Time to revisit some ancient history — and Vigil, again. I’ve been meaning to explore this topic further since the first week after the demo released, but these latest excerpts from Irduin have been spicy enough to make that into a reality. This aims to be a comprehensive collection of evidence for the collapse and destruction of an ancient civilization circa a thousand years before the game, the ashes of which formed ground where new cultures and peoples emerged from a wild, chaotic age.
The Wild Age
Let’s begin with Sojourn, the City: again and again, from the Whiskered Hawk to the Red Kestrel, we are told that the Brauracha did not build the City, and that it predates their arrival in the plains over eight centuries ago.
Cited Texts
“Do any of your tales explain this City?” You point to the walls of Sojourn.
Garab shakes his head. “We have never been city-dwellers or city-builders. Whoever raised these walls did so before the earliest memories of our ancestors.”
“So there’s no trade by sea?” You’ve never been anywhere near Shayard’s coast, but you’ve heard from Carles that there’s thriving overseas exchange with Erezza, the Abhumans, and lands on the far side of the Olossar Ocean.
“None to trade with. The Brauracha built no cities in the western Lands; and the Ebon Ocean only ends where the sun is swallowed up by night.”
(Jevahir, on the origins of Nyryal)
"Around nine hundred years ago, a group of nomad tribes found their way straight across from Halassur, and started roving the plains north of Karagon. That’s us.”
And our most crucial hint comes offhandedly from Herne Alderway, once of Corlune, as he introduces himself to us:
“Do you know who built it?”
“Swive me, no. Always been here, the nomads say. Corlune has some old buildings that look like these, and they’re older than the Hegemony.”
Similarities in architectural style are not hard evidence of a common origin or culture — yet this is a constructed, fictional world, and the game here loudly declares that there may be a pre-Hegemonic link between Corlune (the third-largest city in the Hegemony and capital of the Westriding) and the City, an ancient place built by an unknown people. Corlune stands almost directly east of Sojourn, with the whole of the Southriding and much of the old Forest of Laconne in between: Grand Shayard included.
It seems more likely than not that the City was already abandoned and empty by the time the Brauracha discovered it; there’s no mention in the stories and legends of any living remnants of its people, or of any other people of the plains. That has perpetually been the cycle of the City, after all: abandoned, discovered, settled, abandoned. The Blood Raven tried; now it’s Sojourn’s turn.
With both the emptiness and Shayardene connection in mind, let’s turn our attention to the latest snippet from Irduin:
When wisards and monsters freely roamed the land, more than seven centuries ago: a single castle in the desert waste bringing order to the wild-lands. This describes a world of unbridled, monstrous magic — in a setting where magic is rooted in a deep, intuitive understanding of the mechanisms of the world. Our 2 INT MCs did not discover Theurgy all on their own: their ease of perceiving the four elements is rooted in studying and truly grasping the work of an in-universe natural philosopher; the first intuitive leap to Theurgy proper came from the First Exercise, a standard text. A wild-land full of wisards does not come about through pure luck: it builds on a societal foundation that it may well simultaneously tear down.
The story of Charivert de Shayard and the Knights of the Gryphon evokes post-apocalypse in its imagery, not the dawn of civilizations.
The name “Charivert” itself might be a clue: he is “the earliest king whose name is known”, not the first king. This is likely a reference to Charibert I, King of Paris — whose father Chlothar briefly ruled as King of the Franks after the deaths of his brothers reunited the kingdom, and whose father before him Clovis is often considered the first King of the Franks. Charibert represents the first generation of Frankish kings where the kingdom would not once again reunite within a generation.
Which brings us to Shayard itself, the castle, already in existence at the time of the legends, to which Shayard the city and Shayard the nation can trace their roots. There is little so far to suggest a connection between it and the ancients: but one interpretation of certain vague authorial comments upthread offers a spicy link. These mention something that might happen in Game 2, Ch. 4, so will be spoiled below:
On Grand Shayard
Vigil is ringed by black towers made of pure elemental stone, which can survive in the heart of the Xaos-lands to the point that the earth below would give way before they fall.
This, again, does not prove a connection between the ancients and Grand Shayard. If anybody alive in the present day has this technology, it would probably be the highest echelons of the Thaumatarchy — they could have brought it to Shayard. Nor can we rule out the possibility that the interaction between Xaos-storm and Ward could be part of this.
But the language of Grand Shayard having one such structure “at the heart of the Xaos” evokes the ancient heart of the city itself. There is perhaps no more fitting place to have that immovable ancient stone than the oldest known structure in the city, said to have existed in a wild age of magic and monsters.
I’ll leave this off with some enduring mysteries, and some more speculative takes about these mysterious ancients.
The bone-tokens of the nomad phyles could draw inspiration from this wild age of magic. The Red Kestrel mention that "there are few phyles now left who have borne the skull since before Kargash afflicted us" — this suggests that Xaos-storms are not the origin of this tradition, and that it has deeper historical roots in Brauracha culture, and uniquely Brauracha culture: not only is this not present in Halassurq and Nyrish culture as far as we’ve seen, but Jevahir explicitly views it as sad.
The Whiskered Hawk, Red Kestrel, and Blood Raven all draw on avian imagery altered by magic, and the Gryphon is a beast with the head of an eagle. Perhaps there’s a connection there; it’s difficult to say.
The Seracca are also notable in literally being an ancient magical civilization, albeit one that has persisted for over a thousand years. They represent the earliest point in our timeline, dating back 1,800 years, and where a millennium ago they fought a civil war such that:
“Every Yega’a came together to cast down a would-be tyrant. Since then, none has tried to impose a Hegemony on us.”
I would be remiss if I didn’t at least raise the possibility that this last civil war fought by the Seracca caused cities like Sojourn to be abandoned, and for Shayard to become a wild-land of wisards and monsters (the latter of which, frankly, are probably just how the proto-Shayardenes interpreted the Seracca). And the supposed span of this ancient magical civilization would’ve been the northern neighbor of the modern Seracca Federation.
“Learning and discourse, traditions of change and continuing, that go back eighteen hundred years. We have built cities, and abandoned them, and built them again.” M’kyar looks off to the southeast as if seeing something impossibly far away. “My own clan, the Gara’u Zerez, is one of the oldest, and the Range of Siet, where I was born, has a city on its margins that would make this Sojourn look like a village. But like Sojourn, much of Sietwall stands empty. Only at the great festivals do we come together there and play the game of city life. We are a free folk, and the Red Kestrel knows rightly that a city can become a prison.”
There is even a chance that “Seracca” itself is intended to mean something like “of the plains”: if Cerlota interrupts our duel with M’kyar, she says “Seracca sa’vewa! Peace, daughter of the plains!". If she merely repeated herself, once in Seracca and once in Koine, it could point towards the historical and cultural origins of the Seracca being in the plains: a geographic feature far more strongly associated with what would become the Xaos-lands than what we know of the modern Seracca Federation, with desert, mountain, and jungle.
And there’s a tiny detail that very well could be reading too much into things, that could link the Seracca to the Brauracha at a cultural level, not just an aesthetic:
The tip of M’kyar’s tail lashes the air. “Telling them they cannot themselves be controlled, that they are Powers beyond the capacity of any Theurge to measure or bind? Yes, ${sojname}, I deem that empowering.”
This is the only time “Powers” — proper noun and everything — is used outside the context of the Preserving/Protecting Powers or the Devouring Powers in the faith of the nomads. And crucially, M’kyar does not use the term in connection to the Seracca, but rather to all people: including the “udud”, the nomads among them. This, I think, is more of a reach than even the rest of what I’ve written, but I just wanted to note it down.
Lastly, while we’ve briefly touched on Vigil, this framework notably skips over everything about Cunning-Quick. But briefly, the story of Cunning-Quick fundamentally makes sense as a description of the origin of the Xaos-storms, which we know to be the year before Hera’s death. The Brauracha nomadic tendencies combined with the Towers around Vigil point towards ancients, and so this can be reconciled by Vigil (the place, not the entity) being created by ancients and discovered by the Brauracha.
The rabbit hole following from that, though, is my ongoing bias towards casting Cunning-Quick as Hera the Thaumatarch. But that’s something for its own entire post later, and not immediately relevant for discussion of an ancient civilization.