later years of the war and became associated in Seylandri memory with Frost and Shadow.

The great wyrms entered the struggle as well. Aeginar, Khaeris and Kon Darkeye belonged to an age when the Dragha were still a living power in the Sigil Lands rather than creatures remembered chiefly through ruins and ancient songs.

Kon Darkeye survived.

His shadow would fall across history centuries after the Wrath itself had ended.

The Death of the Monarchs

Among the most devastating acts of the Great Wrath was the destruction of the Monarch Trees.

The airborne Dragha understood their importance. The greatest Monarchs rose thousands of feet above Tar Aerchel and served as living centers of Seylandri settlement, Craft and memory. They could not be hidden.

They were hunted.

One after another, Monarchs that had lived for tens of thousands of years were killed.

Their destruction meant far more than the deaths of revered living beings. Settlements, cultivated groves, water systems, living structures and works of Craft had grown around them over centuries. Knowledge itself could be preserved within those living relationships.

A realm did not always die on the day its Monarch fell.

It began to fail.

Systems that had endured beyond living memory ceased to function. Knowledge disappeared because the living thing that had remembered it was gone. Food became scarcer. Waterworks deteriorated. Structures could no longer be maintained. Communities that had been sustainable for centuries became increasingly difficult to inhabit.

The Wrath destroyed archives without burning books.

It destroyed memory by killing what remembered.

No Monarch survived.

The First Vorghol

The Vorghol appeared only after the War of Leaf and Scale had already raged for decades.

They were made from Rhone.

The creation of the first Vorghol therefore had nothing to do with Sianor's death or the outbreak of the war. They belonged to its later degeneration, when desperation, ambition and cruelty had already transformed the conflict into something far larger than the dispute from which it began.

Not every early Vorghol was an unwilling victim. Some Rhone accepted the transformation knowingly.

Their reasons are remembered imperfectly. Power, survival, fear, ambition and the promise of escaping mortal weakness all had meaning in a world being torn apart.

Among the earliest and greatest of the Fallen was Kon Darkeye.

The Vorghol of the Wrath were not yet the organized Mastery that would one day rule Tael Neydra beneath the Shroud. But the Great Wrath had brought something new into the world, and it would outlive nearly everyone who had fought in the war that created it.

The Collapse of Tar Aerchel

Long before the fighting ended, Tar Aerchel was dying.

Forests had burned. Monarchs were dead. Communities had been destroyed. Food and clean water became increasingly difficult to secure in devastated regions. Works of Craft failed because the people and living systems necessary to maintain them no longer existed.

No decision was ever made to abandon Tar Aerchel as a whole.

The collapse happened one realm at a time.

A settlement became impossible to sustain. Its survivors went where other Seylandri still lived and where the old systems continued to function. The arrival of refugees strained those places in turn. Another region failed. More people moved.

Over generations the surviving Seylandri were drawn increasingly southward, eventually toward Seylannon.

Later Rhone accounts sometimes describe this process as a retreat from empty or ruined lands.

To the Seylandri, they were neither empty nor merely ruined.

They were home.

They had simply become impossible to live in.

The Rhone Move South

As Seylandri were leaving the devastated lands of Tar Aerchel, Rhone peoples were moving south from colder northern regions, particularly the country near the Sea of Mists.

Their reasons were comparatively ordinary. The south was warmer. The country offered better opportunities for farming and permanent settlement and relief from the harsher conditions of the north.

There was no unified Rhone conquest. Tribes, families and war-bands moved independently into land already transformed by war.

Some valleys appeared deserted.

Some were not.

Rhone newcomers encountered scattered Seylandri, Gholibin and other survivors. They sometimes fought, sometimes traded, sometimes learned from one another, and sometimes simply lived as neighbors.

To a Rhone family arriving in a burned valley, an abandoned settlement might look like land nobody wanted.

To a Seylandri survivor, it might be a city whose name had been remembered for three thousand years.

Thus the last generations of the old world overlapped with the first generations of the one that would replace it.

Aryemar

The Battle of Aryemar, fought around c. 500 BB, is traditionally regarded as the end of the Great Wrath.

The choice is partly symbolic.

Aryemar was already associated with the beginning of the disaster. It was beneath its Standing Stones that Sianor had died during his attempt to make peace. Generations later, the same name became attached to the battle that later historians chose as the Wrath's ending.

By then the old world was already gone.

Seylandri had been moving south for decades. The Monarchs were dead. Great stretches of Tar Aerchel had ceased to function as living country. Armies had been destroyed, old alliances shattered, and entire communities displaced.

Aryemar did not restore what had been lost.

It marked the point after which the conflict could no longer meaningfully be described as the same war.

The Lay of Aryemar became the last great song associated with the world of the Wrath. Later Seylandri returned to it again and again because a catastrophe that had unfolded over generations could at least be given a final place and a final name.

The Departure of the Dragha

The Dragha eventually departed from the world.

Why they left, what became of them and whether every Dragha departed willingly remain matters of tradition rather than settled history. Their disappearance nevertheless completed another part of the Breaking.

The people whose war with the Seylandri had begun beneath the Standing Stones of Aryemar were gone.

The consequences remained.

Kon Darkeye remained.

So did the Vorghol.

The enemies created during the Wrath proved more persistent than many of those who had created them.

After the Breaking

The Sigil Lands that emerged from the Great Wrath were fundamentally different from those that had preceded it.

Tar Aerchel no longer existed as a functioning civilization. The surviving Seylandri were increasingly concentrated in Seylannon. The Gholibin carried their own memories of the disaster. The Dragha were gone. Rhone settlers occupied growing stretches of former Seylandri country.

The centuries that followed became the Age of the Thousand Kingdoms, also remembered as the Warg Years.

The Rhone built amid ruins they only partly understood. They learned from Seylandri who remained among them, borrowed from Gholibin and Vulkah traditions, and salvaged material from the wreckage of Tar Aerchel. Even the dead Monarchs entered the new world. Their nearly imperishable wood was cut from fallen trunks and reused in halls, gates, bridges and fortifications for centuries.

Whether the Great Wrath damaged more than civilizations and landscapes has never been settled.

Seylandri descriptions of the Long Summer speak of light, forests, Craft and living relationships that later generations have never reproduced. Some Elders maintain that something in the world itself was broken.

Others argue that no further explanation is necessary. Destroy Tar Aerchel, kill the Monarchs, scatter its people and erase much of its accumulated memory, and the world afterward would inevitably seem diminished.

Perhaps the disagreement cannot be resolved.

Perhaps the distinction itself is false.

Memory of the Wrath

More than a thousand years later, the Seylandri still sing of the Great Wrath.

Their songs do not mourn an abstraction. They remember particular Monarchs, settlements, streams, groves and people. Some preserve names whose meanings have been forgotten. Others contain fragments whose missing portions can never be recovered.

The Wrath began because people grieving one death could not stop themselves from demanding another.

By the time it ended, entire peoples had been displaced, every Monarch was dead, and a civilization thousands of years old had ceased to exist.

For the Rhone, these events belong to ancient history.

For the Seylandri, the distance is less comforting.

And so the songs continue.

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