The war five hundred years ago — faerie against human, seven years of slaughter that ended not in conquest but in a wall raised across the middle of the world.
The First War
Five hundred years before Feyre crossed it, faerie and human went to war — and it took seven years, the lives of soldiers like Cassian, Rhysand, and Azriel, and finally a wall split through the heart of the land to end it.
Not a war that anyone truly won. A war that was sealed away.
At a glance
The war that built the Wall
The conflict
Faerie against human
Long before Feyre ever stepped over the line that separated her world from Prythian, the two halves of that world were locked in open war. For seven years faerie and human fought — a war born of centuries in which humans had lived under faerie rule, and at last turned against it. It is the conflict the High Fae simply call the war, the one whose shadow still falls over every conversation about humans, the Wall, and the old enmities that never fully cooled.
The Wall
How the war ended
The First War did not end in a clean victory for either side. It ended in a treaty — and in the raising of the Wall, an invisible magical barrier drawn across the middle of the land to divide faerie from human. The mortals were given their own territory below it; the faeries kept Prythian above. The Wall is the war's lasting monument: not a triumph carved in stone, but a border conjured to hold two peoples apart so the killing would stop.
Those who remember
Five hundred years of memory
Because the High Fae are long-lived, the First War is not distant history to all who speak of it — it is lived memory. Cassian, Rhysand, and Azriel fought in it, and carry what they saw of it five centuries later. For them the war is not a date in a book but a thing they survived, the reason old wounds between faerie and mortal still ache, and the measure against which every new threat of war is weighed.
Who fought it
