It did not come as a war. Wars have armies, and armies can be fought.
The Withering came as a sickness in the land itself. The outermost Heartgrove Willows, the ones planted during the frontier expansion of the Spreading Boughs, were the first to die. Their leaves curled and browned. Their bark split and wept dark sap. Within a single Turning, dozens of willows that had sheltered frontier settlements for generations simply stopped living. They did not fall. They stood, gray and brittle, as monuments to what had been lost.
Without the willows’ protection, the frontier settlements were exposed to the full presence of the wild spirits. What followed was not violence in the way mortals understood it. The spirits did not march or siege. They simply reclaimed.
Fields that had produced grain for decades yielded nothing but twisted stalks and bitter root. Wells ran dry or filled with water that tasted of iron and rot. Livestock grew sick with ailments that no herbalist could treat, and the animals that recovered were changed, wilder, harder to manage, as if the spirit of domestication had been stripped from them. Roads that had been clear and maintained began to crack and buckle, and the forests on either side crept inward with unnatural speed, sending roots through packed stone.
The settlements farthest from Tathann fell first. Not to attack. To abandonment. Families packed what they could carry and walked back toward the inner willows, toward the older, stronger groves that still held. The roads they traveled were already beginning to close behind them.
The mortal races responded as their natures dictated.
The Thalrun sealed their outermost halls. They were builders, and their answer to the crisis was to build walls thick enough to hold back what was coming. In their deepest mountain holds, the earth spirits had always been quieter, more manageable, and the Thalrun believed their stone would protect them. For some, it did. The great halls near the ancient heartland survived, their doors shut against the changing world. But the frontier mines and the newer settlements carved into distant peaks were lost entirely. The Thalrun who lived there made for the inner mountains, and behind them the stone groaned and shifted as the earth spirits took back what had been opened without their consent.
The Sulhenni, being wanderers, had less to lose in the traditional sense. They had never built permanent settlements of their own, preferring to travel between the cities of other races. But the roads were closing, and the open plains where the wind spirits had always been their companions became something else. The wind grew hostile in places it had never been. Storms materialized without warning and raged with a fury that felt personal. The Sulhenni scattered, and many retreated to the shelter of whatever Heartgrove they could reach. Some, it is said, went the other direction entirely, deeper into the wild lands, choosing to live among the untamed spirits rather than behind willow walls. Whether they survived is not recorded.
The Myrralyn’s rivers turned against them. Not all at once, and not everywhere, but in enough places to destroy their network of canal towns and river settlements. Floods came without rain. Currents reversed in the middle of established waterways. The water spirits, who had been the most patient and the most willing to share their domain, withdrew their goodwill with devastating completeness. The Myrralyn lost more settlements than any other race during the first decade of the Withering. Those who survived did so by retreating to the lakes and pools that remained calm, places where the oldest water spirits still remembered the old rites and the mortals who had honored them.
The Aellonir suffered most cruelly, because they had taken the most. The volcanic lands where they had built their greatest forges erupted in ways that no natural vulcanism could explain. Fire burned cold. Lava flowed uphill. The furnace-halls that had been the pride of Aellonir craft became tombs, sealed by flows of molten rock that moved with what survivors described as intention. The fire spirits had given the Aellonir their gifts freely once, and the Aellonir had repaid that generosity by taking without asking. Now the fire spirits burned what they had built, and the Aellonir fled south toward the temperate lands, carrying whatever tools and knowledge they could save.
The Galadwen did not flee. They had been preparing for decades, tending the inner willows, strengthening the oldest groves, and building what reserves of spiritual goodwill they could. When the Withering reached the inner lands, the Galadwen stood at the boundary between the willow groves and the advancing wild, and they held it. Not with force. With patience, with ritual, with a willingness to speak with the wild spirits that the other races had lost the ability or the humility to attempt.
It cost them. The Galadwen who worked at the edges of the Withering aged before their time. Some simply walked into the wild and did not return, their bodies given to the spirits as offerings or their minds taken by the proximity to forces too vast for mortal comprehension. But they held the line. The inner willows survived, and within their protective reach, the mortal races endured.
The Elunari, as always, formed the foundation. They were the ones who took in refugees from every race, who organized the rationing of food when the fields shrank, who rebuilt what could be rebuilt and mourned what could not. Their villages around the inner Heartgroves became crowded, desperate places during the worst years of the Withering, but they did not break. Elunari stubbornness, the same quality that made them content to live simple lives while other races reached for grandeur, proved to be the virtue that held civilization together when grandeur failed.
The worst period lasted roughly fifteen Turnings, from around Turning 270 to 285. During these years, the boundary between the Aether and the physical world was so thin that spirits manifested visibly in places far from the frontier. Travelers reported seeing shapes in the forest that were not animals or people. Lights moved through the sky at night that were not stars. The rivers spoke in voices that even the Elunari, who had no spiritual gift, could hear.
Some mortals were drawn to it.
This is the part of the Withering that the village histories record with the least detail, because it is the part that shames them most. Not everyone retreated behind the willows. Not everyone wanted to.
Among every race, there were those who felt the wild spirits’ power and reached toward it rather than away. The Aellonir had a word for the impulse that translates roughly as “the ember’s call.” For them, the untamed fire that destroyed their settlements was also the purest expression of the element they revered. Some Aellonir walked into the burning lands willingly, seeking communion with spirits that had just obliterated their homes.
The Thalrun had their deep-delvers, miners who refused to seal the shafts that led to the spirit-touched caverns below. They went deeper instead, and the stories that came back before communication ceased described stone that sang and light that thought.
The Myrralyn had those who swam the changed rivers, following the altered currents into places that the water spirits had claimed absolutely. The Sulhenni had those who chased the wild storms instead of sheltering from them.
Even the Elunari, practical and grounded as they were, had those who heard the voices in the rivers and chose to listen.
These were not evil people. That is important. They were mortals who stood at the boundary between the physical world and the Aether and chose the Aether. Whether they were destroyed, transformed, or simply absorbed into a way of existence that other mortals could not follow, the histories do not say. What the histories do say is that the willows did not welcome them back.
The choice, once made, was permanent. Those who embraced the wild spirits during the Withering were changed by the contact in ways that the willow groves recognized as incompatible. The protective aura that sheltered mortals simply did not extend to them. They could stand beneath a Heartgrove Willow and feel nothing. No warmth. No calm. No shelter.
They had become something between mortal and spirit, and neither world fully claimed them.
The Withering did not end with a victory. There was no final battle, no hero who turned the tide, no climactic moment that the bards could later set to music. It ended the way a fever ends. Slowly, unevenly, and with exhaustion on both sides.
By around Turning 290, the wild spirits’ advance had reached a natural limit. The inner Heartgrove Willows, ancient and powerful, anchored by Tathann’s vast root network, could not be uprooted. The Galadwen’s tireless work at the boundaries had established a new equilibrium, one where the spirits held the outer lands and the mortals held the inner groves, with a contested borderland between them.
The spirits did not withdraw to their old boundaries. They simply stopped advancing. The frontier was gone. The great roads were closed. The Thalrun halls beyond the inner mountains were sealed or collapsed. The Aellonir furnace-halls were buried under volcanic flow. The Myrralyn canals were silted and impassable. Centuries of expansion, erased in four decades.
What remained was enough. The mortal races had their Heartgrove villages, their core settlements, their oldest and strongest willows. They had each other, pressed together by necessity in a way they had not been since the earliest days of the First Roots. They had knowledge, some of it. Much had been lost with the frontier libraries and the master crafters who had not escaped the outer settlements.
And they had a question that would take the next Age to begin answering: what now?