Chronicles of Pannithor, part 5: the Time of Ice and the Great Flood

The Abyss had swallowed Oskan and his kind, Domivar was dead and the God War was over. You'd think peace would follow at last. It did – but not for long, and it was nothing like the peace of old.

Part one: a fragile peace

The world after the war

With the Wicked Ones banished, the world settled into something that, at a push, you could call peace. It had very little in common with the peace of the Time of Light, though.

New and terrible threats now roamed the land, with the orcs and their kin at the forefront. The very shape of the world had changed. Great kingdoms lay in ruins, and many a settlement, many a region – even whole empires – had been wiped out or cut off from the rest of the world. But the worst damage was done to something you won't find on any map: trust. The bonds that had tied elves, humans and dwarfs together for centuries had cracked, and they never regained their old strength. Each people now looked out for its own first and foremost. Quarrels turned into battles faster than they used to, battles turned into wars, and on top of all that there were raids by evil creatures to beat back. The world had become a crueller place.

And then came the cold.

A winter that never ends

At first it just looked like a run of exceptionally foul weather. Harvests failed. Sea levels began to drop as the water froze into gigantic ice shelves. The snow and ice that normally kept to the peaks of the highest mountains began to creep down into the valleys – slowly, but relentlessly.

Within a year, ice covered much of Pannithor. The seasons disappeared. The world was stuck in a merciless winter that simply wouldn't end.

Part two: Winter

Who was behind it

It was the elves who worked out where this unnatural winter was coming from. Behind it all was Winter – one of the Wicked Ones, the dark aspect of Shakara, the Ice Maiden. Somehow she had got out of the Abyss, and now she was waging a slow war of her own against the world. This was her revenge for being imprisoned.

The elves secretly sent envoys to the humans and the dwarfs. They got a frosty reception. Both peoples still remembered all too well the misery the elves had brought down on them – and after the whole business with the Fenulian Mirror, you can hardly blame them.

Those missions did have one result, though. Winter realised she had been rumbled. She stopped hiding and struck with everything she had.

Armies of ice

Winter's glaciers advanced on the civilised lands, and ahead of them marched armies of strange and terrifying creatures: ice giants, frost sprites, ice demons. At their head stood Winter's seven knights – enormous elementals of flesh and frost, bound together by ice magic and devoted beyond all measure to the one who had given them life. It's also said that this was when the Wicked Ones struck a pact with the giants of the north: the giants would lend their support, and in return their lands would be permanently expanded.

Faced with an enemy like that, the old alliances came back to life – though they were far weaker and far more mistrustful than in the old days. The dwarfs held out the longest. They joined the humans and elves grudgingly, and only once it had become clear that there was no running away from this fight.

And there was no point counting on the Shining Ones for help either. They had used up most of their power in the God War, and some of them were now mere shreds of their former selves, their attention scattered and their thoughts adrift.

The world had one real hope. Its name was Valandor.

Part three: Valandor

The hero of three peoples

Valandor appeared among the Noble Peoples after the God War and quickly won the adoration of all three. Curiously, each of them saw someone quite different in him.

To the Primovantians he was the embodiment of everything that was best in humankind: a great warrior, mage and leader. To the elves he was a brother – an elf who for some reason lived apart from his own kind but was still one of them, a brilliant artist and mage. To the dwarfs he was a kindred spirit, a craftsman whose skill impressed even them, and the only non-dwarf they truly trusted and called a friend.

Valandor never set anyone straight. Still less did he want anyone to find out who he really was: one of the Shining Ones. And above all, he didn't want it getting out that his dark half was one of the vilest and most hated generals of the hordes of the Abyss. The mad scribe Athalaneus, whom we met in part two, claimed it was Ba'el – and he was right.

After the war, Valandor worked tirelessly to reconcile the three peoples, and he was making a pretty good job of it. Until Winter, his "sister" from the old Celestian days, showed her hand.

Everywhere at once

In the War with Winter, Valandor was quite literally everywhere. Every one of the peoples has its own legends of him shoring up defences, weaving spells and taking on the enemy in the open field. There was no other way: Winter had bent the very elements to her will and could send her armies to the other side of the world.

But Valandor knew that every battle he won only put off the inevitable. Only one thing could end the war: finding Winter and facing her head-on. When he stood shoulder to shoulder with the elves at Lethuia, holding back a legion of ice giants, he knew that battle would settle nothing. When he commanded the garrison at Sathoi against ten thousand frolicking frost sprites, he knew he had to win – and knew, too, that the victory would change nothing. When he helped raise fortifications at Dolgarth against the advancing glaciers, he knew it would never be enough.

Before the Flood, Valandor also brought down Ba'el himself, one of the most terrible warlords of the Abyss, and bound him in an eternal prison beneath the ruins of Du'lan Var – the last civilisation Ba'el had razed. That day, he was fighting his own twin.

Winter was cunning. She kept out of sight and sent her servants to do the fighting. She knew perfectly well that Valandor was her only real opponent, and she had no intention of facing him in open combat until she had worn him down. She threw army after army at him, and behind the armies crept the ice, covering everything in its path. The war dragged on for years, and the world was slowly choking in an icy grip.

The duel at Ileuthar

The turning point came at Ileuthar. Valandor was beating back the fifth charge of ice demons that day when he stumbled. The spells shielding him wavered, and he sank to one knee.

And that was when Winter appeared. Wrapped in a cloak of icy daggers, her eyes blazing with cold fire and a nasty smile on her lips, she walked towards him as power gathered in her hands. The elves looked on in horror.

Valandor waited until the very last moment. Only when a blade of ice spun itself out of Winter's fingers and hung a hair's breadth from his head did he spring up and hit her with all the strength of his immortal body and all the power he had. Winter reeled back, surprised and furious. Valandor had waited months for this moment, and he had no intention of wasting it.

And then the real fight began. The two demigods clashed on every plane at once: magical, mental and physical. Soldiers on both sides lowered their weapons and simply watched. Winter had the advantage of fresh strength, whereas Valandor had been fighting without a break for years. What he had, though, was experience. He had faced every beast she had ever set on him, none of her tricks could catch him out any more, and he knew her well enough to know that strength alone would not win her the day. He kept pressing, and she, growing more and more frustrated, began to make mistakes.

When his chance came, Valandor hesitated. Even after everything, he couldn't bring himself to simply kill one of his own. He held his blade to her throat and waited – for a curse, or a plea for mercy. Winter only stared back at him with murderous hatred and a mocking smile. Then she sent an image straight into his head: the deaths of his brothers and sisters in the God War – many of whom had fallen by her hand.

Valandor drove the blade home.

Winter burst into a cloud of ice shards in a blinding flash of magic. Bitter laughter rolled across the battlefield. And a moment later, from the direction of the glaciers, came the first ominous rumble.

Valandor understood at once what it meant. Winter had bound her world-devouring ice to her own body and soul. With her gone, the ice had nothing left to hold on to – and it began to melt at a wholly unnatural pace.

The Great Flood had begun.

Part four: Winter's Final Gift

The flood

Exhausted almost beyond endurance, Valandor once again threw himself into saving the world. At Therennia Adar he raised a mighty wall that saved the inner city from the water – but little else. Around Basilea he held back the floodwaters and turned them aside wherever he could, and even so, vast swathes of old Primovantor were lost beneath the waves. Out of that flood a new sea was born: the Infant Sea.

Everywhere he went, Valandor saved as much as he lost. Much of the old world, already maimed by the God War, was swallowed by the unnatural flood – Winter's Final Gift. The elves suffered heavy losses too: the water claimed a great deal of their land and a great many lives.

The end of the Republic

There's a bitter irony to this whole story. It was the High Consul of Primovantor who had pushed hardest to put an end to Winter. And in doing so, he sealed his own country's fate.

The Republic was already in a sorry state by then. The God War had laid waste to much of its territory, and the sundering of the Celestians had hit it harder than anywhere else in the world. The Time of Ice finished the job. The provinces north of the Dragon's Teeth mountains were ground to dust by the ice, and the rich lands to the south disappeared under the sea. The High Consul was dead, the country lay in ruins, and the flood was the final blow for the tottering Republic. What was left of it broke up into feuding petty states, and much of the old knowledge was lost. Some even say that drowning was a mercy of sorts for Primovantor – it washed the bloated, shattered shadow of a once-great power off the face of the earth.

A few scraps of that glory survived. The eastern part of the Republic, Basilea, still exists today, though it's much smaller and stopped being a republic long ago – these days it's the Hegemony, wedded to tradition to a fault. The twin cities of Primantor and the Golden Horn, built on mountain rock, stood firm against the waters. Primantor still stands as a monument to the follies of that age, while the Golden Horn became the centre of humanity's rebirth.

How the map changed

Put maps from before the War with Winter side by side with today's and you'll see the sheer scale of the disaster. Where the heart of Primovantor once lay, there is sea today, and its western reaches are marked on maps as the Drowned Republic. On the seabed lies Vantoria, once known as the City of the Ardent Vale. Primantor, the City of the Tall Peak, held out on its rock. And the Golden Horn once went by an entirely different name: Antanavor.

The death of a hero

And Valandor? In the madness of seething seas and drowning plains, the waves finally carried him away. Nobody knows exactly when he lost his battle with the elements. But nobody doubts, either, that without him far less of the old world would have survived.

His body was found near the Brokenwall Islands and carried with full honours to the top of the Tower of Walldeep. He lies there to this day on a carved bier atop a tall, ornate plinth – untouched by time, as if he were only sleeping. Every year millions of pilgrims make the journey to pay their respects to the Hero of the Winter War.

Nor is the tower the only place where his memory lives on. In the Golden Horn you'll find the Order of the Ardent Light, an order of mages that takes apprentices only from noble families able to trace some connection to Valandor himself.

Once again the world had changed. Elves, humans and dwarfs had to start all over again, and the forces of darkness were already sharpening their claws. What Pannithor looks like after the Flood – and the latest, most terrifying war against the Abyss – is a story for the next part of the Chronicles.