The Council of Venn

The five races -- humans, Halvaen, Thwarch, halflings, and gnomes -- unite under the Council of Venn, originally a temporary military alliance to coordinate against the giants. It will become permanent.

The Council was not designed to last. Every participant in the original formation understood it as a wartime measure -- a mechanism for coordinating separate military campaigns against a shared threat, with the explicit expectation that it would dissolve when the threat was contained. The Halvaen in particular were insistent on this point, and extracted formal commitments that the alliance would not become a vehicle for absorbing Elven sovereignty into a human-led structure. Those commitments were honored, technically, for approximately four centuries before the Council's successor institutions began to interpret them more creatively.

The decision to make the alliance permanent is usually dated to approximately -2400, when the giant threat had been sufficiently reduced that disbanding the Council would have required active political will that no member possessed. It was easier to continue. The transition from military alliance to governing empire happened without a single definitive moment -- a series of small decisions, each individually defensible, that accumulated into something none of the original architects had intended or authorized.