This golden age of unity was not to last. A faction of Giants, led by the proto-Frost-Fang warlord Skarl the Unbent, arose with a brutal philosophy. They saw the act of shrinking as a sacrilege—a voluntary surrender of the power the gods (or fate) had granted them. To them, empathy was weakness, and cooperation with the Lítillfólk was beneath a Giant's station. Skarl preached a doctrine of absolute dominance: the strong should rule, and the weak should serve.
This ideological schism ignited the War of Broken Oaths. It was a brutal civil war that pitted Giants who believed in unity against those who believed in absolute power. The conflict culminated in a siege of Haugaeldr itself. Recognizing that the knowledge within was the greatest threat to his ideology, Skarl did not seek to capture the fortress, but to erase it. Using powerful, unstable geomantic rituals, his shamans triggered a catastrophic volcanic eruption from the very mountain that housed the library. Mokkur and most of his apprentices perished defending the archives, and the vast repository of knowledge—the master runes, the rituals, the safety protocols—was buried under a river of lava and ash.
The loss was total. The art of Rune-Shrinking was shattered, surviving only in fragmented, misunderstood scraps of legend. The War of Broken Oaths cemented the division of the Giant nations and established the Frost-Fang philosophy of "Might Makes Right" as a major power in the world. The destruction of Haugaeldr stands as the great tragedy of Giant history, a permanent scar from a war that broke the one tool that could have ensured true understanding between the Giants and those they are destined to rule. Today, the quest to rediscover a single, complete rune-sequence is a legendary goal, a dream of restoring a bridge that was burned a thousand years ago.