The fall of Vaenor did not begin with the clash of steel or the thunder of siege engines. It began with a lie, spoken not in ignorance, but in the cold clarity of will.
King Baelor of Alveron, who would be named in time Baelor the Dread, declared before his court and his people that his son had been taken by Vaenor and twisted by forbidden sorcery. This tale, borne upon the breath of fear and carried swiftly across the lands, found eager ears among those who had long distrusted Vaenor’s pursuits. The Church gave it sanction, and the realm found in it a cause that seemed righteous and unassailable. Thus was forged not only a reason for war, but a unity that demanded blood.
Yet the truth, as ever, lay buried beneath the weight of convenience.
The prince had not been stolen, nor ensnared by dark enchantments. He had gone of his own will, crossing into Vaenor not as a captive, but as one seeking something beyond the narrow confines of his birth. There, amid the pale towers and whispered studies of the arcane, he found not corruption, but kinship. He came to love a daughter of that kingdom—a princess of Vaenor—and in secret they bound their fates together in defiance of the divisions that had long stood between their peoples.
No record of this union remains in any royal archive, for it was struck from history with deliberate care. In its place stood the tale of abduction and defilement, a narrative far more useful to a king who sought not understanding, but vengeance.
And once such a lie has been crowned as truth, war follows not as a question, but as a certainty.
Alveron did not march upon Vaenor with the intent to conquer and rule. It came with fire in its heart and annihilation in its purpose.
The assault was swift and merciless, a storm of iron and flame that fell upon Vaenor’s gleaming walls without respite. Siege engines thundered against the pale stone until even those masterworks of ancient craft began to crack and yield beneath the relentless force. Above, the sky itself seemed to burn, as arcane fire—twisted into instruments of war—tore through districts with a fury that no mortal hand could contain. Spells collided in the heavens, unraveling into chaos that rained destruction upon the city below.
Within the walls, there was no sanctuary. No distinction was made between those who wielded magic and those who merely lived beneath its shadow. The streets became rivers of blood and flame, where nobles and laborers alike were cast down without mercy. Children fled alongside scholars, only to be swallowed by the same inferno that consumed their homes. The wounded lay where they fell, their cries lost beneath the roar of collapsing stone and the ceaseless hunger of the fire.
Yet even as the defenses of Vaenor failed, the cruelty of its conquerors did not abate; it deepened.
Those who survived the fall of the city were dragged from their hiding places and brought forth into the open, where they were slain in acts of public judgment that were neither swift nor kind. Many were burned alive, condemned as bearers of a taint that none could see, yet all were commanded to believe. The nobles of Vaenor were impaled upon the broken ramparts, their bodies left to wither beneath the blackened sky as a warning to any who might remember them.
Baelor did not seek to claim Vaenor as his own. He sought to unmake it entirely—to erase not only its walls and towers, but its people, its culture, and the very memory of its existence.
When at last the fires dimmed and the smoke thinned, there remained little more than ruin and silence.
The prince was found among the dead, and beside him the princess he had loved. Their bodies were recorded only as proof of Baelor’s tale, not as evidence of its falsehood. Of the child they had conceived, no trace was ever found, and in that absence was born a question that has never been answered.