The fairy folk were slaughtered wherever they were found, whole tribes captured and destroyed. The fury spread across Eion, spearheaded by makeshift armies of men calling themselves “Purifiers,” dedicated to eradicating the Qar, although it is doubtful they killed more fairies than they did their own kind, since many villages of men already devastated by the Great Death were burned to the ground by Purifiers as a lesson to those who might resist what they considered their sacred mission.
The remaining Twilight folk fled north, but turned to make a stand at a Qar settlement called Coldgray Moor, less than a day’s walk from where I sit writing this in present-day Southmarch (“Coldgray,” although an accurate description for the site of the battle, was apparently a misunderstanding of Qul Girah, which Clemon suggests means “place of growing” in the fairy tongue, although his sources for this are unknown to me.) The battle was terrible, but the Qar were defeated, in large part due to the arrival of an army led by Anglin, lord of the island nation of Connord, who was distantly connected by blood to the Syannese royal family. The Twilight People were driven out of the lands of men completely, back into the desolate, thickly forested lands of the north.
Like thousands of other less famous mortals, Karal, the king of Syan, was killed in the battle at Coldgray Moor, but his son, who would reign as Lander III, and would later be known as “Lander the Good” and “Lander Elf-bane,” granted the March Country to Anglin and his descendants to be their fief, so that they could be the wardens of humanity’s borders against the Qar. Anglin of Connord was the first March King.
After Coldgray Moor, the north experienced a century of relative peace, although troops of mercenary soldiers known as the Gray Companies, who had risen during the dreadful times following the Great Death and the collapse of the Syannese Empire, remained a powerful danger. These lawless knights sold themselves to various despots to fight their neighbors, or chose an easier enemy, kidnapping nobles for ransom and robbing and murdering the peasantry.
Anglin’s descendants had divided the March Country up into four March Kingdoms—Northmarch, Southmarch, Eastmarch, and West-march, although Southmarch was the chief of them—and these, governed by Anglin’s family and its clan of noble relations, ruled the northern lands in general harmony.Then, in theTngonate year 1103, an army of Twilight People swept down out of the north without warning. Anglin’s descendants fought bitterly, but they were pushed out of most of their lands and forced to fall back to their southernmost borders Only the support of the small countries along that border (known as “the Nine”) allowed the March folk to hold off the Qar while waiting for help from the great kingdoms of the south—help which was painfully slow in coming. It is said that in the midst of this terrible struggle a sense of true northern solidarity—as well as a certain distrust of the southern kingdoms—was created for the first time.
Only a fierce winter that first year allowed the humans to hold the Qar in place in the March Country In the spring, armies arrived at last from Syan and Jellon and the city-states of Krace. Although men far outnumbered the Twilight folk, the battle against the Qar raged off and on across the north for long years. When the March Kingdoms and their allies at last defeated the invaders in 110? and tried to pursue the Qar back into their own lands to eliminate the threat once and for all, the retreating fairy folk created a barrier that, although it did not keep men out, confused and bewitched all who passed it. After several companies of armed men disappeared, with only a few maddened survivors returning, the mortal allies gave up and declared the misty boundary they named the Shadowline to be the new border of the lands of men.
Southmarch Castle was reconsecrated by the Trigonarch himself—the Qar had used it as their fortress during the war—but the Shadowline cut across the March Kingdoms, and all of Northmarch and much of East-march and Westmarch were lost behind it. But although their northern fiefs and castles were gone, Anglin’s line survived in his great— grandnephew, Kelhck Eddon, whose bravery in the fight against the fairy folk was already legendary. When the border nations known as the Nine banded together and gave their loyalty to the new king at Southmarch (in part for protection from the rapacious Gray Companies, who were growing strong again in the chaos following the war against the Twilight People), the March King once more became the greatest power in the north of Eion.
Containing the opinions of Finn Teodoros, Himself, and no Responsibility to the late Master demon of Anverrin
In this Year of the Trigon 1316, three hundred years after Coldgray Moor and two centuries since the loss of the northern marchlands and the establishment of the Shadowline, the north has changed little. The shadow-boundary has remained constant, and effectively marks the outer edge of the known world—even ships that wander off course in northern waters seldom return.
Syan has almost entirely lost its hold over its former empire, and is now merely the strongest of several large kingdoms in the heartland of Eion, but there are other threats. The might of the Autarch, the god-king of Xis on the southern continent, is growing. For the first time in almost a thousand years, Xandians are exerting power across the northern continent Many of the countries on the southernmost coast of Eion have already begun to pay the Autarch tribute, or are ruled by his puppets.
The House of Eddon in all its honor still rules in Southmarch, and our March Kingdom is the only true power in the north—Brenland and Settland, as is commonly known, are small, rustic, inward-looking nations— but the March King’s descendants and their loyal servants have begun to wonder how much farther the Autarch’s arm might reach into Eion and what woe that might mean for us, as witness the unfortunate events that have befallen our beloved monarch, King Olin. We can only pray that he will be brought back safe to us.
This is my history, prepared at your request, my lord. I hope it pleases you. (signed,) FinnTeodoros Scholar and Loyal Subject of His Majesty, Olin Eddon.
Prelude
Come away, dreamer, come away. Soon you will witness things that only sleepers and sorcerers can see. Climb onto the wind and let it bear you—yes, it is a swift and frightening steed, but there are leagues and leagues to journey and the night is short.
Flying higher than the birds, you pass swiftly over the dry lands of the southern continent of Xand, above the Autarch’s startlingly huge temple-palace stretching mile upon mile along the stone canals of his great city of Xis. You do not pause—it is not mortal kings you spy upon today, not even the most powerful of them all. Instead you fly across the ocean to the northern continent of Eion, over timeless Hierosol, once the center of the world but now the plaything of bandits and warlords, but you do not linger here either. You hurry on, winging over principalities that already owe their fealty to the Autarch’s conquering legions and others who as yet do not, but soon will.
Beyond the cloud-scraping mountains that fence the southern part of Eion from the rest, across the trackless forests north of the mountains, you reach the green country of the Free Kingdoms and stoop low over field and fell, speeding across the thriving heartlands of powerful Syan (which was once more powerful still), over broad farmlands and well-traveled roads, past ancient family seats of crumbling stone, and on to the marches that border the gray country beyond the Shadowline, the northernmost lands in which humans still live.