The first war lasted only a few weeks. The Tehynshins, for all their bravado and arrogance, were a people with no support system, no wide assortment of weapons to wage war with, and no base from which to mount a defensive stand. Additionally, it seemed that the Tehynshins were fighting as much amongst themselves as they were with the confused and amused Ylveryans.
For their part, the Ylveryans had little love for the wholesale slaughter of a people already on the brink of extinction and to whom they had so recently offered asylum. Though they tried to limit their military actions to be defensive in nature, to stop the migrants from taking their lands and their food stores, they also suffered from a schism in ideology. Groups of fighters, younger males mostly, sought to teach the migrants a decisive lesson and pursued the retreating Tehynshins.
Suffering staggering losses and on the run, the Tehynshin people fell back to the only defensible positions they knew… the land’s ancient, ruined heritage sites. What the Tehynshins did not know, but would soon learn, was that the Ylveryans would never go near the ruins. In fact, they would not even look upon them or speak of them directly.
It was not that they considered them sacred, not by any stretch of the imagination, but rather it was more that they knew them to be cursed, haunted, dark, and dangerous. If they knew anything about the peoples that once inhabited these lands in times long past, they never shared that knowledge.
Once they realized their newfound sanctuaries, the Tehynshins consolidated their positions and scattered populations. Within the ruins, they found weapons and armors, ancient but still serviceable and deadly after all these years. The buildings, as old and crumbled as some were, still provided sufficient protection from the elements and were easy enough to renovate now that the motivation existed to do so.
There was no actual declaration that the first war had ended, nor that it had even begun. Despite the lack of a formal proclamation, it was understood by all sides that a war had been waged and that the Tehynshins had been on the losing end of it all. After the few weeks of fighting both sides simply, silently stopped fighting. The Tehynshins knew they could not fight against superior forces and the Ylveryans would not engage in battles anywhere near the ruins. The cease fire was more a result of a stalemate than of any actual peace between the two races.
Several months passed with tense, hesitant relations between the two races. The Tehynshins spent that time discovering that their new home was not the safe haven they thought it to be. Those folks that dug too deeply into the ruins found horrors beyond compare. The potential rewards though still drew the occasional treasure hunter. The weapons, artifacts, relics, books, and other such wondrous items proved themselves to be worth the risk.
Eventually, the newly formed Council ordered all forays into the under ruins to only be undertaken by certified and accredited individuals with the Council taking charge of all discoveries, ostensibly for the advancement of all Tehynshins. The Council also founded the first militia, with the intent of protecting the smaller settlements used for farming and the raising of livestock needed to support the new cities founded in the ruins. As long as the settlements were within view of the ruins, they knew the Ylveryans would have no desire to enforce their own claim to those lands.