Note: RIV01 through RIV04 is Season One content, which is different in format and length than Season Two. Season Two began September 21, 2025 with AVL-01. New readers are recommended to start with Season Two, then come back to Season One.

777 – 803 ASF

For many historians, picking a period to begin with is like picking a favorite child–it’s just impossible (or so our parents tell us). Naturally, though, you love each for different reasons. The country of Rivona is perfect for beginnings, simply because among all of the modern countries in my area of the world, it was the first one established. It’s also quite easy to summarize its history. It is thus:

“Can we beat it with our boats? No? Fine. Let’s build bigger boats.”

Rivonans, you see, have always loved their watercraft. Who can blame them? Rivona is a land of a thousand rivers, of roaring rapids and hushed lakes and eerie swamps. There is plenty of water to go around, so you might think this translates to a relatively peaceful history of sharing and caring.

Nothing is further from the truth.

It is widely believed the first people settled in the riverlands about a thousand years ago. Soon after arriving, these settlers formed into tribes and quickly found things to fight over: cleaner water, greener grass, an insult to someone’s mother, perhaps. Whatever the reason, these tribes locked themselves in perpetual war, with land passing back and forth in a maddening cycle until someone finally came along and shattered it.

Enter Rugon Craythe, a chief of this bloody era, born in the year 777 ASF. The man was practically a giant, standing over six and a half feet tall. Broad of jaw and shoulder. Long raven-black hair and misty eyes, common among Rivonans. I also have it on good authority that he refused to wear pants, preferring instead skirts of metal or cloth. He beheaded anyone that mocked him for it.

So how did Rugon shatter the cycle? With a boat. Most tribes had figured out how to build simple canoes for fishing on calm rivers. Rugon, however, was the first pioneer of the “bigger boat” way of Rivonan thinking. After much trial and error, Rugon and his people built not just a boat, but a warboat—big enough to hold a squad of warriors that, with their combined rowing strength, could travel upstream. With this revolutionary vessel, the Craythe tribe could reach every corner of the riverlands.

And they did. After biding their time and building a fleet, Rugon unleashed his tribe on the riverlands with frightening speed and ferocity. With little warning they descended upon settlements, leaping ashore in raiding parties, pillaging and burning and disappearing in their warboats before reinforcements could arrive. Rugon’s aim wasn’t to capture or conquer, but to destroy and remake from the ground up. As his total war spread across the country, Rugon earned the name Rugon the Ruthless.

One by one the chiefs fell or surrendered until Rugon was the last one standing. Styling himself the first true King of the Rivers, Rugon established the kingdom of Rivona, with House Craythe as its royal line. With his plundered wealth, Rugon built the young kingdom’s first city and capital that stands to this day: Great Forks.

My knowledge of all this comes from my visit to Great Forks as a young, starry-eyed student. I arrived with a few others under the care of Lorekeeper Chrasse, our primary instructor of Rivonan histories, and a self-proclaimed Rugon nut. He had important University business in the city—and, ever a two-birds sort of person—had brought us along to assist him as well as to see the country firsthand. And by ‘country’, he meant Rugon. In our free time, our Lorekeeper toured us around the city, pointing out the hand of Rugon where it was still visible in the city’s bustling harbor, majestic bridges, and soaring towers, among much else.

And yet, the more I learned, the more I noticed an omission in the Lorekeeper’s ramblings. It was as if he was painting a magnificent portrait of Rugon but leaving a patch in the center blank and gray, neglecting it even as he embellished the edges. On a few occasions I asked him to fill the gap, but he always brushed me off, shrugged, or pretended he hadn’t heard me.

Even before this trip, Chrasse and I had always gotten along well. This was mainly because I indulged him after hours with questions about Rivona—an excuse for him to crack open a bottle of Merlish red and rattle on about Rugon for half the evening. So his sudden slipperiness to my questions struck me as especially odd. My questions, after all, were no different than the same that have puzzled Lorekeepers across the ages.

What was Rugon’s secret?

Many Lorekeepers (not including Chrasse) consider Rugon’s achievements as bordering on the unfeasible, even accounting for his bigger boats. How did he win every battle? How was his tribe able to navigate so swift and accurate across Rivona’s labyrinthine waterways? How did Rugon discover and select the perfect place to build a great city, one that still stands to this day? How did he time many of his attacks when the flow of the river and the turn of the weather were at his advantage?

Bigger boats cannot account for all of these things. What knowledge did Rugon wield that others lacked?

Lorekeeper Chrasse, I began to suspect, knew exactly what Rugon’s secret was.

And I was determined to pry it out of him.