The Veil Wars and the Root Closure
The Veil Wars were not a Fey invasion of Avarra. When the final Damar administrations began treating Root Gates as roads, tax points, and military supply stations, human villages, Fey houses, and gate keepers were pulled into war over who could own a passage.
Why the war began
Damar cartographers could measure when a gate opened, but not fully why. Its administrations filled that gap with “public safety”: watch posts rose around anchors, passage received stamps and cargo lists, and some groves were cut for stations. Human travellers were genuinely safer in some places; local keepers and courts lost their say over the gate in return.
Free courts were not one side. Some made pacts with the Union for trade, hospitals, and refugee passage. Others saw gate taxation as betrayal of First Fey claims. Human villages divided too: gate stations brought work and protection, while farmers and guest households near roots paid the first price of war.
Coalition and the lost army
The negotiations that led to the closure gathered at Astereth. The Thorn Crown, Frost Court, Lethar, Copper Principalities, and allied human forces argued over what the gate order could become. Nimrûn and the Black Anvil remained formally neutral. Their neutrality was not indifference; it was a refusal to let the old extraction of deep communities be rebuilt around the gates.
The disappearance of a Hun army at the entrance to the Kharizha desert was the turning point no side could easily explain. Some records say it entered a threshold at the wrong time; others say the gate never opened at all. What is certain is that no administration could afterward safely defend treating a Root Gate as an ordinary military road.
The Root Closure
The Root Closure did not erase gates. It created common law requiring a keeper for every living anchor, the right time, and a recognized oath for every crossing. No state could open a gate alone; no court could ignore care for an Avarran anchor. The arrangement has been forgotten, reinterpreted, and abused, yet it explains why modern passages remain rare.
Accounts that remain
- Union ledgers call the war scattered Fey violence and necessary security.
- Root songs say humans cut not trees but the right of hospitality.
- Court stories do not hide collaborating Fey houses; freedom and comfort had costs in both worlds.
- Village records remember less who was right than which well, mill, and family remained after the war.
Play space
- An old Vein stamp proves not gate access but a village’s forgotten debt.
- A court envoy says the Root Closure is breaking; the local keeper says it is finally being followed.
- A human family requests hospitality from the Fey house its ancestors protected during the war.
Links: Fey Roads and Rootbeyond, Age of Breakage and Refuges, Vein Civilizations, Thorn Crown.