The Twilight Kingdom was not the only realm of the Fey on Skothar. At one time, so the legends say, before the rise of Men, the fey ruled over the entirety of the continent, from the steaming jungles of Tangor to the frozen wastes that hugged the edge of the world in the North.
There rose among the courts and kingdoms and counties two queens, sisters, born of the same mother but with different fathers, one with hair like the sun and eyes like the southern seas. The other had skin like snow, and hair black as a raven on a moonless night, with eyes as the storm-tossed seas of the north.
Both were hailed as the most beautiful among the fey, and were pursued by lord after lord of the lesser fey kingdoms. These they turned away in droves, at one point making a contest of how many would petition for suitorship in a season. Or how many would return, after having been refused. Or to see how many times a given lord would try, in the course of a century.
The sisters laughed the sidhe lords away. They had no need for any suitor, had no plans to take a husband, forge a kingdom. They had each other, and that was all they had ever needed.
It is not known what caused the schism between the sisters. In the turning of a season, the trading of the moon and sun in the sky, their love for each other withered, blackened, froze, only to burst forth as a blazing, terrible hatred.
The fey lords and their kingdoms were quick to align with one or another of the sisters. They were just as quick to strike an opposing lord for any slight given. Ballroom scuffles gave way to brawls. Brawls escalated to skirmishes, skirmishes to battles. Within another century, an entire nation was at war with itself.
The battles of Men, even the savagery of the Beastman Crusades, paled in comparison to the sidhe at war. The magics loosed in the Mage Wars was as a candle against the inferno that the sidhe could command.
A nation that had spanned an entire continent was reduced to tiny pockets among what woodlands were left.
And then the Men came, to fill the gap.
Among those Men, which the fey watched with an intense curiosity, arose one bloodline untouched by the warped magics of the sisters’ war. And after the men had learned the secrets of fire, iron, and steel, did the Titania of the Northern courts, the queen of the so-called Twilight Empire in the North, make her move, to solidify a union that would enable her to at last crush her twin in the south.
The fair queen of the Sommersfei was not so easily undone, and when Uther traveled to the Great Empire for his schooling, she saw her change to strike, and to close the bargain he’d opened with her sister in the North.
As insurance, she also journeyed into the cold North, setting in place a number of contingencies, forging alliances with those aligned against her hated sister’s beloved beleaguered barony.
One such alliance was with the savage raiders known as the Skandaharians.
_________________ Rob
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