The Silverreach Recollections

The Silverreach Recollections are a collection of interviews concerning, written accounts of, and reports on the various oral histories of First Era Ra'khemian civilization and its' collapse. They were written and curated by a group of leaders and scholars known as the Silverreach Elders, in the first centuries of peace after the end of the Ra'khemian Splintering, which had wracked the continent for a millennia.

Contents of The Recollections
The descriptions of events in The Silverreach Recollections are varying and often contradictory, but they do provide enough consistency to help us understand some of the key events that occurred during the era. The information they provide also forms the basis for our rough estimations concerning the length of the First Era.

Scholarly consensus, drawn from The Recollections, is that Ra'khemian civilization prospered for the first ten thousand years of this Era, remaining unified. However, at some point, it began to splinter, and various different nations began to stake their claim over the once-unified continent. Tension soon became conflict, and the continent was wracked by near-constant war and sporadic devastation for the next millenia. Nothing is known of the specifics of these conflicts, but the various accounts in The Recollections seem to agree that after around a thousand years (seven hundred by some accounts, fifteen hundred by others,) conflict had settled into mostly peaceful co-existence. Though the continent was no longer engulfed in war, hope for a future as unified as the past seemed to have disappeared at this point. In fact, while some families and communities still spoke of a singular Ra'khemian society that existed thousands of years prior, at this point, many considered it just to be a myth. Many contributors wrote of an old religion which promised a return of the glorious Ra'khemian civilization, but by the time of the writing of The Recollections, Ra'khemian identity had essentially ceased to exist, replaced by much more tangible connection to kingdom or province.

Later Additions and Hiding
The Silverreach Recollections were written as Eroth began to heal and its inhabitants sought to understand their place in it. In such a climate, The Silverreach Recollections likely would have made a large impact on the small but lively scholarly world. Copies of the Silverreach Recollections were stored in Silverreach in the centuries after their writing, and notes in their pages suggest that they were the subject of extensive study and expansion for many centuries. Then, for some reason, a number of copies of various volumes of The Recollections were imbued with large amounts of magic for the purpose of preservation, and buried in a cave a significant distance from the city. This act is traditionally dated to 1E 12000, but this date is more symbolic than scientific, as a more exact date is impossible to discern. However, most scholars agree that it was only a century or two after the burying of The Recollections that Malok, the charismatic leader of a tribe from the South-Western corner of the continent declared himself ruler of all Eroth at Lavakirr.