Burning of Hyllus

The Burning of Hyllus was a Portian act of wartime aggression that occurred in 508 PT. It resulted in the near total destruction of Old Kingdom Hyllus and the loss of millions of Hyllus lives, along with several thousand Portian lives in a botched retreat.

History
When confronted with a mass exodus of the Hyllus from the Terran Mingle in the late fourth century PT, Portia agreed to give them the dry southern lands of the western half of Pangea Proxima 1. Old Kingdom Hyllus managed to transform these into a habitable and thriving nation, and Portia began to covet its technology and wanted the land for itself, going to war with the Hyllus in 500 PT.

As the war dragged on, Portia found itself confronted with the reality that it might lose. The Hyllus had not made northward progress, but Portia could not successfully take down more than a few Hyllus cities, so a different plan was concocted. Portia cut off the Hyllus water supply at a few crucial points to the west and east and set a huge, monstrous fire. Failure to inform the bulk of the Portian military of this strategy, out of fear that the secret would get out, led to a botched retreat in which about two thousand Portian soldiers were killed in the conflagration.

The fire lasted for ten months and finally ended in early 509 PT. A lack of rainfall in the African peninsula, which was going through its dry season, contributed to the lethality of the fire. When it finally went out, most of Old Kingdom Hyllus was gone, and the forest would not be inhabited by spiders for hundreds of years.