One of the first questions travelers ask is:
"How old is all of this?"
The answer depends entirely upon what you mean by *this*.
The mountains are older than memory.
The rivers are older than kingdoms.
The forests are older than most stories.
The dragons are older than many of the people who claim to understand them.
The Concord itself is comparatively young.
Civilizations often imagine themselves ancient.
Stone tends to disagree.
The realm we know today emerged from countless generations of settlement, migration, alliance, trade, conflict, rebuilding, and compromise.
Roads were not laid all at once.
Cities were not founded according to a master plan.
History rarely works that way.
Most ages are built by ordinary people solving immediate problems.
Only later do historians arrive and declare those solutions inevitable.
MAGDA'S NOTE
Historians are wonderful.
But if you ask three historians what happened, you'll get five answers.
If you ask six historians what happened, you'll get a war.
Before the Concord
Long before the Five Banners existed, the region consisted of scattered settlements separated by wilderness.
Travel was dangerous.
Communication was slow.
Knowledge traveled unevenly.
Entire communities could spend years without hearing news from beyond their nearest neighbors.
The forests were larger.
The roads fewer.
The dragons less understood.
Many communities survived through cooperation.
Others survived through stubbornness.
The distinction remains important.
Archaeologists continue uncovering traces of forgotten villages, abandoned roads, collapsed watchtowers, and ruined halls.
Every generation rediscovers evidence that people lived, loved, traded, argued, and dreamed in places modern maps no longer record.
The land remembers more than the chronicles.
The Age of Expansion
As trade increased, settlements grew.
Villages became towns.
Towns became cities.
Routes that began as hunting paths evolved into roads.
Merchants traveled farther.
Scholars exchanged ideas.
Craftsmen carried techniques from region to region.
The foundations of modern society emerged gradually.
No proclamation announced the beginning of civilization.
People simply kept building.
A bridge here.
A market there.
A road connecting two places that had grown tired of being isolated.
Progress often appears dramatic when viewed from a distance.
Up close it usually resembles maintenance.
MAGDA'S NOTE
If civilization has a secret, it's this:
Somebody has to fix the roof.
Nobody writes songs about roof repairs.
Everybody notices when nobody does them.
The Rise of the Great Hunt
Eventually the realm entered the period now known as the Great Hunt.
This era remains among the most studied and most disputed chapters in recorded history.
What is certain is that dragons occupied a far more central place in political and cultural life than they do today.
What remains uncertain is almost everything else.
Records disagree.
Witnesses contradicted one another.
Entire archives disappeared.
Several kingdoms rewrote portions of their own histories.
Others lost theirs.
Even now, scholars continue debating fundamental questions.
What began the Great Hunt?
What sustained it?
What ended it?
And perhaps most importantly:
Why do the surviving accounts differ so dramatically?
The answers remain elusive.
Aldorath
No discussion of the Great Hunt can avoid Aldorath.
Once a center of influence and authority, Aldorath occupied a position of considerable importance during that age.
Today only ruins remain.
Broken walls.
Weathered stones.
Fragments of a story.
Travelers who visit often report an unusual feeling.
Not fear.
Not sorrow.
Something more difficult to describe.
A sense that important decisions were once made there.
Decisions whose consequences continue to echo long after the people who made them have vanished.
History occasionally leaves scars upon the landscape.
Aldorath may be one of them.
MAGDA'S NOTE
I've been there.
The place feels like a conversation that ended badly.
What We Actually Know
A responsible historian must occasionally admit uncertainty.
Accordingly:
We do not know everything.
We do not know precisely how many dragons existed during the Great Hunt.
We do not know exactly who benefited.
We do not know why some records vanished while others survived.
We do not know why certain dragons remain when others do not.
We do not know why so many contradictory stories point toward the same unanswered questions.
We do not know enough.
Fortunately, unanswered questions are not failures.
They are invitations.
The realm still contains mysteries because the realm is still alive.
MAGDA'S NOTE
Pell likes mysteries.
I like answers.
Between us we achieve moderate frustration.
Why History Matters
Many travelers assume history belongs in libraries.
This is understandable.
Libraries contain a great deal of it.
Yet history lives elsewhere as well.
It lives in roads.
It lives in traditions.
It lives in old arguments no one fully remembers.
It lives in ruined watchtowers and family recipes and songs sung beside campfires.
The past is not gone.
It merely changes forms.
A traveler who learns to recognize those forms begins seeing the realm differently.
The world becomes deeper.
More complicated.
More human.
And occasionally more alarming.
Which, unfortunately, is also part of becoming educated.