SPOILER A Gavellian History Theory

"Huh, that's a pretty vague title. I wonder what exact part of Gavellian history this thread will be theorizing about?"

DISCLAIMER: We're about to go into some Deep Lore. If you take a gander down you will be faced with an utter wall of text. If you're not about all of that, then just skip to "thesis," read that, and imagine in your head the absolutely brilliant, cited arguments I spent the entire post using to justify it.

INTRODUCTION​

Hello! I'm hmtn. I'm "in Wynntheory," however one might exactly be a member of a loose interest group. If you've seen me poking around the forums you might know me better from Wynnlangs, a smaller conlanging-focused subgroup of Wynntheory as a whole.

Which is to say: I don't often write theories. This is actually only the second-ever theory proper I've ever posted to the forums. Like the last, this theory came to me in a flash of inspiration, the morning after an unusual dream. I'll take that as prophecy moving forward.

The theory grew out of my attempts to compile the history of the Villagers, and as it snowballed started to accrete more and more years and peoples into it.

As of right now, this is primarily a sweeping take on the origins and histories of the Villagers, the Elves, and the Doguns, the three I'm most confident about. Also here are the Greenskins, who I'm fairly confident on the very broad strokes of, as well as the Dwarves.

Since it’s so broad, the theory doesn’t have a proper name. I suppose it could be something like “Gavellian Seal Theory,” or “Afenian War Theory,” or something else, but that’s an exercise i leave to the reader.

This theory will assume that you know nothing (zero-zilch-nada) about broader Wynnlore, and haven't done any secret discoveries. I will, however, be citing secret discoveries, so you can look those up if you want.

I've made like three editing runs over this post. I'm a bit frazzled today, though, so it's likely I haven't caught everything. Apologies for that. Let's get to the theory.


On Sources
Wynn canon is only slightly more solid than the SCP foundation. Item lores are at best pseudo-canon. They can support and expand upon canon evidence, but by themselves can prove nothing.

Hard canon is anything seen ingame - world, world-events, flashbacks, quests, secret discoveries et cetera. Anything especially weird that the seaskipper says is taken to be a fourth-wall nod, however, and is thus non-canon until or unless it is supported by a harder source.

The softest canon is anything that a member of the CT says or posts on the forums. Even admins. Written out-of-game wynnlore is exceptionally vulnerable to people changing their mind, and even within the CT itself there are multiple slightly different variations of canon going around, as far as I can tell.

The following abbreviations will be used for various source types:

IL - item lore

SD - secret discovery

WD - World Discovery

QU - quest

FD - festival dialogue

M - it's on the map

THESIS​

The Villagers, Elves, Doguns, and Greenskins are all descendants or creations of an incredibly advanced civilization that accidentally unleashed a horrific threat onto Gavel. After locking themselves into the continent with said threat, the precursor civilization was ground to dust over the course of the following cataclysmic war, with their various remnants developing into most of the modern races of Gavel. The threat that they fought against is of possibly deadlier scope than the War of the Realms, and the current seals on that threat are dangerously weak.

This theory is written in seven parts. Parts 1-2 are setup and evidence. Part 3 is an exploration of Villager history, while Part 4 is about Gavel’s geographic quirks. Part 5 details how this conflict was fought, while Parts 6-8 fill in the timeline for the races of Gavel up to the present day.

PART ONE: CATACLYSM. NO, NOT THE DAGGER.​

The "Ancients" honestly need a better name, but they're fairly well supported as canon. Somebody likely built the Colossi (unsupported conjecture), the smaller - but still huge - stone golem/creatures in Gylia (The Ancient Ones SD), as well as the pre-villager temples in the Western Plains (Spider Ruins SD). It's incredibly likely that all three of these were built by the same source, and the Gylia Lad could be "up to ten thousand years old," (The Grand Archive SD),

Also active in Western Gavel in the fog of ancient days was whoever caused the events that created the Forgery, which "burst from the ground" after "the runes were combined long ago," and apparently anchors and seals "a fracture in time and space" (Fracture in Reality SD).

Presumably the Forgery's at best dismissive relationship to spacetime is what lets one do corrupted dungeons, but that’s less relevant.

Whoever was messing around with these runes was presumably very widespread. An Uth Altar is found in Aldorei and a Tol Altar in the Sky Islands, formerly the Ahms Region (M). The Uth altar might be the Elves, but the Tol Altar is completely unexplained, and still on the other end of the province from the Spider Ruins.

We can thus assume that the people who messed up with the runes inhabited the entirety of Gavel. Absolutely no Skyraider, Dwarvish, Dogun (afaik), Villager, or even Elvish sources mention these people, so either they got absolutely dwemered, were forgotten about, or went somewhere else.

Item lores aren't canon. Officially. They're often written to say something about the game lore, but the current stock were often written with little care to consistency. Still, the Az item lore very clearly describes a group of people that messed with the runes Nii, Az, and Ek and destroyed their civilization in the process. Yikes. Despite the quasi-canonicity, this matches up with our more iron-clad lore. I'll accept it as supporting evidence.

(Terminology note: due to the runes involved, Wynntheory generally refers to this incident as "Niiazek," and that's what I'll be calling it for the rest of the theory).

So: An ancient civilization, adept in runes, one that almost definitely is responsible for the Gylia lad and thus the Colossi, wiped themselves out in an experiment.

That's a good starting chunk of our thesis. Note that in the modern day, Rune Magic is… understudied. Runes themselves are extremely powerful - see the Twains sealing away the Corrupter of Worlds (A Hunter's Calling QU) - but also pretty unwieldy compared to normal magic.

Also note that the only people to actively deal in runes that we know of are:

1) The Twains, a fantasy X-men analogue

2) Corkus, the most techno-magically advanced civ in the world (Powder Exchange M)

3) The Avos, who by all appearances aren’t slouches when it comes to runework.

4) The Olm, who managed to build time valley (Timeless Ruin SD, The Olmic Rune QU)

5) The Elves… apparently, despite the fact that the elves never do anything with runes, as opposed to everyone else on this list, and apparently can’t even decipher them (Camar NPC in Gylia.)

6) The Rune Guardians (presumed, seeing as it's their whole thing), and we'll go into them later.

Outisde of the Guardians, these are all rather advanced groups and civilizations, and yet none of them have managed to recreate Niiazek in the process. Now, perhaps these advanced civilizations have managed to avoid the same mistake that the Ancients made.

However.

This sheer amount of destructive power often implies equally high power or expertise going into whatever accident caused Niiazek. Accepting the Ancients as incredibly advanced, more advanced than anyone currently, also helps better justify them as the creators of the Colossi. Plus, it vibes with villager cultural trends and anxieties, which is yet another thing we will go into later.

So: Far in the past, there was incredibly advanced ancient civilization, one that is likely responsible for the Gylia Lad and the Colossi. They messed with the runes Nii, Az, and Ek, wiping themselves out in the process.

Good start, so let’s go on a tangent.

PART TWO: HOW, EXACTLY, DOES THE VILLAGER CALENDAR WORK?​

This question is the one that sent me down the rabbit hole of this theory in the first place, and where we’re going it helps to get a good sketch of villager history.

The main sources for this part will be The Grand Archive and Llevigar's Secret Library SDs. If I say something without citing it then it belongs to one of those two.

Villager historical dating uses an age system. We know for sure that there were a fifth and sixth age, though historians and the current Gavellian government instead prefer the BP/AP system that Wynn uses.

Remikas, the first known King of all the villagers, probably ruled in the late 500s BP. His daughter, Marika the Admired, had a "long and peaceful rule" before her known passing in 463 BP, which ignited the Wars of the Cousins.

I hold the whole "first king" thing with a grain of salt. First unification in living memory, yes, maybe even first in recorded history, but written Villager history doesn't go back much further than the 5th age, an age that didn't seem fun. It's extremely likely that Remikas' unification of the Villagers was what heralded the beginning of the 6th age in old Villager historiography. An explanation:

The only event that we have in both the Age chronology and in Portal Years is the emergence of the Gerts. The first Gert was transformed from a villager (also: magic can warp villagers, keep that in mind) c. 400 BP (Mark of the Meteors SD), and the first reports of Gerts that villagers reliably have is around Gylia near the start of the 6th Age.

We know for a fact that the founding of the Villager Kingdom and the emergence of the Gerts took place only a bit over a century apart, and that said emergence came shortly after a new Age was declared. If anything would cause that new age, then a unification would be it.

If the 6th age is congruent with Monarchical rule (and we’re assuming that it is), then it ended in 750 AP, around thirteen-hundred years after it began. That's an incredibly long-lived form of government. Seeing as it fell into civil war less than a century after it was founded, however, it doesn't necessarily need to have been the same dynasty.

So it seems a fair lock that the 6th age began c. 550-500 BP, and it's probably reasonable to assume that it ran until 750 AP, which would put us in the 249th year of the 7th Age If the Villagers were still using that system, which they don't seem to be.

What of the fifth age? Are there any major events that we can use to demarcate it? Yes, actually!

The Gylia Cataclysm is the Gylia Plains ultimate discovery, and it has a hard date. In 1400 BP, two massive meteors - purple and blue - fell into the northern Gylia Plains and caused a whole massive mess that resulted in the modern Lake Gylia. This may have been the beginning of a bombardment that continues to this very day (??? QU, Star Thief QU, Mark of the Meteors SD), though it seems to have cooled down somewhat from its downright cataclysmic beginning. Remnants of this bombardment can be found everywhere, strewn across Gavel (M), and some of them are extremely large.

Again, we also know that events near the beginning of the 5th Age resulted in the loss of most written histories, as well as a huge amount of Villager knowledge in general. This Gylia cataclysm probably isn't Niiazek - it's too recent, at least for this theory - and as of right now cosmic magic is not known to be related to runes. Still, it was a cataclysm of all time, and the heavy bombardment probably set back villager development by centuries.

The Gylia lake Meteors might not have been the beginning of the bombardment - we just don't know - but they were certainly the climax. If we set the start of the 5th age as their impact, and end it with Remikas' (re-?)unification of Gylia, we end up with a slightly shorter 5th age of about 900 years. But, again, it could be longer. History gets real muddy prior to this. To bring it slightly more in-line with the 6th age, let’s add two lead-up centuries of bombardment, putting the 5th age at a still-shorter but more comparable 1100 years long.

So despite the muddiness, it seems safe to conclude that the 5th age began with the cosmic bombardment unravelling villager society at or before 1400 BP, and ended with Remikas c. 550-500 BP.

This still leaves four other ages unaccounted for, however. It also leaves in the air a history that could extend back ten-thousand years, as opposed to the "mere" 2600 or so that we've sketched out.

PART THREE: MOST NOBLE AND ANCIENT TARGET PRACTICE
​

Alright, everything from here on is the Theory bit of the theory. we have assembled our facts and entered wild speculation mode. ‘Tis time to put on the tinfoil hats, assemble the cork-boards, and remove the doors from their hinges.

First: let's make the assumption that the average age lasts about 1200 years. This is the average of our current guesses for the fifth (~1100y) and sixth (~1300y) ages' respective durations. This gives us the following age-spans:

7th Age (Republican): 750– AP
6th Age (Monarchical): 500 BP – 750 AP
5th Age (Bombardment): 1600 – 500 BP
4th Age: 2800 – 1600 BP
3rd Age: 4000 – 2800 BP
2nd Age: 5200 – 4000 BP
1st Age: 6400 – 5200 BP

This is. Over seven-thousand years. An incredibly long span of time. For comparison, the entirety of Ancient Egypt managed about three thousand years (ending definitively with the Roman conquest), and it's been two thousand years since then. That's the whole deal with Cleopatra living closer to the moon landings than the pyramids, by the way, the pyramids being one of the earliest things Ancient Egypt did. Egyptian civilization was old as hell. And the Villagers might casually be four thousand+ years older than even them. Two thousand years older than even modern Egypt.

How are they not in space?! Why is Wynn not sci-fi?

A few reasons, most likely:

1. Cultural and scientific energy is going into magical development, not an industrial revolution. Even then, it’s not like people don’t know how to build machines (An Iron Heart Part 2 QU, Rise of the Quartron QU). Gavel is plenty advanced, and the only reason it seems so medieval is because nobody’s gotten around to inventing guns.
2. These guys are known to have come out of a cataclysm perhaps as bad as the Bronze Age Collapse less than two-thousand years back. In their deep-history, Niiazek might have affected them as well. The villager story seems to have been about building up, getting knocked back down, and building up again. No wonder they're so protective & greedy. It’s probably subconscious, but this is how you put a civ under a siege mentality.

But yeah. Villager civilization seems really really old, even if the current culture and tech-base has only been around for about 2000 years. But if that offhand comment about ten-thousand years in the Grand Archive is to have truth to it (and the writer treats it like offhand knowledge that it is), then we're still missing three thousand years.

So this is my proposal: An abnormally long 1st Age that acts as the final and ultimate barrier to any villager knowledge about the past. Most information predating the 5th Age - or about 2600 years ago - is lost, but the Villagers still have dating methods and scraps of information back to the 2nd Age, in the oral tradition, in linguistic history, and in the very numbering of the ages themselves.

The 1st Age, however, is mostly a mystery, and fades out into prehistory. It's a historian synonym for "unspeakably ancient," and artifacts have been found and dated from the generally agreed upon beginning of the 2nd age c. 7000 years ago all the way back to ten. Historians might even generally be in agreement that the whole "first age" thing is a retroactive label by the ancestral Villagers of the 2nd age, who wished to definitively mark the end of that primordial era for a new one. Maybe it was the dating system of a unifying empire? or a religion? or something else? That conjecture is beyond the scope of this theory, however.

(Wild-speculation-that’s-barely-part-of-the-theory, but maybe this is even why the Republic switched to the BP/AP calendar? We have zero clue what the third age was like, but the first and fifth ages seem to have sucked. Maybe the Age system works on a boom-bust cycle, and the third age might have been a dark age as well. The Republic might not want that connotation.)

PART FOUR: HEY, WHAT'S UP WITH GAVEL'S GEOGRAPHY?​

Okay, so Gavel's kind of shaped weird, right? (I know that we're doing some serious topic-jumping, but I promise that it's all related.)

And I don't just mean the rectangle. I'm willing to accept that as a game abstraction. Slightly less justifiable as a game abstraction is the giant wall of mountains sealing it off from the sea. Gavel as a whole is nearly completely isolated from the Azure Expanse, a name I once heard for the Ocean and loved so much that I'm going to use it everywhere now.

The two major current exits (that I know of) are from Llevigar and the Jofash Docks passage. I think that the only natural one is Jofash.

Llevigar… well, that's not a normal cave passage. It was carved. Miners are everywhere in the Western Plains, quarrying tons of quartz. Once the oceans were calmed and the Republican government was putting together its trophy city, the Big Door project and the nearby docks could easily have been commissioned. Note that Llevigar isn't a port — if it had that exit, and had it recently, it would have made more sense to build it on the ocean.

I'd think that there was a pre-existing settlement there, and that modern Llevigar is simply its utter renovation (at the cost of whoever might have lived there before). Not a port, ergo the Door tunnel is recent.

Jofash, on the other hand, is a much wider, more chaotic cave, with a road merely going through it. The port town on the Jofash docks is actually built on the docks. It’s in a fairly decent and protected port location as well. I'd say it's older than Llevigar's, and until the building of those docks would have been the only major path into the province.

There are some other minor caves - the one in the Light Forest (M), as well as a storied one that the mythic Auray traveled through, via a long and winding set of Ancient ruins (Zuett Bonfire FD). The latter seems planned and intentional, and I'll talk about it later, and the former might be a deliberate opening on behalf of the light? Though it is instead filled with Weirds, which are cosmic magic thingys.

(Rapid tinfoil hat mode but those Weirds might literally be there to block an attempt by the Light to spread its influence into the ocean, if fighting influential forces is the reason why cosmic magic and whatever originates it is targeting the world in the first place (??? QU/M).)

To the east of Gavel is the Canyon, and its protector. Behind the Canyon Colossus was the Ahms Colossus. We know that the Colossus' shifting of the canyon prevents Dernmites from spreading the decay further east (The Great Barrier SD), and again it's nigh-confirmed that the Colossi are the work of the Ancients.

This results in a Gavel that, before the opening of the Llevigar passage, is nearly completely shut off from the outside world.

Huge, unnatural mountains between the land and the sea, including ones that straight up block the River Sage. The only exit is blocked by two (two!) Colossi, one turning the Canyon into extremely hostile territory and the other parked directly on the exit itself, if you were thinking of sneaking past. Protectors. Wardens. Ones whose effects, even after all this time, are capable of holding off extra-dimensional forces.

And on top of that: The Ocean. The Azure Expanse. Why was it so stormy? Why could it not be crossed? It must have been a magical effect, since modern mages could calm it. It wasn't a super-insane Ancient-tier magical effect either, since, again, modern mages could calm it. It's very possible that this was a final line of defense, ensuring that even should Gavel fall, the threat could not easily escape across the sea. Seeing how easily it could be undone, it was probably a bit of an afterthought. The main gate defense was still the Colossi, but the sea enchantment was a defense nonetheless.

So it seems that the entirety of Gavel (Especially Gylia and everything to the west) is a massive containment cell, with the Colossi as its wardens. That's why its geography is so weird, and maybe it's even why the Azure was unable to be sailed.

Okay, remember the thesis? Where are we with that, exactly?

We have an incredibly ancient, advanced, powerful civilization. Their rune experiments went horrifically wrong, unleashing some terrible cataclysm onto Gavel. The modern province’s geography is shaped like a giant prison cell, and the Colossi that they likely made are an integral part of that cell.

I propose that after Niiazek, the Ancients locked themselves into the continent with whatever it was that they unleashed. They kept open one major exit, on the far end of the province, their only hatch of control, and raised the current border mountains that lock most of Gavel away from the ocean. If they built the Colossi, reality-shattering creatures, more powerful than nearly anything known to the world today, this could also feasibly be within their power. Which raises the question of "What the hell did they unleash?”

PART FIVE: WAR, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?​

Alright. We are in Deep history now. No villager record will ever contain this information. It's pure reconstruction time. Here's some facts that'll help with this section:

1. The Doguns speak to the Canyon Colossus in High Gavellian. Or Ancient Gavellian. You know, the names of the various Gavellians are very unclear. (The Breaking Point QU)
2. The elves... also frequently speak Ancient/High Gavellian. As does the Light to them, often. It seems to be a language invested with some amount of power. (Lari RoL QU, Ne du Valeos Du Ellach SD, FinnDestren CT)
3. Villagers, curiously, don't. Not really, not much. Instead, they (or at least the orcs) call the language they speak "Low" Gavellian (All Roads to Peace QU, assumes that the player is speaking Gavellian lingua franca)

But, anyway, let's go back to our Ancients. When we last left them, they had sealed themselves away into Gavel to start engaging in an apocalyptical conflict with some unbidden threat unleashed by Niiazek. It. Uh. Didn't go well for them, as we established pretty early on. But Niiazek also eventually came to an end, seeing as Gavel doesn't currently appear to be fighting a War In Heaven.

This is probably the mythical "Afenian War," though that name is probably filtered through thousands upon thousands of years of cultural change and information loss. It might be a completely random Villager myth, the story of a cataclysmic war at the dawn of their people simply such an incredibly lasting and powerful force in their culture. It's as good a name as any, though it's unclear who exactly the "Afenians" were. The ancients? Their enemies? Some other important quality of the war? Maybe "Afeni" is just the word for "Rune" garbled through ten-thousand years of history! Who knows. But that's a tangent.

The theory is thus: There was a war, whatever it was called. The Ancients unleashed something, fought it, and won a pyrrhic victory. Not a fast one, either. Should Niiazek truly be a ten-thousand-year old incident, and its end the beginning point of the 2nd Age, that implies that it lasted c. three thousand years, as opposed to something like the Corruption War's "paltry" single millennium.

Like, have you guys seen what only one thousand years did to Wynn? The province is barely holding on. The only reason the situation is as comparatively good as it is in 1000 AP is because of active war support and re-population efforts on behalf of the Villagers, and though that's really nice of them that doesn't make it any less colonial.

(Side note: Subconscious cultural trauma being another reason why the Villagers are so sympathetic to the Human cause in the corruption war is a very interesting thought).

The Ancients, up against a similar level of odds, probably also experienced massive levels of depopulation and and information loss over the course of some three thousand years of Niiazek. No wonder their civilization shattered, though at first it was probably a more gradual decline. The Gylia Lad most likely originates from this period, it and the various guardians in the plain made with the same techniques (and perhaps slightly degraded versions of them later on), up until the point where the knowledge of how to create or even maintain them was finally lost.

The enigmatic Rune Guardians might even originate from this deep time period as well. They might be the only people to have a complete picture of what exactly happened, though they're more likely to be an atomic priesthood. They seem to have a pared-down role in the modern day: keep the forgery intact, keep people from getting too creative with runes.

Sounds like an atomic priesthood to me, and though knowledge surviving such deep time is doubtful, if it did then the Rune Guardian Order is what I'd expect it to look like. Though again, they might know more. We don't know, though.

PART SIX: ORPHION SHOWS UP TOO I GUESS​

We already know that magic can warp villagers. Cosmic magic resulted in the Gerts, for example (Mark of the Meteors SD). Their main purpose (sorry Gerts) seems to be rendering Villagers mentally inert, with an all-consuming hunger meant to keep them from being able to sustain and improve their thought. Sure, Gerts could be accidental. But if Cosmic forces are deliberately (yet clumsily) attempting to keep the Villagers from causing a new Niiazek and are unable to kill them off via direct bombardment (See: 5th Age), then this is certianly a fallback plan of all time.

Next bit of the theory is that Elves and Villagers used to be Ancients, and that at least for the Elves their current state isn't exactly their baseline.

We know that Villager and Elvish magic potentials are both really high (Order of the Grook QU), and that the Villager's potential often goes underused out of "laziness," while the Elves take full advantage of it.

Notably, nowhere in Order of the Grook does it say that the Elves have more "default" potential than the Villagers. In fact, it's very easy to conclude that they have the same magical potential, with the deliberate contrasts between them and the Villagers' potential and use of that potential.

I do think that at the minimum the Elves are altered versions of whatever species that the Ancients were, warped by a long-term relationship with the Light. The Villagers are probably the original Ancient bodyplan (See: The Colossi and the Lad sharing their distinctive noses), but even if they're the Ancients in body, they're certainly not the same people anymore. This would however neatly explain why the Gylia cataclysm targeted them so hard.

Oh, and, speaking of the Light: note how we're nearly 4000 words into a theory and I've barely touched on the War of the Realms. lol. lmao. The War of the Realms is interesting, don't get me wrong, and it's all-encompassing, but we just know too much about it. There isn't an insane amount of theorycrafting to be done when we get straight-up exposition. But it is still all-encompassing, and here is where it fully enters the theory.

The Light has, I think, always been present in Gavel. But as an inflence. Never fully. Not to a huge extent. Here are some more facts that we know:

• The Light and War Portals were opened in 0 AP (Aldorei's Secret II SD, as well as the calendar system of the game itself)
• The Dark Portal may or may not be open; we just can't enter at the moment. It certainly looks open, though.
• At some unknown point in the past, Dern via the Dark Portal "broke into" the Silent Expanse, and laid waste to the Olm. (The Final Moments SD).
  
• This was after the Olm had fled Time Valley, which was "thousands of years ago" (Timeless Ruin SD).
• In their escape from Dern, the Olm harnessed cosmic magic as a weapon, though it did end up driving them insane, implying that they were not its master. (WynnEx Site D QU)

Wild conjecture: The Olm did not find and use cosmic magic in Time Valley or the Silent Expanse. Only in the Dernel jungle. This implies that the former two events took place before the 5th Age bombardment, which if true would:

1. Conclusively date the Doom of the Olm prior to to 1400 BP, something I think Loreheads are already extremely confident about,
2. Imply that portals "breaking in" to Physicality (the world) are and were separate events to them being outright opened. The latter seems to have taken place all at once, at the origin year of the AP calendar. Now allegedly this is the elves' fault (Aldorei's Secret Part 2 QU), but last I checked in-game lore still says it was miners on the Wynn end (Roots of Corruption WD) and there's nothing stopping that from being coincidence/compulsion.

Honestly though, it could be either way. The "when" of the Dern portal opening is irrelevant to this theory, the important thing being this notion that the force of Influence.... well... forced its way into physicality.

Which implies that the Light Portal did the same thing. But we don't know of that event. Maybe it did it earlier than Dern? Maybe the Olmdoom was an Insanely long time ago, and it was at the same time?

But I theorize that the Light initially broke into Gavel during Niiazek. The Plane of Influence was likely always connected to the material (or maybe that started with Niiazek hohohoho), but the portals are really weird, mess with space, time, and the void, and seem rather arbitrarily placed. The world doesn’t seem to be built around them — The War portal was underground! Thus the world predates the portals.

Maybe some frazzled and war-torn Ancients summoned the Light as a bigger fish. Maybe the Light merely saw a chance to expand its influence. But no matter the exact circumstances, I theorize that a subset of the whittled, surviving, Ancient-Gavellian speaking Ancient population bargained with, started worshiping, or all of the above to the Light.

This could have caused a schism in the remaining Ancient population, who thought that trusting a different extra-dimensional force while they were in the middle of a civilization-annihilating war with the first one was the dumbest idea they'd ever heard. Maybe to this day, even if it isn't well remembered, that's the reason why the Villager population is wary of and generally refuses to worship the Light (Temple of Light SD). Maybe that temple is insanely old, or just maybe it's a relic of an attempt made when that initial schism was so far removed as to be gone from memory.

(Side note 2: I don't think that the elves know that much more about their history than the villagers. Sure, they're longer lived, but their philosophy seems to lean more towards "living in the moment" than "holding on to the past." They keep some history, no doubt, but I also doubt that it's excessive enough to handle the thousands and thousands of years of deep time we're talking about.)

Importantly, both of these populations can be assumed to speak Ancient Gavellian. (There always must be some linguistics somewhere). The less populous, longer-and-longer lived proto-elves would probably continue to speak a more conservative form of the language, while the Villagers would splinter and/or develop into a variety of Prakits - or, rather, “Low Gavellians”, perhaps with a “High” Gavellian as an intentionally fossilized unifying speech. At least until everyone hated the monarchs enough to get rid of them and stop using it in even state functions.

Alright, so, we've got the Light Cult of Ancients, an Ancient-Gavellian speaking population gone to get all elven-warped by the Light (along with the rest of the Light forest).

They leave behind an even-more-remnant population of Ancients, Ancients who have already been nursing a sense of loss for so many generations that they've probably lost count. Seriously, if this is the origin of Villager ‘greed’ then it explains quite a lot.

Lingering distaste might even drive a wedge between the two diverging populations, with the Light-cult splinter population emphasizing their lack of greed as a value more and more as compared to the remnants of what were once a proud people, reduced to ragged wretches, hiding in the villages from which they’d take a new name, holding on to everything they possibly could.

It would be rather cruel to them, I think, if the Light was the one to eventually stop the threat, taking in the process the Light Forest as its domain. It would explain why the Elves are so incredibly devoted to it, however. Even if the Elves personally have forgotten.

So that's the Villagers and Elves accounted for, but what of the Dwarves, Doguns and Greenskins?

PART SEVEN: IN THE INFINITE SILENCE OF THE LATE FIRST AGE​

Well, to start, the Greenskins are enigma. Their oral history (Zuett Bonfire FD) speaks of the progenitor of the Greenskins being a lone creature by the name of Auray, incredibly strong, intelligent, hardy, and independent.

Also "Greenskins" is the name Villagers use, and is most definitely rather racist. I'm going to call them them Aurayin from now on, name them after said progenitor.

As for Auray themselves, plenty of theories. I'm personally thinking "bioengineered war machine," but maybe not, maybe that's just War in Heaven nonsense polluting my mind. The Aurayin aren't nessecarily Green of Skin either -- the Hobgoblins seem to be grey (CotL M). So maybe Auray, too, was an Ancient, or a population of Ancients. Whatever Auray was or were, they seemed to be responsible for road-making or connecting populations, using a tool to do so (in the oral tradition, a shovel). Auray was completely isolated, or close to it, the story probably not very exaggerated in the face of the utter depopulation in late Niiazek-era Gavel (All of this is Zuett Bonfire FD).

The oral tradition has Auray dropping their shovel into a strange location, a ruin. Again, the shovel needs not literally be one - it could be some ancient road machine, or construct, or something else that Auray either directed or followed as it carved paths through the shattered continent. But it was Auray's only companion, and so Auray followed it into the ruin.

The ruin was ancient, or rather Ancient. It seems to have been some sort of miniature escape hatch from Gavel, as after days and days of wandering Auray found the ocean, and decided that "they did not want to live alone, their only companions the shovel and the horizon."

Using various artifacts and runes of the Ancients, Auray returned to where they had first "pulled themselves from the earth" (supporting the notion that they were an abandoned Ancient construct, and not an Ancient themselves), and under the sun split themselves into the progenitors of the Aurayin.

Now, Auray could have been a single large bioconstruct literally splitting themself, or a small population engineering different forms such that they would not be the only kind of people. It's all rather unclear. But what is hopefully plausible is that the Aurayin are a successor population from the fallout of the Ancients and Niiazek, perhaps even life created by them. They would go on to form the native population of the Western Plains, and maybe even the swamp. It's a shame that we can't ask the Naga about their origins, but if they had a cognate story that would most definitely clinch it.

PART EIGHT: DWARVES & DOGUNS​

Alright, so we've filled out Western Gavel with the Aurayin. The Elves are in the forest. The Villagers & Gerts are in Gylia. What of the Canyon?

Well, some of the Aurayin got here — see the Hobgoblins (M). But the canyon is a pretty fundamentally hostile place to Ancients who have forgotten that they are Ancients.

A people live here, however. The native stock of the Canyon, as far as we can tell, are the Dwarves. Honestly, I have zero solid clue where the Dwarves came from. They're fairly inexplicable. A big piece of evidence leaning towards this whole theory is their cities: they’re all underground fortresses, hoarding resources, the latter something they have in common with the Villagers. The Dwarves are rather militaristic, and with their focus on mining and tunnels probably the most mobile force in the canyon. Another Ancient splinter population? Maybe just another species that was in the area and helped them out? It’s really unclear, but whoever they are, they were probably around during Niiazek, seeing as, again, their civilization is a fortress designed to weather the ravages of the world above.

The Doguns, though. Let's look at their known history: They are at least 5000 years old, formed from the same material as the colossus, animated by the flame of Garaheth.

Also, what even is Garaheth? A fourth extra-dimensional influence? One who despite having been revered by the Doguns was regarded by the Dwarves as a Flame Demon?

Also note that, well, did Garaheth ever actually do anything to us over the course of Dwarves & Doguns IV? To anyone? Okay, this allegedly horrifying Demon was just chilling in the Molten Heights for centuries if not millennia, respectfully revered by the Doguns. Where exactly did we get the information that he was going to do an apocalypse?

Anyhow, regardless of Garaheth's plans and motivations, he had been camped out in the Molten heights for an extremely long time. When he was chained and/or banished, he was sent to his realm, but that doesn't explicitly mean that he's extra-dimensional. Slykaar had a realm, and Slykaar was literally just some guy. If the Ancients were capable of bioengineering the Colossi, why not a maintenance system, with Garaheth as it's central node, and the Doguns as his agents? Hell, Garaheth doesn’t even need to be engineered, he just needs to agree to this plan. The Molten heights seem to be natural, with their huge cave system explicitly Dogun work (Subterranean Creation SD).

A chink in this might be the question of how the Doguns went between the Molten Heights and the Ahms region, seeing as the Dwarves were the ones to tunnel into the sky islands. But, like, the Doguns literally reshape stone (Subterranean Creation SD, again), and this is before Ahms was shattered. I've also heard tell of Doguns freezing to death outside the heights, but this also isn't true, seeing as Ineos is absolutely fine in Kandon-Beda (The Breaking Point QU). He even says that it's explicitly the Doguns' job to manage the Colossi, though much of that knowledge is lost. It's worth remembering that even the most ancient elder Doguns are only about 5000 years old (D&D III QU), and so even they aren't first-hand witnesses to any of this.

Also, if Doguns live indefinitely, which they seem to do, and they're so deeply intertwined with the Colossi, which seem to be dated to ~10,000 years back, then this also raises the question of where the oldest Doguns went. Though seeing as not even the Colossus is managing to last that long, maybe not even Doguns can survive such deep time. 5000 years or so might be it.

In conclusion (for this section), the Ancients seem to have built a very solid prison, overall. Let's check back on it's exact composition again:

• Gavel is sealed off via mountain range, the only large exit remaining being Jofash docks.
• A Colossus is placed in Ahms, acting as a defensive gatekeeper for the entire province.
• Another Colossus is put in the Canyon, turning it into an ever-shifting maze deathtrap that seemingly has additional effectiveness versus extradimensional creatures. After the 5th age bombardment, this might be bolstered by Cosmic Magic (Cosmic Crystals SD)
• To maintain and manage the Colossi, Garaheth and the Doguns are placed nearby to maintain and direct the immensely powerful creatures, a role that grows ever more valuable as the Ancients themselves begin to forget who they are after thousands of years of desperate war.

Aaaand then the portals open. The Colossi, detecting the overwhelming extradimensional intrusion, light back up into war mode (The Fallen Protector SD), or at least they try. But damage and the sheer time has caused even immortal living beings of stone to go a bit haywire, and the Ahms Colossus is lost.

The Dwarves then decide to do a genocide, and another part of a system that had still been somewhat functional for ten thousand years reaches its breaking point.
*csi miami riff*

(Side Note 3: i swear to the gods, if the Wybels are the ones who have been trying to contain the absolute hell that is the Gavel province, then that lends a completely new dimension to the Orange Wybel going on about how little we truly understand.)

CONCLUSION​

The Rune Guardians are still around, so things aren't completely broken yet. Yet. And whoever's bombarding the place with Cosmic Meteors seems hellbent on keeping the prison intact, though they don't seem to be able to interact with much precision.

Still, the Doguns are massively weakened, and barely have a hold on the one remaining Colossus, which is quite senile and thus not much of a valid defense any longer. The Azure Expanse is calmed. There is another massive hole in the wall of Gavel. Nearly everyone in the province seems to have forgotten about all of this.

Let's bring back the thesis:

The Villagers, Elves, Doguns, and Aurayin are all descendants or creations of an incredibly advanced civilization that accidentally unleashed a horrific threat onto Gavel. After locking themselves into the continent with said threat, the precursor civilization was ground to dust over the course of the following cataclysmic war, with their various remnants developing into most of the modern races of Gavel. The threat that they fought against is of possibly deadlier scope than the War of the Realms, and the current seals on that threat are dangerously weak.

The good news is that we can probably focus on the War of the Realms for now. There are still two major forces keeping the world in check from a second Niiazek, and as far as we're aware nobody is currently experimenting heavily with runes or trying to break the Forgery apart. The world is safe. For now.

But i hope that this has been a somewhat convincing look into what exactly may be going on in Gavel, and has answered some questions. Again, I’m very proud of this theory, and a lot of things seem to fit, but that doesn’t make it any less unhinged speculation.

Thanks for reading!
go join the lore discord

 

this is good, and the understanding of the lore and the research put into this shows. rare no complaints Madeline Deusphage post.

 

How does Qira fit into this?

 

She probably doesn't. Qira's army has in the past been implicated with a flight from and/or fight with Dern, and she seems far too young to have any firsthand knowledge about any of this. If she knew the situation then it would make sense for her to set up her army in the Canyon of the Lost, and not care overmuch about the decay, but it wouldn't make sense for her to do nothing about the Llevigar gate. It's likely that she's in the CotL because it's gets people to leave the Hive alone.

 

Great theory! You've clearly done your research, and the speculative parts, while speculative, are also interesting and realistic, leaving a lot of room for thought. I tend to particularly like theories that, while not really based on many concrete facts, can draw conclusions that could completely revolutionize how the lore is conceived while not seeming too far-fetched, like the theory/hypothesis I wrote of the Olm being from the Nether (albeit it seems more and more unlikely as time passes and the Nether is renamed and rewritten).

The concept of Gavel's geography being either abused or altered by (Ancient Rune Civilization, which the WynnTheory lore rework team calls Farnians) is one we picked up on too while doing the lore rework, since it seems far too convenient for Gavel to be shaped in such a way that makes it nigh-impossible for certain areas to be reached. Although most likely an artifact of old Wynn, where the lore wasn't held in the highest of regards, we explained it by saying that the ancient civilization engineered the entire province's geography to fit their needs, eg. making the Canyon an impassable mountain range to protect their capital at the heart of the Canyon. This interpretation of Gavel's geography being used like a cage is most certainly interesting in its own right, and way more realistic than what we came up with.

Also, I think I see an underlying theme to this theory and others like it (unless I'm seeing things, which lorebeards often tend to do), which is that things slowly keep going wrong as time passes, and the very carefully constructed order of the world could be completely thrown on its head the instant someone with enough power and stupidity does something wrong. The disaster at the Forgery, the meteors, the War of the Realms, the Colossi failing, etc. are all either causes or results of the world falling into more and more disorder, especially in Gavel. I wouldn't want to shove some new theory (based off of other theories!) here, though, so I digress. It's only a shame that the overarching story of Gavel only focuses on one part of its history, instead of the whole that could be thousands of years of buildup to a massive, world-shattering event, but I also recognize that it may be way out of the CT's scope.

Now, some personal comments on specific tidbits of the theory:

some are

That's a good piece of (not decisive) evidence supporting the theory that Cosmic Magic is, indeed, a ward against forces of influence. Cosmic magic enjoyers will soon get their answer.

This is the part of the theory I have to disagree with, though I'm probably overfocusing on a generally insignificant part of the theory.
Three thousand years is an unbelievably long time, especially if we're talking about a conflict dragging on for that long. It'd be like if the various conflicts that started after the Bronze Age Collapse just... never stopped. The Corruption War has lasted for roughly a thousand years, and though I think it's absurd for a war to last that long, it at least has had enormous consequences on Wynn as a society, most notably how it's extremely militarized, and how the two leading "superpowers" of the province, Ragni and Troms, are city-states whose power relies on their defensive positions and vast military arsenal that they then send all over Wynn to help (or expand their influence to) other cities. It speaks volumes that the only cities in all of Wynn that have Kings are Ragni and Troms, and their soldiers (example: the Player) can act virtually with impunity all over the Province, and their authority basically has no boundaries. Also, the Corruption War seems to be generally a low-intensity conflict, with the biggest worries of people in large cities being the occasional horde of Undead, besides peaks of intensity around the times when Bak'al and Slykaar were active. Imagine what an assumedly high-intensity conflict spanning three thousand years, full of extradimensional anomalies, entities that can shatter reality, magic and what-have-you would do to a province.
Gavel would never recover from such a conflict. The very few people to come out alive from this conflict would most likely create very splintered societies with very different cultures, all based on different interpretations of what had just gone down for as long as they could remember, nigh-impossible to unite into one cohesive polity. Most, if not all, oral traditions and tales belonging to Gavellian species would talk about war, monsters, tragedies and heroes; Gavellian societies would be extremely militarized, as a likely result of the "law of the jungle", where only the strongest and luckiest survived the previous period of war. Considering how the province would most likely be very geared for war and not much else, it's something that would likely have persisted for a long long time. War isn't exactly a time for academia, inventions, social progress etc. to thrive; it's a time where the military can consolidate its power as it's the only thing keeping the inhabitants alive. However, this doesn't seem to be the case in modern Gavellian societies, with the exception of the Dwarves. I could also see a pantheon of various war-related hero-gods sprout into existence, these deities being inspired from tales of actual heroes who lived during the war and made their mark, becoming a beacon for the following generations to not give into despair and keep surviving no matter what. I would also expect a lot more oral tradition and possibly even scarce written records surviving of this war, which would give us a much clearer picture of how it went down, some protagonists (again, the heroes of old against whatever wanted to kill them), and the main events.
To give a real-world example, the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) was a generally high-intensity conflict that resulted in millions of deaths, basically the complete destruction of Central Europe (which recovered after a century or so), and a sweeping revolution in the concepts of religion and popular sovereignty, over which the war was fought in the first place. It was one of the most important wars in European history, and the modern political landscape would most likely be completely different had it never happened. And it lasted 1% of what this conflict would have lasted, and it was fought with swords and primitive firearms, not reality-shattering machines and demigods.
Reflecting on how a region would look after three thousand years of war is certainly an interesting subject, but my point is that it's not something that can be applied to Gavel, because the province would look completely different otherwise. For reference, the oldest event we have a certain date for in the game happened 2400 years ago.
(I did not expect to ramble so much about a probably non-fundamental part of the theory, I'm so sorry)

Pretty sure it's flat-out confirmed that the Rune Guardians emerged after the rune catastrophe (The Order of the Grook - Stage 11 - Magical Materials library - Chapter 2), though I doubt even they have much of a recollection of what happened. There's no reason to think that they have more information on the war than anybody else: if they had written records on it, they probably would've been lost during the conflict, unless they were protected very well, and oral tradition can be very hazy. Maybe they can live longer than normal individuals, which could help in the preservation of records, but not by much (see: Elves and Doguns not really knowing much about it either)

Yeah, the fall of the Olm probably happened around 1400 BP since that's when we first have records of meteor showers becoming particularly intense in the world, and the Olmic mage in "The Final Moments" SD treats meteors falling as a common occurrence.

I might be wrong here since I admittedly have less grasp on post-1.20 lore than pre-, but didn't Dern break into the Silent Expanse through the Void Holes created by TNA? Just a nitpick anyways.

I doubt a grudge like that could last so long, especially through millennia of lost history, the Light being portrayed as a force of good and influence from the Elves. I find it more likely that the Villagers don't worship the Light because it simply doesn't bring much to the table for them: the regions they inhabit the most (Llevigar Plains, Gylia Plains, Sky Islands) don't have much influence from the Light, but still they're quite well off. It applies more to a population like the Elves, that is immortal and needs something to keep their immortality safe, and that is more interested in metaphysical concepts like the Realm of Influence, while on the contrary a Villager farmer from the Gylia Plains probably doesn't even know what the Light is besides the fact that Elves exist.

Looking at it, I don't think the temple is particularly old: a ruin, sure, but surprisingly well preserved. Also, it's fairly similar to Elven architecture more than Ancient, in that it resembles Aldorei more than it does the Spider Ruins. The lore of the Secret Discovery also seems to imply that it was an attempt by the Elves to convince the Villagers to worship the Light, which failed for the reasons above. So I think it was a temple built by the Elves in more recent times that failed in its purpose.

Until the CT decides to fully detach from Mojang's naming conventions and renames the Villagers to something that probably makes more sense in-lore but realistically will be less memorable.

The deep origins of the Dwarves are a mystery, but the first quest in the D&D storyline (more specifically, the theatrical play at the beginning) hints at the fact that they were escaping from the Villagers for some reason or another.

Not a contradiction, but here's something interesting:

• Elder Desint: Thrice, now, I have lived... to see His fall. Thrice now... I have mourned. Never again.

Elder Desint, who has lived for give or take 5000 years, seems to imply that Garaheth has been defeated three times. We know of the latter two times: once in 300 AP by Algard and Osseus at the end of the Dogun War, and once in 1000 AP by the Player. But the first time remains a mystery. Considering how long Doguns can live, it might be that he knows a piece of long-lost history that he himself personally witnessed. Whether or not this "first time" is connected to the Niiazek incident is up to you to speculate I suppose.

TRUE!


Anyways, my concluding thoughts on this theory is that it's one of the most solid ones I have ever read, besides the "small" critique I had of the war's duration. It's very nice to see the first pieces of research me and Blastbasher/Fool/"Lore God" did regarding the rune civilization blossom into such creative and interesting theories. Keep it up!

 

Okay just going to point out 2 typos first:

You may want to change that last one to six.

the typo should be pretty clear.

(I'm just a typo nitpicker, nothing against the post)


Awesome post, theories make a lot of sense and don't directly contradict any in-game lore.

I have literally no idea what the Afenian war is.

yes

 

No. No. No. No

________________________________

This was never meant to be part of the lore. It was a fluke that it ended up being written as part of the hero beta. Darkness doesn't leak into the world through void holes. Void holes are not portals. Void holes are gaps in reality where existence has been excised by The Nameless.

 

Oh, okay, my bad lmao

 

You can correct someone without being that harsh...

 

matteo games response <3<3<3

tytyty

And as to the war's length, yeah, that's probably the weakest part of the theory. I threw a bunch of weakly supported numbers at the wall and extrapolated wildly. Maybe some ages were longer than others, maybe the 10,000 year mark is itself a throwaway line that doesn't actually mean anything important.

I do think that the war had massive consequences on Gavel still felt to this day, though.

Assuming they're all descended from minor remnant Ancient populations, it's millennia later and Gavel still isn't fully united as a province. The Villagers and Dwarves are still super militarized. The Dogun population was never meant to be fighting in the war, they were on Colossus maintenance, and the moment the baleful eye of the Dwarves turned towards them the result was a genocide. The origin of the Orcs and the rest of the Aurayin seem to be in the aftermath of the heavy fighting, in a depopulated province, so their generally more peaceful societies are reasonable. And for this the Villagers conquered them.

The popular explanation for the existence of strange stone creatures in Gylia is an ancient war. Villager & Dwarvish heroes are all great adventurers and warriors. The basis of their imperial ideologies are a sense that they're fighting monsters and demons. The sheer span of time causes a lot of it to be scarred over and thus less visible, and we literally enter those parts of Gavel via the viewpoints of the Villagers and Dwarves, but everything you talk about here does seem to be true for Gavel.

Something that didn't make it into the final cut of the theory are my thoughts that this war gradually dialed down over its course. I think that the Ancients won a pyrrhic victory, and that their massively degrading information and abilities as the war raged on were matched by a continually degrading threat level of whatever it was that they were fighting. A very lord of the rings style conflict, where the amount of cool stuff happening goes down significantly as a function of time. This also allows for the war to be won and the threat to be sealed off; either the post-ancients could stop it themselves or Orphion could single-handedly put an end to it, if that's indeed what he did. There's a reason that I titled the Auray section "In The Late First Age," not "In the Early Second." I really do believe that the war ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, leaving a 95% depopulated & nearly silent Gavel in its wake.

but aye, you're right, this is a non-essential part of the theory and more-or-less rampant speculation unsupported by much evidence. We just don't know.

Aye, I don't believe that the Rune Guardians would have a complete picture of what's going on. In the theory, I called them an "Atomic Priesthood," which is a real-life proposal for keeping some amount of information about nuclear waste intact through incredibly long spans of time. Dogmatic and/or orthodox religion is probably the single most effective way to retain information through time - The Catholic Church has managed to retain an insane amount of information across 2000 years, and Vedic culture and practices are creeping up on their third millennium.

We can fairly conclusively re-construct the most important elements of the Proto-Indo-European religion, which dates back roughly six thousand years IRL. The Rune Guardians don't even need to know about the war: The only information that they would need to retain are that Runes are dangerous and powerful, and that it's critical to keep the Forgery intact and running. Within the space of the theory, we know for a fact that they haven't retained the Gavel prison thing, because they would have tried to stop the Llevigar gate had they known. So yeah, it's hard to imagine much information lasting the length of time between the present and this war, but should any info at all survive I could very easily imagine it looking like the Rune Guardians.

Thank you! The typos have been corrected.

It's offhandedly brought up in the Grand Archive secret discovery as a popular theory about the origins of the Goliaths of Gylia, the Lad and his ilk. The writer dismisses it as a myth, but myths often have grains of truth to them. Or at least grains of use.

dwbi, Deus has extremely high standards and uses complaints as a show of respect. The implication is that Matteo isn't of such hopelessness that she wouldn't care about him having incorrect information.

 

i've never dove into Wynn lore but this was very interesting to read and makes me want to read some more

 

Very good theory ! It had been while since the last "wall of text theory" (barring shitposts)

 

I didn't intend to come across as rude. The initial "No. No. No." was meant to be comedic, and not ridiculing.

ive never felt more read in my entire life

 

In order to come across as less rude, use three "no"s separated with commas and remove the doublepost bar


Anyways, could this theory somehow explain Gavel's weird hydrology, as in: where do the rivers in Gavel flow to? I think the rivers most likely flows into the swamp, but where after that? Could this be what the Auray passage is?

 

This isn't lore, this is just 2014 wynncraft builders, and their bizarre decisions to make the entirety of Gavel a Rectangle and to not give a coastline where the water drains out into the sea

 

Gavel coast update when?

 

Nothing is stopping it from being lore, though.

 

Maybe! MC physics make the flow of the Sage unclear, but I assumed it was N-S on account of how 1) the river widens the closer it gets to the ocean 2) other rivers appear to join it in that direction. This is one of the big reasons I considered the border mountains strange and unnatural; the Sage looks as if it ought to empty into the ocean.

There are a bunch of waterfalls on the western chunk of the Gavellian border mountains, though, so maybe that's where all that water drains from? Somehow? Hidden pumps? I'd have to poke around the area in-game to be sure. The Auray passage was explicitly via Ancient ruin, though, and alas I certainly don't remember any extensive underground ruins near the southwestern Gavellian border.

 

ok mat pat

________________________________

I absolutely hate Maro Peaks and that is part of Gavel's coastline, so if I ever get the excuse to redo that place at least some of the coastline is being redone with it

 

As a question, where do the dragons come into this? It seems they were very powerful considering a single Ice Drake, albeit powerful, could freeze a large portion of the nigh unfreezable Molten Heights. Also Ozoth's presence alone has warped her nest into something akin to the Molten Heights. Could they have been creations/minions of Garahreth to help his maintenance. If that were true what were the Ice Drakes for? Oh I also forgot Farcor, where does he come into this? Great theory, I love the Gavel lore and this overview on its ancient history is awesome.