Five thousand years ago...

[Prince Ísur-Ai]

Trying to keep faithful with SSHIT canon, I began drafting a history of Elwynn. It's a lot to read, and there is unfortunately not much about the Elw (or Elwys) in it. I'm hoping that you can help me out with writing this, you who know history and you who digs out history from the depths

I don't write history well. So please correct, expand, and write more. ELwynn is ours, we're 12 people here. Let us do a real work here

This is all fictional of course, taking place long before Shireroth even popped up in Erik's head. We begin our history five thousand years ago, in a time when the Elw were a proud nation of tribes living in the primeval forests of the lands between the rivers Elwynn and further north to the coast of what is now the Northern Reaches of Shirerithian and Amokolian Benacia. Each tribe functioned as a state of its own, but when facing common threats, they joined forces with each other. No one knows how many tribes there were, as their numbers increased and decreased over time.

The Elw believed in one spiritual force, personalized Creator or Artist in their systems of belief. In these days, the Elw were significantly theocratic and ruled by Prophets of the Artist, whereby the princes of the Elw tribes had little governing power, their powers were defined from time to time by the Prophets. The Prophets taught the Elw their view of the Artist and developed a code of conduct for the Elw tribes. They believed that the Artist had, through the Prophets, enlightened them about how to behave. This Code, known to them as the Code of the Nation, contained defined rules on what behaviour was acceptable and what behaviour wasn't. But it contained no punishments. It was the princes' task to enforce laws, represent the people before the prophets in the magocracy of the Elw tribes.

The Elw engaged in no or little agriculture at this time. However, they built boats and harvested the fruits of the Elwynn rivers and the small lakes of the inland. When in the inland, they hunted animals in the large wildwood of Elwynn and gathered berries, cones, nuts, fruits, plants and leaves. Nuts and cones were milled and made into a certain type of flour, used for baking “bread”.

Having no concept of territorial sovereignty, the Elw believed that all the Artist's lands were open for all creatures great and small. So when Woodshirians came to build and outpost at what is now Shirekeep, they had few objections. The Elw and the people of Woodshire began trading goods with each other.

But war broke out. Not between the Elw and Woodshire, but by Raynor's Brookshire and Woodshire. This was in b2400. Woodshire fell and Goldshire, a grand state of its own, to the east of the Realm of the Elw, occupied this former Elw-Woodshirian land.

The occupation didn't last long. Raynor of Brookshire ordered the Goldshire outpost destroyed. In a surprise attack, the Brookshirians moved over the Fork of Elwynn and attacked it. Many lost their lives, the Goldshirithians of Elwynn had little chance to resist. And so began a war.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

In the Academy Library there exists a summary of the antiquarian Polycandour’s sole noteworthy tome ‘The Mitigating Circumstances of the Elw’ which was compiled some time during the reign of Yarad I and which drew heavily from (indeed some might say outright plagiarised) the earlier work of the Sage Bukolos which was itself begun some time around 1789 ASC.

From these various fragments we have been able to collate the semblance of an outwardly coherent narrative:

Some two years after the founding of Shireroth, the lands of the former Musican Alliance, Brookshire’s old ally, proclaimed their independence from the new nation. This was a great surprise to the new Kaiser and his government, for the Musicans had been Raynor’s closest allies all through the wars, and the Alliance had been reconstituted as a Barony within Brookshire as a reward for their service. As the Musicans began sending raiding parties up the Elwynn and out to sea, attacking Goldshire from the water and retreating quickly, Raynor gathered up his armies and marched south, sending messengers ahead to demand an explanation.

But Raynor soon found himself turning his attention away from the Musican conflict. In summer of b2390, as the Kaiser was making preparations to leave the battle to his generals and return north to Shirekeep to resume governing his nation, news came to him of attacks on the capital from the north. Although Shirekeep had adequate natural defenses on the east, west and south, Raynor knew that the northern defenses were not yet complete, and that the city might still fall if the attacks were heavy enough. Rallying all the forces present that could be spared from the Musican campaign, he began marching north along the Elwynn. The siege was left in the hands of a prominent Brookshirian general, Francis Fenrir.

When Raynor finally arrived in Shirekeep in autumn, he found his own city under siege. The invaders were a people called the Elwys, who lived in tribes between the branches of the Elwynn. Although not advanced technologically, the Elwys were organized and disciplined, and protective of their homeland, which included the land upon which Shirekeep had been built. Moreover, they had been staunch allies of the Musicans, with whom Shireroth had suddenly choked off trade.

But their numbers and discipline, while enough to besiege a city with only partial defenses, were not enough to stand up against the forces Raynor had at his command. As the armies returned to Shirekeep across the Brookshire Bridge, some were sent to reinforce the gaps in the defenses, while others went out in forays to help break the siege. Over about a week, the battle raged hotly, with heavy losses on both sides, but a full-scale charge, with Raynor at its head, finally routed the Elwys and chased them back to their villages.

This would not be the last time that the Elwys were to attack the young nation, and neither would it prove to be the most successful. But after their first attack, the Elwys remained quiescent during most of the rest of Raynor’s reign, their activity in Shirerithian lands being reduced to quick raids and border skirmishes. Their war parties were preoccupied with invasions from the west, beyond the West Elwynn, where the precursors to the Machiavellian nations lived. Meanwhile, Raynor chose not to pursue further subjugation of the Elwys, seeing that their attention was elsewhere.

In the years after the breaking of the siege of Shirekeep, Raynor remained in his capital instead of rejoining the armies in the south. Although this may have been due in large part to a perceived need to defend Shirekeep and the north against further attacks, there is little doubt that the Kaiser’s decision was also affected by the morale of his people, especially that of his troops. Raynor had been long at war – uniting Brookshire, then conquering Goldshire, then fighting the Musicans, then fending off the Elwys. His armies were weary, and many soldiers longed to return to a civilian life. Moreover, the Kaiser’s campaigning had left him little time for the governance of Shireroth. Now that the greatest threats to the nation’s existence had been neutralized, Raynor may have seen a chance to let his people rest and grow strong, and to put Shireroth in order.

In any event, he began cycling out some of the longer-campaigning troops and putting them on reserve, bringing in new recruits, and disbanding some of the units least necessary for Shireroth’s defense. But he maintained his siege of Musica in the south, and continued to build his navy.

The Time of Building lasted from b2378 until b2337. In those forty-one years, Shireroth prospered; domestic difficulties remained small in scale and easily controlled, foreign invasions amounted to little more than raids on village granaries, infrastructure continued to develop. Raynor’s children, like himself enjoying the longer life of the Khaz Modanians, slowly grew up into adolescence. Although slowly, the grip of the new nation began to be extended again, with careful expeditions being made into the lands of the Elwys, and to the west among the proto-Machiavellians.

We should I feel adduce from the text that the proto-Elwish tribes of the Elwys were subject to a profound exogenous shock by the arrival in turn of Woodshirians, Goldshirians, Brookshirians and finally Musicans, who were albeit all seemingly monomaniacally obsessed with the spit of land that would become Shirekeep. Nonetheless the conflagration which engulfed the established empires of the lower Elwynn undoubtedly triggered a social revolution which broke the equilibrium between the magisterial Prophets and the Princes and shattered the almost idyllic pastoral existence of the Elwys – transforming them into a more disciplined and militarised tribal society, and certainly a formidable enough enemy to be a plausible enough threat to Shirekeep to detain the Kaiser Raynor there for a forty-one year long stretch of his formidably long life after raising the initial siege.

Hopefully it will be possible to reconstruct Polycandour’s text – but it was never a popular work, only having a limited print run in the first instance, and the sole remaining copy was badly damaged during the burning of Ardashirshahr after the 2nd Hyperborean Descent on Elwynn circa 3341 ASC.