After the Invoked Devastation, the Oeridians managed to save more of their great magical knowledge and profound lore than the Bakluni or Suel peoples did. The concentration on “combat magic” by Oeridian mages was ruthless and played a key role in strategic defeats of the Suel, with their subtler wizardry, in particular.

Initially, this powerful resource kept the Oeridians on top, but in the long run it stilted the creativity of their wizards—over-specialization leads to insights which are too few and of too limited application. Thus, both the dominance and the decline of the Oeridians can be seen in their wizardry.

The priesthoods of the Oeridians also played a vital role. Deities of travel, such as Procan, Celestian, and Fharlanghn supported their people’s restless drives to new lands. Zilchus’s priests played a key role in supplying, provisioning, and distributing resources and goods. The martial priesthoods of Heironeous, Hextor, and even Erythnul all had their role in driving on Oeridian armies.

The Heironeous-Hextor enmity actually drove the armies of different houses of Aerdi to greater struggles and competition for glory. Against the Suloise in particular, this combination of priesthoods proved highly effective. The Suel pantheon had few potent deities. Among only three intermediate powers, Lendor’s faith was a stagnant, wholly less creative one, and that of Wee Jas was too mystical, too fixed to lead active resistance to the Oeridians.

The evil Suloise deities too often failed to strengthen their people, but rather to conceal them at the margins, in the shadows, unable to oppose the strength of the Oeridians save by subversion and sabotage. Consider Pyremius and Syrul, for example; the are powers of lies, deceit, and poisonings.

Thus, the Suel people were easily driven like the wind before the wrathful Oeridian armies, marginalized to the boundaries of the Flanaess.

A Vengeance From The Past?
When the Aerdi swept across the lands of the Great Kingdom, there were certain pockets of powerful, ancient magic which they despoiled and razed with fire and acid or drove down into shadows and twilight.

The sacred sites of the Ur-Flannae, the rare mystics of the Flan people (feared by the Flan far more than by the Aerdi), and the haunts of the Old Elves, were among them. Some of those magics, old beyond knowing, are not wholly lost to the world, but they tend now to take terrible forms.

The most feared by far is the magical sword guarded by the gray elf remnant of the Grandwood. However, the wise and far-sighted see manifestations of this longrepressed magic in the fate of the Great Kingdom. Established by war, force, and brutality in many instances, the Kingdom is doomed to pass into chaos and suffering. Istus knows, of course; Gwydiesin does; the tiny shrivelled elf known as The Spectre does; and, beyond them, perhaps Mordenkainen has some inkling, and it is surely written in Rillikandren’s Book of Hours. But this is getting far ahead of the story.

Such is the history, the peoples, and the destinies of the lands of Aerdy. Its many powers and factions remain for us to understand.

Ahlissa