A brief History of Ardalia: Ardalia, #4

Alan Spade

A brief history of Ardalia

*****

Introduction

At a time when Ardalia was still young, the krongos, people of the rock, and accomplished builders, ruled the world. Their cities were legendary, unforgettable. But soon, a split occurred between the Northerners and the Westerners. Valshhyk the Immolated, god of fire and destruction, took the opportunity to expand his territories and destroy almost everything. A mage, Ekelran, had to resort to the greatest sacrifice in order to give the world a chance to carry on.

This mythological, not to say cosmogonic, story describes in a few pages the genesis of the four great civilizations of Ardalia and the most significant events preceding the Ardalia trilogy. For those who have read The Breath of Aoles, Turquoise Water and The Flames of the Immolated, it offers an interesting shift of perspective. For others, it permits an easy introduction to the details of the universe while furnishing a complete synoptic history from a different viewpoint.

As a bonus: the five first chapters of The Breath of Aoles are also included.

Special bonus: if you subscribe to my Readers’ group, you’ll receive in your inbox the free link to download the complete ebook of The Breath of Aoles (Ardalia, Book One).

Author’s note

For a long time, A Brief History of Ardalia was not intended for publication and, to tell the truth, did not even bear that title. It was a story conceived for my eyes only, as a reference guide to the history of the four elemental peoples.

For anyone unfamiliar with the world of Ardalia, it is a good introduction. If, on the other hand, you are a lover of fantasy and science fiction and you have the firm intention of reading the trilogy, I recommend not reading The Brief History of Ardalia until after having finished The Flames of the Immolated, in order to preserve the pleasure of discovery. It will always be possible, if the beginning of The Breath of Aoles seems too strange, for you to return to this mythological story in order to familiarize yourself with the universe.

I laid the initial foundations of Ardalia in 2004, the decade my children were born, during which time I changed my profession and then moved house. Moments of doubt were frequent. For a long time, I had the impression of having undertaken a challenge beyond my means of achievement. While evoking the adventures of creatures evolving in another world, with a different fauna and flora, without any purely human reference point (unlike the Planet of Adventure series by the great Jack Vance, which retains a human explorer), putting this fantastic planetary romance on the screen of my computer, I could not help telling myself that my intellect was too rational for that kind of work, that it was beyond my scope, that I would never finish it.

Certainly, I derived a great deal of pleasure from constructing and interpreting this universe, but that was not sufficient to bring the project to completion. In addition to the active support of my wife, my first reader, one fundamental element helped me to overcome my moments of doubt, and that was the brief text that I am now presenting, A Brief History of Ardalia.

One might say, with reason, that the subject developed here is not particularly original—and yet, every time I came back to it, I found a kind of epic breath therein. I knew that I did not have the talent necessary to render due homage to the universe; I knew that another author might have done better with it; but it was my personal interpretation of the material, and I was fond of it.

Every edifice needs foundations. Without this short history to which I could refer, and various elements linked to the universe, I would doubtless not have completed my project. I have smoothed the rough edges and polished it to make it more relevant to The Breath of Aoles, but in essence, it remains faithful to the initial version that, I repeat, was not intended for public consumption. It was on realizing how important it had been to me that I made the decision to publish it, in spite of its faults.

The Ardalian Cycle is an important stage in my career. Two books are pending publication, namely Turquoise Water and The Flames of the Immolated. If this first volume, which has already sold more than 1700 copies in its printed version, is successful, I promise not to make readers wait too long. I am constantly seeking to improve my work, and I am grateful for the opportunity to once again immerse myself in this world of my own creation: the fear of the unknown that it is necessary to confront in order to bring my efforts to fruition.

Being an author involves a degree of masochism; but it is by surprising yourself that you reap the finest fruits of literary creation; it is, at any rate, worth the trouble of trying to thrill not just yourself, but more importantly your reader.

Happy reading, everyone!

*****

The History of the Krongos

The Awakening of Ast

The eras succeeded one another, and Ardalia was only populated by savage creatures, predators and prey. But the equilibrium remained unstable, the strong devouring the weak before tearing one another apart. Ast, the Creator of all things, incarnate in the vast molten globe of Astar, observed the animal species battling one another, beneath the moons Tinmal and Hamal, without ever achieving a result. The world was chaotic. In order to remedy that, Ast conceived four elementary gods: Cilamon, the god of terrestrial life and father of Aoles, the god of the wind, Andunieve, the god of the waves and aquatic life, and Kerengar, the god of the mineral world.

The creation of the krongos (25,000 cycles of life before the epic of Pelmen and his companions)

Ast decided to help Kerengar to create an intelligent species, the krongos. The latter appeared on Ardalia 25,000 years before our era. One of the greatest krongos mages of that era was named Terenxar. He created a stone that permitted him to link his thoughts to those of his friends. Then he founded what was to become an immense city and named it Terenxinar, after himself. Soon, however, Ast was disappointed by the krongos, for those beings, to which he had given liberty of thought and action, after having hunted wild animals and built their cities, were gradually divided into the Northerners (comprising the inhabitants of the north and the east) and the Westerners (from the west and south of the Glacial Summits). Each people strove to outdo the other by means of its architectural achievements, its knowledge and its utilization of magic.

The Genesis of the malians, followed by the hevelens (-21,000 years)

So Ast dreamed of harmony, and from his dreams was born Malia, the goddess of harmony. She and Andunieve gave birth to the malians. But Aoles was jealous, because the wind’s only representatives on Ardalia were winged creatures called algams, so he fashioned a carnal envelope to reproduce himself. His intention was to take inspiration from the krongos and the malians and possess his own people in his turn.

There were no intelligent bipeds in that era other than the children of the earth and the water. He therefore coupled with ten females of a primitive species called hevels, which had the ability to climb trees and were more intelligent than others, but which nevertheless made use of all four limbs in walking. The Ten First Children, five males and five females, he named Aguerris and ordered them to take care of their descendants. Shortly after their birth, they stood up and walked on two limbs, and revealed themselves to be far more intelligent than the hevels.

Aoles also asked his own father, Cilamon, to watch over the Ten Aguerris and their mothers until the end of their long lives, to welcome them in the branches of his trees and to keep away ferocious beasts, which he did. He also asked him to teach some of them magic, in order that they would not be disadvantaged in comparison to other beings endowed with understanding, and because he loved his son Cilamon agreed to do that too.

The Ten Aguerris lived for five hundred years and had many children. And the ten mothers, who were under the protection of Cilamon continued to conceive one child every year, for the duration of their long lives. They became known as the people of the hevelens. Ast was saddened by that, because he knew that the beings in question would have a shorter lifespan than the others and that they would be in danger of extinction, hunted by wild beasts. Because of this, he agreed that Cilamon should shelter them in the form of a tree; but requested that the other gods withdraw, and no longer walk the terrain of Ardalia in a carnal envelope, so that each of the three peoples might live according to the law of free will. His request was granted.

The Day of the Great Rift (-20,000 years, year zero of the krongos’ calendar)

At the same time, however, Ast was fighting an internal conflict. His shadow, the antithesis of creation, which had never previously had a name but had always existed, irrevocably linked to the creation like death to life, decided to take on a physical form and turn his own people against Ardalia in his turn. The shadow named itself Obneron.

Ast denied the shadow the right to exist in the form of a conscious entity, but Obneron resisted. They fought one another for a thousand years, and then Obneron succeeded in separating himself from Ast. He immediately, he became aware of his absence of reality, and that inside him lived a void. Through sheer desperation, he immolated himself in an Ardalian Volcano called Ixal, and did this on the day that the two moons, Tinmal and Hamal, merged with Astar. The partial eclipse of the Sun-God, masked by the two superimposed moons, was henceforth synonymous with cataclysm for the krongos, the malians and the hevelens.

The peoples were, in fact, accustomed to the merging of Astar with one of the two moons, which were frequent, and even total eclipses by one moon, which were rare; those were occasions for celebration, not mourning—but the three stars had never aligned in that collective manner before.

All of Ardalia was shaken by an enormous earthquake, and as Ixal erupted, a gigantic volcanic fissure formed: a bottomless gulf. It was the day of the Great Rift, and the krongos, who had learned to write, consigned it to their records. The world changed then, to such a degree that the mineral beings established a new calendar commencing with the Day of the Great Rift. According to that calendar, transmitted to the malians, the day in question was twenty thousand years before the present epoch.

The essence of Obneron fused with Ixal and he became Valshhyk, the Tormented. Sulfurous vapor escaped from the volcano and the fault, corrupting certain krongos and driving animals mad. Those emanations became more toxic and more dangerous with each eruption of Ixal—which, fortunately, only occurred at long intervals. Fire beings appeared not far from the volcano, destroying everything around them and then suddenly disappearing. They never lived for longer than a few months before being extinguished, but they had time to spread out and ignite great conflagrations.

The krongos decided to confront the fire-beings and to battle against the unleashed elementals. The Northerners, who possessed the more powerful magic, made use of it to protect themselves from the vapors, and mounted direct attacks on the creatures born in the vicinity of the volcano. They were then able to defeat those of their people who had been driven mad. They fought the elementals in the manner of the descendants of Kerengar—which is to say, in the context of concepts appropriate to the time.

Thousands of years had gone by before they finally reached a conclusion, and the landscape of the north of Ardalia was permanently disrupted. The lands to the north of Ixal became sterile and volcanic. Everything unfolded as if the krongos had been left with no choice but to battle the unleashed forces of nature, with the difference that Valshhyk had perverted the work of Ast, in order to make it an instrument of destruction and chaos.

First contact between the species: the period of the Great Conflagrations (3,000 years after the Great Rift)

About three thousand years after the Great Rift, Valshhyk extended his incandescent claws as far as the south of Ardalia. Beings of fire appeared in the malanite and hevelen territories, igniting great fires. It was in that era that the Western krongos revealed themselves, for the