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The Cold March is an extension of Isldar lore and Aldurism religious lore. As a whole, it describes the Civil War between the Allorn Dregodar (Dragon Worshipers) and the Empire itself in the heartland, and then after their failure and the death of their ruling Prince, their flight northward through increasingly hostile territories until reaching Ellador, fight with the Dwarves, second defeat, and eventual survival.
Origins
The Arch Era of the Allorn Empire was a hostile and unforgiving place where entire Principalities and cities could sink into the ground overnight as a result of cataclysmic battle between vicious Archmages. With the Estellian Gods absent, silent, or unwilling to intercede, the Elven people looked in different directions for faith to repair the situation they were in, or for new providence to follow to a better life. With the patronage of a few key figures, the Dregodar or Dragon Worship cult grew exponentially in the Allorn Court as people began to look to Dragons, the mechanical architects of the world, as figures of worship: something Dragons at the time resented, and scarcely accepted.
Civil War Phase
Things would come to a head when the cousin of the ruling Empress Vinnalea, a young Prince named Varendracar, would openly convert to Draconism and begin lobbying at the Allorn Court for his cause following a tour in the Sollerian colonies where he was able to see the devotion of the Anglian tribes to the Dragon Regulus, and conclude that a society could be built around Dragons after all. Depending on whether one trusts the Allorn or Dregodar narration, it is either the case that Varendracar was caught by the Empress in the process of planning a coup against her power and exposed, or that the Empress pre-emptively set him up and attempted to squash him to silence his dangerous cult. Modern historians think that both things are true, that in the long term if left up to his devices the Prince would have effected a coup, but that in the short term he was just being framed.
Varendracar is remembered as a saintly man, a smiling Elf with soft eyes and long unbraided red hair that fell to the middle of his back. Though he lived more than 700 years ago, the Elves who met him and still live describe him with a uniquely kindly presence for the awful age when he lived, someone with sweet words that did not have guile lurking beneath. In the same breath, though, they would say that a lack of cruel competence was his undoing, because while after exposure he rallied his followers to his banner and attempted to march on the Allorn Palace, he ultimately failed. He also failed to centralize them by properly nailing down what a Dregodar actually was. Some of them were still Estellians with heretical sympathies to Dragons, some of them were Dragon Worshipers of just one Dragon, and some of them tried to worship multiple Dragons. There was no priestly hierarchy and no direct recognition from Dragons to profit from, a situation he did not have enough time to solve.
After his military defeat against Vinnalea near the capital, Varendracar retreated northward, picking up the Dragon Gaia on the way and an increasing number of refugees who joined his warband. Historians speculate from the testimonies of his inner council that he was marching towards Amontaar in the hopes that he would be able to conquer it and steal the Amontaari Fleet to sail eastward and set up a new capital in the colonies at Solleria. However, with a contingent of powerful Archmages from the state of Bel-Hammon, Vinnalea both cut him off outside the walls of Amontaar, defeated his army a second time and even more badly, slew him in single combat atop her hippogryph against his wyvern mount, and permitted the Archmages to use their dark Magic to kill the Dragon he had brought with him. That day, remembered as the Battle of Singing Stones as the rocks heated so hard under Magic that they boiled, was the definitive end of the Civil War. Varendracar's broken followers and the remnants of his council began to flee ever northward across land, Amontaar's gates closed to them.
Flight Phase
The remaining councilors made the snap judgment after losing their Prince that they would flee ever northward as far as land would take them, until Vinnalea and her armies either tired of pursuing them, or they could plant their heels in the ground, turn around, and win a military victory. With the refugees not in a position to disagree, knowing they would all be killed if they turned around, the Cold March proper began.
The Selvath
It was the Selvath that the Dregodar ran into first, begging them for entry into their walds so that they could hide from the Allorn armies and potentially resist together. However, the Selvath would immediately refuse, saying that while they had sympathy for what had happened the Dregodar were still outsiders, and additionally guilty of apostasy against Estelley, of which they were still faithful worshipers. As much as their God Gilan did not necessarily like the Estelley Empresses or the Allorn Empress, he could not tip his hand against the deal he had made with them by siding with the Dregodar, and so they kept marching.
The Maquixtl
While the Maquixtl as an idea did not properly exist yet, the beginnings of the idea that would lead to their creation were being experimented with in the Soronsiven Plains of central Daen, where the Genos-editing Prince Suel tinkered with his followers in the hopes of creating an ultimate army to then use to build a state of his own out of the decaying realm of the Allorn Empresses. As the Maquixtl had already been meeting with military success destroying Allorn patrols, Suel took in the fleeing Dregodar and swelled the ranks of his army. The idea of Dragon Worship hopped from the refugees to his soldiers, who would eventually turn to Caius when they too later left the Allorn Empire, and for a time it looked like they would stay with Suel. However, as Vinnalea and her armies approached, a combination of Suel deciding they weren't worth the trouble and the councilors of the old Prince resenting Suel's attempts to replace him in their legacy led the Dregodar to eject and continue running.
The Eronidas
For several centuries, by the time of the Dregodar passing through their provinces, the Dragon-worshiping Eronidas had been invading the Allorn Empire's northern low-populated provinces in attempts to carve out a state of their own, generally meeting with success. The Dregodar councilors tried to establish a common camaraderie with the Eronidas Kings based on their shared Dragon Worship and opposition to the Allorn crown, only to be laughed at and forced to keep marching, because religion did not to the Eronidas absolve these Elves of still being Elves, and until very, very recently, followers of a cousin of the Empress that they were trying to conquer.
Ravala
By this time, while the Aldurism God Ravala had already ascended to the Pantheon, the Dregodar passed through her old Principality in the south of what is now Ithania. While she watched down with boredom, her fellow God Onalinn pulled on the strings of the future and whispered in her ear that the Cold March would surely fail, and surely the Dregodar would perish along with the Dragon Aurora who they coaxed from her nest nearby and enjoined to their March, and that there would be no record of them in the world. Consideringly, Ravala put together the strings of a plan that would preserve them in the world, but under her dominion instead of law of Dragons, usurping them with a trick. While the Dregodar at this point felt that they had abandoned Allorn sensibilities, there are some things Elven that do not truly leave any Elven society, and manifesting to speak with them she gave them a number of Artifacts and gifts and blessings to stoke their fear of death at the hands of Allorn armies and re-kindle their hunger for Magic with valued and powerful possessions, laying the first seeds of her long plan to come, and sending them on their way.
The Drovv
Before Cataclysm, the Daen continent was joined to Drowda still by a neck of low swampland that has since been swallowed up by the sea. It was at this point that the Dregodar truly began to leave the Allorn Empire in its entirety and cross into lands outside its borders, the first of whom were the Drovv provinces on the gray rocky Drowda craglands, poor and empty, but proud in their martial spirit. While the Drovv for a while seriously considered the idea of joining with the Dragon worshipers and making a stand there together, they ultimately decided that they did not have enough food and resources to keep all these Elves around even if they wanted, and sent them on their way with good wishes for the future.
The Skags and Cains
The great division of the Velheim Ailor having happened at this point and scattered them around the world, the Skags and Cains were populated by a patchwork of different Jarls and clans that barred their way to Ellador. While at first the Dregodar tried to treat with them, too, the Velheim were bitter and ferocious about millennia of suffering at the hands of the Allorn Empire stoked by the hostile words of Asha refugees living in these countries, encouraging them to cut the Dregodar down before they could pose a risk. As a result, the long train of battered Elves had to fight their way through the entirety of both the Skags and the Cains, the Dragon Aurora with them but only watching high above, more protected by them than protecting them as their long columns of ragged banners drifted towards the end of the world, Vinnalea's armies still in pursuit far away.
Ellador Phase
Crossing the grinding, freezing straits in the dead of winter between the last of the Cains and Ellador, the Dregodar would eventually arrive at the end of the world on all known maps, the continent of Ellador, which while steeply mountains with deep valleys and difficult to pass terrain, blossomed green and beautiful with the summer. The only people in Ellador were the Dwarves who kept to the underground in their tunnels and Holds, and so while initially just as mistrustful of the Dregodar as the rest, ultimately agreed with a great deal of trust to a treaty where the Elves would stay aboveground and they would stay belowground, with neither interfering in the other one's area of influence for any reason. The Dregodar settled in, then, and began to found the Spire Cities that are still standing under their descendants' rule, finally regrouping for one long breath of peace. However, being as far as Ellador had ultimately not deterred the still scornful Empress Vinnalea from sending patrols after them, likely to be eventually followed by an army.
As a long shot, they sent dignitaries to the Suvial Elven realm, Elves from the far western provinces whose unique mastery over Demons had allowed them a great deal of autonomy from the Allorn Empire over the course of history. Hoping that some shared Draconism population, shared Elven heritage, and anti-Allorn sentiment would see them through, they were surprised with at long last a warm approval from the Suvial, outlining a plan that would involve using schematics left behind by the grace of Dragons to connect an old tunnel that ran rapidly between the continents, joining the Suvial realms and Ellador together by a quick transport plan which would then let the Suvial blackmail Vinnalea into staying out of Ellador, or they would start meddling using the tunnel. There was only one issue: breaching the ground to connect the tunnel would mean violating the treaty that the Isldar had made with the Dwarves.
While one can take an Elf out of the Allorn Empire, one cannot necessarily take the Allorn Empire out of the Elf. All too easily, the Dregodar councilors agreed that security from the Suvial was worth betraying the Dwarves, who they hazarded might never find out anyway, and dug the tunnel behind their backs to complete the deal with the Suvial. All at once, the distance between continents was shortened into a mere few days, enabling the two factions of Elves to send people back and forth between the west and the farthest north, further endearing their already somewhat close cultures to each other. However; in the end, it backfired. Vinnalea turned around with the information used to blackmail her and had her diplomats present it to the Dwarves, who with a little poking, a little prodding, and a little Mind Control inflamed their reasonable outrage into a genocidal hatred of the sneaky Dregodar for betraying them, and commenced the Dwarven-Dregodar war against the unprepared Elves.
Against the Dwarves and their allies the local Velheim Kingdoms and jarldoms, the exhausted, divided, and depopulated Dregodar began to lose again, and all the more horribly as their settlements were put to the torch and Spires levelled with fine siege artillery. Though the Suvial sent some Mages to help, this was ultimately not enough as their coalition forces were driven out of Spire after Spire after Spire, until their last stand at a place now infamous in history, the Valley of the Long Song, where the entire population of every single remaining Dregodar pitched camp against the Dwarven armies and resolved to face their doom together, Aurora still circling overhead, watching, unwilling to inflict mass death to save her followers. As the battle commenced and the final defeat unfolded, Ravala's Spirit which had been mingling in secret the whole time whispered into Aurora's ear about the failure she was to her people and how she would never be able to unsee their death that she could prevent but refused.
Ravala's plan worked, and the Dragon's panic brought her to a fever pitch, causing a moment of vulnerability that Ravala exploited to snap her soul and instantly blanket Ellador in frost, killing the Dwarven armies on the spot and bathing the continent in eternal frost, saving the Dregodar followers and uplifting them to thrive in the conditions she had created as Isldar, Ice Elves. Her most powerful Spirit, beloved Iskaldor, she summoned and bound in Aurora's corpse body, leading the survivors in nation-building and reforming with their Dragon Worship corrupted to belief in her name with the Elves wrapped around her finger. For historical progression from this point, read the Isldar page proper.
Legacy and Meaning
The Dregodar are indisputably the movement that came the closest to toppling the Allorn Empire and replacing it with something else. Their leader Prince Varendracar stood on the steps of the Allorn Palace and almost took it. By bloodline he had a powerful claim to the throne, and many hundreds of thousands of followers, with devoted, skilled officers and a powerful army. The tragedy inherent to their story and the Cold March is that almost is not good enough, and Varendracar's failure to do the important things that mattered are why he is buried in a cairn near Amontaar, and his followers are cast adrift to the other side of the world, most of them worshiping a Goddess he would have considered an agent of damnation and corruption.
However, as much as the Dragon loyalists among the Isldar would like it to be otherwise, it is indisputably true that without Ravala's scheme and intercession the Dregodar would have died to a man in Ellador, killed by the Dwarves as the conclusion of Vinnalea's final revenge against her treacherous cousin, and that as much as they tried to distance themselves from everything Allorn, the Elven tendencies to Magic-hunger and fear of death and disappearance from the world without legacy ultimately wrought them an ending that rhymes with the state they fled from. The actual details of the Cold March are hotly contested between the Dwarves, Isldar, and Allorn narrators, because all three sides see themselves as victims.
To the Dwarves, the Dregodar betraying them was something to be hated and remembered across the ages. The foundation of the Dwarven state requires nationalism and rallying around hatred of the perfidious Ice Elves so that outlying provinces and old frosted-over Holds can be reclaimed from them, even if their reaction to the Dregodar betrayal was disproportional, and they were manipulated in part by the Allorn Empire. Meanwhile, the Isldar tend to downplay the responsibility they had in their ancestors both callously betraying the Dwarves without any dialogue, and in Varendracar's culpability for getting in so far over his head and getting tens of millions of Elves killed because he was not careful enough, deifying him as the irreproachable saint of history. While most Regalians lack sympathy for the Allorn Empire of any kind, it is true from an Allorn citizen's perspective that the Dregodar betrayed the Empire when it needed its citizens most. Vinnalea was a powerful Archmage and a competent Empress, but her cousin's treachery made her obsessive and drove her mad. Sometimes even more than the Kathar, Archmage cults and Void cults, the Allorn inheritors blame the Dragon followers for the Empire's collapse, because the war they caused deprived a powerful Empress of precious years to mend the ailing Empire, depopulated whole provinces, and killed millions in an avoidable act of secession.