The Elysor Reaches Seals
PDFThe Weohstannuk Empire
After two decades of increasingly urgent warnings to the Weohstannuk imperial court about the Maygus faction's ideological trajectory, the High Elves of Elysor cease diplomatic contact and seal their borders. No mortal has entered the Reaches since.
The formal record of the Elysor Reaches' sealing is a single line in the imperial court documents of Emperor Aldrath III: 'The Halvaen ambassador delivered notice this morning that the Reaches would henceforth consider their diplomatic obligations to the Empire fulfilled. No replacement ambassador has been named.'
The Elysorian record is considerably longer. Sun King Aelindrath's private account, portions of which have since been shared with trusted scholars, describes two decades of watching the Maygus faction's influence spread through the imperial advisory structure and reaching the same conclusion each time the evidence was reviewed: that what they were observing was not political ambition but something older and more deliberate. The methodology -- the patient cultivation of sincere idealists toward destructive ends -- matched records from the Age of Venn that the Halvaen archives retained when the equivalent mortal records were lost.
The court did not want to hear this. Courts rarely want to hear that the advisors they have grown comfortable with are instruments of corruption rather than servants of reform. The Halvaen pushed the argument for twenty years. At the end of twenty years, Aelindrath made a calculation that the Elysor Reaches' oldest scholars found painful and correct: that the Reaches could not stop what was coming, could not prevent the empire from following the Maygus where they led, and could not survive unprotected if they stayed open when the collapse arrived.
The Reaches sealed. The empire fell fifty-three years later. Aelindrath has not discussed publicly what he thinks about the interval between those two events.