Note: dig out explanation of early spells, and go to current thoughts on relationship--

The single time the indigenous races acted (or so the Mage Council believes) was the year when they themselves decided to raise a mountain range to keep out Norsunder, and to hem in the Chwahir. If one is permitted to go deep in hidden archives, there one can find the journals of the mages involved, all until that day. Their councils--their warnings issued to people to leave--the increasingly sharp dreams they had, full of symbols and images that, later, were recognized as warnings. At the time, the mages dismissed their own dreams as stress-caused.

The idea was to create mountains that themselves would be a formidable barrier, but the real purpose was to lure the Geres and the other mysterious races, whose very presence seems to have so strange an effect on time and space. But the mountains were a catastrophic failure. It is true no humans lost their lives, not even Norsundrians (who discovered what was about, and delayed their march), and animals ran, feeling something amiss in the environment. But countless trees were ripped from life in the crashing avalanches and wrenching of the ground upward.

When the dust pall finally settled (and it took about two years until it did, and until the ground was stable enough to venture onto), the only trees standing numbered the exact same count as the missing mages.

Some of those trees still stand, ancient and gnarled, and High Mages must spend at least a night under the leaves of one. Seldom do they talk about the experience.

After that, scrupulous respect for the environment has been observed.

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