The Great Wrath

“Blood calls to blood!”
— Elohil Miravel, daughter of Sianor

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, drew Seylandri, Dragha, Gholibin and Rhone into a struggle that continued for generations and transformed the Sigil Lands permanently.

The Seylandri also call the age the Breaking. The name is apt. The Wrath did more than destroy kingdoms or kill armies. Forests burned, the Monarch Trees were systematically slain, living works of Craft failed, memories vanished with the things that had carried them, and peoples who had inhabited the same lands for thousands of years were scattered.

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 War of Leaf and Scale

No surviving history gives a complete account of how the War of Leaf and Scale began.

Relations among the ancient peoples had never been simple. Seylandri and Gholibin carried memories of the Numberless Wars. The Dragha had fought beside the Gholibin at times and had old grievances of their own. Local disputes, inherited hatreds and individual acts accumulated until conflicts that might once have remained separate became parts of something much larger.

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

Their stories survive unevenly. Some are preserved in histories, others principally in song, and some events are remembered so differently that later scholars cannot confidently reconstruct their order.

The accidental death of Sianor stands among the tragedies most often associated with the war. Whatever intentions surrounded the act, its consequences were not accidental. In a world already burdened by grievances and fear, one death became another reason for vengeance.

The conflict widened.

A War Without a Clean Front

The Wrath was never simply an army of one people fighting an army of another across a fixed frontier.

Campaigns crossed enormous territories. Alliances shifted. Settlements found themselves isolated. Individuals fought beside peoples their ancestors had regarded as enemies, while old friendships broke beneath the pressures of the war.

The Gholibin and Dragha fought together during parts of the conflict, though neither people can be reduced to the other's cause. The Seylandri themselves were not governed by a single mind or purpose, and disagreements among their leaders became increasingly important as the catastrophe deepened.

The war therefore survives less as a single orderly sequence than as a collection of campaigns, disasters and remembered names.

Among them was Aesaren, where Caeloran Miravel died. Elohil Miravel survived to become one of the figures most closely associated with the bitter later years of the struggle, remembered in connection with Frost and Shadow.

The ancient wyrms also entered the war. Aeginar, the Auld Wyrm, Khaeris, and Kon Darkeye belonged to a world in which the Dragha were still a power in the Sigil Lands rather than creatures remembered chiefly in story.

Kon Darkeye survived the Wrath.

His story would continue long after almost everyone who had first fought beside or against him was dead.

The Death of the Monarchs

The destruction of the Monarch Trees was among the most consequential acts of the Great Wrath.

The Dragha could not fail to understand their importance. The greatest Monarchs rose thousands of feet above Tar Aerchel and served as living centers of Seylandri settlement, Craft and memory. They were impossible to hide and devastating to lose.

The Dragha hunted them.

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

Their destruction did not merely deprive the Seylandri of revered living beings. Entire regions depended upon relationships built around them. Settlements, cultivated groves, water systems, living structures and works of Craft had grown together over centuries. Knowledge itself could be held within those living networks.

When a Monarch died, its realm did not necessarily die with it that day.

It began to fail.

Systems that had endured beyond living memory ceased to function. Knowledge disappeared because the living thing that had carried it was gone. Food became harder to obtain. Waterways and cultivated landscapes deteriorated. Structures could no longer be maintained as they once had been.

The Great Wrath destroyed archives without burning books.

It destroyed memory by killing what remembered.

No Monarch survived.

The First Vorghol

The Vorghol first appeared during the later Great Wrath.

They were made from Rhone.

The precise circumstances surrounding the earliest transformations are obscured by later legend and by the horror with which subsequent generations regarded them. What is certain is that not every early Vorghol was an unwilling victim. Some Rhone accepted the transformation knowingly.

The reasons undoubtedly differed. Power, survival, ambition, fear and the promise of escaping ordinary mortality all had meaning in a world collapsing around them.

The result endured long after the immediate circumstances had been forgotten.

Among the earliest and greatest of the Fallen was Kon Darkeye, whose survival would connect the Great Wrath directly to the much later age of Brannais.

The Vorghol were not yet the organized Mastery of later Tael Neydra. Their creation belonged to the chaos of the Wrath. But something had entered the world that would trouble the Rhone for the next thousand years.

The Collapse of Tar Aerchel

Long before the fighting ended, Tar Aerchel was dying.

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

Seylandri leadership could not reverse the destruction.

The population began to move.

There was no great command ordering the Seylandri to abandon Tar Aerchel and no single migration south. A realm failed here, a settlement there. Families left places where they could no longer live and went toward regions where other Seylandri remained and the old systems still functioned.

Those refuges then came under greater strain.

Another region failed.

More people moved.

Over generations the surviving Seylandri were drawn increasingly toward the south and eventually toward Seylannon.

Later Rhone histories sometimes describe this as though the Seylandri simply withdrew from the country.

They did not.

Their world ceased to support them one piece at a time.

The Rhone Move South

At the same time, Rhone peoples were moving south from the colder northern lands, particularly the country near the Sea of Mists.

Their reasons were far less dramatic than the events surrounding them. The southern country was warmer. It offered better prospects for farming, permanent settlement and escape from the harsher conditions of the north.

They entered a landscape already devastated by war.

The Rhone did not arrive as a single conquering people. Tribes, families and war-bands moved independently, settling where they found land they could occupy. Some encountered surviving Seylandri. Some fought them. Others traded, learned from them or lived beside them.

To a Rhone family arriving from the north, a burned valley containing abandoned ruins could look like empty country.

To a Seylandri survivor, it might still be home.

Thus the last generations of Tar Aerchel and the first generations of the later Rhone world overlapped.

One people was leaving.

Another was arriving.

Aryemar

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

It was not the moment at which the old world suddenly disappeared. By Aryemar, Seylandri had already been moving south for decades, many of the great forests had been ruined, and the last Monarchs were dead.

The battle instead became the conventional line after which the conflict could no longer be understood as the same war.

The Lay of Aryemar is remembered as the last great song of the world before the Breaking had fully run its course. Later Seylandri tradition returned again and again to Aryemar because an ending that had taken generations to unfold could at least be given one place and one name.

The war ended.

The damage did not.

The Departure of the Dragha

The Dragha eventually departed from the world.

Why they left, what became of them, and whether their departure was entirely voluntary are questions upon which later traditions disagree. Their disappearance nevertheless marked another division between the ancient world and the one that followed it.

Later generations would know wyrms principally through stories, ruins, ancient enemies and the consequences of things they had done.

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 not the world that had preceded it.

Tar Aerchel no longer existed as a functioning civilization. The surviving Seylandri were increasingly concentrated in Seylannon. Gholibin communities carried their own scars and memories from both the Numberless Wars and the Wrath. The Dragha were gone. Rhone migrants occupied growing stretches of the devastated country.

The centuries that followed became the Age of the Thousand Kingdoms, or Warg Years.

The Rhone built in the ruins of a civilization 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 became part of the new world: their nearly imperishable wood was cut from fallen trunks and reused in halls, gates, bridges and fortifications for centuries afterward.

The world was diminished.

Whether it was literally changed is another question.

Seylandri accounts of the Long Summer describe light, forests, Craft and living relationships that later generations have never reproduced. Some Elders maintain that the Great Wrath damaged more than civilizations and landscapes—that something in the world itself was broken.

Others say nothing supernatural need be imagined. Destroy Tar Aerchel, kill the Monarchs, scatter its people and erase its accumulated memory, and of course the world afterward would feel colder.

No one can now determine which explanation is true.

Perhaps both are.

Memory of the Wrath

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

Their songs do not merely lament a civilization in the abstract. They remember particular Monarchs, settlements, rivers, groves and people. Some preserve names whose meanings have been forgotten. Others contain gaps where verses or knowledge disappeared with those who once carried them.

For the Rhone, the Wrath belongs to ancient history.

For the Seylandri, that distance is less comforting.

Their people live long lives. Their traditions reach backward through comparatively few generations, and the world around them remains filled with evidence of what was lost.

The forests have never returned to what they were.

The Monarchs are gone.

And so the songs continue.

Sigil:Great Wrath