Caernguard Re-Founded

Descendants of the last Emperor Weohstan re-found Caernguard at the confluence of the Caern River and the Blue Vale pass. This act marks the end of the Time of Nightmares and the beginning of a new era.

The re-founding was a deliberate political act, not an organic settlement. The Weohstannuk-descended community that established Caernguard in year -1 TN understood what they were doing -- the name, the location, and the formal founding ceremony were all chosen to reference and invoke the memory of Venn's greatest city, which had stood near the same confluence before the collapse. They were not trying to restore the Empire. They were trying to establish legitimacy for a new beginning by connecting it, carefully, to something that had existed before the darkness.

Whether this worked is a question historians still argue about. Caernguard's walls have never been breached, which is either evidence that the founding was auspicious or evidence that the Weohstannuk-descended builders knew how to build walls. The city became the largest in the Settled Lands within three centuries, which is either evidence of divine favor or evidence that controlling the confluence of two rivers and the primary mountain pass produces commercial advantages that compound over time. Both explanations are probably true. The founding families would have considered them the same thing.