The Orcish Invasion of Rhaedwyn took place a little over two thousand years ago, in the early The Age of Shadow, right after the Shattering of the Shardspire, though most of its details have rotted out of the record. What remains are fragments: burned chronicles, broken border stones, and three names that still carry weight in stories of the western kingdoms. Alostor. Kiraven. Venocht. These were the three Kuhans of the Great Western Steppe who took the Dark Oaths and turned their roaming hosts east toward the Taurus Mountains.
At that time the mountain passes stood only under simple lairs owned by the Dragon Kings themselves. The Dragonborn did not yet exist. The Kuhans, strengthened by the Endless Night and guided by Darksworn advisors, broke the Taurus defenses in a campaign remembered more for its terror than its strategy. Old songs claim that one Dragon-King fell in battle and another barely survived, his mountain-temple half shattered under orcish siege fire and dark workings. In the panic that followed, the surviving Dragon Kings turned to a solution no one had seen before and poured their own blood into the Ritual of Solelichesis, creating the first Dragonborn to hold the passes.
Most accounts agree on the broad shape. The orcish hosts rode out of the Steppe under storm-dark skies, poured through the Taurus gaps, burned and raided deep into Rhaedwyn alongside the forces of Virulan, then were driven back only after the first fortress-temples filled with Dragonborn and the human realms rallied behind them. Whether Alostor, Kiraven and Venocht died in battle, were consumed by the Endless Night, or withdrew to the far Steppe is unknown. Modern orcs remember them as flawed heroes and war-leaders who paid too high a price for power.