The Vaelish are what remains of the Kingdom of Vael, which the dragon Kanzekill destroyed four centuries ago. Fewer than a thousand survive, perhaps eight hundred, all descended from the refugees who fled into the southern Dragon's Spine and raised the hidden fortress of Mountainveil. They are not a nation and will not be one again. Four centuries of hiding have not made them a separate people; they are ordinary humans still, a single sheltered community whose reason for existing is to outlast the thing that hunts them.
Vaelish life bends toward two tasks that are not the same and sometimes pull against each other: staying hidden, and staying Vaelish. Children are taught never to name the fortress to a stranger. Trade with the outside passes through intermediaries who are never told where their contacts live, and the rare person who leaves for good is given a ritual that buries the route in their own mind. Against all that forgetting, the community works just as hard at remembering. Who they were. What Vael was. The names and rites that a scattered people lose first.
Two institutions hold them together. The Council of Ash, seven elders, governs by the policy it has kept since the fortress was built: hide, and wait. It has no plan for the day that policy stops working. The Keepers of the Name are a hereditary priesthood who guard the one weapon Vael ever took from Kanzekill, her true name, seized in the ritual that doomed the kingdom and able to command the dragon if it is spoken aloud. The Keepers have never spoken it, because using it would announce exactly where they stand.
We have held her name for four hundred years and never once said it. The young ones have started asking what we are keeping it for. We do not have a good answer anymore. — attributed to a Keeper of the Name
Four centuries of guarding a weapon they cannot afford to draw has made the Vaelish patient and brittle at the same time. The younger generation, born into a hiding they never agreed to, no longer takes the caution as settled. Some want to leave. A few want to speak the name, bind the dragon, and take back the land their ancestors lost. The Council fears them more than it fears Kanzekill.
Aspects
- We remember what Vael was
- The name is ours, and we dare not use it