Valdrun

The province at the eastern edge of the world, and the only one on the map that is empty.

What Hobbes says

He changes register before he says it, which the chapter notes:

something in his voice shifted slightly as he did, the particular careful neutrality adults sometimes adopted when discussing something they didn't want to frighten children with directly but couldn't avoid mentioning either. (ch. 243)

Then:

HOB: And here, at the very eastern edge of the world, sits Valdrun. Once called the Old Dominion. The oldest seat of power in all of Maeris, they say, before it fell to ruin some two centuries back.

How it fell

Asked why, twice, he answers.

HOB: The stories say a great darkness took root there. That the man who ruled Valdrun back then was corrupted by something old and terrible, something that should have stayed buried, and that he became something else entirely. Something the old stories call the Ruined God now, though whether he's a god or a king or something in between, nobody living can rightly say.

HOB: Valdrun's been barren ever since. No one goes there. No one who's gone there has ever come back to tell what they found.

See ../characters/the-ruined-god.md.

The library's version

Ch. 265 gives a different cause from ch. 243's. Hobbes says the ruler was corrupted. A Brief Accounting of Valdrun's Fall says a soldier opened a ruin.

It arrived, by every surviving account, as accident, a single soldier, name lost to the record, who disturbed something in an old ruin that had been better left undisturbed.

See ../characters/the-ruined-god.md.

A ruin that had gone strange is also the one supernatural item in Calder Lyerm's account of his own travels (ch. 240). They cannot be the same ruin without something the text has not offered, since Valdrun fell two centuries before Calder was born. Recorded as a repeated shape, not as a link.

The date

"Some two centuries back" from Arthur's childhood. Arthur is born four hundred and seventeen years after Acts 9 and 10 end, so Valdrun falls roughly two hundred and seventeen years after ch. 237, give or take whatever "some" is doing.

That is the only dated event between Acts 9 to 11. See ../lore/the-timeline.md.

Open questions

• The name of the man who ruled it.
• What "something that should have stayed buried" was, and where it was buried.