Era IV · 2700–1500 BC

Age of Breakage and Refuges

The failure of the Vein network, the Great Closure, underground migrations, and the Veil Wars broke old connections; people sought safety in refuges, local law, and guarded routes rather than empires.

The Veil Wars · 2700–2580 BC

As the Damar unions broke apart, their administrations sought new arenas of competition and treated Root Gates as roads, tax points, and military supply stations. Fey peoples called this a blasphemy. Few states wanted Eladrin, Elves, Thornbloods, Giants, and Shadar-kai as enemies, yet none could avoid deciding who ruled the gates.

The coalition against the dwarven states first met at Astereth for roughly a week of continuous council. The Thorn Crown, Frost Court, Lethar Star Kingdom, and Copper Principalities declared cause for war; human empires pledged support for the Thorn Crown and announced Hun riders would move to Vein entrances. Nimrûn withdrew, saying they respected both peoples; the Black Anvil chose neutrality. Other kingdoms followed interest.

Damar kingdoms still could not organize together and failed to take the threat seriously. They expanded watch posts, while new dwarven kingdoms born from Damar surrendered entirely to human attacks. Then a Hun army disappeared at the entrance to the Kharizha Desert. The Hun Empire declared forty days of mourning and ceased forging iron. Fey houses closed every gate. Damar commanders failed to force them open; Fey peoples secured them with magic and made their opening rare, dependent on codes and rare considerations.

The war killed people from many communities. Irokua bounty hunters sent to find the lost army found its dead—or piles of bones. Kenku initially thought this an organizational failure, until thrown spears revealed they had violated the territory of a tribe or state.

Spice and Music · 2580–2000 BC

The pact was finally forced through by the Elven union. A High Council party of one hundred High Elves and Drow crossed toward the newly discovered desert state. They travelled only at night, then every other day near their destination to avoid misunderstanding. Gilerior, their eldest diplomat, realized desert people had been watching them and designed his speech so he could hear and decipher their language: it faintly resembled Valois court speech but used harsher sounds. He told the council that the people’s leader was Azh-Khar and that they feared it deeply.

The next day they reached a vast river city of artificial shade and no obvious wall. Young Lonwenthir spoke with a Sahr, whom the Elves first mistook for a soldier people. The party was given a garden house large enough for five hundred, full of vivid cloth, scent, and male servants. On the full moon, drums and unfamiliar reed instruments announced an embassy of fifty to seventy. Quemenar, richly dressed in solar symbols, introduced themself as High Neshar and a member of the Seven Shadowed Council; the empress was Zhaqara, the empire Qasyrra, a sacred matrilineal state. Lonwenthir’s diary is the fullest account of this contact.

The diary shows that survival, not conquest, was Qasyrra’s central aim. Spice and dye trade followed. Street musicians around the world increasingly came from Qasyrra’s lower-caste communities.

The Seven Lines · 2640–2350 BC

While these events unfolded, a great earthquake struck Asteron. It drove communities into seven fissures, now filled with water, and later understood as the place where Veyrans emerged and formed. Dwarves were blamed; other accounts declared the disaster divine punishment. The Seven Lines Refuge preserves the longer account of survival, water sharing, and record custom.

Population Scarcity · 2000–1500 BC

After war’s deaths came long diplomatic silence. A coup in the Black Anvil brought more radical Karadağ-born leaders to power. In Valois, the palace was burned by the public, many nobles died, unrest spread, and crime rose. Ottonian and Stuart tried to inflame the crisis, then closed borders and waited for neighbours to collapse.

Fey-linked communities abandoned their coalitions one by one, turning to opaque intrigue. Minotaurs and Leonin began managing the legal part of world trade and building diasporas around major commerce. Minotaurs were more tied to their lands and worked especially to enrich Qasyrra. Other details remain unknown because many peoples kept no written records, or did not share the records they kept.

Vardûni exiles were not one voice within that silence. By 2450 BC, the division between the Five Seals, who treated the tablets as binding law, and the Eight Witnesses, who kept new testimony from the road open, had become two great paths. In 2100 BC, Sairava monks brought disciplines of silence and purification into some caravan hearths; in 1850 BC, Theskar mysteries travelled through soldiers and merchants into other Vardûni communities. Neither influence ever governed the whole family, but both ensured that later disputes concerned not only texts, but the habits that migration had carried.

The closure of routes had a smaller but lasting religious consequence. Many Aškari communities were separated from their main shrine, their stone, or the city law that recognized them. Some reclaimed an old face years later; others made a new aškar from ash, a mask, a debt ledger, or only a carried name. When two distant quarters now claim the same face, it is often not an error but two different routes of survival left by the Breakage.