In 12 BÆC, twelve years before the Ætaine Calendar was first set, a varvarski horde descended from the Northern Mountains in numbers no chronicle had ever recorded before: over two hundred thousand of the brutes. At that time Ætaine held perhaps half a million souls within its walls, yet its field army was shattered in the initial engagement, forced to retreat behind the city’s defenses. What followed was a six-month siege, during which allied hosts from multiple kingdoms struggled to push through the tightening ring. The western half of Ætaine, divided from the east by the great river, was eventually overrun and sacked, burned so thoroughly that only scattered foundations remained when the smoke cleared. The final relief battle, fought on both banks, ended in a decisive victory for the allies and the near-annihilation of the horde.
As ever, when it comes to humans, triumph bred new troubles. The prestige of saving Ætaine sparked rivalries among the victors, leading within two years to a chain of wars that toppled the city’s ancient monarchy. The new dynasty that rose from that chaos created the new calendar and spent the next two centuries subduing or absorbing half of the continent, both east and west, before collapsing under the weight of its own ambition. That is why, to this day, most of the eastern continent dates its years from the start of that era: the Ætaine Calendar does not commemorate the city’s founding, but the cataclysm and rebirth that nearly erased it and the empire that briefly remade the world in its aftermath. And that is why, I posit, Ætaini dialects dominate in the east.
— from the research notes of Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, “Magi the Blade”, high-aelv scholar, mage, and swordsman
