Once, long, long ago, back in the days, when people believed,
before maps learned to lie, before memory learned to thin,
there was a wager made in halls now lost,
a boast called out, a promise kept in laughter and in stone.
Sing, sing, spirits of legends old—
sing of the giants who walked the black waters,
dragging the ships of Ro’Edyne ashore,
their laughter shaking the bones of the world,
their labor set in the mountain’s heart.
Sing—of hands that cut thunder into stone,
of halls raised with ships for rafters,
of swords not as threats but as covenants,
set deep so the land would remember who built,
who bled, and who left.
Sing—of the revel, of the mirth that shook the heights,
of the horns that called the giants westward,
of promises made not in fear, but in the joy of great work finished.
And when the war-whistles sounded,
sing how the giants turned, stone-faced and sure,
stepping into myth as the mountains bowed low.
Sing—of those who remained:
the daughters of Londorai, proud and wild,
who lingered when their kin marched to their end,
who gave and were given, weaving new blood into Roedon’s ereth,
standing beside the folk who remembered,
not the deed, but the story.
Sing—of the halls left behind,
of the stones set by hands now dust,
of ships buried as bones,
of swords deep as vows,
of the covenant never quite broken—
that Ro’Edon would stand back to back with the world
should war come again.
Once, long, long ago, back in the days, when people believed,
the High Halls were raised,
not for the keeping of kings or the counting of years,
but to show the world that those who have no history
can build their own,
and name it true,
and sing it so.
Now, as the halls of Vulsa ring with new voices,
as banners rise that will not bow,
the tale lingers—half jest, half prayer—
a promise built on laughter, loss, and the stubborn refusal to let myth die.
So let them say Ro’Edon is a land with no past—
the stones remember.
The water remembers.
And as long as the song is sung,
the High Halls stand.
Category: The Ro’Edyne Cycle
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I. The Tale of The High Halls
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The Ruin of Ardenga
1
Of the many obscurities which attend the study of the Northern Provinces, there is none more perplexing than the matter of Ardenga and the lands that once lay beneath its authority. The city itself, so far as can now be determined from the surviving records, appears already to have entered a period of gradual decline in the century preceding its destruction. Trade routes altered their courses. Tributary settlements withdrew from its influence. The revenues recorded in such fragments as remain suggest increasing military expenditure accompanied by diminishing agricultural production. Such developments, though unfortunate, are neither remarkable nor uncommon in the annals of antiquity.
Yet here the familiar course of history appears to abandon us. For what befell Ardenga cannot readily be compared to the ordinary dissolution of kingdoms. Cities have fallen before. Provinces have been ravaged. Dynasties have vanished into dust. But in the northern territories there occurred a rupture of continuity so profound that one is tempted to speak not of destruction, but of erasure. The population vanished. The institutions vanished. The dependent settlements vanished. Even the memory of events appears to have become disordered with unusual haste.
We are left instead with contradictory chronicles, abandoned roads leading into wilderness, valleys marked by inexplicable scars, and a body of evidence whose fragments refuse to assemble themselves into any satisfactory whole. The legends speak with confidence. The evidence does not.
I have devoted no small portion of my life to the examination of these matters and can claim little success beyond this singular conclusion: that those who witnessed the end of Ardenga encountered something for which neither their language nor ours possesses adequate expression.
2
Ten millennia have passed since those events, yet the distance has yielded surprisingly little clarity. The disappearance itself appears to have occurred with astonishing rapidity. Entire districts vanish from the historical record within periods measured not in generations but in months. Settlement patterns cease abruptly. Administrative correspondence ends. Commercial accounts terminate. Population estimates collapse with a suddenness which exceeds any ordinary expectation. We possess examples elsewhere of cities ruined by war, by famine, and by pestilence. Ardenga seems, in some obscure manner, to have suffered all three at once, accompanied by phenomena which no accepted historical model adequately explains.
Particularly troubling are the vitrified escarpments situated north of the ancient river basin. Numerous expeditions have documented extensive glassing within exposed stone strata. Early theories attributed these formations to wildfire, but subsequent investigation rendered such explanations untenable. The temperatures required exceed those associated with any known forest conflagration, while the distribution of the affected regions follows no geological pattern presently understood. The damage conforms to no fault line. It corresponds to no volcanic activity.
It bears no resemblance to known impact formations. Instead, the scars appear concentrated around former population centres, military roads, and regions associated with the final years of Ardengan authority. Students are often eager to invoke the so-called Dark and Arcane Wars of late antiquity, a cycle of legends preserved in scattered northern traditions. Such stories are undeniably colourful. They are also unsupported. Unfortunately, so is every competing explanation.
Here we encounter the familiar difficulty which afflicts all inquiry into the Late Provincial Era. The Great Collapse deprived posterity not merely of records but of context. Archives perished. Languages drifted beyond recognition. Entire peoples vanished without descendants. Each generation recovers another fragment and mistakes it for a complete picture, only to discover that the new evidence has merely enlarged the boundaries of ignorance.
“I confess that age has not diminished my impatience with this circumstance.
One cannot spend thirty years among ruined roads and broken foundations
without developing a certain resentment toward antiquity.“
3
Particularly vexing are the military accounts. Several independent sources, originating from regions which possessed neither common allegiance nor common culture, describe armies increasing in number after engagements rather than diminishing. Such reports occur in Vulsan chronicles, surviving Zhurian maritime records, and fragmentary caravan narratives recovered from the northern passes. Historians have generally dismissed these accounts as literary embellishment, and under ordinary circumstances I would be inclined to agree. The difficulty lies not in their extravagance, but in their consistency.
The dates vary. The names vary. The numbers vary. The descriptions do not. The prevailing interpretation attributes these reports to panic, confusion, and the well-documented tendency of exhausted survivors to reconstruct events according to mythic expectations. Such an explanation remains satisfactory in most instances. Yet when the Ardengan material is considered as a whole, confidence begins to falter.
Nor are the vitrified escarpments the only anomaly associated with the region. In several deep folds of the northern valleys, particularly where erosion has exposed older strata, excavations have revealed deposits of peculiar amethyst-coloured glass intermixed with ash layers of uncertain origin. Unlike the larger formations previously described, these deposits appear irregular, often occurring in sheltered depressions and beneath collapsed forest beds where no known geological process would be expected to concentrate such material. More disturbing are the remains found within and around these layers.
Archaeological surveys have documented extensive distributions of skeletal fragments, frequently reduced to little more than dust-stained impressions, isolated teeth, fragments of skulls, and partial bone clusters whose original arrangement can only be inferred. In many locations the positioning suggests neither formal burial nor battlefield internment. Bodies appear to have fallen where they stood, leaving only the faintest traces of their passing.
When settlement eventually returned to the region, giving rise to the lesser Province of Dengan—a polity respectable in its own right, though never approaching the scale or sophistication of its predecessor—the new inhabitants inherited a landscape already ancient in its ruin.Village foundations repeatedly emerged atop older deposits, and throughout the centuries labourers, foresters, and builders reported uncovering strange concentrations of bones beneath the soil. Such discoveries naturally encouraged the development of local superstition. The primitive mind has often regarded these deposits as evidence of cursed or unholy ground, and one may forgive such conclusions given the circumstances. Yet what continues to command scholarly attention is not the folklore itself but the remarkable consistency of the underlying evidence.
Across hundreds of kilometres of forest, mountain hollow, and river valley, the pattern repeats with unsettling regularity. The deposits differ in scale, yet not in character. The remains differ in number, yet not in condition. Whatever occurred in those final years left marks upon the landscape so widespread and so uniform that even ten thousand years of weather, growth, collapse, and resettlement have failed to erase them entirely.
One encounters, again and again, the same sensation familiar to all students of the deep past: the uncomfortable suspicion that the witnesses themselves may have understood less of what they were observing than we would like to believe, and that the truths concealed beneath their accounts are stranger than either their legends or our theories permit. It is perhaps for this reason that the ruin of Ardenga continues to command such fascination. Not because we lack explanations, but because every explanation leaves behind a residue of evidence which refuses to be explained.
“The sea now covers Roedon, as it covers much of the world from which Dengan emerged.
The Southern Isles are no more. The roads have vanished. The valleys have vanished. Even the escarpments whose strange scars perplexed earlier generations have long since passed beneath the waves. It may well be that the answers sought by so many historians passed beneath them also.“ -
The Sorcerer
“They said I was a sorcerer,
An affront to chosen gods,
They gathered in their temple courts
And spoke their righteous frauds.They said I walked with shadow-things,
That darkness knew my name,
They lit the pyres, raised the ropes,
And prayed I’d die in flame.They drove me from my father’s land
With arrows at my back,
The cowards cheered from castle walls
As I vanished into black.They said the wilderness would claim
What judgment had begun,
That wolves and cold and hunger’s teeth
Would finish what they’d done.But years have passed beyond their sight,
And years have taught me well,
The things they feared in whispered dreams
Were waiting there as well.Now raven watches overhead,
strange fires stain the sky,
And every lord who cast his stone
Will learn the reason why.Now I return through storm and ash,
Through moonlit mist and flame,
With all the powers they accused
Already in my name.” -
The Capital Structure
In the vast central regions in the Realms of Ro’Edyne the land descended in colossal green shelves drowned beneath mist, cataracts, and the eternal roar of falling water. Great white rivers thundered endlessly through vine-choked ravines older than empires while heat rolled upward from the jungle floor in silver veils thick enough to swallow entire caravans from sight. Vast reptilian cries echoed somewhere far below the hanging bridges and cliffside trade roads, answered now and again by the distant horn-calls of freight skiffs threading cautiously through the fog. Here and there amongst the greenery ancient stonework still protruded from the wilderness — collapsed arches, half-swallowed statuary, broken causeways from dynasties whose names no longer survived outside archival engines and priestly disputes. Yet even amidst all this savage immensity the eye was always dragged upward eventually, toward the impossible white geometries rising beyond the jungle horizon.
For there stood Tykon’Mach.
Not merely a city, but a continent of vertical civilization whose vast steel-and-crystal structures climbed into the heavens like the polished bones of dead gods. The twin pyramids dominated all things, their impossible mirrored faces reflecting cloudbanks, sunlight, waterfalls, and moving freight-lanes across hundreds of colossal terraces alive with constant movement. Around them rose forests of alabaster towers, elevated transit bridges, suspended ports, cargo lifts, docking spires, habitation arcs, administrative monoliths, and immense anti-grav causeways carrying uninterrupted streams of skiffs through the humid air. Water itself had been conquered here. Entire cataracts plunged directly through the lower city tiers and vanished into engineered canals beneath the foundations while hanging gardens and dense green districts sprawled between sectors of blinding industrial refinement.
Skeer and his father — a fat and prosperous boar merchant of arms and sanctioned ordnance — rode, slow and heavy through the lower canal roads of Tykon’Mach aboard a broad commerce-skiff burdened beneath stacked crates of rifles, slug-throwers, sealed powder tins, and sigiled ammunition drums stamped lawful beneath Imperial charter. Ahead of them rose the Capital Complex itself: one of the twin steel-and-crystal pyramids of the great city, colossal beyond sane proportion, its mirrored faces vanishing into haze and industrial vapor high above the suspended freight lanes. Across its immense terraces crawled caravans, skiffs, cargo-haulers, labor transit, elevated liftways, and streams of lesser merchants forever feeding the hungry machinery of the Pyramid State. Skeer himself was some breed of hound, though plainly not the old boar’s true son — one of those strange arrangements the merchant occasionally alluded to over roast bird and potatoes after too much drink and too many cigars. The boy had ceased asking years ago. In Tykon’Mach, lineage often mattered less than usefulness.
As the skiff neared the outer gateworks, layered scanning lattices passed over them in pale bands of blue light. Sigils shimmered briefly across the cargo manifests before vanishing into the Pyramid registry systems while hanging slate-screens and hovering trade displays already carried the morning reports from the upper districts.
They were not first to arrive. Entire consignments had sold clean before dawn and vanished into the inner terraces while fresh caravans regrouped below beneath awnings of steel and canvas. Trade within Tykon’Mach never truly ceased. It merely changed elevation. Curiously absent amidst all of it was the operation of Hul Sanpho. That alone drew the old boar’s attention. As much as Skeer despised the ancient rat and his black-and-violet merchant concern, Hul’s clientele usually infested the lower trade districts by first light. Wherever firearms, transit rights, salvaged machinery, or suspect charter permits changed paws, Hul Sanpho was generally somewhere nearby grinning through cigar smoke. Yet today there was nothing.
The skiff drifted onward through the gate amidst congestion thick enough to stall smaller craft outright. Father and son exchanged an amused glance as they passed a cluster of outer-world gazelles displaying scoped and sight-locking crossbows to packs of local riffraff inspecting the weapons as though they were relics from forgotten dynasties. “Idiots,” muttered the boar through pipe smoke before pointing upward toward the canal lane ahead.
Towering over the traffic lumbered a vast Apatosaur draped in red and royal blue trade cloths, its immense spinal membranes fluttering lazily in the furnace-winds pouring down from the upper freight tiers. Thick catfish-like jowls swayed beneath its skull while caravan goats lounged atop the creature’s cargo platform smoking sloke and blowing grey rings downward toward a swarm of obnoxious monkeys screeching curses from the bridge railings below. “Look at the little bastards,” wheezed the merchant. The monkeys shrieked louder as the caravan passed beneath them.
The Yantarian firearms drew attention almost immediately, as they always did. Half the crowd gathered for the weapons themselves while the other half stared openly at the topless silver-painted jackal female emblazoned across the lacquered crate panels, her glowing blue eyes and ceremonial gold markings promising death, luxury, and frontier prestige in equal measure. The old boar sniffed the air once. Then again. Skeer noticed the change immediately. “Not everyone is here,” muttered the merchant. “Hul?” asked the boy. The old boar shook his head slowly while reloading his pipe. “No. Thought perhaps it was him. Seems the rat’s become more discerning lately.” “Core-world business?” “He can keep it.” The boar shrugged dismissively though his tusks ground faintly at the mention of Hul’s increasingly stable trade access beyond the frontier sectors. “The prick.”Then both of them caught the scent at once. Grilled gold-fruit. Without another word the skiff veered eastward through traffic toward the larvivore stalls, though by the time they reached them half the district and all its distant relations appeared already lined before the counters. Skeer settled instead for red lizard-on-a-stick while glaring murderously at the remaining queue.
screamed a brightly feathered parrot overhead, causing the boy nearly to tumble from the skiff outright.
it shrieked again while swooping downward and stealing half his meal. “What in all blazes does that even mean?” snarled Skeer. “No clue,” chuckled the old boar. “Some jackass trains the damn things to say it and hopes for profit.” He handed the boy another unlucky lizard-leg from his own portion.
Then the horns began. Not alarms. Arrival horns. Deep. Metallic. Monstrous. The entire district convulsed instantly. Somewhere above the lower freight clouds an Imperial freighter was descending toward the upper terraces seeking contracts, unloading rights, bulk exchange agreements, and enough commercial gravity to drain half the markets dry before sundown.
The streets exploded into chaos. Merchants screamed figures over one another while labor crews broke formation and caravan bells rang wildly through the smoke-thick air. Two camel brothers immediately descended into a fistfight beside a spice lift while three dock-runners vaulted directly into a canal trying to beat traffic toward the ascending cargo ramps. Everywhere curses erupted in twenty dialects at once. The old boar merely elevated the skiff slightly above the congestion and laughed through a cloud of smoke. Skeer looked over. The merchant grinned broadly. “Change of plans, boy-o.” The boy blinked. “Get the slug-shots. We’re going three layers up.”
Then it struck him. The idea. His idea. Last season they had discussed it quietly while drinking behind the Yaruma warehouses, wondering whether anyone else had realized the weakness in the local testing circuits. Nobody within Tykon’Mach was importing proper frontier slug-throwers from Barimus or Nawan. Nobody except them. Old Uncle Algus had secured favorable dealings with Vanios the smith and the route had remained quiet ever since. Somehow nobody else had noticed. “Doing the local guild proud,” Skeer grinned. The old boar barked laughter. Officially there was no guild. Only ledgers, rogues, smugglers, quarter-agreements, grudges, and favors written in disappearing ink.
The hanging screens all along the liftways flashed reports from some blasted Kydahni station called Pentyr. Riots. Losses. Gunfire. Labor dead. “A prison colony with an operator’s license,” grumbled the boar. “Dreadful place. Avoid it.” Skeer had reviewed the station files once through public codex access after hearing one of his father’s drunken tirades regarding the sector. The images alone had been enough: black corridors, industrial haze, fortress gantries vanishing into darkness. A miserable place by every account. His father tolerated uglier corners of civilization than Skeer yet cared to imagine.
By the unloading levels two Tyvexian laborers awaited them already. White-furred jackal lads wearing teal mesh tunics beneath matching visor hardware moved with clipped professional efficiency while organizing the crates into clean stacked rows beside the government inspection lifts.
One gave a thumbs-up as the final cargo lock disengaged before speaking rapidly in his native tongue. “’id ha aht jyt ’iya ’ae shay yeen…” Only then realizing his translator headset remained inactive, the jackal laughed awkwardly and adjusted the device. The Tyvexians knew scarcely a word of Imperial Tongue unaided though the headsets usually compensated well enough. “Apologies,” he said afterward. “If needed further, our signal remains active. My brother and I prepare now for transit negotiation.” “Aye, boy-o. Good luck,” replied the boar with a wave. “Chances are they won’t return,” he muttered afterward to Skeer. “Fine by me. Means fewer percentages.”
Above them entire divisions of imports descended from Thanator and distant Jotun alike, each shipment escorted beneath different heraldic codes and industrial seals. Jotun’s cargoes especially drew attention: dense machinery, ammunition caskets, strange alchemical cylinders, and polished steel assemblies smelling of furnace oil and black powder. Skeer’s father narrowed his eyes immediately. Now he understood. Chewing slowly upon a dark Ramwaza leaf-cigar from the southern reaches, the old boar counted silver while glaring across the platform toward a group of monitor lizards being escorted from an adjacent loading terrace beneath armed supervision. “Idiots,” he spat.
Profiteering beneath Imperial oversight was dangerous enough already. Doing so publicly while Pentyr still burned was outright lunacy. The Kydahni possessed ugly reputations at the best of times — cold, humorless, vindictive creatures liable to remember insults three generations after the speaker’s funeral. Best not to shout too loudly about Pentyr while losses were still being counted. “Lizards,” growled the merchant again while pocketing another five Imperial sands of silver. Still. Good profit.
Once the Jotun imports became visible the remainder fell neatly into place. “Barbarians,” the boar muttered approvingly. “Sturdy folk.” Skeer smirked. “Thought most of Vandyrus was barbarian according to you.” “It is. Jotun’s simply sober about it.” “Isn’t their neighboring moon the High Throne world?” “Exactly!”
Not long afterward a tall wolf with cropped black mane and heavy beard delivered the official primer regarding the new Jotunese rounds — strange ammunition, hybridized craft-science, alchemical metallurgy fused with frontier practicality. His father watched for perhaps five minutes before moving. Approaching a distracted quartermaster agent, the boar casually requested verification on unloading placement charts. The overworked official handed him the slate without thought. “Right back,” muttered the merchant before crossing directly toward the Jotun unloading sector. The guards saw the black slate and waved him through unquestioned. There was conversation. Nods exchanged. Skeer waited. His father glanced back once and winked though the boy still did not entirely understand. Moments later the boar returned and handed the slate back to the quartermaster with perfect calm.
The official nodded absentmindedly and resumed listings without suspicion. Then the old merchant grinned broadly. “Can you believe nobody else noticed?”
Far below them upon the immense inner terraces of the Pyramid, merchants from Arkamar, Janvere, Tolpus, and Wan Warril still screamed accusations toward the Imperial testing boards while shaking fists over firearm imports. The old boar mocked them mercilessly in exaggerated Pranjan tones.
“‘OW DAAAAARE DEZE IMPERIAALS SELL GUNS IN DERE OWN REALMS! IIIREDEEMABAAAAAL!”
Skeer burst laughing. “They’re going red-faced all day.” “Ready?” asked the boar. “For what?” “Here’s the rub, boy-o. Went over to the Jotun tag-cutter. Told him we had local guild testing selection ready for administrative review. Took longer getting here than expected, but now we’re available.”
Then Skeer understood completely. “You genius.” “Gods damn right.”The testing demonstration annihilated the market. Every firearm sold. Every slug-round crate emptied. The Jotunese themselves elevated the entire operation onto the main demonstration dais beneath the Imperial seal, showcasing the frontier throwers beside their own imported ammunition systems as officially approved local commercial compatibility examples.
Not only had the stock vanished clean, no percentages were owed to the core-world trade offices.
Local business.
Entirely legal.
From a distance the city resembled less a constructed place than some vast celestial mechanism partially overtaken by jungle growth and still expanding despite the protests of nature itself.
By dusk the lighter skiff drifted once more along the upper canal roads toward Yaruma where they intended to restock and repeat the operation again the following week. Crossing the bridgeways into the garden districts, they passed the same furious merchant factions still screaming conspiracy and corruption toward the Pyramid terraces far behind them.
And from this; Father and son laughed all the way home. -
The Antique Ro’Edyne
“Ere upon ages and eras of old,
aye, upon these grey steel cliffs,
these roving meadows of violet bloom
and the scent of the towerpine borders,
these waning isles of lore and leisure,
these isles of the Ro’Edyne,
nearer to the stars than I.”
“Ere upon ages and eras of old,
aye, upon these grey steel cliffs,
these roving meadows of violet bloom
and the scent of the towerpine borders,
these waning isles of lore and leisure,
these isles of the Ro’Edyne,
nearer to the stars than I.”
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IV. Tales from the Post-Cataclysmic Age
IV. Tales from the Post-Cataclysmic Age
INDEX
NEXT:
II. The Culling of King Thyun
III. The Test of Enthybyrbis
IV. The Founding of The Fearless
V. The Fall of Valbara
VI. Kai-Kha’Lybahn
VII. A Hall of myth and legend
VIII. The little Tymerian war
IX. Trade Hell from Varduun
X. That Cold Northern Attrition
XI. Beware Bleak MundaynumThis is how Roedon first learned itself—through song, tale, and voice echoing across the long dark. The Ro’Edyne Cycle is no chronology, but the living heart of the north: mythic, tragic, and half in jest, spun by bards before dates were kept and memory could thin. Here are the stories that made the folk, teaching them not what happened, but what it meant. If the written history is bone, this is the blood—singing out what survived the storm, and naming what was lost.
The Ro’Edyne Cycle 3:
Tales from the Post-Cataclysmic Age
–NOW AVAILABLE–
RELATED
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II. Tales of the Lost North
II. Tales of the Lost North
Volumes:
Volume I: The Northern Ro’Edyne
Volume II: Beyond the Ro’Edyne
Volume III: The Realms of Thyuratahn
Volume IV: A Kingdom of the North
Volume V: Lost Blade of the North
ENTRIES
Volume I: The Northern Ro’Edyne
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I. Tales from Tykon’Mach
I. Tales from Tykon’Mach
INDEX
The Antique Ro’Edyne
The Capital Structure
The Sorcerer
The Ruin of Ardenga
NEXT EPISODE:
A Prison for Books
Lost to the Undercity
Smoke & Mirrors
Betrayal at Ramwaza
