Ghyll:Absolute Erasure
Much in the tradition of your favorite "Let's destroy all evidence of the past in order to reshape it as we see fit" storybook, King Harandraff the Great enacted what we like to call the Absolute Erasure to do just that. That is, to destroy all evidence of the past in order to reshape it as he saw fit.
It began innocently enough. While sitting in his grand throne, having just beheaded his top advisor, the idea struck the King like so many Aelfants charging: he would simply rewrite his journals and his castle's rosters to exclude any mention of him ever having a "top" advisor. The King found the exertion of his power over himself and his court quite exhilirating. And thus it began, with him executing one of his staff, and tasking the remaining servants to erase him from existence. Soon it became an addiction, and the great King of all Ghyll began stretching his reach outside his castle.
In one instance, he removed the drawbridge in front of his castle and replaced it with a canopy to shade the creatures of his moat. And the very next day, nobody who had previously knew about the drawbridge knew about it anymore, or else they were beheaded. And anyone who knew those certain beheadees was also told to not know about them, lest they find themselves headless also. Needless to say, Harandraff had a remarkable number of people killed in order to prevent anyone from knowing that they were killed.
It was around the first days of year -397 EC that Harandraff's plan began spiraling out of control. Bute University, having been founded three years earlier, was becoming ever more of a threat to the King's hobby of rewriting history. By this time, the King had written his family to be the wealthiest, most prominent, strongest, smartest and, overall, the superlative family of Ghyll proper. Knowing that this was not true, and jumping at the chance to provoke the King, Bute U. published King H. is a Ninny and So's His Family Too, outing the King's brethren as slovenly drunkards, as rightfully they were. So the King infamously appointed Exis Ehnos of Whunn to head an Army that would march to Bute and give them "a stern talking-to and numerous slaps on (their) wrists." This siege of Bute University and its surrounding town would last six months, and erupt the whole of Ghyll proper into a Civil War lasting many years hence.
Impatient with the progression of his armies' attacks on Bute and it's accompanying forces, the King exiled Exis Ehnos, and set off on his own in the year -392 EC to right the wrongs done by the university. However, finding that he could not repair his family's reputation, he sought the only logical conclusion: he would have to kill them all and erase them from history. And thus, he did. He killed them all.
Widespread reporting of the decimation of the Harandraff lineage would come to be the final proverbial wrench in the spokes of the clockwork (or however that insipid saying goes), thusly preventing King H. from fully erasing his family. So with his armies' final energies, Harandraff set out to kill absolutely everyone in Ghyll, in order to rewrite the whole of Ghyll history. This is what most scholars would deem the meat and potatoes of the Absolute Erasure. Unfortunately, his plan was derailed when he accidentally ran head-first into the blade of an unknown soldier and, as a result, subsequently went dead, or missing, or both.
Citations: King Harandraff the Great, Whunn, Unknown soldier.
--Snood Trunion 02:11, 2 November 2005 (EST)
