History, as told by Allaria

The history of Allaria goes back to a time when humans had not appeared in the world; but it was their arrival, and their conflicting interaction with the ancestral Ellari peoples, which gave birth to Allaria and shaped the most glorious nation in the Westerlands.

The Ellari Kingdoms
Before the first realms appeared in Valerna, the Westerlands were dotted with ellari cities, under the rule of great Fai magicians. These were known as the Ellari kingdoms - sites of great power, where mortals lived as close to Dream magic as they ever have. It is told no spells were needed during that age, as Fai manifested in the natural world through the dreams of ellari, and they could dream either awake or asleep, with a natural magic of which modern Dreamshaping is but a flimsy vestige. The ellari of the time, still close to their Primordial origin, were so powerful that they could pick which dreams would become true and which would not, creating a region of peace and restful might.

The Nine Green Kingdoms of the Western Woods dedicated to arts and joyous things, while the Nine Silver Kingdoms of the Eastern Woods focused on understanding and research of the deepest mysteries in the Cosmos. At the center lay the Three Gray Kingdoms of Adorean, which guarded the Three Crowns of Charm - Wenarin, the Crown of Life, which gave birth to trees, birds and beasts; Xiarin, the Crown of Thought, which gave wisdom and willpower to living things; and Fairin, the Crown of Dream, the dearest to Ellari, which gave solid form to hopes and aspirations.

It was the power of the Three Crowns which allowed the Ellari Kingdoms to prosper despite the dragon attacks from the Red Moon, for their combined power was greater than that of the Azhurma themselves. While the dragon raids cost many lives and toppled many walls, a thousand times they razed the Westerlands, and a thousand times the Ellari kingdoms stood their ground.

Separate from the Ellari kingdoms, free to rule themselves but enjoying the protection of the Adorean Crowns, lived the Godao gnomes, the Tunnel Diggers, who thrived below the ground as the Ellari did on the surface. They were less powerful than the Ellari, and fewer in number, but their ability to dream and create outshined that of their elven neighbors; for the gnomes understood how dreams worked, and crafted things of power that strengthened both peoples. While the Crowns of Charm could only be fueled by Ellari magic, it was the gnomes who crafted them as a gift to the elves.

The Coming of Humans
While the Ellari Kingdoms lived in peace and prosperity, they knew the world outside their borders fared much worse, both against the Red Moon raids and against their own conflicts. A new people arose, which dragons called ‘humans’, and lived short, violent lives. Humans had no defense against dragon raids, but the great wyrms let them live and multiply, so that their people would serve the dragons in the Red Moon. But humans did not bow, and the dragons were forced to keep them in check by strength, fear and culling.

The elves admired the human defiance, for they challenged the dragons without magic or power, and approached the Chiefs of Humanity with the First Overture for alliance.between their peoples. To the Ellari’s surprise, the humans refused them too, for protection from the Ellari kingdoms would result in subservience. The elves respected human defiance, but the other peoples of the world - birdfolk, lizardfolk and snakefolk - did not, and decided that humans needed to be subjugated for their own good. Thus, humans rejected the protection of the Ellari, only to become the thralls of the Snakes.

The Dragonbonded
For long centuries, the Scaled League of the Three Saurian Peoples repelled one dragon attack after the other, with power that diverged from that of elves but rivalled it, and they taught their human slaves to survive and resist the raids from Drakha. Thus came the first dragonslayers and, shortly, the first Dragonbond, which took place when a dragon recognized the elven wisdom in Teryane, High Fai Priestess of Inessai, and was forced to respect it, as Teryane recognized the dragon’s wisdom and learned to admire it.

In time, the dragonbonded became legion, and they joined together against the dragon invasions. Many elves became dragonbonded, for the dragons respected them best among all mortal peoples, and thus humans, elves and saurians, along with their bonded dragons, presented a united front against the Red Moon. This was the first Heroic Era, during which the earliest songs of great deeds were first sung. Through the dragonbond, humans learned to work alongside other mortals; not in defiance or subservience, but in fellowship. And dragons, in turn, learned that they could rise against the Protogons, the only creatures stronger than themselves.

When the Great Wyrms rose against the Protogons, it was one dragonbonded human, the former slave named Altan, which led his brethren to help the dragons and slay Kadmos the Protogon. This stopped dragon raids for a few centuries, but the dragonbonded order stood strong, knowing it would be called upon to defend Valerna once again.

The Altanesi War
When the Dragonbonded returned to the world after the defeat of Kadmos, Altan saw that it was unbecoming for humans to be slaves of other peoples, after having fought side by side as dragonbonded - as equals. So he demanded the Saurian peoples liberate their human slaves. The Birdfolk agreed, but the Snakefolk refused, and so the birdfolk, lizardfolk and humans rose together against the snakes. The rebellion established humans as a Power in the world, and they formed the first Great Realm in history, built on the power of Altan the Dragonbonded - the Altanesi Empire. For hundreds of years, the Altanesi expanded through the land, conquering all other human peoples, and soon Altan’s Empire spanned all of Valerna, save for the small territories where the saurians had exiled themselves, and the Ellari Kingdoms, which had nothing to do with the quarrels of humans.

But Altan did not see it that way, and decided that elves should also become his subjects. When the Altanesi marched on the Three Gray Kingdoms, the Dragonbonded Queen Inyse, who had fought alongside Altan in the Red Moon, stood against him, and offered humans the Second Overture for a peaceful alliance between them and the Ellari. But as his ancestors had rejected because they didn’t want to bow to the elves, thus Altan rejected because he wanted the elves to bow to humans. And humans and elves fought, and Altan fell in battle against Inyse.

The death of Altan shattered the Empire, sending ripples that toppled the greatest cities in the world. No human tribe was spared the confusion and anarchy, and eventually humans split into hundreds of disparate tribes, which spoke different, smaller languages and followed different, smaller leaders. Thus humans fell back into smallness, after having been the greatest power in the world. But other peoples remember their hubris, and no other tribe of Valerna sought to associate with humans ever again.

The Dreambleed
The peace that followed the defeat of Altan was short-lived, however. The world was still reeling from the war, and the dragonbonded were still reaching the peoples of the world, teaching them to stand against dragon raids after the fall of the Empire. Then, something happened that no mortal in Valerna could have predicted, or expected.

Ennai, the Raven King of Elerenai, the highest of the Three Gray Cities, and custodian of the Crown of Dreams, was an apprentice of Queen Inyse and one of the mightiest wizards in the land. His followers numbered in the hundreds, and he had formed a cult that dwarfed the might of all other Ellari kingdoms. Yet, for all his power, he envied the power of dragonbonded, and the near-immortality it provided. Seeking to expand their power over Fai, Ennai’s followers fled Valerna, looking to conquer the Fai itself. They took the Crown of Dreams with them, which upset the magic power and wards of the other two Grey Cities - Yserenai and Inessai - and left the kingdoms in turmoil. While the other Ellari kings looked for Ennai, trying to understand what he was doing, the Raven King performed a secret ritual beyond the ken of all other Ellari, causing a major cataclysm during which boundless Fai exploded in the mortal world, in a destructive wave of madness that flooded the land, drowned forests and toppled mountains. The survivors called it the Dreambleed, and it is recorded as the greatest catastrophe to ever hit the world.

The Dreambleed destroyed half of the Ellari Kingdoms, flooding all of the Silver Cities of the East and burning the Three Grey Cities, along with their remaining Crowns of Being, which crippled the surviving Ellari, ended the stability and power they had enjoyed for millennia, and left them defenseless against dragon attacks. The Dreambleed also razed the few surviving Altanesi cities, driving the final nail into humanity’s hopes to unite again. It changed the landscape of Valerna, creating vast seas and endless deserts where there had once been lush forests, and it spawned the Fell, the cursed Dream Elves, from the remains of Ennai and his followers. For the first time since their creation, elves were as broken and lost as humans. And the whole world felt the effects.

Karra, Qan and The Hydra Lord
Without the power of the Three Crowns, even the surviving Ellari Kingdoms - the Nine Cities of the West - began dwindling, and soon they were barely stronger than the neighboring human kingdoms, even shattered as they were by the fall of the Altanesi Empire. Humans began settling the Westerlands, and the Ellari had no strength to repel them. Bucentauri hordes rose on the other side of new rivers created by the Dreambleed, and the Ellari had no strength to stop them. The dragons fell on Ellari cities with millennia of restrained vengeance and cruelty, and the Ellari barely resisted their onslaught. The silver elves knew their time on Valerna was in its long, sad death throes.

Of the few surviving Ellari cities, Taessai was one of the weakest, its size reduced ten times from its heyday and its magical might but a spark of its former power. Taessans had been forced to accept a relatively strong human tribe as a neighbor, for, while the Ellari were still the mightier state, their power diminished with every season, while the humans only grew stronger and more numerous.

Among these humans, there was a huntress, name of Karra, who daily visited Taessai asking for an audience with its King, Qan. Karra was infatuated with beautiful, ageless Qan, and sought his hand in marriage. The elven king, scared by these brash humans and the decadence of his own people, refused to even look at her. Karra came with battlesongs and love sonnets, and Qan did not open his window. Larra came with lavish gifts and gold coffers, and Qan’s advisors dismissed her. Karra displayed her hunting prowess with the heads of defeated Fai monsters, and Qan’s guards turned her away.

Then one day, a larger, scarier Fai monster than anything mortals could have dreamed of, an abomination born of the Dreambleed, came to Taessai. They called it the Hydra Lord, for it was a terrible lizard with thirteen heads, as large as a castle. When the monster approached Taessai, Karra came again to Qan’s gates; this time, she offered no gift and spoke no words of love. She asked the king to march with her, to defeat this creature together. And Qan opened his window, and he came down from his tower, and his advisors signed peace between Karra’s soldiers and Qan’s subjects, and his guards joined Karra’s warriors. Together, Qan and Karra faced the beast, and Qan said he hadn’t accepted her courtship for that would mean humans would rule elven lands. Thus Qan and Karra made a bet - whoever cut off more of the hydra’s heads, would be the ruler of Taessai. They cut six heads each, and the thirteenth head they cut off at the same time. Thus Qan understood that Karra was indeed his equal, and his heart at last melted for her. The following day, not only Qan, but the rulers of the other surviving Ellari cities, called on Karra’s people, and offered them the Third Overture of peace between humans and elves. And neither people would be subservient to the other, but they would be as equals. And the humans agreed, and the Third Overture was the last one, and elves and humans became one people. Taessai was renamed Allaria, the Crown of Honor, and Allarians, who had already resigned themselves to die with their city, won a victory and a new Queen. For Karra and Qan married, and their thirteen children included the first elves with human blood, and they were known as Allai, or honor elves, for their birth honored the Third Overture and the First Alliance. And all Allai queens and kings were hence called Qan, in honor of the first elf to marry a human.

The Covenant
The union of Qan and Karra inspired the Dragonbonded to help the world unite and become strong together. Allaria became the site of the Covenant - a pact among all dragonbonded, establishing they would protect Valerna as one force. They built the Temple of Ret Sajuut, at the mountain where the Elf Sage Teryane had bonded millennia ago, using human work, elven magic and human craft. Cities with Dragonbonded rulers, such as Allaria, were spared dragon attacks. And the world began to heal.

For nearly a thousand years there was peace in Allaria and across Valerna, as the world recovered from the Dreambleed, aided by the protection of the Dragonbonded Covenant. Remembering the alliance that brought Kadmos down, the Great Wyrms spared those cities that had dragonbonded leaders, and they found savage resistance in those that didn’t. Allaria flourished under the rule of honor elves and their lineages, which spread across the Westerlands, slowly replacing what had once been the Ellari Kingdoms with a new culture, one that emulated Allarian society, and brought human focus and expansion to the ancient wisdom and power of the elves.

This era marked the birth of many of the dragon defense methods still known today, such as flame-retardant housepaints and Dragonbows - the huge ballistae that adorn the rooftops of most Valernian cities. All these innovations came from the imagination of Golden Gnomes, who had survived the Dreambleed at the cost of many of their underground territories, and happily joined the new Allarian rule on the surface. This time was also when the first draft of The Eliadu began circulating, penned by unknown hands that warned against rest or optimism, and demanded that Allaria adopted a sterner, more orderly approach, lest it be drowned in a second Fai cataclysm.

Despite the Eliadu’s grim warnings and its growing popularity, these centuries are still remembered as a Golden Age for Allaria and all of Valerna, for all mortal peoples were free, all realms lived in relative peace, and the dragonbonded protected the land against the dangers that remained.

The First Null War
Eventually, the Eliadu’s omens came true - or rather, its followers claimed that what happened had been predicted. During a particularly bloody Red Moon, the Dragonbonded cast a massive spell, intended to summon pure Vaala against the swarms of Drakha. The result decimated the dragon horde, but it cost the life of the Dragonbonded that cast it. It had not summoned pure Vaala, but brought its opposite, Null magic, into the material world.

This led to the Null Wars, which split the Dragonbonded Covenant among those that forbid the practice of Null magic and those that believed in using it to defeat the Great Wyrms of Drakha once and forever. The latter sacrificed themselves to bring about an invasion of Nullborn entities into the world, which would have destroyed Rhaava, and then Valerna, but for the sacrifice of the remaining Dragonbonded - and the power of the bond itself.

During the war, Allaria’s optimism was turned on its head; weapons that had worked against the mightiest dragons were useless against the weakest Null entities. Most of the remaining Ellari kingdoms saw their last stand during this war, the Null wiping out what the Dreambleed had toppled. The Null invaded the Ellari’s dreams, causing them to summon Null things through horrid, waking nightmares. When the sacrifice of the Dragonbonded ended the threat, it still took decades for Allarians to fully come to terms with what had really happened. One of the sacrificed Dragonbonded, the hero Mannai Arn, was well loved by Allarian people, and his fall seemed to represent the end of the Allarian Golden Age.

And indeed, after the Null Allaria was a frightened, diseased land. Many Allarians still had terrible Null-related nightmares, and feared their Ellari brethren would summon the Null back. The Eliadu was cited, and the fear of dreaming expanded from its possibility to summon Null creatures to the danger of a new Dreambleed.

The ellari didn’t realize it then, but they could still fall much further than they had.

Zai Qan, the First Dragon King
The Dragonbonded Arn Zai, a honor elf warden and brother of the hero Mannai, had distinguished himself during the war, slaying a Nullborn entity and building the first of the Nahuac Seals that trapped the Null by his own faith and power. Worshipped by the people, Arn took the throne of Allaria, becoming Zai Qan, and named himself the first Dragon King of Allaria.

He then set out to help rebuild the Allai cities of the Westerlands, demanding in turn that every city adopt Allaria’s new law, which included strict adherence to the Eliadu and enforced government control of all elven magic.

The weakened Ellari wanted to resist, but they weren’t strong enough; and Zai, in a show of goodwill and honest intentions, made a pact with the Great Wyrms of Drakha: from the next raid henceforth, every city under Allarian law would bind itself to one dragon brood. When the Red Moon came, that city would be safe from attacks by that brood, in return for the sacrifice of one of the city’s royal heirs. Zai began the tradition by binding his house to Brood Fulgen, the mightiest dragon lineage of Drakha, and giving them his only son, then an infant, as the tribute that would cement their pact. This sacrifice convinced the people of Zai’s purity and commitment to his own ideals, and established the Dragon Royal lineage as the ruling house of a new, unified realm, with Allaria - now renamed Allaria City to differentiate it from the Kingdom as a whole - at its center.

Then Zai Qan welcomed all Godao gnomes as full citizens of the Kingdom, and granted them the Grand Guild, which allowed the Godao to conduct their experiments freely and sell their tools and inventions across Valerna, in return for their research in Allaria’s best interests.

At the height of Zai’s popularity, few dared to stand against his sterner measures, which included forcing the Ellari to submit to a magical treatment that removed their capacity to dream, and relegating them to second-class citizens because of their suspiciously Null-like, colorless eyes, under the more honorable and responsible Allai caste. For better or worse, Zai painted the new face of the Dragon Kingdom, and it was under his rule that Allaria became the sole dominant state of the Westerlands.

The Náhuinn Wars
As Allaria grew in size and power, it needed more and more land to feed its growing population and its tremendous expenses in magical research. Since a lot of farmable land remained in the hands of bucentauri hordes to the West of the Greatgold river, and fertile Ysval was already a semi-tributary to Tyveria, the Kingdom looked south, and Zai himself was the first Qan to try and establish a trade agreement with Nahuac.

But the Náhuinn were the most isolationist Realm in Valerna, and stubbornly rejected any deals with foreign powers. After Zai’s death, his sons Endu and Kelai tried again to barter for Nahuac’s goods, but the southern Coalition remained adamant against it. When Qan Endu was crowned Dragon King of Allaria, he abandoned all pretense of diplomacy, and sent armed forces across the Sea of Nahuac. Many warriors on both sides died, and Allaria failed to conquer an inch of Náhuinn land. Endu was succeeded by his daughter Enneia, who paid for covert expeditions to infiltrate Náhuinn territory and steal some of its resources. These expeditions succeeded at first, and they even formed settlements, expanding the Allarian border into the Náhuinn forests, but they were repelled a few years later during the Cádhaidd Revolt.

Enneia’s descendants tried to leave Nahuac in peace, but the chieftain Áodhain, who remembered the many Náhuinn dead during the Expeditions, launched a guerrilla war all across the southern Allarian border. It was during this war that Allaria realized just how poorly claimed its border territories were, and it was only the near-miraculous intervention of Princess Warrior Aldea and her troops which prevented the city of Riverglint from being decimated by the Náhuinn armies.

Since then, the Allaria-Nahuac border has been a steady bloodbath, one decade bloodier, another less so. Some later Qan monarchs attempted peace talks with Nahuac, but if the Náhuinn were mistrustful previously, now they had become unappeasable. Only the two realms’ ancient pledges of cooperation, and the fact that Nahuacáinn still housed the seals that could unleash the Null again in the world, prevented the tension from escalating into all-out war.

The Second Null War
The son of Queen Aldea, Qan Yin the First, inherited a stable, prosperous kingdom, which had followed the laws of the Eliadu for a thousand years and managed to fully tame the Ellari into a servant class. Only a few bucentauri tribes and ellari rebel bands subsisted at the Kingdom’s edges, and Náhuinn attacks had trickled down to what barely amounted to road banditry. But Yin’s realm was marred by tragedy, starting when his wife, Queen Aisse, gave herself to the Fulgen in the third year of their rule. Then one of Yin’s bastard daughters, the Ellari child of a palace servant, was chosen as a sacrifice during the following Red Moon; and Yin himself, along with his firstborn Nisse, walked into a Náhuinn ambush, which led to Yin’s death and the Nahuacáinn massacre - a military retaliation, spearheaded by Nisse’s consort king Qan Fan, against the city of Nahuacáinn and its surrounding villages. In turn, the massacre allowed for the weakening of the Nahuac Seals, through which the Null returned to the world. A joint force of Náhuinn defenders and rogue dragons slew Fan and routed his forces, but the damage had been done - the Null was back.

Convinced that joining an unbeatable enemy was better than trying to beat it, Qan Yin Nisse, Yin’s heir and Fan’s widow, and the third Dragon Dynasty ruler in one season, embraced Null worship and allowed Nullborn entities to freely roam the Kingdom. But the weakening of the seals had a very important consequence - the magic of dragonbonding returned as well. In the single season that transcurred between the reigns of Yin, Fan and Nisse, at least a dozen new dragonbonded appeared in the world and, while they were few, they managed to band together and stop the new Null invasion by slaying the Nephali entity, which had concentrated all the power of the Null into itself. And Queen Nisse, like other Null cultists, was just one of the many casualties of this second Null War.

Albeit brief, this new Null invasion had ravaged Allaria and, more importantly, left the Dragon Dynasty in shambles.

Elyse, the Ellari Queen
Unknown to most Allarians, Yin’s other daughter, the Ellari bastard Elyse, had survived the sacrifice to the Fulgen dragons, instead bonding with one of them - the great Ferellon, who was famed and respected even back in the Red Moon. Empowered by her Dragonbond, Elyse returned to Allaria, to find it infested by Null creatures and in the hands of corrupt officials, who performed numerous criminal activities under the nose - or perhaps with the approval - of Queen Nisse.

Backed by Ellari rebels from the Fai Woods, and with the support of loyal senators, Ellari raised the Warden Lodges and human guilds against the criminals under Nisse’s rule. The coup was short, and the cleansing was thorough. Elyse was crowned Dragon Queen, against the advice of the very senate that helped win the battle, and even against her own wishes; but with the support of the common classes, and the very weighty backing of Lord Ferellon Fulgen, whose brood had been bound to the Qan Dynasty for a thousand years.

As the first Ellari queen in the history of Allaria, Elyse enacted a full overhaul of Kingdom rules, making silver elves into full citizens protected by law, abolishing caste distinctions and allowing nobles to keep their wealth only if they donated sizeable amounts to the pursuit of arts, studies and welfare across the Kingdom. She removed the Grand Guild’s corrupt leadership, and appointed humans, bucentauri and even ellari to the Allarian Senate, along with Allai and gnomes of her confidence.

Now, a few years into Elyse’s rule, Allaria is a completely new kingdom - one that still follows the Elliadu and the ideals of Honor and Duty; but also struggles with new values that it doesn’t fully understand, such as acceptance, and cooperation without hierarchy. True change will surely take very long to settle in; but Elyse is Dragonbonded, which all but guarantees she will be around to see it through.