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The Shagals were the royal family of Anaeran-Adrani, which became Sles Adran, which was then absorbed back into Enaeran-Adran by Macael Elsarion.
The Shagals' history thus parallels the history of that part of the Sartoran continent. The Shagal rulers (they term themselves na Shagal, or 'of' Shagal in a sense of ownership) reached their greatest years just before the turn of the fourth millennium through the next couple of centuries, with sporadic bright, charismatic leaders afterward. Valdon na Shagal was the first of this string of brilliant leaders, he of the famous Take Heed, My Heirs! which, alas, was better heeded by other rulers than his own descendants after a certain number of years had passed. Valdon married Joret Dei, descendant of the western Deis connected through marriage to the Cassadas family. Their progeny were models of royal grace all over the continent, and for a century or two Nente, with its evocative "flower language" and its newly re-established music school in Nardarian, was a second Alsais, or a cultural haven.
Unfortunately, in the middle 4200s the Shagal heir, Cardal na Shagal, was haughty, lazy, snobbish, prone to throwing his illustrious past in the faces of those who brought up his shortcomings; when he made the mistake of trying to force his volatile third-cousin, Trevor Elsarion, to obedience, he touched off a civil war that nearly lost him a kingdom. Hasty negotiation by older nobles unwilling to see their entire land swept up by young hot heads (and by the fact that most of Elsarion's young hot heads had relatives on both sides of the river border, and didn't really want to be hacking kin to death) in a subsequent treaty the kingdom was divided.
Thereafter the Shagals were shadowed by this decision, and by the need for a lot of hasty treaties in order to patch up broken promises made in exchange for support in the division. Certain Shagal rulers managed to wrest a hiatus in the slow slide into inertia, but the Shagals' overall sense of superiority--their insistence on straight line inheritance--and their combativeness among themselves (when they weren't holding off the wild Enaeraneth) produced, at the end, the effete, amoral Bartal na Shagal, sister to Chantal of Denwy, who was even more amoral, though her courtly affect was far better. These two were locked in a deadly match for the crown when Norsunder began poking about for weak places. Bartal was one of the first seduced into alliance; his kingdom was thus not overrun by Norsundrian warriors, but he paid for that in many other ways before he was finally deposed.
His niece inherited the crown, but handed it immediately to her husband, Trevor Macael Elsarion.
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