Cogadh na Scéalaithe (ˈkoːɡə n̪ˠə ˈʃeːl̪ˠəxə)

"Our battlefield? The minds of everyone. Our enemies? Everyone. Allies? Also everyone. Welcome to The Talespinners." - Ualter na Isigidh, leader of The Talespinners

One of the least well known and most wide ranging conflicts in the world is the Cogadh na Scéalaithe, which translates to "The Storyteller's War" in Amhrán. Most people have never heard of it, but few have escaped its impact, even if they don't realize how it has touched their lives. The Cogadh na Scéalaithe is carried out by The Talespinners, an organization founded by Ruairí Marcach Stoirm, the Rí of Liria and headquartered in the Three-Headed Tavern in Aerendel. Their goal is to harness The Egregoric Force to tame and shape the Invasive Narratives that plague Liria, and using all the minds in the world as their arsenal to do it.

History

For centuries, the island of Oileán Fiáin was under the rule of the Clarati sorceress Celestina. She used the island and its inhabitants as a laboratory to investigate the nature and power of The Egregoric Force, with a specific interest in connecting Oileán Fiáin to a particular corpus of stories and myths drawn through The Dream from another reality. This effectively embroiled the entire island in a permanent Invasive Narrative with immense ramifications. The native spirits of the island split away from the Ellyll pantheon to become the Fae, while the island itself became inescapably linked to the strange and half-real Dolphin Islands. The most intense effects were in the region now known as Liria, and specifically in the city of Aerendel. There, the laws of narrative and story operate on an equal footing with those of physics. At a moment's notice, people can be dragged into an ongoing story, with their decisions ordained by the needs of the plot. Sometimes the story will deem a character unimportant, and they will simply fade away and be forgotten. Other times a villain is required, and whoever best fits the role is snatched from their lives to carry out a nefarious plot, and usually to be slain by whoever is playing the hero that day. The Folk Magic environment allowed for radical magics to be performed, and in one notable year there were five elderly women driven to transform themselves into dragons to avenge themselves for minor slights.

The situation was untenable, and the body count was impossible to determine, as the relentless laws of plot and story simply forgot and erased anyone no longer significant to the story. When Ruairí Marcach Stoirm, prince of Liria, married a plucky young heroine, his father quietly vanished so that Ruairí could ascend to the throne. His erasure was so complete that even his name is lost, and few among the population remember or can name any ruler prior to Ruairí.

When the young Rí realized he could no longer remember his father, he raged at the injustice and inhumanity of the conditions the Lirians lived under. And then he decided to do something about it. He sent his finest scholars to learn what they could of the rules of story and how The Egregoric Force had been so thoroughly empowered to destroy them. They traveled across the Great Ring, looking for answers in all the great storehouses of knowledge from the Coleg Cerddorion to the Gwāsa. Ruairí studied what they came back with, and formed a plan to save Liria from the legacy of Celestina by turning it into an asset. With that in mind, he began the organization he named Na Scéalaithe, but is more often known as The Talespinners.

As Rí, Ruairí was too tangled in the stories of the kingdom to actively lead the group, nor did he have the skillset to carry out its mission on his own. Instead, he turned to Ualter na Isigidh a storyteller who had spent decades trapped in The Dolphin Islands and learned more about how stories were told and retold than anyone else in the kingdom. Ruairí laid out the strategy he wished to pursue to the old bard, and explained his aims. He believed that by crafting and disseminating a carefully crafted set of tales about the kingdom and the kinds of stories that invaded them, they could shift the rules they lived by to be kinder - perhaps even benevolent. They argued through the night, as the monarch and the storyteller matched wits and skill against one another, and came to an agreement of how it could be done. They started with a copy of the Scéalta Sí, the stories of The Dolphin Islands compiled by Celestina, and began to break it down and rebuild it. Things began to fall into place, and it looked like things might be going happily. Of course, this is when the plot took a turn.

Threats to the kingdom began to appear. Ruairí suddenly found himself with twelve daughters, each more lovely than the last, who had not previously been members of his family. The princesses were constantly kidnapped or threatened, and each time a champion would appear to demand her hand and half the kingdom to rescue her. His wife disappeared three times and was replaced by strange women who usually turned out to be a witch. Ruairí himself was beset with strange compulsions to hold special competitions, or pass oddly specific and draconian laws. He resisted, but it was clear that something in the rules of the story was attempting to prevent him from carrying out his plan.

Ualter saved the day. He moved the Na Scéalaithe out of the palace to escape the center of the narrative intrusions, and took up residence in an old tavern in the Docks district of Aerendel. There, he began telling stories. He spread counter narratives to the events plaguing the Rí, and convinced other storytellers to pass these new tales on. The tavern was well frequented by foreign sailors, and Ualter filled their heads with stories calculated to undermine the plots working against Ruairí. The field of battle kept shifting beneath them, as new and stranger stories kept appearing, including one truly bizarre invasion by an army of animate pagodas and marionettes that sailed in from the Dolphins. Ualter managed to shift their tale into one where the pagodas and marionettes attacked one another and became eternal enemies. Ualter recruited dozens of Talespinners, and the stories they crafted began to spread.

Eventually, the attacks from the stories began to slow down, and The Talespinners were able to assess their wounds. Strange changes had been wrought upon the city and the royal family. The twelve princesses were permanent additions, although they each had their own plots and seemed hardly related to each other. A mountainous observatory had appeared, creating a whole new district of the city with it. The tavern where The Talespinners met had somehow acquired three animated animal heads which would sing and talk to the customers, and which caused it to be renamed the Three-Headed Tavern. But despite all the strange effects the city and country underwent, it was safer. The stories no longer brought gigantic wolves to the city walls, nor did it erase people it no longer required. Hardly anyone demanded the living heart of a young woman, and poisonings were down to levels seen in other large cities. The goals of the Cogadh na Scéalaithe were achieved.

Aftermath

Of course, stories are never stable. Today, The Talespinners spend nearly as much time maintaining and improving their chosen narrative as they did while the plot was actively trying to destroy them. It also appears that their new stories may have invited new and different Invasive Narratives, that are beginning to strike beyond Liria's borders; tales of the Papagálos Tavern have caused mutterings among The Talespinners, some of whom think they may have dreamed of it before it ever occurred. Unspoken is the concern that their curated narrative may have a dark side that they haven't yet seen, and that they are only in the first act of a much larger plot, one where the heroes live to see themselves become the villains. But that, as they say, is a tale for another day.

Location

Oileán Fiáin

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