Latest revision as of 17:56, 24 September 2026

Histories

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

The history of the Sigil Lands reaches back thousands of years before the first Rhone kingdoms. Every people remembers that past differently, and the divisions historians draw between one age and another are matters of convention. Some Ages overlap: the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms describes the political development of the Rhone realms, while the Age of the Triad describes a religious and cultural transformation within them.

The further one travels into the past, the less certain the record becomes. Ancient dates are estimates, old accounts contradict one another, and much that was once remembered vanished during the Great Wrath.

Reckoning the Years

The Rhone traditionally date events by the reign of the local sovereign: the fourth year of King Garrovic III, for example. Scholars comparing events across different kingdoms instead use the Brannais Reckoning. The coronation of Brannais is 1 BR; earlier dates are given as BB, or Before Brannais. There is no year zero.

The present year is 501 BR. Dates assigned to the ancient world are retrospective estimates and are usually given approximately.

The Long Summer

The earliest historical age is the Long Summer, which began with the exile of the Seylandri from Aervallon and endured for thousands of years. Across Tar Aerchel, the Seylandri cultivated a vast forest civilization centered upon the ancient Monarch Trees, living beings around which settlements, Craft and memory grew.

The Seylandri remember the Long Summer as a golden age when the world itself seemed younger and warmer. Whether this is memory, poetry or something more cannot now be known.

The Numberless Wars

Long before the Rhone entered recorded history, the Long Summer was scarred by the Numberless Wars, the great conflicts between the Seylandri and the Gholibin. Their causes and course survive differently in the traditions of the two peoples, and even their name reflects Seylandri memory rather than a universally accepted account.

The wars ended, but both peoples carried their consequences into the ages that followed.

The First Rhone

Only much later, roughly a thousand years before the Great Wrath, do the Rhone begin to appear in the records of the older peoples. They were northern tribal peoples without writing, and their own earlier history survives only in oral tradition.

The Seylandri and Gholibin appear to have regarded them as little more than obscure, hirsute peoples from beyond the familiar lands. Nothing in these scattered references suggests that anyone imagined their descendants would eventually become the most numerous people of the Sigil Lands.

The Great Wrath

The Great Wrath, remembered by the Seylandri also as the War of Leaf and Scale, ended the Long Summer. The Dragha systematically destroyed the Monarchs while war consumed Tar Aerchel and shattered the living systems upon which Seylandri civilization depended.

The collapse came one realm at a time. Seylandri survivors gradually withdrew toward lands where their people and living infrastructure remained, while Rhone peoples moving south settled among the devastated and increasingly abandoned territories. The Wrath conventionally ends with the Battle of Aryemar, c. 500 BB, although its consequences continued for centuries.

The Seylandri still sing of what was lost.

The Age of the Thousand Kingdoms

From c. 500 BB to 1 BR, innumerable petty Rhone realms spread across much of the former Tar Aerchel. This was the Age of the Thousand Kingdoms, also remembered as the Warg Years, when rulers called wargs or wolves carved out domains that often vanished with them.

It was also the formative age of Rhone civilization. The Rhone borrowed, adapted and combined knowledge from the older peoples around them, gradually developing the towns, writing, agriculture, trade and institutions from which their later kingdoms grew.

The Age of the Hundred Kingdoms

The coronation of Brannais in 1 BR conventionally begins the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms. The name describes the long consolidation of innumerable petty realms into larger and more durable states rather than a literal count of kingdoms.

Brannais's creation of Tael Neydra, and its survival under his son Caelric, demonstrated that a Rhone kingdom could endure beyond the life of its founder. The founding generations of Tael Neydra are also commonly remembered as the Age of Brannais.

The Temple Wars and the Age of the Triad

The Temple Wars, which reached their height around c. 351 BR, accompanied the rise of the Triad to predominance among the Rhone. They were not one war but a generation of religious, political and social conflicts involving temples, rulers and communities throughout the Rhone lands.

The older traditions survived, but Triadic worship became increasingly intertwined with Rhone law, kingship, education and public life. Later historians sometimes call the resulting period the Age of the Triad, an overlapping cultural age whose precise beginning remains disputed.

The Fall of Tael Neydra

Around 391 BR, Tael Neydra fell after decades of subversion by Malivare. The creation of the Shroud by Xoth freed the Vorghol from their former dependence upon the hours of darkness and transformed the war.

The old kingdom became the heart of the Mastery. For more than a century the Deathless Masters have ruled beneath the Shroud, appropriating and mocking the traditions of the realm they destroyed.

The Age of the Comet

Around 490 BR, the Comet appeared in the heavens at approximately the same time that Henrick became King of Angharais. After several years of coalition-building, the Third Crusade against the Mastery began around 493 BR.

The war has now continued for approximately eight years. The name Age of the Comet has spread beyond the Rhone because the Comet belongs to no kingdom or faith: every people of the Sigil Lands can look upward and see the same light.

Whether future generations will truly regard its appearance as the beginning of a new age remains for history to decide.

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 <div class="codex-page codex-page--sigil">
-**NOTOC**
+= Histories =
+[[File:HistoriesLanding.jpg|750px|center|The Sigil Lands have a long history]]
-<div class="sl-epigraph">
+<blockquote/>
-''“The years behind us always seem warmer than the years in which we live.”''<br />
+''“The years behind us always seem warmer than the years in which we live.”''
 — Seylandri saying
-</div>
+</blockquote>
+The history of the Sigil Lands reaches back thousands of years before the first Rhone kingdoms. Every people remembers that past differently, and the divisions historians draw between one age and another are matters of convention. Some Ages overlap: the '''Age of the Hundred Kingdoms''' describes the political development of the Rhone realms, while the '''Age of the Triad''' describes a religious and cultural transformation within them.
-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.
+The further one travels into the past, the less certain the record becomes. Ancient dates are estimates, old accounts contradict one another, and much that was once remembered vanished during the Great Wrath.
-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.
+== Reckoning the Years ==
-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.
+The Rhone traditionally date events by the reign of the local sovereign: ''the fourth year of King Garrovic III'', for example. Scholars comparing events across different kingdoms instead use the '''Brannais Reckoning'''. The coronation of [[Sigil:Brannais|Brannais]] is '''1 BR'''; earlier dates are given as '''BB''', or '''Before Brannais'''. There is no year zero.
-Nevertheless, the broad course of history can still be traced.
+The present year is '''501 BR'''. Dates assigned to the ancient world are retrospective estimates and are usually given approximately.
-<div class="sl-history-nav">
+== The Long Summer ==
-'''The Great Ages and Turning Points'''
-[[Long Summer|The Long Summer]] •
+The earliest historical age is the '''[[Sigil:Long Summer|Long Summer]]''', which began with the exile of the [[Sigil:Seylandri|Seylandri]] from Aervallon and endured for thousands of years. Across [[Sigil:Tar Aerchel|Tar Aerchel]], the Seylandri cultivated a vast forest civilization centered upon the ancient '''Monarch Trees''', living beings around which settlements, Craft and memory grew.
-[[Great Wrath|The Great Wrath]] •
-[[Warg Years|The Warg Years]] •
-[[Age of Brannais|The Age of Brannais]] •
-[[Temple Wars|The Temple Wars]] •
-[[Fall of Tael Neydra|The Fall of Tael Neydra]] •
-[[Age of the Comet|The Age of the Comet]]
-</div>
+The Seylandri remember the Long Summer as a golden age when the world itself seemed younger and warmer. Whether this is memory, poetry or something more cannot now be known.
-== The Long Summer ==
+=== The Numberless Wars ===
-The '''[[Long Summer]]''' began with an exile.
+Long before the Rhone entered recorded history, the Long Summer was scarred by the '''[[Sigil:Numberless Wars|Numberless Wars]]''', the great conflicts between the Seylandri and the [[Sigil:Gholibin|Gholibin]]. Their causes and course survive differently in the traditions of the two peoples, and even their name reflects Seylandri memory rather than a universally accepted account.
-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.
+The wars ended, but both peoples carried their consequences into the ages that followed.
-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.
+=== The First Rhone ===
-Memory has been generous to it.
+Only much later, roughly a thousand years before the Great Wrath, do the [[Sigil:Rhone|Rhone]] begin to appear in the records of the older peoples. They were northern tribal peoples without writing, and their own earlier history survives only in oral tradition.
-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.
+The Seylandri and Gholibin appear to have regarded them as little more than obscure, hirsute peoples from beyond the familiar lands. Nothing in these scattered references suggests that anyone imagined their descendants would eventually become the most numerous people of the Sigil Lands.
-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.
+The [[Sigil:Great Wrath|Great Wrath]], remembered by the Seylandri also as '''the War of Leaf and Scale''', ended the Long Summer. The Dragha systematically destroyed the Monarchs while war consumed Tar Aerchel and shattered the living systems upon which Seylandri civilization depended.
-Its terrible centerpiece was the '''[[War of Leaf and Scale]]''', whose surviving histories and songs preserve names such as [[Aelorin Thaelion]], [[Ceanor]], [[Elohil Miravel|Elohil]] and [[Caeloran Miravel]], [[Aeginar|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|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.
+The collapse came one realm at a time. Seylandri survivors gradually withdrew toward lands where their people and living infrastructure remained, while Rhone peoples moving south settled among the devastated and increasingly abandoned territories. The Wrath conventionally ends with the [[Sigil:Battle of Aryemar|Battle of Aryemar]], c. '''500 BB''', although its consequences continued for centuries.
-Tael Neydra endured.
+The Seylandri still sing of what was lost.
-Brannais's son '''[[Caelric|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.
+== The Age of the Thousand Kingdoms ==
-More than four centuries later, Rhone kings still invoke the ideals of Brannais, even when their conduct bears little resemblance to them.
+From c. '''500 BB to 1 BR''', innumerable petty Rhone realms spread across much of the former Tar Aerchel. This was the '''Age of the Thousand Kingdoms''', also remembered as the '''Warg Years''', when rulers called wargs or wolves carved out domains that often vanished with them.
-== The Temple Wars ==
+It was also the formative age of Rhone civilization. The Rhone borrowed, adapted and combined knowledge from the older peoples around them, gradually developing the towns, writing, agriculture, trade and institutions from which their later kingdoms grew.
-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 Age of the Hundred Kingdoms ==
-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 '''[[Triad|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.
+The coronation of [[Sigil:Brannais|Brannais]] in '''1 BR''' conventionally begins the '''Age of the Hundred Kingdoms'''. The name describes the long consolidation of innumerable petty realms into larger and more durable states rather than a literal count of kingdoms.
-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.
+Brannais's creation of [[Sigil:Tael Neydra|Tael Neydra]], and its survival under his son Caelric, demonstrated that a Rhone kingdom could endure beyond the life of its founder. The founding generations of Tael Neydra are also commonly remembered as the '''Age of Brannais'''.
-They did not disappear after the Temple Wars. They simply ceased to stand at the center of southern Rhone life.
+== The Temple Wars and the Age of the Triad ==
-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.
+The '''Temple Wars''', which reached their height around c. '''351 BR''', accompanied the rise of the [[Sigil:Triad|Triad]] to predominance among the Rhone. They were not one war but a generation of religious, political and social conflicts involving temples, rulers and communities throughout the Rhone lands.
-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.
+The older traditions survived, but Triadic worship became increasingly intertwined with Rhone law, kingship, education and public life. Later historians sometimes call the resulting period the '''Age of the Triad''', an overlapping cultural age whose precise beginning remains disputed.
-''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.
+Around '''391 BR''', [[Sigil:Tael Neydra|Tael Neydra]] fell after decades of subversion by [[Sigil:Malivare|Malivare]]. The creation of the [[Sigil:Shroud|Shroud]] by Xoth freed the Vorghol from their former dependence upon the hours of darkness and transformed the war.
-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 '''[[Shroud|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|the Mastery]]''', ruled by the [[Deathless Masters]] from [[Dolgur]].
+The old kingdom became the heart of '''the Mastery'''. For more than a century the Deathless Masters have ruled beneath the Shroud, appropriating and mocking the traditions of the realm they destroyed.
-The enemy had not merely destroyed Tael Neydra.
-They had taken it.
 == The Age of the Comet ==
-For roughly a century the Mastery endured.
+Around '''490 BR''', the Comet appeared in the heavens at approximately the same time that [[Sigil:Henrick|Henrick]] became King of [[Sigil:Angharais|Angharais]]. After several years of coalition-building, the '''Third Crusade''' against the Mastery began around '''493 BR'''.
-Then, about ten to twelve years ago, '''[[Henrick|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.
+The war has now continued for approximately eight years. The name '''Age of the Comet''' has spread beyond the Rhone because the Comet belongs to no kingdom or faith: every people of the Sigil Lands can look upward and see the same light.
-They are living through it.
+Whether future generations will truly regard its appearance as the beginning of a new age remains for history to decide.
-== See also ==
+== See Also ==
 * [[Sigil:Timeline of the Sigil Lands|Timeline of the Sigil Lands]]