Breaking of the Enorns
Breaking of the Enorns, called the Battle of Relanor by the Enorns themselves, who name it for the place rather than for what it cost them, was the engagement at which Þordil the Great came closest to losing his career. It was fought during the late phase of the Wodarsubjuten, the High King’s twenty-year campaign of subjugation against Enonia, the Northern Isles, and the Northern Tribes.
Approach
Þordil’s force crossed the eastern frontier into Enonia weakened. Weeks of forced marching, sustained harassment by Graoigorn mercenaries in the High King’s own pay, and the cumulative attrition of a campaign already two decades old had all taken their toll. The Nortr column arrived before Relanor in poor order, its siege not yet established, and Þordil dispatched his terms of surrender to the Enorn court ahead of his army.
The Enorn king Argyllic I, the Shatterer returned, in his own hand, a single line:
“I shall not treat with this Scourge from the West.”
The assault was ordered begun within the day, and no further parley was attempted on either side.
The Sally
Argyllic did not wait behind his walls. While the Nortr encampment was still being established, the Enorn king sallied at the head of his household guard and struck Þordil’s army with such ferocity that the High King’s commanders were caught entirely unprepared. Within hours, Þordil’s personal banner stood in danger of being overrun. Military historians of every later generation have largely agreed that, had Argyllic continued to press his advantage, he would have carried the field and very possibly forced the abandonment of the Enonian campaign altogether.
Single Combat
He did not press it. At the moment when the battle hung visibly in his favour, Argyllic broke from his line and sought single combat with Þordil himself. Whether the choice was driven by pride, by grief at the day’s cost, by a misjudgment of the moment, or by a calculation no record has preserved, the chroniclers have never settled.
The outcome they agree on: Argyllic was slain by Þordil’s own hand, his army broke with him, and Relanor fell within the season.
Aftermath
The kingdom of Enonia did not formally survive the Wodarsubjuten, and the line of Argyllic was kept from its throne for nearly half a century, restored at last by his grandson Argyllic II in the Oldenakriso of 80–85 AFS.
Argyllic’s written rebuke, modified in the mouths of his surviving peoples from the personal “Scourge from the West” into the broader “Scourge of the West”, became the standing euphemism by which the Enorns referred to his killer, the name they would no longer speak aloud.
Among the Nortr, the engagement is remembered as the Breaking of the Enorns: the day a kingdom was unmade. Among the Enorns themselves, it is the Battle of Relanor: the day a king proved that the High King could be beaten, and, the chronicles came to hold, the prelude to the end of that reign within five years.