By the time this missive reaches you, my plans will either have been enacted, or have failed catastrophically, in which case I will be dead. For this eventuality, this is my will and my farewell.
I will let it to others to write the story of my life, if they find it deserving of such attention. I offer no apologies, and ask for no forgiveness. I express my hope that my works will stand for my name, and for my memory, and that if history passes judgement on me, it will be for what I was, not what I failed to become.
I wish it to be known and recorded that Riven Dusk, who stood by my side in victory and in exile, is appointed the inheritor of my estate, and the new lady of the House of the Rusted Sword. I wish it to be known and recorded that she is more of a Dynast than most scions of the Great Houses ever managed to, and that the Daoshin Peninsula will not suffer an insult to her name and character. I wish it to be known and recorded that whoever speaks against her blood and character blasphemes against the Dragon host entire.
I wish it to be known and recorded that Smile-of-Skies, who I have treated wrong, is appointed to my seat on the board of the Everblooming Ash Trade Company, to lead it to greatness and benefit from its success. I wish it be known and recorded that I challenge all who saw in me a friend and benefactor to always provide for her, and aid her in whatever task she sets herself to.
Such is my will, and the division of my wealth, my honours, and my possessions.
Article:
I understand now that I was wrong to envy you. It's not about becoming like Her. It's about becoming your own.
Article:
The time is now. Thank you. You were always a friend.
Immaculate Negotiations
(Written by @Gargulec with my approval)
Before the disappearance of Her Imperial Majesty, the Mouth of Peace held a reputation of a woman who, in spite of her advanced age, showed no signs of decrepitude. In her public appearances, she made herself seen as timeless and ageless, the proper edifice for the Order entire, representing its universal ambitions and unassailable sanctity. But that was before.
It didn't, then, surprises the ambitious matriarch Valetari Seia, that the woman who offered her an audience in the very heart of the Palace Sublime, looked nothing like that statuesque visage she remembered from the court days. The succession crisis left the Mouth of Peace wizened, all the years of maintaining decorum catching up to her finally. In fact, she looked little better than the desiciated mummies that one could still find amidst the ice-capped peaks of the Blessed Isle's mountains.
No, what surprised her was something else. In her memories, the head of the Immaculate Order was a woman of utmost serenity, carrying herself with the aloof sacredness of someone beyond the temporal concerns, of someone who stood at the gates of enlightenment and turned away from them only for the purpose of ushering others in. Little of that remained in the crone staring at Seia, her lips pursed. But that is not to say that she was lifeless, oh no, far from it. It is just that what filled her wasn't peace at all.
"You may sit," she offered, and Seia, mindful of the protocol, and mindful of the holiness, knelt. If it made an impression, the Mouth of Peace did not show it.
"I have summoned you, my adherent," the word adherent came bitterly off her lips, at once respectful, and yet carrying a kind of a mistakable edge, "because I find your task admirable."
Seia kept quiet. She had made her case before, and at length, through countless mouths. She could recognize the gravity of the situation; the Mouth of Peace wasn't here to argue, but to pass a decision. All that was left to the matriarch was to hope.
"Your generous donations, honourable conduct, and wise reasoning, all do you credit in the eyes of the Order," she continued, and Seia couldn't help but to feel her heart race. Maybe - just maybe - it was going to work after all. "We have considered the Jira matter carefully, and decided that doctrinal variance," the phrase is little more than a hiss when she speaks it, "is ultimately benign. Appropriate changes have been made to the Calendar."
Seia looked up, and realized, with the grim certainty of someone who had seen too much politics in her life, that this was not going to be the victory she had hoped for.
"Similarly," the Mouth of Peace kept on speaking, her tone nothing but light, "the Order can ill-afford to split over minor matters. The Meleaists have always been a part of our community, for all of their petty heterodoxies. It would be foolish for us to renounce them, at such a time. The Order blesses and approves of the doctrines of the North."
A pale imitation of a smile briefly flickered through the elder woman's face. Seia exhaled. She knew where it was going.
"However," the word came off dagger-sharp, "your attempts to mend other rifts show a startling degree of naivete, if not cynicism. Valetari Seia, there is a term for speaking on the behalf of House Cynis today, and that term is unforgivable blasphemy."
***
Cynis Ilyssa found it very easy to speak from a place of hate. In fact, it was that one place in her soul she had cultivated all her life, against the wise counsel of the Immaculate Order. Wise counsel that she, finally, did not have to even pretend to give a shit about.
The branches of the beautiful oak tree behind her bended under the weight of the fruit dangling from a dozen nooses. Warrior monks and other insurrectionists, caught red-handed, stripped of their robes, Low Realm characters for "rapists" and "child-killers" written in tar on their dead flesh. Once, even Ilyssa would find herself disgusted by the sight. But that was before Pangu drowned in blood.
She turned to the gathered crowd - soldiers, farmers, patricians - all gathered on the town's square. She could tell by their restlessness and unease that the spectacle they had seen did not leave them assured of Cynis cause, and she was here to make up for it. She breathed in, and opened her mouth.
The trick was to speak from a place of hate.
"Kia Bakari," she shouted, "was a patrician's son. He wanted to grow up a soldier, to go out and fight in the war on the distant Caul."
Her voice boomed across the plaza, and everyone went quiet.
"He was fifteen when the Immaculate inciters came to his town, a throng of blood-crazed slaves raging behind them. He couldn't believe that the monks would act against the people; he went out to beg for them to speak peace into the terrorists. They gave him to them instead."
Still no words. No sounds. Everyone was staring at her. She shook her head, her voice dropping to almost a whisper.
"With their brutish hands, they tore him apart, limb from limb."
She allowed the words to sink in. She allowed a murmur to go through the crowd. And then she shouted again.
"Kia Bakari could have been your son! He was of our blood, and of our land, and of our values. They tore him apart, because they hate us."
And there it was, her hate seeping out into the crowd, the shades of sympathy towards the terrorists hanging behind her vanishing one by one.
"This is what we are fighting against."
***
"The issue, Valetari Seia, is that there is no more ambivalence," the Mouth of Peace's voice crackled with anger. "There is the Order, or there is barbarity. And you can't stand with both."
The matriarch clenched her teeth. There was nothing to be said.
"This is no longer a matter of politics, or of succession. The Realm may fall, but the Order must endure," it wasn't even the anger, anymore. It was the cold. The cruel certainty of a set, direct path, that emanated from the wizened woman's every word. "We are declaring House Cynis Anathema, every single last one of them. You, and all who think this is politics, have until the next Calibration to renounce them and their works."
"And if we do not?" Seia asked, even though she already knew the answer.
"It's the Order," the Mouth of Peace repeated, "or barbarity."
***
In the North, the sun rose over Grand Cherak, for the first time in centuries. Walking amidst the afterglow of the great festival, Ferem Auris could almost forget that the world was ending.
House Ferem was, finally, ascendant. Bound by vows of marriage and loyalty to the Sesus and the Tepet, reconciled with the Immaculate Order, secure in its borders and prosperous. With the wealth of trade and prestige of victory, they saw an opportunity to claim an old mantle again, and did it. The Grand Cherak was restored, under their rightful guidance. In a way, it was everything she - and so many other scions of the House - could have hoped for, and more.
And yet-
The sky to the south was rosy red, the warm color of a breaking dawn. And yet, looking at it, Auris could only think of flames, of the messages coming from the Blessed Isle screaming blood, blood, blood. Sister rose against sister, and the Civil War was a reality. They all knew it was coming, and yet it was still a shock when it broke. And worse-
The news about Pangu, and what it meant.
In the afterglow of the greatest victory of her House, in a moment of utmost celebration, Ferem Auris couldn't help but to consider the irony of the sun rising over Grand Cherak just as it was about to set over the Realm.
- The matriarch of House Valetari made a good faith attempt to encourage reconciliation between House Cynis and the Immaculate Order, aimed at convincing the Order that this was not an existential battle and that even a victorious Cynis would still need the Faith.
- Cynis Sekhara proceeded to declare that the Immaculate Order were all child-killing monsters who had slaughtered the innocents of Pangu, before swearing a blood oath to see the Order torn down in the name of vengeance no matter the cost. No matter the allies she would need to take. Her followers then proceeded to lynch, burn or feed to tyrant lizards every outspoken Immaculate in their territory.
- Negotiations, needless to say, stalled somewhat.
- The entirety of House Cynis has been declared Anathema - Cynis scions can either renounce their family name and all allegiance to Sekhara, or they can take the mantle of Anathema for themselves. All those who cooperate with House Cynis in any capacity are guilty of aiding the Anathema, and are to be punished appropriately. Defections have already begun, less among the faithful (there are few enough of those left in the Cynis camp by this point) and more among those unwilling to spend the rest of their lives fearing that their servants are going to murder them in their bed.
- There is no longer any hope of peace. Cynis will destroy the Immaculate Order, or it will be destroyed.
- In slightly brighter news, the Order has officially reconciled with both Jira the Wave-Froth Serpent and House Tepet's Melaists, acknowledging both as variant but legitimate paths towards enlightenment.
- House Ferem has successfully reconstituted Grand Cherak and effectively declared its independence from the Realm. The Realm is too busy burning to the ground to do anything about this.
Fools and Dead Men
(Written by @Gargulec with my approval)
A few hours after the battle was over, the last siaka left, leaving behind a ruddy-red sea, strewn with flotsam and shreds of men.
A few boats were lowered into the water to look for survivors amidst the wreckage. Out of principle, and not hope - the last screams and shouts for help ended long before, in the gnashing of the blood-frenzied beasts. The image of the sea foamed with blood, and bestial fury, teeming with the scaled siakas' bodies as if an upturned anthill, was going to haunt admiral Helkar Ferem for the rest of his days, and he knew that he wouldn't be the only one.
In the dour, exhausted silence, he turned his eyes from pointless rescue efforts, and to the shores of Onyx, and the line of battered black hulls withdrawn into the bone-white port.
***
Honoured Matriarch, it is with a heavy heart that I report to you a victory…
***
If there was a single benefit to the horror of what they had all witnessed mere hours ago, it was that when the admiral called the captains of the fleet to pass his orders to them, they were all too shocked or numbed to protest. And besides, even though many of them would later go on to claim otherwise, they all recognized the base facts of their situation, and were clearly glad to turn away from those cursed waters, cursed lands, and pointless triumphs.
The time for doubts, regrets, and recriminations would come only later, as would accusations, shifting blame, and all other untidy consequences of hollow victories. For now, the orders were received, commands given, and before the day was done, the citizens of Skullstone were celebrating in the streets, watching the dreadful dragon fleet turn and sail away.
***
...our sailors and our allies have all availed themselves to the highest Dynastic standard, and though I have no doubts many will try to malign them later, I stress it now: it is our strategy that was flawed, not our navy…
***
The Battle of Red Teeth - the name stuck, quick, and the stories of siaka gorged to bursting on sailors' live flesh spread through the West like a tsunami wave. Hushes, revolting tales of how the red-handed Cynis sacrificed twelve hundred souls to the insatiable maw of Siakal, so that she would send her children into battle for them, ended up the talk of every of tavern from the tips of the Coral Archipelago all the way to the Sunken Luthe. And unlike many such stories, they did not grow much in the telling; what the Cynis did baffled the imagination in its sheer scope and callousness.
The cruelty of those stories was that they displaced the true heroes of the battle, the Ferem, V'Neef and Charono sailors who stood against the Black Fleet and beat it back to port, a full third of it sent to the bottom of the sea. But it was the siaka that devoured every shred of flesh, living or dead, that were credited with victory on that day, and in time it became common knowledge in the West that it was only through the Realm's atrocity that the Silver Prince lost.
***
...the Silver Prince's admiral turned out no hero. When the tide of the battle started to turn, they sacrificed a portion of their fleet to give the rest a chance to retreat back to port. As such, what we had hoped to be an opportunity to destroy the Black Fleet as a fighting force only managed to cause it significant damage, almost, but not quite crippling. In the absence of appropriate landing force, and with the prospect of maintaining blockade increasingly unfeasible, I have made the decision to withdraw. I accept full responsibility for the fiasco, and put my fate in your hands.
Signed,
Helkar Ferem, admiral of the Great Western Fleet
***
Only in the North-West, the narrative differed, and mostly thanks to Velosa Ferem's thankless efforts to spin the yarn of a hollow naval victory into the gold of a perception of Ferem's naval supremacy.
But then again, it was easier to believe there that the defeat of the Black Fleet meant that the Ferem would always steward the North, that the Grand Cherak was an idea to believe in and a power to respect. In gruelling months of rallies, diplomacy, speeches, and endless political gifts, Velosa finally managed to kludge together the North-West, around the banner of Grand Cherak resurgent, and the rousing story of Skullstone defeated by naval might of the Realm. Or the North, depending on whom you asked.
It also helped that the Cynis decided to leave.
***
The rooms that Mnemon Vika requisitioned for her use as the military commander of Grieve used to belong to some wealthy merchant who made big money off the trade with the Cynis. He had enough good sense to flee the moment he realized his masters were withdrawing from the north. Like them, he took with himself everything that wasn't nailed down. Unlike them, he didn't have much experience cutting deals with the local element; to the best of Vika's knowledge, his corpse was presently feeding the eels, and his riches adorning the cabin of one notorious fae pirate or another.
In any case, the bare walls suited her fine. There was something profoundly satisfying in such a showcase of the enemy's abject cowardice.
Unlike many of her sisters in arms, she wasn't disappointed to find the Cynis' northern satrapies abandoned. She wasn't bloodthirsty, or itching for battle. A walk-over victory was still a victory, and try as they might, the Cynis couldn't have stripped the land of all of its riches in their flight back to the Isle.
Well, flight. On her desk, there was a stack of letters from the Tepet and the Ferem, notifying her that prior to the evacuation of her scions, the Cynis' so-called "Empress Incarnadine" had ceded control of the northern satrapies to their Houses.
Vika nursed no personal grudge against either of those Houses; in fact, she had no small amount of respect for the Tepet. As such, she bit down on the urge to write them some pithy letter like "come and take them, then", and forced herself to compose a polite answer explaining that House Mnemon was taking the northern satrapies into protection, and that the Anathema known as Cynis had no authority at all to govern those lands anyway. As such, no sovereignty could have been ceded.
In truth, she felt bad for those Northerners (and how easily did the Tepet become "the Northerners" in her mind!). It was just like the cowardly Cynis. Cause a mess, offer victory, pay with false coin, and then leave it all to the House Mnemon to clean up.
- In the North-West, an allied operation between Houses Ferem, V'Neef and Charono brought the Black Fleet of Skullstone to battle and delivered a serious defeat to the Silver Prince's military. However, without any ground forces suitable for garrison or occupation work (especially in a shadowland ruled by a Deathlord) the alliance was unable to capitalise on this strong opening, and while Skullstone's ability to project power has been curtailed, its industrial core and population base survived largely unscathed.
- In support of the alliance, House Cynis offered mass human sacrifice to Siakal, Goddess of Sharks and Slaughter. Her assistance ensured that the naval victory was decisive and prevented any of Skullstone's allies and neighbours from getting involved, but also did great harm to the alliance's morale and thoroughly poisoned any hope of local support. Somehow, the Silver Prince has come out of this whole mess with the moral high ground, at least in the eyes of other western nations.
- House Mnemon made a counter-attack in the North West, seeking to relieve their besieged forces and push back the Cynis, only to discover that House Cynis has abandoned the entire direction without a fight. House Mnemon has now taken possession of all of Cynis' satrapial income and non-military assets.
- Attempts by House Cynis to distribute its holdings to Ferem and Tepet ahead of the evacuation have been derailed by Mnemon Vika's refusal to acknowledge the transfer, or even Cynis' original claiming of the holdings in question, as legitimate.
Fully Armed and Operational
(Written by @Crilltic with my approval)
Seven Stars had been in the Immaculate Order a long time. He had seen many things in his time, he had born witness to all manner of heroics...and many more unspeakable evils. He had even seen events like this, with believers strung up with slit throats as a message, but he had never thought he would see such things here on the Isles. Such things were the domain of the Threshold and the barbarians that lurked there…or they were supposed to be.
The Holy Banners stretched out in front of him, clouds of incense billowing in the winds, as the formations marched into Aru-Thistle. They had already met the forces of the heretics once, and drove them from the southern reaches of the province. Now they pursued them back along the path they hard burned through provinces. The Immaculates of Aru-Thistle had not accepted the heretic invasion of their land, and they had died well in pursuit of their faith.
But they had still died.
Now, all Seven Stars and his army of pilgrims could do was exact vengeance for their deaths, and so the Saffron Pilgrim Army marched through Aru-Thistle and cut down every tainted official and Relin spy they found in their wake. Once upon a time, there had been a thriving community in this province, but now all they had were bodies. It made Seven Stars sick, to see how far they had all fallen. How far they had yet to fall, but he would do his duty.
The Realm may fall, but the Order would preserve.
Something twinkled in the edge of his vision on the horizon. He looked up at the sky a-
---
Relin Savath and his men hid in the undergrowth. His section was down to 10, less than half he had marched into this accursed province with. A handful had been lost in their pacification of this province. The victim of the odd ambush or last stand of the fanatics that had opposed their seizure of the region. Despite their support in the Governor's office, many refused to be swayed, and left House Relin's Household Guard no option but force.
Most died when the armies of the Immaculate Order swept into the province, burning everything before them. The Household Guard had tried to stand and fight, but the officers had ordered the retreat once it become clear they were out-numbered. It stung his pride to retreat, but there was little else they could do, as long as the Immaculate Order pursued them in force. So he and his men formed a portion of the rear-guard.
So he crouched in the under-brush, as a gang of Immaculates forced their way into the clearing. The chaff marched in front, many little more than peasants wielding cudgles and farm tools, and orange scarf or arm-band the only evidence of their allegiance. They would be of little concern to him and his men, but more worrying was the tall figure in their midst wearing the orange robes of a Immaculate. She carried no weapons he could see, but that made her even more dangerous in his opinion.
Still, he gave the nod, and the small section of troops burst forward from the tree-line. The first to taste Savath's blade was a young woman, face partially covered in an orange bandana and dressed in peasants garb. He could see the surprise and fear in her eyes, as his twin blades carved through her wooden stave, and separated her head from her body.
Ahead of him, he saw one of his men try and challenge the monk, only to have his arm ripped from its socket in a sickening display of brutality. As his comrade fell in a spray of gore, he was already moving. Lunging forward in a blur of movement. His first blade sparked off the stone-like skin of an upraised palm, but his second found its mark, and buried itself in the monk's chest.
The monk coughed once, blood flowing from her mouth, and he could see the hate in her eyes as she tried to speak but no words would come.
Pulled his blade out of-
---
Bright-as-Fire cowered in the cellar of her parents house. Her infant brother bound tightly to her chest, and she prayed to the gods that he kept quiet. All around her were the other children of the village. Most were too young to understand what was happening, alternating between gently crying for their parents and being urged into silence by those few children who did know what was happening. They had all been ushered down here, into the darkness of the cellar, and her Mama had told her in no uncertain terms they were never to come out until Mama or Papa came to get them.
Last year, when the women and men of House Relin came in their fancy robes, they had seen them away. First with forceful words, and then when they refused to learn, with sticks and farm tools. They would not be swayed from their righteous path by fancy words and baubles. An Immaculate preacher had come through latter and thanked them all for their bravery, and Bright-as-Fire had felt pride. In her childish mind, that was the end of it. They had defeated the bad men, and that was the end of the tale.
Then riders had come through the village, and her mama and papa had turned ashen pale, and all the ushered them into the dark. Where they had stayed, despite the screams and the smell of smoke, because they were obedient children.
The ground rumbled beneath her feet and she stumbled slight-
- House Relin, angered at being repelled from their attempted takeover of Aru-Thistle province last year, sent troops into the territory to force the matter. When the locals - fanatic immaculates - resisted, they began enforcing order through executions and pogroms.
- The Immaculate Order responded in force, marching a Saffron Pilgrim army into the province to counter Relin's over-eager grasping. The House Relin forces were largely destroyed, though not without putting up a fight.
- House Relin then employed their First Age superweapon Incandescence to obliterate the Immaculate forces, the villages they had taken and all nodes of significant resistance with beams of searing sunfire from close to the horizon.
- Casualties were immense. Aru-Thistle province is now a lawless wasteland, the people too terrified to gather in large groups lest they be mistaken for armed militia.
Faith's Reward - The Caul Crusade
(Written by @Gargulec with my approval)
In the quiet of his tent, away from the eyes of soldiers and aides, Cathak Cainan could finally lower the mask of the great general and admit to himself - and to the portable prayer altar, which had been giving him less and less comfort in recent months - that he felt trapped and, increasingly, hopeless.
What did he have to show for the years spent in the quagmire of war? Clouds of funeral smoke shrouding the sky; rivers of blood profaning the sacred soil. Misery, treachery, and an enemy without shape or form, who would not even give him the comfort of a glorious battle, and perhaps, a holy death. Instead, slow waning from the fangs in the night, from poison and disease, from hostile weather and cruel sky.
He put a stick of incense at the altar and lit it. Increasingly, the guidance he beseeched was not Mela's or Hessieh's, but Sextes Jylis, hoping for a vision of rebirth and flourishing. Yet, his soul felt, if anything, barren.
It would be easier if he could rest easily knowing that the Isle he had left behind was safe in the Dynastic stewardship; that all he had to worry about was the persecution of the crusade. But what was even its purpose, now that it seemed that there could be no unity among the squabbling contenders for the Throne?
The smoke wafted around him, revealing no hidden meaning or sacred shape. The tiny ember at the tip of the incense stick flickered reluctantly; in the damp air of the Caul, fires struggled to burn.
Everything he had done was for the purpose of preservation of the Realm. The Crusade, a token of their shared faith and purpose. The reconciliation between Her Imperial Majesty's eldest, and youngest, so that they would rip their world apart. Struggles in the Deliberative, and on the battlefield, struggles he put every spark of his Essence. And what of them? A war that refused to end, while the news from home was getting worse by the day.
"It is my fault," he whispered to the altar that was his mothers' before. The carved jade remained mute, and he remembered to keep quiet, lest one of his aides hears him wavering.
What he had to do was to accept defeat. Withdraw. Take his armies back to the Isle, march them into Scarlet, restore some semblance of order. Save the Realm. The dream of the Crusade was an obvious failure, and…
"Honoured Matriarch," he heard a voice outside. One of his old officers. "New reports from the Isle have arrived."
He wanted to dismiss the woman, but there was clearly urgency in her need to interrupt his evening prayers. He let her in, and received a sealed package of letters, freshly delivered from across the sea.
He read them slowly at first, and carefully, but with each line, it became harder and harder to bear the weight of this recounting of atrocities. From between the lines of dry, soldiers' text, he drew a sense of not as much as horror, but as despair. It was the names. The names of women and men he knew, back in the days when the Realm was one, with whom he had feasted, and duelled, and hunted, and sang, and those names now followed reports of slaughter and blasphemy, and he saw their faces in his mind and realized in that very moment that even if he was to turn back now and rush to the shores of the Isle, he would find there not the Realm, but ash.
And in that, finally, his heart broke, and in its crack, the road to Feng-Yi was opened.
He summoned his aides, and all the commanders, and when they rushed into the tent, expecting the long-awaited, long-dreaded retreat to be announced, he looked at them with eyes full of fire, and said:
"We march at dawn, and do not stop."
***
They would call it the March of Ten Thousand Dragons. Not because there were ten thousand Dragon-Bloods assembled in the Crusade's host, nor because there were that many soldiers there. No, the name was coined because the road to the Last City was always a metaphor, and only legend could properly traverse it. As such, the numbers did not matter. What mattered is that they marched as one, their song rousing the land, and there was such fire within them the likes of which hadn't been seen in Creation since the heirs of the Shogunate stood in a thin line against the onslaught of Prince Balor.
The battle that followed would not end up studied by strategists and generals, because its sacred principles and battle-lines could not translate to the temporal and base. Ten thousand dragons fought as one against the fangs at the gates of Feng-Yi, and witnessed by the holy soil and bottomless sky, emerged triumphant.
Those who fought on that day - for the Dragons, or for the Fangs - would go on to carry, to the last of their days, an air of greatness upon them. But of the battle itself, they would speak little, as if convinced that it was a kind of a mystery that should not be brought to mere words and mortal language. Ellipsis ruled the poems composed about it; its songs were melody itself.
This much is known, however: at the end of the day, Cathak Cainan walked to the gates of Feng-Yi, the last city, and the gates opened before him, and he entered alone. And when, after long hours, he emerged, he proclaimed the end to the Crusade, and a new order to Creation.
***
From his place far from the gates, squashed among hundreds of her sisters in arms, Crooked-Nose Fesa, a fisherman's daughter, listened to Cathak Cainan's grand speech. Or tried to, at least. She could only see him as a tiny figure wreathed in a column of scarlet flame, and his words reached her only as booming echoes, followed by erupting cheers. But she did not mind, because words were not important.
In her heart, she already knew them. She already knew that from the moment her feet touched the soil so sacred, she was bound to the Caul, and that the purpose of the Crusade was not to conquer or subjugate, but to test piety, and that thoses who had marched as Ten Thousand Dragons have emerged from this test victorious.
Their reward was bitter-sweet, as all rewards of faith are. They had given up on a home, now swallowed by the ravages of the Anathema. Who they were before was gone, and irrelevant. There would be no sailing back to shores of the Isle to be greeted as heroes. Instead, theirs was the Caul, and its soil so sacred, and the legacy of great unity and clarity of purpose.
Without hearing the words, she wept at their loss, and cheered for the Blessed Dominion of the Caul, and Cathak Cainan, the Protector of the Faithful.
***
Two years ago, Ardent Hymn was a mousy and unloved bastard son of a Faxai's patrician, scapegoated for his father's failure to meet the Crusaders' demands. With nothing but the clothes on his back, and a desperate refusal to give in to those who would make his life a living hell, he fled into the jungles of the Caul, and where the monsters inside turned him away as a spy, he refused to let others define her any longer.
A year ago, she was a rising star in the Silver Pact, already a lieutenant to Sha'a Oka only a few months into her Exaltation. With her spear, the Refused Thorn, she harried the armies of the Realm, each drop of blood spilled nurturing the fury she hadn't even realized had always filled her soul.
And now, she was one of the last Lunars remaining on the Caul, on the run from the emissaries of the newly-forged Blessed Dominion, scared, lost and terrified to the core of her exalted soul of how this soil so holy had refused its Silver Pact wardens. The Black Lion vanished without a trace, likely dead, and the victory he had promised as inevitable turned into nothing, leaving them a choice of hiding, or exile. In neither of those, the fury that sustained her was of any help.
Worse yet, as she pushed the tip of the Refused Thorn closer to the Dragon-Blooded prisoner's throat, it seemed that even that rage could no longer push her through what had to be done.
"Don't," the fiery-maned woman barked at her, staring directly up the moonsilver blade and into Ardent Hymn's eyes, "hesitate."
There was something strange about her. They captured her stumbling blindly through the jungles, and though she was clad in jade and carried herself with the unmistakable airs of a Dynast, she swore that she had come to forge an alliance between her House, and the Silver Pact. Ardent Hymn did not believe in any of that; she did not believe in the Dynasts to be able to think in terms of anything else but righteous fury and blind fanaticism. She took the woman - claiming to be named Cynis Zhabele, or something like that - for a spy, and promised her a swift death.
Or, to be honest, it didn't really matter to Hymn if Zhabele spoke truthfully or not. She just wanted to shed some more of the Dragon's blood, before fleeing the Caul and spending the rest of her Exalted life in the shadow of failure. She said as much to herself, had the prisoner dragged out, and then-
And then she couldn't do it.
"Listen to me, girl," Zhabele said, still staring directly at her. Her voice was flat, not as much as defeated, as completely, terrifyingly, at peace, "none of us will be given a second chance. The longer you hesitate, the stronger the regret will grip your heart, and once it has taken root in there, it will never leave."
Hymn stood perfectly still.
"If you think that you can stand at the precipice, and turn away from it, you are mistaken," she continued. "You will never overcome regret. It will consume you and poison you. You are given one chance, and if you blow, there will be no another."
A thought, dangerous in its empathy, slithered its way into Hymn's mind. Her hand shivered.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.
"Because," Zhabele explained in the same ashen affect, "I once had a chance, and I walked away from it. And I regretted it ever since. And I dreamed of a second chance. And all that it brought me to is here, the end of the world, the end of some girl's spear, the bottom of failure."
Hymn thought back to how she used feel, back when she was trapped, back when she was hopeless, back when it seemed like there would be no chance for another start. And she thought back to the blessings that have been given to her, and could no longer hold back that worm of empathy. She put the spear down.
"You wanted to be brought to our leaders," she said.
Zhabele's face twitched. It seemed like even she hadn't yet stamped out hope.
"We have none in the Silver Pact. But there is someone who, I think, would like to meet you."
***
The fire over Faxai's harbour was visible for miles, tinting the deep Caul's sky red. The blow, however serious, was only symbolic - a single act of sabotage, no matter how extensive, could not hope to cripple the Blessed Dominion's commerce, or seriously disrupt its supply lines. It would hurt, possibly for months, but in the end, there was little doubt that the damage would be repaired. Far more dangerous, however, was what it symbolized.
Sandswept Garda Empress dropped the two women from her talons, and landed next to them, transforming back into her angular, hate-filled human shape. The harbour fire reflected in her eyes.
"I have to admit," she said to Cynis Zhabele, a tension stretching her words almost to the point of breaking, "that I am surprised. I fully expected it to be a trap. In fact, I almost relished the idea of dying in one. It would make things so much easier."
"We are not all traitors," the Dragon-Blood protested, starting to remove her soot-stained armour. Ardent Hymn reached out to help her, and the two women were briefly close, almost in an embrace.
"What you are," the Lunar hissed, "is a family of slavers, butchers, and parasites."
"What we are," the Cynis replied, "is a family of desperates, exiles, and blasphemers."
The older Lunar looked away from her, and again towards the blaze on the horizon. She knew the nature of the moment she was in right now, this kind of a lingering place between a decision made, and a decision made known.
"You do realize that there can be no forgiving your kind for what it did," she said finally.
"We wouldn't ask for it."
"And what would you ask for, then?"
"It may well come to this," the Cynis said, carefully weighing every word, "that we may find ourselves without a home at all, and hunted at every turn. What we would ask for, then, is shelter, and perhaps…" she looked at Hymn, "at some point, a second chance."
Sandswept Garda Empresses nodded to the woman that was her enemy, that was everything she had hated in Creation, who was a heart-broken exile, accursed and far from home, from a family of monsters desperate to survive until another day. She then turned to the Caul, and its soil so sacred, and thought of what changing, and leaving your failures behind, meant.
None of it was easy. None of it was pleasant. But, as the fires across the sky symbolized, all of it was already fact.
***
My honoured once-Matriarch,
I write those words to you knowing that I should not have been allowed to. In truth, the very fact that I am still alive is nothing more than an act of unexpected grace.
The body of my once-sister has been recovered, and will be returned to my once-home for proper rites. I hope she rests well, and is given a good lot in the next turning of the wheel.
Her killer is with me now, and I will be leaving Asura by his side, never to be heard of again. I will leave behind a city where the name of Yueh is spoken with love, as a name of mad fools. It is a saying here that the definition of insanity is to try the same thing again and again, and expect different outcomes. By that metric, my once-family is certainly mad, but madness, especially on this soil so sacred, is not always futile.
I hope the Baihu Leagues prospers, that the Everblooming Ash Trade Company sails always on auspicious winds, and that the Blessed Dominion is ever an ally to all who were once close to me. But I have to leave.
The Caul, I understand it now, is a lesson in letting go, and in the terrifying beauty of that which is dark and uncertain. To such a future, I now depart, without a name, a family, or a past.
Farewell, my honoured once-Matriarch. Until we see again, in a different time, under a different sky.
- The Caul Crusade has concluded, its armies victorious. Sha'a'oka, the Black Lion, has either been slain or fled, and now the Crusaders hold all five of the sacred Shrine Cities. Cathak Cainan has passed through the gate to Fen Yi, and emerged revitalised in body and spirit.
- The Blessed Dominion of the Caul has been officially declared, with Cathak Cainan establishing sovereignty over the entire land as its Righteous Defender. All Imperial Legions remaining on the Caul have sworn loyalty to him personally, in the name of faith and bonds forged in blood.
- House Cynis, acting through proxies and mercenaries, savaged the Crusade's docks and supply lines during the waning months of the war. Though this was not sufficient to break the Crusade's momentum, it served to forge an alliance between them and the Lunar Anathema, a section of whom have consented to aiding Cynis in their war to tear down the old order and replace it with something new.
- The Silver Pact is heavily divided on this matter, to say the least, whereas virtually all Immaculates are unified, their decision to declare Cynis Anathema almost prophetic. Opinions on the Blessed Dominion are somewhat more varied, but few will speak against one who reclaimed the holy land and bears the mark of the dragons' favour.
- Yueh's attempt to persuade various Caulborn and neutral settlements to sign on with the EATC and allow greater trade and cultural exchange has born fruit, at the cost of the scion who bore the offer, claimed by the madness of this changing era.
It would take a military genius to face up to the troubles that House Mnemon will experience in Dejis this year.
Mnemon Vane is not a military genius. He barely graduated the Spiral Academy, and his ambition is built of civil things. He is a man whose lacking intellect has cultivated in him a painful level of attention to detail and a willingness to delegate that which he does not know to those smarter than him. Ten years earlier he would have been the perfect man for the tasks Mnemon set of him; now he is inadequate to their scale.
Stil, he tries his best, working with the nun Atessa. He aids her in the work to spread the Righteous Bronze Dragon Guild and instill abolitionist sentiments in the followers of Mnemon. All across the northern Isle, slaves are freed and freemen hear that House Cynis is looking to enslave them too. They're certainly willing to believe it, because the petit bourgeoisie of the Isle fear what the big landholders with their big farms and their wealth will do without the Scarlet Empress here to protect them. The daughter promises to follow her mother's way, and they hear those promises. Mnemon's money finds its way into the pockets of Immaculates all over the isle. They're more than willing to return the favour.
Back home in Dejis, he moves to protect Mnemon's core territory, both militarily and economically. House Mnemon publicly takes over the duties once fulfilled by the Thousand Scales, talking about the need to ensure that there is no interruption in law and order. Road repairs skipped last year are funded, new skyship hulls are hastily laid down in the coastal docks, a delicate web of negotiations reach out to power players in Dejis, Endless and Winter Blossom to ensure that no one else can claim sovereignty in such places while maintaining Mnemon public stance of avoiding weakening imperial authority. The Praetorian Guard is readied, while the geomantic corps step up patrols and search out saboteurs.
And none of it means a damn thing in the end.
The Snake
Orochi knows the sourness of a nearly perfect victory. For it is a victory and none can say it is not. In storm-tossed Chanos, he moves his pieces into place. Money to the right man in House Mnemon. Favours to a patrician student at the Heptagram. Aid from Sesus's skilled spies. Autumn Snow to handle the lesser details, to free up his brilliant mind to outmatch his rival. All to ensure that House Ragara is unquestionable in its dominion over the foremost school of sorcery in the Realm.
But Mnemon Rulinsei is not there, and his spies cannot tell where she is. Rumours suggest the Imperial City, or the East, or that she has gone to the Caul. He considers delaying. He considers what assets he can pull together to hunt down this self-righteous woman. He considers calling her out. No. A wise man does not throw good money after bad. He settles for success with bile in his mouth. Instead of Autumn Snow handling the seizing of the Heptagram, he does it personally and his presence turns a likely success into a crushing one.
The operation goes off with brilliant ease. Only a few of Mnemon's sympathisers escape the jade jaws of the trap born within his mind. A few sorcerers flee in the shape of birds or transforming themselves into fish to swim away in cold waters. But the vast majority are taken, and with minimal bloodshed. The secure archives at the Heptagram have cells that can hold demons and other mighty spirits; they serve as adequate jail cells for his hostages.
And yet. And yet.
He has not had his triumph. He has not stood against Mnemon's hand in these matters and crushed her against the tiles of the school that she claimed to value so much. Mnemon - damn her! - has not given him a wall to break down. She has abandoned the Heptagram like it does not matter to her. He simmers over the insult. And so what should have been his glorious victory is spoiled by the fact he cannot take his seat at the Heptagram over Rulinsei's broken body.
How sour the taste of a near-perfect victory.
First Blood
House Ragara is still playing the same game as the other Great Houses in the northern Isle. A game of Gateway pieces, of hostages and pressure and of moves veiled in legitimacy. But its allies are not. House Sesus does not feel it needs an excuse to draw jadesteel. There is no posturing, no grand stories of betrayal, not even a faked incident at the border. Its attacks start silently and are not acknowledged.
Lean and wiry wolfmen from the North West are the probing spear thrust into Dejis's side. In the hilly terrain around the border, they strike isolated villages. The border checkpoints are occupied by Sesus's house legions, but they only hit the fortified points that would let Mnemon know exactly what they are doing and avoid committing too hard.
Mnemon Vane is no general, but he is conscientious and he listens to his underlings. He is afraid that Mnemon will end his highly-prized career if he gets her Praetorian Guard killed by blundering off into some Sesus trap. And so House Mnemon's responses are as tentative as House Sesus's own ploys.
The wolfmen are not soldiers, as the Realm would know it. They are coin-hungry mercenaries, mammoth-herders who roam the northern steppes and fight for settled folk for silver and jade. They keep well away from any Mnemon forces, unwilling to risk their own skins in any fair fight. In the initial phases of this campaign, there is only one major engagement, and it is not precipitated by the wolfmen of clans Kawo, Oto or Achi. Instead, Mnemon's sorcerers manage to scry a planned attack by the Sesus Fourth on the poorly guarded fortress at Kano's Pass. Mnemon's Praetorians, aided by the sorcerers of the Seventh Column and the knowledge of the secret routes known by the geomancers of the Geomantic Regulatory Enforcers manage to reinforce Kano's Pass, and Sesus's soldiers retreat from the field of battle rather than press the attack.
But within a season, the order is given for Mnemon's forces to fall back. They surrender the border, letting Sesus and their wolves run wild. For words have been carried by the wind of a greater threat.
The Fire and the Deep
Oh curse the gods, whose mercurial whims cause so much suffering. Or otherwise bless the gods, for they favour ambition and decisiveness and care not for the strictures of the Immaculate Order.
By sheerest chance, the great armada of House Cynis carrying their soldiers from the North-West, woefully under-escorted with warships, runs into newly built Caulrunner ships heading to that direction to aid Mnemon in occupying the self-same satrapies that Cynis has just evacuated. And there are diverse alarms and great concern on both sides for on one side there is a vast armada of large-holded merchant ships escorted by the priests of Siakal and Haslanti air-pirates, and on the other there are lean-hulled warships bristling with firedust weaponry.
For a moment, all hangs in the balance as Dedicate-Commodore Third Wave orders the attack, and his initiate-sailors swing around their fire arrows and steam-rockets and prepare the fire-rams. For if they can get past the savage ships of Siakal's servants and the spirit-sharks that swim sub-surface, searing shock will see the sudden cessation of Cynis's schemes.
From his ship, Cynis's heir Tamaz sees death approaching. Fire arrows fall like rain upon the ships, and men and women are everywhere with sand and water trying to stop the flames from catching. He is helpless in the face of this; another ploy of Mnemon. Hate churns in his gut. He lets the sight etch itself into his mind, so that if he is slain here he will remember this in his next life and be able to get his revenge on women like Mnemon and the wretched Immaculate Order.
But House Cynis has given many slaves to the priests of Siakal, and these savage reavers have in turn given those slaves to their goddess. Siakal waxes wrothly, her strength so terribly potent upon these cold northern seas. The ships of the Order have been warded against divine meddling, but in the face of a war goddess such as her such protections are tested to their limits. Sails tear as her storm-servants sweep in, stirring up the winds, and her servant's ships crest the blood-tinged tides. There! A caulrunner goes down, the men onboard butchered by blood-priests! There, fires catch in the sails of one of Siaka's temples and men throw themselves overboard knowing that their goddess cares not from whence the blood comes.
As dusk sets in, the caulrunner ships break off, uncertain of how aggressively they can push with their new untested firedust designs, and afeared of taking too heavy losses now when they are needed in the northwest. They disengage as best they can, leaving their dead for the siaka, and the dragonblooded among their ranks send word to the Order and to House Mnemon.
This is all the warning that the Dejis prefecture gets, and it is far from enough to stop what is about to happen.
Invasion
Mnemon thought to raise a Sky-Ship fleet in the shipyards of Dejis, the so-called First Concordat Sky-Fleet. But it is but half-built and its sailors as green as the timbers of their vessels when war comes to their shores. Valiantly half-trained men led by dragon-children whose experience in the skies are barely better than their underlings try to intercept the fleet, and they are smashed from the skies by Haslanti sky-pirates and by the elemental bolts of legionaries. A death that is a sharp fall terminated by a sudden stop is kinder than many deaths offered by House Cynis.
There is nothing to stop the landings all across the northern coast of Dejis. The priests of Siakal immediately begin their bloody devotions, raiding all along the coast - and in Nuwa and Chanos too, for when a shark tastes blood it sees only red. House Cynis has brought its own wolfmen and the Haro clan burn hilly villages and cut apart the trading routes across the prefecture. The misfit air-pirates of the Haslanti come to their own arrangements with Clan Haro, and the two mercenary units do very nicely for themselves as they feast leech-like on the wealth of the Realm.
This is not the main thrust of Cynis's attentions, though. The 34th and 36th Imperial Legions, bought by Cynis coin and Cynis favours, march against the Realm itself under the banner of Cynis Tamaz - and ahead of them are savage north-western beastmasters, tamed wolves and hunting hawks and iceholm foxes and other stranger creatures. They are a hammer, turned against the cities of Dejis, seeking to crush Mnemon's capability to stand against her rival. But her soldiers will not stand and fight. Dejis is a hilly land, full of fortresses, and they retreat to these prepared fortifications rather than stand in open battle against the full might of two legions.
This is the state of affairs as the year reaches its height; Mnemon's hard-pressed forces still hold the highlands and Mnemon-Darjilis itself, though the city is under siege and has been extensively damaged. The beautiful pyramids that once rose above the skyline have been smashed by Mnemon's own people and their stone salvaged to patch the walls. Mnemon's Praetorians are a shell of what they once were, their heavy losses patched as crudely as the walls as old veterans and potters and stone-miners and fresh-faced boys now take their place.
And yet, there is no quick victory to be found here. There are too many fortresses, too many manse-citadels, too few soldiers trained in the Realm's arts of war among the invaders to storm and crush the opposition.
Cynis Tamaz finds he cannot destroy all of Mnemon's soldiers. He simply takes his hatred out on her house subjects.
"Dejis shall become the biggest mass grave in the Blessed Isle," swears Cynis Tamaz. He does not break faith with his vow.
Death
There are many ways a man might lay waste to a land. House Cynis practices all of them.
Dejis is not a land friendly to the extensive rice fields of Pangu and the rest of the eastern Isle. It is too steep; it is a land of millet and wheat and barley on stepped terraces even on the coastline. In the hills it is too steep for that, and so they herd sheep and goats. Cynis burns the fields, and slaughters the herds for meat. These are the orders that go out; anyone who does not hand over food when demanded is to be executed as a traitor to the Empress. Anyone who conceals food from the Empress's soldiers is to be executed as a traitor. Anyone who attempts to leave their assigned land is to be executed as a traitor. Any Immaculate who does not publicly denounce the Immaculate Order and accept the Empress as the Voice of Heaven is to be executed as a traitor. They take all the food, then they plunder the village and if they find hidden food there are more executions. If people leave their farms to search for food, or flee from the soldiers, there are more executions.
Cynis Tamaz knows what he is doing. He is wrapping murder in a veil of law.
His soldiers hold down the siege of Mnemon-Darjilis, pinning the remnants of Mnemon's Praetorian Guard there. The rest of the province is defenceless. The geomantic enforcers try to arm and train peasants, but they are hunted down and crucified in the name of Empress Sekehara.
An army of saffron-clad pilgrims try to break the siege. They are defeated before the walls of the city despite an attempt by the defenders to sally forth. The trained monks and nuns at the centre manage to retreat in good order with what refugees they can; the pilgrims do not and are butchered. Cynis Tamaz catapults the corpses of the dead pilgrims into the city to spread plague and disease. When a winglord of the 34th Legion protests this to his face, he has her crucified as a traitor.
Mnemon has prized the cultivated geomancy of her land, the manses which grant her much power, the harmony and peace it brings to the hills. Blood spoils such purity. It sinks into the hillsides. Corpses choke the rivers. Funeral pyres burn day and night. Their black smoke rises up, visible from all sides.
Awakening
The Immaculate Order has declared House Cynis to be Anathema. There are no monks in their armies. No monks among the Sesus, either. The northern wolfmen know no Immaculate rituals. Some soldiers know a little of what to do. Enough to try to appease a man who dies in battle, or cover up plundering gone wrong. Not enough for what has happened here. And there are orders from Cynis Tamaz. No prayers are to be said for anyone in House Mnemon. This man is so full of hate that he denies them even this.
Perhaps it would not matter. There is so much death in Dejis. They burn the bodies because they must. Or they shovel them into chalk pits. The smell is thick enough to chew; the funeral pits cough out their smoke day and night. This is how war comes to the Blessed Isle; Low War, bloody war.
And it is the soldiers of the Realm who do this to their own people. The wolfmen might plunder the manicured villages and kill anyone who tries to fight back, but they do not do this out of hate. Cynis Tamaz has his orders, straight from his mother. They are making an example of Mnemon. Mnemon the Immaculate, Mnemon the Heir Apparent, Mnemon who is the mother to her people and cares so deeply for them.
Shadows
There is so much death here that the lands of the Dead throw their doors wide open, and embrace the living who will soon be among them. The shadowlands are like veins in a sickly man, seen through his sallow skin. Black stains spread along the dragon lines, along the flow of rivers that carry corpse-corruption, in the direction of the winds from the west that carry smoke from the pyres. Lakes stagnate and turn fetid and poisonous. The marble in the quarries where bodies are dumped has an ashen grey shade.
The birds no longer sing in Dejis, though obese crows caw from weeping pines. The sun is forever shaded in certain valleys. The mountain lakes are still and dark. There are places where the earth is disturbed, and no grass grows on certain mounds.
The dead do not rest. The murdered dead, who have no prayers for them. Some, indeed, were slain for the crime of trying to carry out Immaculate funeral rites. Corpses crawl from the ground, and shamble back to their villages, mindlessly trying to repair the rubble and carry out the affairs of their day-to-day lives like broken automata. Not all are so harmless. In the stagnant ditches hungry ghosts lurk, dragging men who march by down into the cold water where their corpses bloat and are consumed. Malicious spectres wail out in the night, calling women out with memories of home that turn to nightmares.
There are no monks here! Not among the living! And the many saffron-robed corpses and spectres who linger are consumed with hate and their tongueless mouths spare no prayers of sweet passing for their victims.
When the Wind Blows
The wind blows to the east. It sheds corpse-ash onto Chanos. Nature does not respect the borders that men impose on the world and now-sickened dragon lines curl across the border. The dead shamble back across the broken border, an invasion of hateful spirits.
The harvest in Chanos fails. Unseasonable rains cause flooding and dams that have held for generations break. And whenever crops fail, the peasants are sure to revolt. And when peasants revolt, Sesus Bokran is waiting. The rebellion around Mokra is suppressed, and then the population is decimated. Crosses along roadsides are decorated with peasants who dared to talk about curses from the gods.
Sesus Bokran is the executioner's blade; Embodied Antimony is the velvet glove. There is at least someone who buys grain and rice from the eastern isle, and ensures it is distributed, who sends geomancers to repair crumbling dams, who makes sure the Smoke Fleet docks are accepting fish shipped from the north and who coaxes sallow-faced merchant princes who are scared that they will not be paid next time they arrive. Even if any plans of turning this land into a northern powerhouse must be abandoned in the face of failed harvests and the need to feed Chanos with plunder from Dejis. And salt - aye, so much salt must be bought. But prices are sky high. Without Imperial authority, the salt rate cannot be enforced - and the Immaculates are not there to ensure the gods demand a fair tithe. Many salt-sellers will not deal with House Sesus for fear of losing their Immaculate protection; the ones who do mark up prices five-fold. For it is a seller's market.
Curses
From within Mnemon-Darjilis, Mnemon Vane sees the smoke of countless funeral pyres and sees bodies in the rivers and watches the clouds blot out the sun. Dejis was left to his command, and he has failed them. Perhaps he has lost his mind, or perhaps it is the world that has gone mad. After all, he is a bureaucrat and an administrator. He can do nothing in the face of such relentless hate; he, a man who barely graduated the Spiral Academy and was born to a mere patrician house. Could he have changed this dark fate?
He endures the siege for only three months. Then he shaves his head, burns his hair, and mixes the ashes with his own blood and hemlock. Mnemon Vane drinks the poison, and is dead within the hour, his death poem a curse upon the name of Cynis.
There is a dream that Cynis Tamaz has for three nights in a row. He dreams of a cherry tree, standing proud and tall, with a dragon coiling in its roots. It blossoms in beautiful pink, and gives a bountiful harvest of fruit. Its leaves fall, and the dragon is safe and warm under the tree when snow lies on the ground. Next year, the snow melts, and the cycle repeats. For seven years the cycle repeats. And then a woman in violet with white hair comes and cuts it down so that she has firewood for the cold months. The next year there is no tree, and the worms eat the rotten stump. The dragon lies there, nestled in the roots, even as the worms bore into the wood. The next time the snows come, the roots are gone and the dragon dies in the cold.
Each day he wakes, and does not let boyish dreams shake the womanly resolve in his heart to ensure Mnemon pays for her crimes against him.
Doubt
The fire crackles, up near the mountain. Her blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Sesus Ifran Anfa stares into the orange glow and hears the crackle. This is just a campfire, she reassures herself. No matter what she has heard.
She wears no mask. She does not feel like she can hide her face, like her House does.
The bandit queen of Meru sits on the other side of the fire, hatchets close to hand, her armour rusty and stolen from a soldier. "You said you would bring me assurances of Sesus's faith in this offer."
"I know."
"Do you have them?"
Anfa swallows. She does. "No," she lies. "I haven't yet heard from my people."
The bandit-queen meets her eyes, and in that gaze is something that Anfa has only seen in a few people before. But she knows what this woman is. "Liar," she says.
"I know."
"Then why lie to me?"
"Because." Anfa inclines her head. "I have heard word from Chanos. And from Dejis too. And you made sure I heard you talk to your people from Dejis."
"Did I?" The bandit-queen is no member of House Sesus, learned in the arts. It was a child's play.
And yet it crept in through the crack in Anfa's heart, and stabbed her in the compassion. "I know that… it looks bad."
That draws a harsh laugh from the other woman. "Looks bad," she says mockingly. "So say you. Sesus." The name is a profanity on her lips. "When did you ever care about that, Sesus?"
And that is the problem. She does care about it. She cares. And she knows her family sent her to this bandit queen to be the pretty face. And to make sure that she isn't there to see what's happening in Dejis. "I shouldn't," she says.
"But you do."
"Yes."
"So what now, dragon-child? Mighty lady? Princess of the earth?" This is what the bandit queen has asked her before, words dripping with sarcasm, and Anfa has not had an answer. She should not be losing faith in the face of the blemishes of this unlettered wretch, but she is.
The woman rises; no longer Sesus, no longer Ifran, only Anfa. "The Order says I am Anathema if I stay with my family," she says, voice husky. "And Anathema if I go with you. But I… I can't be a part of this."
"They'll come for you." The bandit-queen chuckles. "And their jade. And it will not be what you are used to. You are a mighty lady. Mighty ladies know nothing of hunger, of fear, of scrabbling in the dirt for another day of life. And this is our life."
"I'd rather be dead than party to this." Anfa rubs her hands together for warmth. "I don't know how many of my kin will see that we can't let a woman who would order this be empress. Too few, probably. But at least one has to take a stand. Even if they'll kill me for this."
The bandit-queen reaches out, and in her eye is the gleam of a new day's dawn. "If this is some Sesus trick, I'll kill you myself," she says.
"I wish it was," Anfa says, trying not to cry. "I wish it was."
Article:
the mountain crumbles
as cruel roots tear it down
rivers run crimson
Spite, Ferem Odat Mai
House Ragara sweeps into the Heptagram in force, making use of both their own agents and the agents of House Sesus to take the majority of House Mnemon-loyal students and teachers hostage and smashing what little opposition there is aside. Much to Orochi's boundless disgust that rat Mnemon Rulinsei is absent from the Heptagram, and so he turns his attention to ensuring he has plenty of hostages to drag that dramatic-showdown-denying bitch out of hiding.
House Mnemon spends the early part of the year spreading the Righteous Bronze Dragon Guild across the northern Isle, working closely with the Immaculate Order, and reaching out into the rest of the Isle. They also work to fortify the homefront, taking over the responsibility for the formerly Imperial duties and moving to secure Dejis, Endless and Winters Blossom and pre-emptively fortify the provinces against economic repercussions of the increasing instability of the Isles and Imperial Government. It isn't enough.
House Sesis attacks Dejis across the land border, attacking with the Fourth Sesus Legion, the Second Sesus Legion, and three units of Wolfmen Snowstriders. From their fortified positions, House Mnemon wins initial victories, with the Fourth Sesus 'Sirroco' legion taking a level of damage. However, this victory cannot be maintained, and House Mnemon pulls back, to face a new threat.
House Cynis moves its troops from the North West, in a highly, highly ambitious landing in Dejis escorted by Siakal's Own. The House Cynis armada consists of those ships, Haslanti Air Pirates, Wolfman Snowstriders, and the 34th and 46th Imperial legions. In a passing engagement, the Caulrunner fleet heading to the North West runs into this armada of merchant fleets. The priests of Siakal call on their goddess and force the Caulrunners to disengage due to weather magics, barely managing to stop the firedust weapons of the Caulrunner ships from utterly devastating the commandeered merchant ships.
The under-construction Mnemon Sky-Fleet is hastily sortied with green-as-grass air-sailors and destroyed by the experienced Haslanti air-pirates. Questions might be raised whether the Haslanti deliberately let Cynis hire those air-pirates to help enforce their monopoly on airships.
Mnemon's forces are horribly outnumbered and out of position, and unable to stop the landings in the coastal lowlands. Cynis's forces are unleashed to plunder and pillage and devastate freely.
The situation at the start of the warmer months is that the remaining forces of Mnemon are holed up in their mountain fortresses, still controlling the uplands, but the coastline has been deliberately sacked and plundered. This is not enough for Cynis Tamaz. If he cannot destroy Mnemon's forces in a single year, he will destroy her subjects. And that is what he does, stepping up the previous plundering into full-on Low War. Fields are razed, dams are smashed, the geomantic networks carefully cultivated to feed Mnemon's manses are ruined, her subjects are slaughtered en masse. This is the worst extremes of the Realm's treatment of foreign powers, unleashed on its own people.
There are no Immaculate monks or nuns among the forces of Cynis or Sesus. Such death corrupts Dejis's carefully cultivated geomancy, tearing gaping shadowlands across the prefecture. The dead rise, full of spite and hatred. Packs of hungry ghosts sleep in stagnant pools and hunt at night. The wolfmen refuse to operate in small units for fear of yidak; one clan deserts Sesus entirely and takes up banditry. The siege of Mnemon-Darjilis holds, but now the besiegers are ringed by the hungry dead and morale is poor - and as the year comes to an end, food starts to become a concern as scavenging parties have to fear the restless dead.
Mnemon Vane takes hemlock out of the guilt and shame of failing to save his House's people, and dies begging the gods to strike down the murderous wretches of Cynis.
The ashes from countless funeral pyres blow on the winds from the west towards Chanos. Unseasonably poor weather ruins the harvests. The poisoned geomancy of Dejis does not respect borders and so its corruption touches Chanos too. House Sesus cracks down with an iron fist against the grumbling peasants who talk about curses, and feed their people with jade and food taken in blood from Dejis. A peasant uprising is put down brutally and crucified rebels left along hillside roads. Embodied Antimony's wildly ambitious plans do not account to a fraction of what was expected, for trade with Dejis has collapsed and all other potential investors are terrified of this atrocity and the people responsible. The funds which were meant to be spent on trade infrastructure have to be instead spent on reinforcing the border against the wandering dead and on the import of salt at vastly inflated prices - for with the collapse of Imperial authority, the salt rate has not been negotiated with the salt gods and the Order will not help House Sesus.
Sesus Ifran Anfa (with the negative tag 'Afflicted with a conscience') was sent to negotiate with the bandit queen of Meru. She has vanished, along with the sum total of the money that House Sesus had sent along with bribes. House Mnemon's bribes had already vanished into her pockets, along with a notable number of the Mnemon refugees who fled towards the Imperial mountain. House Sesus forces who try to investigate what happened to Anfa are killed by ragtag bandits better trained than an Imperial legionary.
House Mnemon
Cultural "Mnemon-Darjilis": reduced to 3 dots by war damage. Under siege and now effectively ringed by shadowlands.
Capital "Geomancy Consulting Fees": Geomancers butchered. Destroyed
Levy "House Subjects": Butchered en-masse. Reduced to 1 dot. 1 dot Mnemon Refugees asset created in Nuwa, with "Starving" and "Hates Cynis" tags.
Capital "Shipyards": Razed by Haslanti Air Pirates. Destroyed.
Capital "Pilgrimage Routes": Pilgrims butchered on the orders of Cynis Tamaz. Destroyed.
Military "Praetorian Guards" - Desperately holding Mnemon-Darjilis and under siege. Reduced to 3 dots, and lost the "Veterans" and "Excellent Equipment" tags having essentially bulked out their ranks with anyone who can hold the walls to avoid total collapse.
Military "Geomantic Regulatory Enforcers" - Butchered to the last man. Destroyed.
Saffron Pilgrim Army - Defeated in battle and shown no quarter. The battle-pilgrims were butchered on orders of Cynis Tamaz. The remnants of the elite core have fallen back to Nuwa, protecting what starving refugees they could find. Destroyed.
Mnemon Vane - Dead by his own hand.
House Cathak
Capital "Dejis Trade Post": building sacked, pilgrims butchered on orders of Cynis Tamaz. Destroyed.
House Charano
Capital "Salt Trading House" - Traders butchered, buildings razed. Destroyed.
House Ferem
Capital "Trade Ties" - Traders butchered, trade destination ruined. Destroyed.
House Cynis
Military "Haro Clan (Wolfman Snowstriders)" - reduced to 2 dots by battle damaged, gained "Bloodthirsty" and "Plunderers" tags
Military "Haslanti Air Pirates" - Gained "Wealthy" tag
Military "34th Imperial Legion" - Reduced to 2 dots from battle damage. Gained "Shaken" tag.
Military "36th Imperial Legion" - Reduced to 3 dots from battle damage. Gained "Dead Inside" and "Bloodthirsty" tags.
Military "Mazi's Men (Beastmasters)" - Gained "Bloodthirsty" tag.
Military "Oko's Chosen (Beastmasters)" - Destroyed
Cynis Tamaz - Loses "Everyone's Favourite Teacher" Tag, gained "The Butcher of Dejis" and "Curse of the Murdered".
Military "Siakal's Own" - Reduced to 3 dots from battle damage. Would have gained "Bloodthirsty" but they had it already.
House Sesus
Military "Kawo Clan (Wolfman Snowstriders)" - reduced to 1 dot by battle damage and attacks by the restless dead.
Military "Oto Clan (Wolfman Snowstriders)" - reduced to 2 dots, deserted Sesus and switching to Bandit faction.
Military "Achi Clan (Wolfman Snowstriders)" - reduced to 2 dots, gained "Mutinous" tag.
Military "Fourth Sesus "Sirroco" Legion" - Reduced to 2 dots by battle damage and attacks by the restless dead. Gained "Horrified" tag.
Military "Second Sesus "Retribution" Legion" - Reduced to 3 dots by attacks by the restless dead.
Patricians
Capital "Marble Quarries" - Workforce butchered. Destroyed
House Petal
Capital "Dejis Foundries" - Workforce butchered, buildings razed. Destroyed
Capital "Navy Donations" - The docks have been destroyed and the navy isn't getting work done here any more. Destroyed
House Ragara
Covert "Friendly Administrators" - Butchered, and the survivors aren't friendly anymore. Destroyed.
A Cenotaph of Rusted Swords
(Written by @God and the Snake with my approval)
In the bowels of Iora, Laughs-at-Calamity labored over a forge cold as ice, shaped steel black as night, and mused on the nature of paradox.
Her Lady's work had been the labor of centuries, every soul on Iora working towards its completion… whether they knew it or not. It had consumed them, driven them, drawn so many of them to Berit in the first place…
And thus it seemed almost laughable that so close to fruition, they could become so addled by petty distractions! Calamity had to stop herself from snorting at the absurdity that after a lifetime of labor so nearly rewarded, she would be forced to even spare a thought towards something so petty.
"Kashkassu." She chuckles, setting her hammer to the side and examining her work: A helm of Ioran steel, though one far too sharply angled for any mortal head. She sets it back atop the anvil, perfectly aligned with the rest of the suit of mail she'd forged.
She slit her palm, took her hammer back up, and reflected. She'd nearly been furious at Berit's command, to be set to something so dreadfully simple.
Now, as she raised her hammer to strike the final blows on her masterpiece, she was almost grateful. She swung her hammer down.
Once. Steel warps, spasms, flows like water from a stream and blood from a wound. Metal becomes flesh, pale and sinuous and undulating under the strain of her blows.
Twice. The sinew splits, a thousand needle-like maws ripping terrible wounds across the twitching body as the gnash with a terrible hunger.
Thrice.
Fou-
A hand of steel and fire caught her wrist. The behemoth rose and rose and rose, far taller then then the armor she'd forged. It looks down at her for a moment… and Laughs-at-Calamity smiles.
"Lucien, I bind thee."
The monster watches her for a moment… and releases her hands. And speaks like a whisper carried on the wind.
"And what would you have the Archon do?"
Calamity's eyes gleam as she gives her orders. She had never realized a distraction could provide such clarity.
-----
"Know that this is not a war of vengeance, but of love!"
Rasira looks down at the sea of steel and silk beneath her. The 2nd Legion had been at parade rest for an hour now, assembled before the great eastern gate of Myion. Next to her, atop battlements inscribed with stone-carved reliefs of the Immaculate Dragons and flying the resplendent banners of House Cathak, a monk with hair like fire roars down her sacrament. The sun had beat down on them all day, hot despite the only recent blossoming of spring. Rasira found comfort in that.
Despite everything, the sun still shone. Only the Realm had stopped.
"When a flock is ripped asunder by the wolves, can the sheep be blamed? No! Only the shepherd, who has so failed in her duties! And can the people of Daoshin, so close to Her Realm's righteous heart, be blamed for being lead astray?"
A throaty roar rose from the legion as they screamed their answer.
"No!"
The monk looks at them all, the army of the righteous… and nods. "No. Such sin lies with the ones meant to guide them! It lies with the blood-drunk Simedor, and their Ragaran masters! It lies with Muq, and their countless blasphemes! And if they will fail in their guidance, it falls upon us to correct their paths."
She turns, gesturing to her companions. Rasira stands tall despite the pit in her stomach. Besides her, three scions of Simedor stand firm before the adulations of the crowd. They have come to fight, to fulfill their duty.
To restore their family's honor.
"Each of you is a day, a dawn, the calendar on which the Isle's future is written!" Beneath the monks feet, the gate begins to groan and open. Rasira roars, fist raised to the sky.
"2nd Legion! Forward! To victory or death!"
As one, the Inferno Legion began to march. Rasira moved quickly to the head of the column, despite the cold knot of worry in her gut. To fight the heathen, the barbarian? That was one thing. Simple enough. But this?
She ruminated, hand on her sword hilt, as the 2nd marched on. Through the gates, across the black-soiled fields of Myion and past the gridwork of the province's fortress-manses.
Onwards, ever onwards, to Brilliant Autumn Shades and Red Sky.
Onwards to war.
----
Simedor was prepared of course. How couldn't they be? The Immaculate Order frothing at the mouth, Cynis and Mnemon knifefighting across half of Creation… war was coming. So it was up to Simedor to move first. So no one was surprised when Matriarch Simedor Toren strode into the governor's palace, splayed himself out across the governor's chair, and hung Simedor's banners from the governor's rooftops. Or when grim southron mercenaries began arriving by the hundreds, jumping the border from Red Sky and sailing down the Gulf of Daana'd in carefully disguised merchant ships.
They do take pause, however, when the Agate Manse begins to glow a sickly red late past dusk. All who live within thirty miles of the place speak of hearing terrible whispers at night and strange lights during the day. And at every hour, they claim to hear a terrible buzzing.
But dread rumors will not stop House Cathak. So when they arrive, they find the borders of Autumn Shades wrapped in dirt and steel! Border forts ringed earthworks, built by sorcerous might and ceaseless labor! Manned by veteran mercenaries, even Cathak Rasira would hesitate to take them by storm!... Or so Simedor claimed.
And they were half right! Rasira did not take them by storm.
When Rasira surveyed the first hillfort, ringed in a catacomb of trenches and overlooking the the main road north-east, she considered for a moment. Then two. Then she called her artillerists to the front, gave a simple order, the 2nd Legion lived to its epithet...
"Burn them out."
...And Rasira's flamecannons sang. The first volley set the fort ablaze, the second the rest of the hill, and all the rest that followed were just for good measure. Within the hour, the 2nd's advance continued apace.
Behind them, they left a still raging inferno and a cinder waste.
----
Honored Matriarch,
We have met the enemy and made her ours. Resistance minimal. I advance.
Cathak Rasira
---
"-the purgation of the Simedor continues apace, Your Eminence, but there is a disquiet in my heart. We have found camps in the forests abandoned and redoubts nestled deep in valleys lie empty. And every step we take we are watched, from distant hilltops and across winding rivers.
The Kashkassu knew of our coming. Among us lies a traitor, of this I am certain."
Excerpt from Sister Changying's reports to the Mouth of Peace.
---
Cathak Cainan has seen fit to minimize our expenses. I can but only return him the same courtesy.
A message from Matriarch Simedor Toren(disputed) to Ragara Golden Orochi
---
House Simedor's reprisal did not come in the form of an army of hardbitten mercenaries. It wasn't in a daring strike by loyal house guards. It was not even the House's loyal sorcerers raining hellfire down on the heads of the encroaching host.
It came in the dead of night, under a waning moon, with the chittering buzz of a thousand wings.
In one moment, the 2nd Legion rested after a long day's march. The legionnaires were exhausted, the air so humid and thick they might as well as swam instead of walked. Most of the army had retired to their tents hours ago…
And in the next, a great insectile swarm fell on the legion like a knife going for a hog's throat.
Hellish wasps crashed through tents and carried soldiers off into the dark above. Legionnaires fought desperately, stumbling out of makeshift barracks and clutching anything they could to fight! But even the finest mortal soldier would struggle against demons on the field, let alone when taken by surprise in the dead of night! They scattered, desperate, gathered in a hundred tiny clumps, bereft the grand battle lines that defined the Realm's legions. It might've been a rout-
If not for Rasira, and the blood of Cathak.
The beloved marshal strode from her pavilion, burning like a second sun. Every flick, every slash, every twitch of her blade was like another dawn that drove back the horde and the darkness. On her lips, a single cry.
"For the Dragons, to war!"
And the wasps fled that terrible, burning light. They vanished back into the inky black of the skies beyond, the moon already swallowed by looming clouds.
None among the 2nd Legion slept that night.
---
A victory? Perhaps. The midnight blow did little more than slow the 2nd Legion down. The exchange might have even been worth it, if it had not been the first of dozens.
Baggage trains were set alight far to Rasira's rear, those towns wise enough to accept the Immaculate's truth punished for their disloyalty to their once masters. Even House Cathak's own territory wasn't safe, farms all along the Myion border burned through night and day.
Within a week, Brilliant Autumn Shades lived up to its name, cast in the flickering red glow of a neverending blaze.
What had been a swift lightning march to restore order devolved into a slog, then a quagmire. Mercenaries to Rasira's front, demons all around her… and to her rear, the Kashkassu.
The guerilla-people ate away at the edges of her army. Patrols vanished in the night, and her own dragonblooded kin were hunted by their strange sword saints. More than once, a scion of Cathak would vanish only for their body to be found scattered across every hill in a valley. A dire warning.
This land is ours, and we will water its grasses with the dragon's blood.
Of all the foes against her, the Kashkassu were perhaps the one that birthed the most dread in her legion.
It was ironic, then, that they themselves were hunted.
---
The phrase 'clandestine guerilla encampment' summoned a certain pathos in Cynis Khatreen's mind. Perhaps a cunningly web of caves bored into a mountain's side, a subterranean fortress concealed from all. Or the ruins of some long forgotten castle, tucked away in Last Breath's hilly moors. The warriors within would be hardened killers, women of stony conviction and merciless bloodthirsty.
What she had instead was a smattering of goatherds' shacks, deep in the forest and filled by a haggard, hunted people.
In halting words, choked by grief and a singular mortal terror, the village headman explained how death had come for the Kashkassu. It had come at the hands of sisters returned from war. It had come nestled in the grasp of lifelong lovers. It had come in the embrace of sires long thought dead.
And always, always, no matter what face he wore, it came at the hands of a pale man with a hundred mouths.
"You have done much for us, child," the headman murmurs, tears disappearing into his beard. "The Empress has been a friend to the living, but what can she do for the dead?"
Khatreen fights the knot in her throat, struggling for an answer…
...But it is Cynis Azhlei who replies. Her sister, eyes gleaming in the moonlit night, smiles. In the darkness she almost seems like something more. A reflection… or perhaps an echo of something far older, and far more hungry.
"For the living? Sekhara will offer a place by her side in the new order to come. And for the dead?"
She laughs, sweet and clear.
"We offer justice."
---
Today, Cathak Rasira had led from the front. A heavy monsoon had grounded Simedor's fliers, and her legion had advanced at a crawl through the deepening muck and mire. They'd caught a column of southern outriders in a valley, penned in a corner between floodwaters and a battle line of fire and steel.
Still, even cornered rats died hard.
She walked among the dead and dying, letting their cries wash over her. A lesser woman might have hid from the weight of her orders, but Rasira was anything but a lesser woman. As her bodyguards gather the corpses of the fallen, she sees one among them twitch and shake. She stoops by the poor soul's side. Were these death spasms, or a surv-
The fallen soldier, clad in the bloodsoaked raiment of Cathak, lunges for Rasira's throat with bared teeth.
The woman decapitates it in one smooth motion, and rises, orders already on her lips.
"Formations!"
Legionnaires recoil, searching for this new foe…
...And burning corpses began to rush out of the vast funeral pyres spread across the once, and the dead at the legion's feet started to rise as one. A terrible moan drowned out the steady splatter of rain.
Terrible rumors from Dajis echoed in Rasira's ears as she rallied to kill these men a second time.
---
This is a tale told a thousand times across the Daoshin Peninsula. Ancient graves burst open, kin long buried crawling free of the dirt. Mass graves, so plentiful after a season of terrible war, begin to churn as the dead crawl atop themselves to hunt the living. The hills stink with the sweet scent of rot as an endless horde of the dead flood the countryside. The crossroads across the province become haunted by terrible hounds, the hateful spectres of the dishonored dead.
The land was already dying. Now, it lies in the throes of death itself. Simedor barricades itself behind stonewalls and steel gates. House Cathak has not the luxury, and it advances through the charred remains of a thousand years' dead. The nightmares of the Underworld made real on the face of Creation.
Terrible. Glorious. And ultimately meaningless.
---
Lucien knows his work is done the moment the earth begins to tremble beneath his feet. He feels a sense of annoyance… and disappointment. His work in this place is far from done, this isle of dullard children playing with their mother's blades still far too full for his liking. But the ties that bind him are powerful, and so he returns to the forge that birthed him. His purpose was fulfilled.
He had been a lovely distraction.
---
The tremors that shook all the Daoshan Peninsula were not the end of all things, as terrified fishmongers and muttering soldiers feared. Far from it.
They were the beginning.
In Myion, farmhands and hunters alike stop in wonder has the forests begin to move. Ancient oaks, twice the age of any mortal living, wrench their roots as they begin to drag their way south.
In Falling Rains, the skies broil as the eternal monsoons rain fire and steam, entire villages consumed in an instant by a scalding mist that covers everything from the Sun Straits to Cypress Mountain.
In Wading Crane Rookery, the coast grinds to a halt as a great pillar of fire cuts the sky in half.
And deep within Brilliant Autumn Shades, in the tallest tower of the Agate Manse, Simedor Toren laughs even as his servants and courtiers race to raise the sputtering wards and find shelter in deep catacombs. How could he not?
The earth shatters and the wind carries it into the sky, the very world itself rebelling against what she's done.
Toren raises a glass to the south.
He drinks in reverence for Iora.
And he bows towards Berit's throne.
- Berit and Cathak join forces to launch a brutal attack on all others who might dream of claiming the Daoshin Peninsula for their own. Legions march and demon lords are unleashed, and both Muq and Simendor are the targets.
- Simendor Toren, under orders from his benefactors in House Ragara, digs in and prepares as best he can. He hires mercenaries, summons demons and bunkers down to weather the coming storm. When war comes, he fights with a madman's bitter determination.
- House Cynis dispatches two of its scions, one living and one dead, to aid Muq and the Kashkassu. This they do by performing a great necromantic ritual, unleashing upon their foes and bystanders a great shambling horde of the undead, tens of thousands strong (mechanically this was eight different Shambling Hordes occult mercenary units, plus ghosts and Kashkassu).
- All of this is context, is prelude. On Iora, Berit completes her grand ritual, and even the first echoes of what she has done are enough to derail all campaigns on the Peninsula. There will be more to come, with a specific report focused around it.
A Brave New World
(Written by @Gargulec with my approval)
The customs officer inspecting Bargash Kie's ship was almost ridiculously jovial and pleasant in his affect, regaling the merchant with hilarious and bawdy stories of the exploits of slender, Tengese men, while her underlings were scouring the ship for any hint of contraband.
"You have to forgive us," she said, between anatomically dubious anecdotes, "but with the current unrest, one may not be too careful. I am sure you are an honest man, but just the other week I have intercepted three crates of firedust hidden inside a shipment of rice!"
Kie nodded, nervously stepping, shifting the considerable weight of his body around. This was all just a hassle - of course he had entertained the possibility of smuggling (who hadn't these days, and besides the monks in Myion were paying), but eventually decided against it. It was too much of a risk, especially in the south, especially among the Ragara.
No, what set him ill at ease was how normal and ordinary it all felt. How peaceful the port seemed. How everything looked just like it always did. How the officer seemed actually invested in explaining to him the fates of Tengese boys, instead of asking him for the news from the Imperial City, or Pangu. Instead of asking him for a missing family member, lost spouse, the fate of an army.
The air tasted of peace.
"You've really ratcheted up the security here," he mouthed. "It's almost like-"
"The Bank prizes itself on the safety of its citizens," she cut in before he could mention the war, a broad, beaming smile gracing her round face.
"Wait," Kie blinked, turning as if stung. "Its citizens?"
***
Contrary to what many would later go on to claim, the Realm did not end amidst the massacres of Dejis and Chanos, it wasn't undone by cataclysms in Scarlet. Those events, momentous as they were, made for good headstones, and symbols. But by the time they happened, the Realm was already dissolved.
It came apart during rainy, warm days of spring, in a way far less spectacular and coordinated, but no less definite.
For House Ragara, it was a matter of establishing as a political fact what was already a practical reality. In a ceremony that was perversely modest and restrained in pomp and festivities, Ragara Tsaia announced independence and sovereignty. The newly formed state had an official name, very flowery and inspiring, that would end up gracing only official documents and the lips of public servants. It had another name, occult and esoteric, which was only known to those behind those servants, and no one else. And for everyone else, it was just the Bank.
The independence was, as most things Ragara, a transaction. An offer for the populace to trade away its attachments to the Realm, to their neighbours, to the Immaculates in the Palace Sublime, and receive in return safety, prosperity and welfare. The fact that it was naked bribery helped to conceal the fact that, as most things Ragara, it was also a profane rite of transmuting rivers of jade into pillars of power.
There had been, of course, some dissent. Much to the surprise of the dissenters themselves, eager to become martyrs to the cause, no persecution followed. They were allowed to speak against the Bank, to preach orthodox Immaculate dogma, to maintain that the safety of an individual is too high of a price to pay for the soul of a nation.
And then, the news of Dejis hit, and there was no more dissent.
***
The Tepet soldiers, still carrying the air of the North about them, moved into the bureaus of the Trigram Society followed by a throng of monks. Knowing what to look for, they rushed straight to the great vaulted cellars, where the doors to Cecelyne shone bronze and silver. They did not - as Sage Kon had expected them to - smash them into pieces. Instead, they moved to disassemble them, pack them together with everything else of value that the Society housed, and passed the building back to the Immaculates for "purification".
When sage Nia tried to argue; she was shut down by some Tepet officer, barking at her in a whip-sharp tongue of the North, and then erupting in barbarous laughter. Those women were no longer of the Realm, Kon realized. The ice had gotten into their veins, and customs.
A giant of a soldier, wearing a fur-lined cloak of Medoan make, slapped Kon on the back. He jumped up, terrified by the gesture, and the Tepet roared in laughter, as if amused by some practical joke. But unlike with Nia, there was no malice to this burst, just good, barbarian humour. Barbarian humour they would all have to live under, now. He turned away, and heard the soldier speak, in an erudite's High Realm.
"You know I was born not far from here?"
***
Unlike the Ragara, the Tepet made no formal declaration of independence. All they did was to assert it, in a very direct manner. The heart of their family had moved from the Isle, that was true, but they were not ready, or in fact willing, to truly sever themselves from their old ancestral homes.
For any other family, or for any other state, it would be perhap impossible to maintain both land-locked enclaves lost within the chaos of the fallen Realm, and its own federation in the ice-locked North. But the Tepet valued their past as much as they valued their future. And though the future of the twinned family, of the Isle, and of the North, looked to be filled with complications and challenges, it was also a future they were ready to face.
And so was born the Tepet's Melaist, half-barbarian dominion, as impossible and as real as the victory over the Bull of the North had been.
***
General Duru Mazi, of the 21st Imperial Legion, was not called "the Unbending" without a reason. When the Nellens representative arrived, along with the Nellens' bribe, she felt disgusted enough by that little merchant of contemptible breeding (it was very liberating to not have to hide this sort of disdain anymore) to seriously consider sending her head back home in a burlap sack.
But then, she had a chance to consider her words, and realized something disturbing, and that something was that she wasn't just tempted, but that there was also a chance for something greater to come out of the despicable family of patricians. Something that even the famed Mnemon seemed unable to accomplish.
Hadn't it been for the news from the Pasiap's Stair, the idea wouldn't have even crossed her mind. But with the Outcaste school dissolved, without the Imperial ministries to offer lost eggs the choice of a razor, or a coin, it was very difficult for Mazi to even imagine a return to the Realm as it used to be. And in the absence of the Realm, in the absence of an Empress, there was only one institution left for her to be loyal to.
The Realm was falling, but the Immaculate Order had to survive. And if it was the Nellens that were going to facilitate it, so be it.
She composed a short letter to the Palace Sublime, and summoned the Nellens envoy again.
***
It was a bit ironic, but entirely unsurprising, that of all the Great Houses it was the disreputable Nellens that clung to the idea of maintaining the Realm the most, even if in the name only. While the independence of Houses Ragara and Tepet was just a matter of asserted sovereignty, what the Nellens did was to become in fact a state in their own all through the name of maintaining the imperial order and preserving the institutions of the Realm.
Of course, in the absence of the Relam's legions, the peace-keeping was done by Threshold mercenaries, peasant militias and flocks of summoned spirits. Of course, with the heartlands of the Realm going up in smoke, provisional ministries had to be assembled in Sdoia and Turu. Of course, it was all a farce.
But the line between a farce and a victory is never as easily marked as the mighty believe, and House Nellens, of all the families, knew how to transverse it best. The appeals to the imperial order and the Perfected Hierarchy did not fall on deaf ears.
The Immaculate Order, or rather the part of it housed in Incas, and around the Palace Sublime, blessed the rump Realm formed by the Nellens - formed, to add, without a plan and mostly through sheer stubbornness and refusal to accept the complete collapse of the old imperial order - and chose to support it, and urged those who still followed its example to follow suit. Of course, until the time Imperial sovereignty could be restored and a proper heir found. It was not, as the monks claimed, and the Nellens concurred, permanent. Merely provisional.
The foundations for the halls of the Incas Deliberative had been laid before the year was properly over.
- House Ragara has laid claim to Kizuna, Dhorash, Halcyon, Dragonswrath and Radimiel's Seat, in all cases building on groundwork laid years in advance, and effectively seceded from the wider Realm (They're certainly paying no taxes or tribute to the empty throne). The lands of their new empire are peaceful and prosperous, well protected and effectively governed. What horror, what atrocity, what costs are necessary to keep this beautiful peace intact... well. Such things have always been hidden from view. And if you can't see them, do they really exist?
- House Tepet have strengthened their hold over Lord's Crossing and Damson, while laying claim to Serpentine. In the eyes of most they are no longer truly of the Realm, though how many care and what can be done about it is another question. In Damson tensions have spiked with Nellens after a forcible closing of the Trigram Society.
- Nellens has laid claim to Juche and Sdoia, deploying mercenaries and bound spirits to many surrounding lands to maintain order in the name of the Realm and the Empress. The Realm doesn't really exist anymore, but the 21st Legion and the Immaculate Order have joined with Nellens to preserve what can be preserved, to salvage what can be salvaged, maintaining loyalty to the idea of the True Realm if not the factual remnants of it. Temporarily, of course.
- Pasiap's Stair has dissolved. Absent imperial funding or support, the outcaste students and their instructors have taken offers from Ragara, Tepet, V'Neef and more, choosing to chase prestige and profit and a future rather than staying on their spartan mountain fortress-school. Similar fates are rapidly befalling all remaining Imperial bodies, and without the continuity of Imperial institution, the Realm as it once existed is effectively dead. Now only the idea persists, and even that seems to be fading.
Ragara Turu loved her work. There were few who were her equal, a bare handful who exceeded her in ability, and none who approached the business of empire with even half as much honest enthusiasm. Where others had despaired at the collapse of the Realm, given in to the temptations of drink and hard drugs to numb the pain of seeing an empire's worth of wealth slipping between their fingers, she had rejoiced at the opportunity. This was a new age, an age for bold visionaries and daring entrepreneurs, and she would rather lose all the jade beneath Mount Meru than see it pass her by unclaimed.
Her dearest uncle, always so wise, always so insightful, had sent her south two years before. South to the deserts and their precious oasis, to the firedust mines and the sugarcane plantations, to the supine natives and warlike princes with a simple mandate - secure what House Ragara had and expand what it might claim, and let no scruple or hesitation cost them the seeds of tomorrow's victory. She had revelled in her task, managing the House's growing empire with verve and bloody enthusiasm, tracking the flow of jade and silver and slaughtered cattle on ledgers that all but dripped with blood, and it was in large parts due to her efforts that the House's fortunes had only grown and grown with the passing of the seasons.
So when the missive came, accompanied by hard-faced sorcerers and the smiling embrace of her beloved father, she was already prepared. Half a dozen hypothetical stratagems were already drawn up, each appended with myriad options and appendices to be chosen or discarded in line with the scope of resources at her command, and though she needed no external validation to know she was good at what she did… it was still nice to see the pride in Banoba's eyes. As a little girl she had dreamed of being given an army and a small mountain of jade and leave to employ either in the way she preferred, so to be presented with such and more alongside a goal bold and audacious enough to take the breath away was truly a day worth savouring. Not for long, of course, not with the burdens of time and opportunity weighing heavily on the mind, not with the external limitations of her best asset's availability, but time enough even so. Time to smile, to laugh, to raise a glass and toast her father and the vision of a bold new age for all.
Time enough to celebrate the coming death that would score her name in the ledgers of history forevermore.
-/-
It had taken years before V'Neef Noma had grown used to being addressed by her family name. In truth she still didn't feel entirely at home in dynastic society, her rough manners and bloodstained past far better suited to the butcher's yard than the salon, but in fairness the unease was hardly one way. Her Matriarch had hardly seemed to know what to do with such a fearsome admiral at her command, her stomach unsuited for the kind of orders Noma knew best how to execute, but if there was one thing to be said for the state of the times it was how swiftly even the softest became willing to use more extreme means.
At last, V'Neef had given the order to enter the war directly, given Noma the latitude and authority to propose and execute plans. Gem's defiance had been the final straw, a sign that decisive action was required lest the Realm's holdings (and the merchant fleet's profits) slip from grasp entirely, and once the Empress' youngest daughter had committed to that much it was easy to talk her into a broader campaign of punishment against all the rebel powers of the south. The Ragarans, so fat and happy, the Perfect of Paragon so smug… Noma was to humble them all, and in the process tilt the war in the south back towards the Concordat's gain.
Even then, there were restrictions. She'd proposed travelling south for negotiations with the Deyha, but her matriarch had baulked at dealing with slavers while pursuing abolition herself. The idea of turning pirates and reavers towards Ragara's holdings on Radimel's Seat had been floated, only to be denied for reasons of cost and public image. Eventually she'd managed to secure enough coin for a mixed force of infantry and a sizable light cavalry screen, working through the Valetari to find someone willing to take her payment and reliable enough to do the job, and together they'd set off for the south together. Chiascuro was to be avoided, the negotiations with Saloy Hin supposedly at too delicate a stage to risk compromise by the sudden appearance of armed soldiers, so she'd travelled down the coast and made landfall at Harborhead instead.
Then they marched inland, to the lands of House Ragara and war.
-/-
The lands of House Ledaal were renowned throughout Creation for their stoic defenders, their high degree of public order, and for the simmering level of discontent held just below the surface. Their dynastic lords cared not one whit for the latter, content to be feared and respected and obeyed rather than loved, for they saw their satrapies as staging areas and logistical bases rather than dominions in the truest sense. They played host to the enclaves and forward bases necessary for the effective operation of the Shadow Crusade, and so long as the jade was on time and the supplies readily available, it mattered little to Ledaal what their subjects thought of them.
Perhaps, if they had been warmer or more kindly lords, the people might have warned them. Might have passed on news of tall men and women with sun-bronzed skin and golden yellow eyes filtering into towns and villages with the latest trade caravan. Might have done something to help, when the were-lions closed in around their targets and slipped their skins on the first ring of the noonday bell.
Ledaal's security had always been based in secrecy, the location and nature of its frontier caches and redoubts a closely guarded secret, but there would always be people who had to know. And among those people there would always be those who spent too freely, desired too much, dreamed too readily. House Ragara was always willing to meet such profligates on their own terms, providing funds and contacts and resources all in exchange for the most generous of terms. And now, after years or decades carefully tracking their books and mustering their assets in the frigid House Ledaal, they called in their markers all at once. Intelligence, stolen communiques, sabotaged warning systems… the cost was high, every Ragara agent in the House either burned or rapidly evacuated, but as far as their paymasters were concerned victory more than justified the expense.
And victory there was, as all across the south Ledaal safehouses were raided and their territories seized by strike teams of god-blessed lionfolk, surprised defenders torn limb from limb in explosions of sudden violence. Ledaal satraps were roused from their beds just in time to be taken hostage, and Ledaal vassals came to deliver tribute just in time to find Ragaran masters standing ready to receive it with a smile.
Clean, efficient, businesslike, with nine in ten parts of the blood spilled coming from the House's enemies. Just how Ragara Turu liked it.
-/-
Noma's first glimpse of the enemy came early, scarcely a few weeks into her campaign, when the scouts brought back word that a column of troops flying Ragaran colours was marching westward to meet up with a greater force. She'd known that her foes were gathering their forces to strike back at her - they'd have been fools not to, considering the half dozen towns and mining complexes seized and claimed in the name of House V'Neef at her back - but to chance upon one of those mustering elements isolated and alone was a gift from the dragons themselves. Wasting no time, she swung herself into the saddle and set off with all the light cavalry she'd been able to muster, determined to scatter or at least bleed the Ragaran troops before they could meet up with their main body.
Unfortunately, her mercenaries were not legionnaires, nor were they formal auxiliaries with the necessary training and tradition to wield unified cavalry tactics to best advantage. They were thugs and bullies, roaming bands of slave-catchers pressed into service as scouts and outriders, and though their initial reaving attacks went well they lacked the will or weight to press the advantage. Ragara's soldiers were true professionals, well drilled and well supplied, and under the barked orders of their Dragonblooded liaison they left their dead for the sands and drew back into a hard defensive formation, flamewands protruding in all directions.
Even that might have been a victory, given time, but even as Noma encircled the trapped Ragarans and sent orders for her trailing infantry to accelerate their pace she found herself outmaneuvered. Word from her outriders came in of the great bulk of the Ragaran host already marching to the relief of their embattled comrades, having clearly set off before she had ever begun the attack, and with bitterness in her heart the famed admiral pulled her outriders back to rejoin the column. This would be an infantry battle, it seemed - soldier against soldier, firewand against firewand, until the better general triumphed. So be it - she had faith in her skills and experience, in her ability to inspire men with words and a hand on the purse strings. Against any normal commander she would have been fully justified in being confident, would have been almost assured of victory.
Against Octavian the Living Tower, Breaker of Mountains and Lord of Hell, it was woefully insufficient.
To her credit, V'Neef Noma held her troops together in the face of the unholy juggernaut, keeping their courage intact even beneath the demon lord's baleful eye. She matched wits with the beast across a broad stretch of lifeless desert, line troops advancing and falling back in careful sequence as the two sides exchanged volleys of fire and probing attacks, her light cavalry harassing Ragara's flanks and then veering off before Octavian could smite them. She fought well, but in the end such a battle was only ever going to end one way, and when a courier from the foe arrived with offers of surrender she bowed her head to the inevitable and accepted.
Somewhat to her surprise, the terms were honoured. Her troops were escorted to the nearest city and released unharmed, the civilians in the towns she had conquered were returned to the Ragaran fold with a nod and an understanding smile, and she herself was provided all courtesy and luxury due to one of her station as an honored hostage of Ragara Banoba and his daughter. A prisoner, certainly, but still a dynast, still a child of the dragons, kept close at hand and treated well as their grand host continued on its campaign. Allowed to witness what happened to those who defied House Ragara, who thought they could play word games and double dealing while supporting those that declared themselves the Bank's mortal enemies.
She was there when Octavian broke the fortress-spires of House Cathak's firedust mines. She was a guest at the Despot's court as Ragara negotiated new terms with Gem under the bloody smiles of lionfolk warriors. She watched as rebels in the Lap were systematically slaughtered, their lands transferred to other, more pliable subjects. She watched it all, and by the time it was done and the notice for her ransom had been sent back home, she thought she understood the truth at last. This wasn't about the Realm anymore, about grudges and rivalries and competing interests. This was about Ragara, no longer a House but a sovereign power, an empire in their own right.
This was the dawn of a new age, and those who were fated to see it made.
- House Ragara has launched a massive military campaign throughout the southern threshold, seizing by force and guile virtually all satrapies and their tribute save those which belong to House Tepet. These lands have been incorporated into their new sovereign realm, alongside their territory on the Blessed Isle.
- An effort by House V'Neef to invade Ragara's southern provinces with mercenaries was defeated in battle by mercenaries and soldiers in the service of House Ragara, including the Demon Lord Octavian the Living Tower. V'Neef Noma was captured and taken hostage during this campaign. Defense forces maintained by Houses Ledaal and Cathak in the region were similarly overcome, often in remarkably one-sided battles.
- In general, Ragara went out of their way to offer surrenders, honour truces and take captives rather than corpses. Messages have been sent to the courts of all the relevant Houses, offering to ransom their scions for negotiable prices.
Apotheosis/A Song of Dragons
(Written by @Crilltic with my approval)
They had not know what they were hunting.
Jadeite Blackstream slumped against a fallen log, and she knew she was dying. She could feel it in her broken limbs, and the way the darkness pulled at the edges of her vision. Her life-blood leaking out onto the forest floor. She was the last one left now. All around her she could see the bodies of those she had led in their final stand, laying still in the moonlight.
A dainty peel of laughter split the silence of the moonlit night, a beautiful tinkling sound, that sent a shiver of fear through Jadeite's soul.
A slight figure strolled through the clearing, fiery red hair glistening in the pale light. She looked like little more than a peasant girl on the cusp of womanhood, with her tanned skin and red hair she could have passed for a villager anywhere on the Isles.
It was only the backwards fingers and their black tips, that reached down so gently to caress Jadeite's face, that gave away her true identity. She can feel the claws on her face, the wet warmth of freshly-spilled blood trickling down as they sliced through her cheek. At her feet rolled a tide of fog, cling to the underbrush like a cancer as it swirled over her comrades remains, the flickering eddies and shadows eating away at their final resting place.
"Why hello there little dragon" said the Queen of Monsters, "I'm surprised to see one of you lived through that."
Jadeite did her best to spit in the thing's eye, but only succeeded in sending more blood spilling from her mouth.
"I want you to know it really is nothing personal. I'm a fan, truly I am, of what that hateful snake is attempting today. Such ambition, such artistry. To play with such forces, that she was never capable of understanding, it nearly makes me giddy to think about the possibilities. Of what the world would be like if she were to succeed" Raksi tittered, releasing her hold on Jadeites head and standing up, "But my duty calls for blood to spill on this day, and I could not allow distractions."
Jadeite strained against her own broken body, to attack the monster that had slaughtered her comrades, but all she could do was force a sentence past her blood-stained teeth, "Just...kill me...Anathema."
"Oh but where is the fun in that?" Said Raksi, with a slight pout that looked almost child-like on her face, "It'd be a shame for you to miss the grand finale to all this, and I require a certain degree of help to bring about what is to come."
"Rot in hell" Jadeite choked out, but she could do nothing to prevent Raksi's advance, nor defend herself as the Anathema raised a hand cloaked in black flame and plunged it into her chest. For a fraction of a second, she felt an impossible chill spread through her body and saw a mouthful of fangs spread far too wide, and then she knew no more.
---
Have you ever been to the edge of reality? The borderline where the control of the twin tyrants, time and casuality, start to fray at the seams. Where you can look out upon the roiling sea of possibility that exists on our shores and see from whence we came. To see the fundamental forces that birthed our souls, where we were created, and where we will return.
Our world is older than can possibly be imagined. It is older than time itself, for Time was the first hammer used to break the inchoate chaos of our world upon the altar of the possible. More would follow after that, but in all of us exists the echo of that chaos, the leftover seed of everything that came before. For what is a soul but a collection of possibilities that define the person. The imprint of every choice they have made and every act they will do. That Soul, that Essence, exists in all of us.
Exists in everything.
What the snake seeks is a self-sustaining cycle. To boot-strap divinity from the bones of this world. To use the twin tyrants' chains as a springboard to accomplish her goal.
There is a lesson here. Essence is the raw seed of possibility. It yearns to be something, to create, to do, to act.
One little push in the right direction is all you need. To make the impossible real.
---
Cathak Nala knew when she was dreaming. It was the only time she could feel anything at all. Everything in her life had begun to dissolve around her, memories of days passing by bleeding into one another and evoking nothing. Every waking moment descending into a mechanical routine, from which she could never seem to rouse herself to anything but cold detachment. Every day was yet another cycle. Passing by the stone-faced guards that stood outside her villa. Reading reports of yet more fighting against the forces of the Anathema. Meeting with the ashen-faced tea merchant and his daughters that brewed her afternoon tea. Even her favorite park in Myion, where the children would play in the sun, failed to stir the remnants of her spirit. She could no longer recall the faces of those she met, or even anyone she knew. All had been sacrificed to the dream.
She knew she was dreaming because it felt real.
Even in her waking moments, she could feel it calling her, could feel it underneath her skin. She wore long sleeves, her arms wrapped tight in bloody bandages to hide the missing strips of flesh her nails had carved away in desperation. She could feel the hidden bits of her soul there, sliding just beneath her skin, as the sibilant call of the dream coursed in her blood.
The feeling of standing just shy of something endless and timeless followed her like a spectre, the crash of the waves like a massive heartbeat reverberating in her chest. The pale blue of a clear sky stretching out into infinity before her. It spoke to her in something greater than mere words, the weight of something more primordial moving through the world, echoed through her mind. Echoed through every soul in Daoshin.
When she awoke, she knew she was still dreaming, because the world felt real. She knew she was awake, because the world was real. Real at last. The sun burned overhead, burned so hot all other possibilities burned away beneath its light, ushering in a cloudless sky so blue there was no horizon between and the azure abyss that stretched out beyond Daoshin's shores. She passed by the stone statues that stood their eternal vigil at the entrance to her home, forever given over to their duty, and she could feel the call deep in her bones.
The streets of Myion were cracked, torn apart by the great roots, just as it always had been since forever and now. As she walked familiar streets, an ashen dervish blocked her path, and several smaller ones followed behind it. It turned to face her, its body billowing in a cloud as it turned, and its eyes were sputtering embers. It opened its mouth to speak, and its scream was the sound of a roaring flame. Nala merely bowed her head, and it moved to let her pass. She could feel liquid on her face, and when she brushed her hand across her horns she found them covered in blood and scraps of skin.
Then she was whole again, and she continued.
As she approached the epicenter of the dream, she could see her goal in the distance the world-tree spiraling upwards into infinity, and she ventured further into the forest. She could feel the call of her mistress in every footstep she took. Every now and then she would come upon one of its children, elfin faces carved into the bark of the forest trees. Black eyes forever weeping blood-red sap in long streaks. She reached out a claw and pressed it to the child, wood and bark parting easily before her, and when she withdrew her arm she could see her scales were painted red and new life flowed in her veins. The siren call of her mistress echoing in her soul as she spread her wings anew.
The World Tree grew ever higher.
Daoshin woke anew, now and forever.
- The Daoshin Peninsula is gone.
- Seeking ascension, Berit performed a grand ritual on the island of Iora, making use of devices and the blood of ancient monsters and ritual tools years in the making. Her intention was suicide, her goal apotheosis - by tearing her soul from her body and infusing it into the dragon lines, she would become Daoshin in a literal sense, returning as a draconic embodiment of the land, a divine spirit-avatar overflowing with elemental essence.
- In this, she succeeded. Hail Berit, Lady of Daoshin, Greater Elemental Dragon. Hail Berit, Soul of the World Tree.
- Raksi, Queen of Fangs, interfered. The preparation was too careful, the defences too strong, so she did not seek to sabotage the ritual directly. Instead she enhanced it, augmenting it with ancient knowledge and her own protean spirit. The ritual succeeded, and from every manse and demense the excess energy spilled out to consume Daoshin whole.
- Daoshin is an elemental wilderness now, a monument to primeval glory. The trees are the height of skyscrapers, the fires burn volcanic without source or end, the seas descend into an endless oceanic abyss. All mortal life on the peninsula has been transformed - men becoming granite statues, birds becoming gusts of coherent wind, livestock rising up as monsters out of legend.
- All who lived on the peninsula with even a scrap of the dragon's blood, exalted or mortal, have seen their ancestry come to the fore. They are dragons in truth now, ascended spirits of the material world, confused and disorientated by their transformation but with minds and memories intact. Stronger than ever before, bound together into a grand elemental court under their Dark Sovereign, She Who Was Once Berit.
- The Realm is dying, but Creation yet lives. A New Age is dawning. Embrace it.
A Dream Worth Fighting For
(Written by @Gargulec with my approval)
When the end comes, V'Neef is entertaining Crown Marshal Amon Hisani in the opulent chambers of one of her manses in Eagle's Landing. There is music, fine delicacies from the Threshold, a sampling of recent vintages of V'Neef's beloved vineyards, there is the bright summer sun shining through great windows opening on the serene hills and forests of the Eagle prefecture. Amidst all that dazzling comfort, one could close their eyes and for a moment forget the war, the butchery in Dejis, the collapse of the Realm as it used to be. And many do, in fact; although the salon was meant to win the Crown Marshal to the side of the Marble Concordat, in practice it comes off as a wake for a world now obviously ended. Whenever the conversation turns to politics, it turns sour, and dies. But then, a new course is served, a new story of the exotic beauties of far directions told, and a measure of peace restored, if only for one final salon.
But the end comes, as everyone knew it would. Even as the salon refuses to end, continuing into the small hours of the morning in the fear of what was to happen once the courtiers and soldiers finally parted, the end still comes.
"My lady," a terrified soldier shouts, running between the drowsy socialites and drunken officers, "the harbour is burning!"
***
For House Peleps, the strike was only partially a matter of political interests, although those couldn't be discounted. But it was also setting the record straight. The old family of sailors and admirals had never, would never suffer a rival. And, with their honour badly besmirched in the years of the war, tarnished by painful losses to the Lintha, and with the rank insanity of the old Rightfully Guided Admiralty Board, it was perhaps more important to remind Creation what the name Peleps used to mean, even more than to secure naval supremacy.
But, in truth, the plan drawn up by Peleps Lai was going to see to both.
Take everything, was her command to her captains. What you can't take, destroy.
***
From the great windows of her manse, V'Neef watches her future burn. The Peleps master-stroke was executed flawlessly; the bitter irony is that it didn't even have to be. The harbour was poorly defended, anyway, and the Merchant Fleet caught mostly at anchor. At the best of their readiness, her sailors might have fought a heroic, but doomed struggle against the combined might of Peleps' fleets. But they are not at their best.
Flames rise up from the sea, burning so bright that it seems to her as if there was a desert sun hidden beneath the waves and now revealed, a white pyre into which the fortune and fate of House V'Neef is to go. She opens the window, and allows the smell of smoke and disaster to sweep into the opulent chambers that for too long had maintained an illusion of peace.
"My lady," the soldier continues, "the Peleps are making a landing. We need to get you to safety."
Behind her, Amon Hisani watches, intently. For the first time, she sees in his eyes a kind of curiosity, a curiosity she finally starts to understand.
The incandescent sea ahead of her is only evidence of failure. She had never wanted a war, never wanted for more power, more land, more respect. Unlike all of her sisters, all of her peer matriarchs, she had her eyes set on life, not glory. On vineyards yet to plant, songs yet to hear, on the serenity to find. Perhaps it was her fault, then, that she was not ambitious enough, not vicious enough, that where everyone seemed to look only for more, she could settle for better instead.
And perhaps that was why of all of her sisters, and peers, her mother loved her best. Because she was nothing like her. And perhaps it was her mistake that she did, perhaps-
"No," V'Neef whispered to herself, her voice lost in the roar of the end that came for her. Something cracks; her youth finally ends. "This is not weakness."
"My lady!" the soldier reaches for her shoulder. She bats her hand away.
"Fetch me my sword," she says in a voice that surprises her with how calm it is, "fetch me my bow. Crown Marshal?"
Amon Hisani, a man of few words and many scars, takes a measure of her one more time, and sees what changed. He comes to the opened window, palm extended, and throws into the night sky a burning sign; his soldiers see it, and respond.
***
The battle for the harbour is as vicious as it is short. The Peleps marines sweep through the meagre guard, rout it, and set themselves to take proper hold of what was supposed to belong to their family anyway.
But they do not get to. The Tsunami Legion sweeps into them, V'Neef herself at the frontlines, shrouded in the fury of summer. They clash; greet deeds are accomplished in the span of minutes, the stars and the fire bearing witness.
The resistance is enough. The Peleps have already accomplished enough; they do not have to bleed for more. The call to retreat is sounded; they withdraw through the fiery sea, and the graveyard of ships.
But, after a fashion, Eagle Landing is saved, even if the Merchant Fleet couldn't be.
***
Her ships burn slowly, like lanterns floating downstream for hours, before finally sinking. She watches them in silence, from the edge of her harbour; she no longer smells smoke, but only the summer flowers of her anima.
She is, perversely, at peace. The end has come, and she emerged on the other side.
"You will pledge allegiance to me, tomorrow," she addresses the gaunt Crown Marshal towering above her. She sounds like herself, even if she sounds nothing like herself.
"And why would I?" he asks, but the question is not hostile, merely curious.
"Because we've shed blood together. Because I have nowhere else to go, so I will stay here. Because if I want my vineyards to grow, I must fight for them. Because this is the end of what you have served, and I can offer you something better."
"Better?" there is an incredulous edge to his words, and yet he remains intrigued.
"I couldn't build peace for our Realm," she admits, with great regret, but no more self-hatred. "But I will build it here, on those ashes. Or I will be destroyed. Which would you rather see?"
There is no answer. The end has come, and passed.
- House Peleps launches a devastating raid on the city of Eagle's Launch. A considerable portion of House V'Neef's merchant fleet is caught at anchor and burned, and the port facilities themselves are looted and savaged, making future maritime operations considerably more difficult.
- Crown Marshal Amon Hisani, known as "The Silent", was in the area to meet with V'Neef and hear her offer for the future. The two fought together against the attack and drove it back, forging a lasting bond. The western Legions are now withdrawing to the Isle, swearing allegiance to House V'Neef and the Marble Concordat.
- House V'Neef's dream of a Realm preserved is gone, ruined by treachery and bloodshed. They have a new dream now, of a new and better world grown in the bloodstained ashes of the old. Perhaps it will succeed. Perhaps it will fail. Either way, it is a dream worth fighting for.
Self-Made Man
(Written by @etranger01 with my approval)
The tension in the waiting room was palpable. The palatial antechamber was emblazoned in House Ledaal's markings, and there were several red-clad soldiers present covering up the House mon and other relevant symbols. They, at least, seemed immune to the thick fog of anxiety and concern that had descended upon the room.
That anxiety was emanating not from one Dragon-Blood, but from nearly a half-dozen of them. Along one wall, the representative of House V'neef had decided to seek out the Cathak ambassador as a source of potential reinforcements, even though the two had arrived on entirely separate missions. Conversely, the Incarnadine Empress' delegation included members of both House Cynis and House Ragara, operating entirely in accord, and their flat-eyed stares at the Concordat were just as unnerving as the tangible heat haze of their opposite numbers' zealous fury.
Stuck in the middle of all of this was a young officer from House Peleps, who tried to affect nonchalance in keeping with his House's public image, but he had also made mental note of the room's several exits and the sturdiest piece of furniture that might provide cover. Dying in glorious batle was one thing, but who wanted to go down in the Battle of the Waiting Room?
After what seemed like forever, the five Terrestrials were ushered into the grand chamber beyond and seated in a semi-circle around the dais. Sitting on the throne-like chair atop the dais was a vigorous, highly attractive individual dressed in Southernized Realm uniform; the chair itself was covered in a red cloth to obscure its Ledaal markings from view. He regarded each House ambassador solemnly and with all due courtesy, and waited for them to sit before speaking.
"Greetings, august delegates of the Great Houses. I, Saloy Hin, custodian of Arjuf, am pleased to receive you. Though the many problems and issues plaguing this Dominion have taken much of my time, I could hardly delay expressing my gratitude any further. On behalf of myself, my legions, and the grateful people of the Arjuf Dominion, I thank you for your timely aid."
The representatives, having been kept waiting for at least a week before General Hin had deigned to receive them, did not voice the various acerbic thoughts flittering through their minds. Instead, they kept half their attention on him and half their attention on their counterparts.
"I understand that there are those who are desirous that this Dominion and its custodial legions take any number of actions beyond its borders. Indeed, the great strife engulfing the Blessed Isle is one of our foremost concerns. However, at this time, we are too consumed with the many unresolved problems left behind by Arjuf's former steward to even contemplate such actions."
While it took a variable amount of time for each delegation to have the realization that Saloy Hin had been paid not just by their own party, but by all the others as well, at this point it had dawned on even the most obtuse of the representatives. That he reposed in them exactly zero gratitude for this was, perhaps, to be expected.
"Now, with that said, I hope that each and every one of you will be present when I formally proclaim my mandate as matriarch of House Saloy. I intend to take several consorts, and your candidates will of course receive the utmost priority in my consideration."
A faint flicker of hope flashed through the representatives. Not an alliance, perhaps, but influence? Maybe? Please let there be something good to report back home.
"Now, come, there is to be a formal banquet in your honor. Let us proceed there at once."
Well, the Peleps officer reflected, at least there'll be free food.
- Saloy Hin has, together with his legions and the backing of quite literally every side and faction in the ongoing civil war, invaded the Dominion of Arjuf and proclaimed himself its "custodian". House Ledaal's forces were largely turned elsewhere at the time, and the invasion went off very smoothly.
- Which is to say, Saloy Hin managed to get bribed by three separate people to do something he was thinking about doing anyway.
- The self-titled Matriarch of House Saloy came into the possession of a number of hostages during his takeover, most principally the remaining staff and students at the House of Bells. These, he has made a point of returning to their families with only the most modest of ransoms.
- Indications thus far appear to be that Saloy Hin intends to maintain friendly relationships with all sides in the war and all successor states of the Realm. To that end he has entered marriage and consort negotiations with more or less everyone, and has committed no troops or military support outside of Arjuf's borders despite several very appealing offers.
- With their homeland captured and their foreign satrapies ravaged by repeated raids, invasions and 'security operations' for years on end, House Ledaal is reduced to a shadow of its former self. Remnants of the Shadow Crusade still cling on in far flung outposts and hidden redoubts, but they have suffered too much at the hands of too many to remain a cohesive or unified force going into this bold new age.
Turn Four - From the Flake of Snow, an Avalanche
(Written by @Wade Garrett with my approval)
A storm has come upon the North.
The thunder of its passing is the drumming of hooves, riders in their thousands, more than any Legion of the Realm has ever numbered in its ranks. Its lightning bolts are the killing flashes reflected from vicious polearms and massive single edged hacking swords, weapons just as capable of carving apart the dead as they are at slaying the living.
House Tepet rides to war, and it rides in force. They are the North, and the North is theirs. Such are the words of Matriarch Marek, sister of the Honored Tepet Vergus, whose deeds and death are recounted by the Medoan Dirgespeakers in the night when the fires burn low, daughter and granddaughter and great grand daughter of many Tepets who are honored in such a way. And so it will be.
So they sing their slaying songs and make their oaths to Mela Who Watches From On High, and they go forth.
None can gainsay them. None will even try. House Sesus is gone, their braggadocio and swagger chilled by the Northern frost, their flame snuffed out by the cold winds. And if any of their one time subjects are less than pleased by these events, if they preferred the master they knew, the master that for all its caprices and shadowplay was familiar, had been master of their mothers and grandmothers, they have the good sense to keep such sentiments to themselves, the good sense to bow their heads and offer up thanks to Mela and the Honored Ancestors for their deliverance from the swaggering scions of the Realm.
General Ledaal Moran is cold and starving, the leather cords around her wrists gnawing into her flesh like living, hungry things as the wind sets her body swaying again. She could end this. Could bring this torment to a halt, but for what purpose? What else is there for her, in this new Creation she has been cast into? The House that nurtured her is gone, torn apart by ravenous, rapacious mouths. The Empress she swore to serve, the Realm she swore to defend? Gone and gone. This is all there is, this struggle against hunger and thirst and the cold, the lashing and gashing of the icy air, knowing that she only needs to speak and bringing it to an end and biting her lips against the urge to do so, shaking her head in refusal, in negation, swallowing her screams, keeping them locked behind her teeth.
She only screams only when strong arms take hold of her and deft fingers begin to unfasten the cords, a rasping croak from a throat too dry to form words, shaking her head furiously, trying to tell them she doesn't submit, that she isn't giving in, that she can endure, and then there is a gentle touch on her forehead, soothing her, silencing her as a vessel of broth is pressed to her lips and stinging salves are rubbed into the flesh of her wrists.
"You return to us scoured by Mela's breath." The Tepet Dynast says, drawing a fur lined cloak around Moran's shoulders as she speaks her benediction. "What you were is given to the winds, what you are is born anew. Rise now, Moran, child of House Tepet. Rise, my sister."
The commander of the Thirty Third Legion does as she is bid, leaning on the other woman for support, meeting the gazes of her fellow generals Cynis Xoza and Sesus Welina...both of them just as drained by their ordeal as she is, and Moran manages to smile at both of them. At her two new sisters in this strange new world.
Mnemon Forola snarls as the Crown Marshal's blade bats hers away, baring her teeth in a bloody rictus of hatred. Once she would have sought to keep her face impassive, to show nothing but perfect tranquility even amidst the most violent of conflicts...but that was before the word came from Dejis.
"This is madness." Rose Ayamo's voice is sickening in its sympathy, the concern in her eyes more enraging than Forola's blood dripping from her sword. Once, they were more than comrades, they were friends. In a different time. A time when Forola's husband and son were still among the living, when Ayamo hadn't spent evening after evening with Tepet envoys and their poisoned tongues. When the Crown Marshal wasn't bound and determined to piss on every oath they ever swore.
The general attacks again, hammering on the other woman's guard, all pretense of defense cast aside, leaving herself open, hissing in agony as the Marshal parries again, opens another cut on her sword arm, the Mnemon Dynast's wild flurry defeated once again...before Forola slams the edge of her shield deep into the soft flesh of Ayamo's throat.
The Crown Marshal dies an ugly death, gurgling for breath that won't come, hands clutching futilely at her ruined neck, staring imploringly at her one time comrade. Once, Forola would have given a mercy stroke, wouldn't have even let an Anathema suffer so. Now she just hawks phlegm deep in her throat and spits, saliva flecked with yellow and red spattering against the traitor's face.
"I'm going to serve the Empress. I'm going to save the Realm." She roars the words, letting the Dragon's Blood in her veins carry them to the legionaries all around them. "Any that want to come with me, can. The rest can go fuck themselves." Crude words. Hateful words. Words she wouldn't have ever imagined herself speaking before. But that was then. And this is now.
There were times when Argent Perrin regretted their chosen role among the Northern Pantheon.
Not often, mind. The Falcon Headed Arbiter Of Honorable Accords was respected even if not always heeded across the width and breadth of the North, a position they had earned by being unfailingly, scrupulously evenhanded in all their dealings with others, their services as a negotiator and treaty writer were sought after and indeed fought over on occasion for exactly that reason, it was a position no few of their fellow divinities envied and most of the time Argent Perrin felt fortunate to have it.
And then there were times like this, when they found themselves dealing with the Ruling Council of Fortitude. That is to say, seated within a lightless catacomb deep within the earth, unable to see anything outside the glow of their own divine aura, while questionably sane men and women circled them in the darkness, navigating by means Argent Perrin had no desire to even speculate upon.
"You bring us the word of Tepet."
The spirit very pointedly did not flinch as the voice hissed behind them, idly examining the talons adorning their secondary set of arms as they replied.
"That is indeed so."
"We have heard of them." A different voice, almost cackling as it takes up the refrain. "Warriors, conquerors, Sun slayers. They would be welcome in Fortitude, yes-yes..."
Argent Perrin relaxes just a fraction, allows themselves to imagine the acclaim they will reserve for negotiating an alliance with Fortitude, of all places, they allow the hint of a smile to grace their central face, and then the voice behind them speaks again.
"Oh yes, they will be welcome indeed. Many souls found their way to the Everhalls because of the Sesus, but there are many yet who must atone. To fall in battle against the Tepet, that would be a heroic death indeed."
"Indeed."
"Indeed."
"Indeeeeeeeed."
"I see." Argent Perrin remains stoicly impertutable, his many arms do not even twitch towards the javelins lashed to his belt, that would hardly be an honorable or courageous action, after all. "I shall convey your sentiments to General Aradna, then."
"And our thanks! There is so much evil we must atone for, we wept when the Sesus fled, but now we are given new oppurtunities to atone, oh, what a blessed day!
-/-
OOC BREAKDOWN
House Tepet seizes all of House Sesus Northern satrapies fairly bloodlessly, Sesus military forces having more or less abandoned their holdings.
The 30th, 32nd, 33rd, and 4th Legions all pledge their allegiance to House Tepet
General Mnemon Forola of the 31st Legion kills Crown Marshal Rose Ayamo in a duel, declares for Mnemon, and moves her troops to Mnemon's Northern Satrapies. 31st Legion gains the Tag "Hates Cynis"
Attempts by Tepet to negotiate Fortitude becoming a Satrapy of theirs falter in the face of the Sesus mass exodus and Fortitude's desire to die heroic deaths in hopeless battles.
In the shallows, the Lintha flagship was burning. Harried and bled across a dozen leagues of open sea by vessels of the Imperial Navy, it had made the decision to hide in the shallows of the nearest island, and there found the red-flagged corsairs in Peleps employ waiting.
On the deck of her battleship, Admiral Peleps Namag watched the final stages of the battle unfold with a thin, satisfied smile on her withered face. Close to three centuries on the sea and the sight of a well executed ambush - with auxiliary elements no less - was still a feast for the senses. The Lintha knew better than to ask for quarter from their foes, and her sailors were doing her proud in granting them the bloody end they so deserved.
"Admiral," her flag-captain, some young lass whose name she hadn't bothered to learn yet, said with a crisp salute and a sharp click of her heels on the wooden deck, "Word from the detachment. The merchant convoy reports all hands accounted for and wishes to express its gratitude for our intervention."
"Mm. Good. Have the quartermasters run an inventory," Namag said, running her hand across the surface of the chest of coins at her side. Each was stamped with her very own name and face, a bit of political sleight of hand she found more amusing than flattering at this point. "Compensate the merchants for any lost cargo. It seems the least we can do, to repay their service as bait."
They certainly had the coin for it, and oh, how good that felt. A decade and change of scrabbling in the dirt, of loans and schemes and desperate gambits aimed at making two ends meet, of watching the fortunes and capabilities of the House slip away drop by bloody drop… brought to an end. They were rich again, powerful again, respected again. For this alone, Namag would have butchered a thousand Lintha vessels.
"At once, Admiral," the Captain confirmed, before briefly hesitating, "And, if I may… reports indicate that two of the ships yet fly the colours of House V'Neef."
"Your reports are mistaken, Captain," Peleps Namag said, taking her gaze from the ongoing fleet battle to look her junior in the eye. "Any ships foolish enough to fly those colours in our waters were sunk shortly before our ambush was sprung. Lost with all hands."
There was a long moment of silence, and in the quiet Namag weighed her subordinate's likely response. She was young - talented, of course, nobody commanded a battleship in her fleet without the qualities to justify it - and the young tended to be principled above all. The only question is which principle it was - loyalty to the old Throne, to the battered and bleeding corpse of the dynasty and its ways… or to the new world, and the grand destiny of Peleps in the west?
"...as you say, Admiral," the Captain said at last, and to her credit she did not look away, "A tragedy."
"Not at all, Captain," Peleps Namag said with a rasping laugh, turning her attention back to the last desperate moments of the battle, "Simply a… balancing of accounts."
And the Earth May Shake
Mai Tazang Lao cut a very fine form, if they did say so. Part of it was the clothing, to be sure, expensive and ostentatious and imported from only the finest and most exotic of foreign lands, but the majority was the person such magnificent garments adorned. All the silk and perfume in the world could not buy you presence if you did not know how to use it, but fortunately for all the unattached and impressionable souls of Creation, Mei Tazang was the furthest thing from ignorant as possible. Why, even the savage Lintha could scarcely take their eyes away!
"The kin will feast well tonight," one of them said, just another face in the ragged crowd, a pale-skinned brute with far too many tattoos, "a dragon's child, rich and ripe… oh your blood will honour the Great Mother, dynast!"
"Really? My, that sounds utterly dreadful," Mei Tazang said in an idle drawl, flicking their daiklaive to one side to clean away the blood. It was an elegant and beautiful weapon, as indeed it must be to suit an elegant and beautiful warrior, and the corpse of the last pirate to try their luck spoke well to its killing edge. "I don't suppose I could convince you all to surrender, or perhaps to spare me the effort and fall upon your swords instead?"
"A brave facade, dragon-child, but nobody here is fooled," one of the other Lintha, a whipcord thin female who had apparently filed her teeth to literal points for some gods-forsaken reason, leered at them. "I'll give you a chance. Tell us how you found this place, and who your sources were, and I'll make sure you're dead before we eat your flesh."
"My dear lady, you should know by know - the Bank never bluffs," Mei Tazang replied, their tone serious and level for all that the sardonic smile never left their lips. "It would be bad for our reputation. No, my friends, when a dragon smiles at you, it is because it knows something that you do not."
Most of the Lintha laughed at that, grinding their weapons against one another, muttering comments as they reserved sections of dynastic flesh for their own palate. The woman was rather more cautious, doubtless experienced enough to feel the change in the air, but bravado and the demands of her station prevented her from acting on it. Mei Tazang might have sympathised, were she not a demon-worshipping cannibal.
"Go on then, my pretty little peacock," she said instead, with a theatrical roll of the eyes, "what is it that you know and we do not? Some great gambit, some clever scheme? We already saw your ship lurking past the bay, if that is what you were relying on."
"Oh, a fine guess, but no," Mei Tazang Lao said with an appreciative nod, smile growing a few degrees sharper, "No, what I know, and what you have overlooked, is simple. The sun set five minutes ago."
The Lintha had no chance to react, no chance to redeploy, no chance at all. The shadows came alive and in their hands were blades that gleamed in the faded light, and with sombre silence the slaughter began. Mei Tazang Lao watched it happen with a smile on their face, moving only a handful of steps so as to make sure the blood did not stain their clothing.
It was, after all, very expensive.
Remember, It's Just Good Business
There was a map in Yueh Ko Luhn's office spanning the entire eastern wall, depicting everything from the Pendant Isles in the West, all the way to the Jiaran sea in the east. The entire south portions of the Isles and Creation itself depicted in stunning detail. It had been the work of half a decade to make, and over the course of the last few years it had given Ko Luhn the opportunity to see the Baihu League take shape before his eyes.
Now though, as the scribes removed pin after engraved pin, he could tell a new age was dawning. Each pin represented a pirate haven cleared, and a shipping lane rendered safe. All told, despite the pain and heart-ache they had caused, the destruction of the Lintha seemed almost perfunctory. The combined might of three Great Houses had descended, and the pirate lords had proven unable to meet that challenge. He didn't dare expect that they had been exterminated entirely, doubtless some rats had escaped, but there was a new age dawning, and it was clear that the Lintha were relics of the old.
"Your tea, Grandfather" someone said from behind him, and he turned to see Yueh Zu Lan. His grand-daughter served him as an attendant of sorts. She was young, just barely having achieved her second breath, but he had taken her on ostensibly as a favor to his late brother. In truth, he had seen a spark of something in her. She would go far, provided the correct values were instilled early, and Yueh Ko Luhn had not gotten where he was by neglecting talent. Especially amongst one's family.
"There is bloody news from the Isles" she said and she sat down across the desk from him, her own cup of tea steaming gently in her hand.
"What news from the Isles isn't bloody these days" Ko Luhn remarked, but in truth, things had deteriorated faster than he could have predicted. Faster than anyone could have predicted. Each day brought tales of new atrocities that would have been unimaginable even a handful of years ago. "It is a shame how low we have all sunk, and we will have to maneuver carefully lest we be caught in the Realm's fall."
"You truly think the Realm's fall is inevitable, Grandfather?" said Zu Lahn quietly as she took a sip from her tea.
"I do" said Yuek Ko Luhn, and still felt somehow blasphemous to say it aloud, but that was the truth as he saw it, and he was not a man who had found denying the truth in front of you to lead anywhere productive, "But I do believe there is one thing that ensure our continued good fortune in these times. "
"People are what they love, my dear, and what they love is cargo" Ko Luhn spoke softly, and took a sip of his tea before continuing "They love fancy linens and exotic spices, silks and slaves, and as long as what they love is delivered on time and in sufficient quantity they are content to leave their involvement in our affairs to a number in a ledger."
"House Ragara and House Cathak" said Zu Lahn in understanding.
"Yes, both...eminently reasonable houses, if one speaks their languages, but ones unfortunately locked at each other's throats by circumstance. It will be a balancing act to be sure, but the world has always had need of middlemen" said Ko Luhn.
It begins in Gloam. The city is a hive of activity during the year, the last of the undead being hunted down the the taint of the incipient shadowland being purged with fire and salt, but while the surviving civilians offered praise and set about trying to restore some sense of normalcy to their lives, the assembled legions merely rested in preparation for the next campaign. Nobody expected anything less, for with the passing of years the last illusions of normalcy had been stripped carefully away. There would be war to the knife, a bloody conflict of steel and spell that would spell the future of Creation, and legions such as these would be at its heart. Such knowledge lent a certain shade to any number of otherwise unremarkable developments.
With his matriarch and Empress-claimant recuperating from her wounds, enforced bedrest and sorcerous rituals both playing their part in restoring her to health, it fell to Mnemon Ta'an to see the negotiations through to their conclusion. The cantankerous bureaucrat had left scribes and lesser diplomats in tears more than once before, but in the Seventh Legion of Lookshy and the Crown Marshal of the East he found partners more than able to put up with even the most acrid tongue. The negotiations drag on for months, an extended period of delicate uncertainty as news trickles in from abroad and the world shifts violently beneath everyone's feet, but by some capricious whim of fate Gloam itself and all encamped there are spared the violence and disorder, permitted to come to terms at their own pace and in their own ways.
It is the Immaculates who forge the bridge across the divide in the end, the Faith of the Realm and the Philosophy of Lookshy divergent in many ways but united at least in the core of their dogma - the Anathema must be opposed, those who do so are the worthiest to rule, and compared to this sacred mission all other concerns are to be left by the wayside. The news of the attack on Dejis and the atrocities in Pangu only help to seal the deal, and the sohei of Lookshy confirm their counterpart's proclamation - House Cynis is Anathema, from root to flower, and must be torn down for the safety of all Creation. To that end the Seventh Legion of Lookshy recognises Mnemon as Empress of the Realm, and Onyx Wolf as her Shogun, the commander of her military forces and her strong right hand.
(Mnemon's true hand, her limb of flesh and blood, was lost to the Mask of Winters, only to be replaced by a grim contraption of metal and soulsteel built from the Deathlord's reforged armour. Onyx Wolf is said to have been asked about the implied analogy only once, and her fierce laughter was the talk of the camp for days to follow.)
Determined to live up to the faith shown in her by all involved, Mnemon summoned three of her granddaughters to Gloam, and with the aid of Taimyo Linwei of Lookshy and the newly appointed Shogun Onyx Wolf, they planned a three part campaign of military conquest on a scale rarely seen in Creation's history. The East had been referred to as the 'cradle of mankind', the verdant lands among the most populace in all Creation, and so the East would belong to Mnemon.
Mnemon Elissa led the march into the Scavenger Lands, crossbowmen and levies tithed by the Confederation of Rivers paired with Lookshyan field forces and imperial legions sallying forth in a grand array. At each satrapy or imperial holding she came to she raised the flag of truce and offered parlay, preferring in each case to bring these lands into the fold through diplomacy and negotiation than violence. Her argument was simple - while Mnemon stood against the darkness, Cynis Sekhara brought it forth in her own lands. While Mnemon fought to protect the innocent from the scourge of the dead, Sekhara unleashed atrocities against those who could scarcely hope to fight back. The choice was obvious, of course, and to those who felt it might be worth considering… well, there was always the looming form of Karvara in the background, its fearsome jaws and burning eyes the silent counterpoint to Elissa's velvet glove.
Most chose peaceful surrender and compliance. Of the few that resisted, none were quite so successful as the Tyrant Lizard Riders that grew so notorious in Cynis' service, who attempted a breakthrough of the encircling legions and made it halfway to their destination before being intercepted by Karvara. The Walking Devil Tower brought them down like a leopard on the hunt, and it's great moonsilver jaws dripped with hot gore for hours afterwards. The 20th Rivershore Legion chose retreat in place of futile defiance, and for reasons both pragmatic and principled Elissa permitted them to depart, seizing the now-undefended holding of Greyfalls in their absence.
Further south, Mnemon Vana chose to take a more conciliatory and supportive role, leading a force of legions, mercenary auxiliaries and Lookshyan commandos to liberate the wartorn nation of Taira, long a thorn in the side and an insult on the lips of Sesus' smiling operatives. In this they were joined by the Dragon Caste of Prasad, goaded by continual border skirmishing and the stories of further atrocities from within the Shahzadeh's palace, who offered troops and funding and most crucially a puppet ruler they claimed had some degree of legitimacy via blood ties to the old Shah. Such support was contingent on overlooking their own local imperialism and the fact that the 22nd and 23rd Legions now flew Prasadi banners - Generals Azure Princess and Azure Empress having taken husbands for themselves from among the Prasadi elite in addition to copious piles of jade and silver for them and their soldiers. Mother and daughter would go on to form a small but valuable part of Glorious Prasad's dragon caste, and Mnemon Vana could do little but smile through clenched teeth at the sight of a regional rival rising to prominence. Still, anything was better than permitting the continued presence of one that all called Anathema on the Tairan throne.
When the war came to Zamash, Sabah II elected to show the world the price of coveting a throne that was not theirs. The capital was all but impossible to defend against such an overwhelming force, so the damned Shahzadeh did not even try. Once the walls had fallen and the enemy were at the very gates of her palace, she detonated some ancient abomination of dark wonder torn from the mausoleums of the Dragon Kings, condemning the entire city and all within it to a cursed unlife of flesh and crystal woven together as one. A gift to noble Prasad, she said, before disappearing into the night with a substantial force of her greatest killers, none of whom would appear within the nation's borders again. Across the nation her cataphracts and hoplites dug in with a fervor, hardened killers under the command of Tahir of Red Waters willing to do whatever it took to halt the Mnemonite advance… or, at least, to bleed her for every inch. For her part, Mnemon Vana was too kind a woman to do the pragmatic thing and leave it to her rivals to bleed for her, and on a dozen battlefields she forged ties of blood and fire with the emissaries of the Twin Houses as they fought for a poisoned chalice of a land.
In the north-east, Mnemon Sana led the assault, an inspirational soldier with a widely known knack for bonding with the soldiers under command. Such skills might have been sorely tested in such a protracted campaign, for there were five full legions in the north-east not yet sworn to any banner (at least openly), but in this Mnemon had an unexpected ally. Valetari Taara stepped in to mediate and oversee negotiations, ostensibly determined to ensure that as little blood as possible would be shed between those who once had marched beneath a common banner. More cynical observers thought she was perhaps more interested in making sure that those legions did not turn to warlordism and banditry in Valetari's metaphorical front yard, thereby risking all the House and its allies had worked to achieve for years.
Regardless of her intent, the eventual success was significant, as four of the Imperial Legions agreed to stand down and depart with swords sheathed and banners lowered, returning to the Blessed Isle or dissolving on the spot, leaving the Mnemonite forces free to reclaim the north-eastern territories largely uncontested. Only the 8th Legion remained intact as a fighting force, and though offers were made to Crown Marshal Blessed Dawn, word of an old rivalry with Onyx Wolf went a long way towards persuading her to take her soldiers and enter the service of the Valetari directly, along with whatever defectors and turncoats she could entice from her fellow legions in the process. Free to all but name her price, Blessed Dawn could only smile, buying for herself and her sisters-in-arms a place in the future yet to come.
By year's end, the East belonged to Mnemon and her allies in its entirety, still plagued by pockets of resistance and the normal post-conquest troubles, but surprisingly stable and well founded. House Cynis had not merely failed to defend itself, in many places it had actively declined battle, retreating from fights it could have won and abandoning assets that it had spent years or decades cultivating. Though triumphant, Mnemon and her supporters could not help but wonder at the reason.
When Calibration came, they had their answer.
Mnemon forges an alliance with Lookshy and the Confederation of Rivers, launches a major military campaign in the North-East, East and South-East that can generally be said to be overwhelmingly successful.
House Cynis and its allies are universally defeated, but in many areas decline to give battle, instead withdrawing their military assets ahead of time to serve some other, unknown goal.
Taira is the grand exception, Sabah II using dark sorcery and foul pacts to turn her land into a poisoned chalice that will sicken any that try to grasp it, yet cannot be safely ignored by any. The Shazadeh herself is known to have escaped.
The 22nd and 23rd Legions defect to Prasad, now on the ascent in the South East.
The 8th Legion joins House Valetari, bringing a large number of veteran soldiers with local knowledge to support the House's north-eastern endeavours.
Virtually all other Legions in the area have either covertly or openly declared for Cynis, though the fact that they did so while in the midst of full retreat towards the Blessed Isle complicates the matter somewhat.
Before any calamity there are clues to be seen, if one has but the wit to divine them. Tsunamis are heralded by the fleeing of all manner of animals from the shore, great storms by the greasy weight of the air. In Scarlet Prefecture in the runup to Calibration, it was the sudden disappearance of many familiar faces that served the same end. Scions of House Ragara, a cross section of bureaucrats and magistrates, even the Imperial Matchmaker herself - all vanished in the space of mere weeks, finding excuses to leave the city or simply disappearing in the dead of night.
Such a diverse diaspora could not help but leave a void in the halls of power, and into the gap stepped the Marble Concordat, moving with such perfect timing that half who heard of it assumed they were responsible for the opportunity in the first place. Under the iron hand of Mnemon Rulinsei, the Concordat's forces and sympathisers moved to secure the institutions of power and tools of state, both in the interests of preserving the Realm as something more than a ruin and to keep them from Sekhara's unworthy hands. Strangely the efforts went all but uncontested, the Incardinines choosing to defer conflict and fade back from every confrontation, and with an uneasy heart Rulinsei abandoned her public work and focused all her efforts on hunting down the hidden threat she was sure had been left in their wake.
Fresh from the glorious battle at Gloam, the feted Nellens Sidal took charge of the Concordat's public efforts, for while House Nellens had declared for neither side in the ongoing dispute they shared Mnemon's desire to see the seat of the Realm secured for whichever claimant might sit upon it next. An Empress would need more than a field of ash and rubble to rule over, after all, and for such a cause did the war hero use their fame as pretext for any number of salons and galas and intimate liaisons across the city and calendar. The officers and respected heroes of the First Crown Legion were of particular concern, being feted and honoured by all sides in an attempt to sway them for what both sides knew might be a decisive role in days to come.
Of course, the First was but one Legion out of many, and to that end the allied forces turned their attention towards securing the Empress' Purse for their own. The source of all discretionary spending and the Legionary budget, control of the Purse would give its owner a powerful lever in days to come, and to this end Nellens and Mnemon moved to install new laws and overseers to keep track of its spending, hoping to steer the Legions into service of a stable Realm by proxy. In this they were slowed principally by the sheer number of absences among their foes, which in several cases prevented key committees among the Deliberative from forming proper quorum. Replacements were arranged, new allies found to take up burdens allowed to fall slack, but such things would take time. Time that they did not have.
Cynis Sekhara, Incardinine Empress and Immaculate Anathema, had known from the start that she would not claim the Scarlet Throne through conventional means. In legal standing and classical legitimacy and even popular support she was a clear second to Mnemon, who might have been crowned within the month had such things been all there was to sway the hearts of the Dynasty. No, her path to the throne would take another form, one inspired in part by the first and only woman to do so before. The Scarlet Empress had been a nameless officer of the Shogunate prior to her ascension, seizing in desperation the means to defend Creation and secure her reign without recourse to wider appeal or popular acclaim. She had turned the Sword of Creation upon its enemies, and when the Seven Tigers had risen to challenge her, she had broken them with heavenly fire. Bold action, that was the key, bold action and a willingness to wade through a river of blood if that was what it took… and Sekhara was only too willing.
Still, she had many other things she would need to attend to before she could claim her throne, business in Pangu and abroad, and so she turned instead to her younger brother to prepare the stage. Cynis Meles, overlooked for most of his life and loathed by the world for the last handful, would be a fine instrument to assure her ascension. He would prepare the Imperial City, secure the assets of her allies and identify those of her foes, and if he had time he would also hook up with that darkly mysterious Sesus Kyoji and the Eel Lord Izyscyllo, a little treat to reward him for all his hard work, Orochi was fully onboard she was sure.
Perhaps fortunately for all involved, Meles was quite used to his sister's eccentricities, and on matters of the heart entirely prepared to simply pretend that everything would work itself out until it inevitably did so. Sekhara was trusting him with the details, and also with full access and authority to House Cynis' surprisingly extensive and well connected network of covert assets in the capital. That the Imperial Matchmaker had been under their thumb, trading information and advice in exchange for being covertly smuggled out of the city, was to be expected. The cells of demon-blooded bastards hidden throughout many of the capital's most prestigious branch families was somewhat more surprising, but if there was one virtue that Cynis could claim without irony, it was a willingness to embrace and accept those the old order had so little time for.
Rulinsei was aware of his work - how could she not be, when he was so distinctive and so notorious? She saw him courting those that might be swayed, identified his efforts to signal out those who would not turn on her sister, pinned his name to several unexpected deaths, and in her success missed the mountain for the trees upon its back. A shadow war, she thought, a battle of spies and ambushes and assassins, a bloody-edged escalation in the struggle for control of the capital but nothing she could not handle. She reported as much to Mnemon, and in her confidence missed her final chance to escape the coming disaster.
If there was a secret to Sekhara's success, it is this - victory belongs to the first woman both willing and able to stop smiling and trade barbed words for spears instead. When one was willing to accept any amount of pain, any amount of blood, any about of collateral damage in pursuit of her aims… victory in some form was certain. As the final day of the year rolled by and the sunless gloom of Calibration began, Creation had its chance to learn this lesson at last.
It began in the west, along the banks of Scarlet Bay. The Imperial Warstrider Corps emerged from the gloom, grand and terrifying and utterly unexpected, shaking the ground as they advanced. The city's guards and garrisoned troops were still struggling to get over their shock when the charge struck home, the great gates of the Imperial City crumpling like paper before the unchecked might of those titans of jade and steel, and through the gaps and from hidden redoubts and out of what seemed to be the very air itself emerged Sekhara's chosen killers.
Imperial Legions swayed to the cause, accompanied by Cynis facilitators. Reaver champions of the Linowan River Tribes, their faces hidden behind war masks of devilish aspect. Cold-eyed Tairan cataphracts, fearless and murderous in their rage. All of these and more invaded the Imperial City in a single bloody rush, every asset and horror and ally that House Cynis could muster committed to a single bloody strike, one final gamble to decide the fate of the Realm. Such a force could have made a credible effort at claiming the city, if not necessarily holding it in the face of resistance and civilian discontent, but such dry military objectives were judged insufficient. The capital would belong to Sekhara alone and in full, no matter the cost in blood or jade, and with a child's promise ringing in his ears Cynis Meles set forth to see it done.
The Butcher of Pangu, they called him, missing in their scorn the very qualities and experience that made him so suited to this mission. This was not the first time Meles had been called upon to cleanse a province of its undesirables without too much damage to the land and its facilities, and he could not help but smile at the irony. The high and mighty of the Realm had always looked down on him and his, but now the tables were turned, and he took great personal pleasure in chastising them as one would a rebellious slave. Let none doubt the cost of defiance, or the Incardinine's ability to see it paid.
On the floor of the Deliberative, senators rallied for an emergency session were slaughtered where they stood, their white robes stained bloody red. In the halls of the Ministries, obstructive and opposing bureaucrats were burned alive on pyres made of their own papers. In the streets and gardens magistrates were hunted by ghostly hounds, and in every district and neighbourhood those known or suspected of harbouring sympathies to Mnemon and her false claim were dragged from their beds and butchered by the howling mob. Meles oversaw it all, with nerves of steel and a heart of flame, and in the doing burned his name into history from now until the falling of the world.
It was said that the great water-cranes of the bay were what gave Scarlet Prefecture its name, the vivid hue of their wings the inspiration for the Empress' chosen sobriquet. In years to come folk would forget such a peaceful and inspiring tale, for the truth seemed far more evident - the province was named for the stains that no amount of work would cleanse from every stream and stone.
The move was far from unopposed, of course, for even outnumbered and caught off guard the scions of the Marble Concordat were dynasts and Exalted both. They fought hard and died slowly, rallying together in holding actions and desperate counter-attacks, swiftly coalescing around the indomitable form of Unbroken Amethyst and the First Legion. The Crown Marshal was no fool, she knew that holding the city in the face of warstriders so well supported was suicide, but she did not surrender. Many of her soldiers had families in the city, and in an organised evacuation for those she found herself the lynchpin of a staged withdrawal for all who feared the prospect of Sekhara's iron mercy. Street by street and junction by junction they withdrew, ultimately breaking out to the south and retreating towards the Nellens-held stronghold of Sdoia with a sizeable column of evacuees and rescued innocents in their charge… a retreat that Meles was only too happy to let them make, his eyes turned towards a greater prize.
Mnemon Rulinsei refused to evacuate. She knew full well the usurpers would not let her flee, and so resolved to sell her life dearly, buying time for her granddaughters and their families to escape in her stead. Though her daiklaive notched and cracked, and her starmetal eye stared out through a mask of blood, she did not yield, and with her last breath overloaded the geomantic array on her family manse, consuming a full eighth of the city in elemental flames. A pyre fit for a hero.
(It was said, by some in days to follow, that Mnemon had spoken to her sister by words carried upon the wind in those last few moments. If such was the case, the Empress in the East never spoke of it, nor of what words might have passed between the two in that single private moment. She merely mourned in silence, as was her way, and added another tally to the scale. Another sin in need of restitution.)
Cynis Sekhara entered the Imperial City through a broken gate, heralded by the crackle of flames and the screams of the dying. Her path was lined with an honour guard of bloodstained giants, the Imperial Warstriders saluting their Empress Incardinine with weapons fit to fell titans, and when she passed through a drifting bank of smoke she left with the smiling form of Sesus Agelin at her side. None had seen Lady Smoke come or go, but none would be so foolish as to deny her a place at her lover's side, on this day of all days. Together, the two women and their entourage moved to confront the final obstacle in their path.
In a plaza outside the Imperial Palace, the Silent Legion stood in wait, a full thousand alchemical giants in black plate holding their enchanted blades at the ready. Sekhara's legions surrounded them, but at a cautious distance, and when the Empress Incardinine herself arrived she needed no explanation as to why. In the spirit of fairness she spoke to them, honeyed words and brazen promises offering all they could wish and more if they would stand aside - their lives, their names returned to them, a place at her side or an honorable discharge to whatever post or role they might desire in the Realm to come.
The ringing of readied weapons was her only answer, and in truth she had not expected otherwise. The Silent Legion was sworn to the Scarlet Empress, not Incardinine, and it was only fitting that her ascent be paved by the bodies of those who could do nothing but cling to the tattered remnants of the old order. So she nodded, she bowed to those who were about to die, and she led the charge.
The Immaculate Order declared her Anathema, and with her mastery of Wood Dragon Style did Sekhara make her reply, a towering oak upon the battlefield as she tore through the ranks of the Silent Legion and soaked her roots in blood. Beneath the shadows of her boughs danced Lady Smoke, here there and everywhere and always with a knife in hand, and at her back marched an army brought together from every corner of Creation. Step by step she advanced, life by life she settled her claim, and when at last the final foe fell and she stood before the Five Dragon Throne, there was an air of unreality that not even the laughter of bloodstained killers could dispel.
The throne. The very symbol of all she had fought for, all she had desired, five dragons of ever-living jade coiled around the seat of the most powerful woman in Creation. Did they look at her with approval, with disdain, with indifference? It hardly mattered. The throne was hers, and with a brilliant smile Sekhara turned and beckoned to two figures - the woman who had fought at her side, and the mildly shellshocked judge she had brought with her for this purpose.
After all the blood and death, all the pageantry and deception that the day had wrought, the wedding of Cynis Sekhara and Sesus Agelin was concluded in what felt like the barest handful of heartbeats. A single kiss, sweetened by the tang of smoke and the coppery aftertaste of blood, and the Empress Incardinine took her place upon the throne and looked out upon the land she meant to rule. The city was in flames, the sky darkened with smoke, the gutters overflowing with blood, and it didn't matter. Mnemon yet lived and ruled an empire of her own to the east, Cainan held dominion over the Caul to the south-west, and it did not matter. Her mother's disappearance was unsolved, the Immaculate Order yet stood, Saloy Hin was but the first of several warlords likely to establish himself, and in that moment none of it mattered.
With the Imperial City in flames, the Legions divided between multiple competing factions, large sections of the Blessed Isle either ruined or transformed beyond all recognition and the establishment of multiple Great Houses as independent Threshold powers, the war for the Realm is over. Realm Divide has most assuredly hit level six, and while I fully expect several of the various successor states to remain at each others throats for a long time, the fact remains they are just that - successor states.
I don't want to promise full epilogues for every faction, on account of how the delays to this turn and the last kind of proved my words unreliable in that regard, but if you wish to write or hammer out an epilogue for your faction I am more than happy for you to post it in this thread directly.
Thank you, one and all, and may the Dragons ever smile upon you.
As the civil war began to quiet down, the last true flames of the once-great Realm fading into history, House V'Neef saw a radical change in doctrine.
Part of this was simple necessity. The betrayal of House Peleps and the destruction of the Merchant Fleet made the house's previous maritime trade focus impossible. But V'Neef was an adaptable woman, and she had a clear idea of what her House needed to do next.
It was a hard time for her people, but she had their love, in a way that few others on the Isle could truly claim. She gave rousing speeches, promising a beautiful future past the suffering of the present, and a genuine, earnest desire to see it. Her people were as devoted to the world she wanted to build as she was.
Fortunately she had already been working on plans to expand land trade routes. Had she but a bit more time, she would've been able to weather the loss of the Merchant Fleet without issue, but that wasn't in the cards. Over time, the house's mon became known for well-protected shipping lanes and trade throughout the Isle. Elementals and demons protected trade as well as any military force, and the House strangely had very good relations with the local spirits and gods. Rumors of heresy abounded, but nothing was ever proven, and given the Anathema status of many of the Great Houses, were not a priority.
Diplomats and ambassadors were sent out to the various houses of the Realm (current or former), partly to make greetings and entreaties but mostly to clarify V'Neef's new stance towards preservation and growth of the Blessed Isle, and a desire to avoid conflict if at all possible. Of course, in those days after the civil war, conflict was inevitable, but V'Neef was one of the few truly trying to be a peacemaker.
Tepet very much went its own way in the future, but it never forgot V'Neef, and V'Neef never forgot them. It was unfortunate that the House no longer had the resources to be generous to its friends, but V'Neef's legendary charisma didn't require treasure. Occasionally, she would show up at one of Tepet's parties or gatherings with a quiet laugh and a bright smile, Igan as her personal eye candy.
The nation that was once House Ragara might have expected V'Neef to continue her petty grudge, but to their surprise, V'Neef greeted their probing ambassadors like cousins. Oh, those members of the guard and soldiery that directly fought their house certainly gave sour glances at parties, but the matriarch held no clear animosity any longer, and both she and her family treated politely and easily with them.
When asked, the matriarch simply shrugged, and said Ragara had won the little war between their houses when they ransomed Admiral Noma. V'Neef had more immediate problems to deal with and didn't have the resources to prosecute such a war anyway.
One or two of the Bank suggested taking her lands to remove whatever threat she posed entirely, but others pointed out that fighting through four Imperial Legions and the Ivory Guard simply wasn't worth whatever meager resources they had. If they'd still had the Merchant Fleet, perhaps, but… well. They didn't.
V'Neef was rather lucky in that regard; they were too weak to be considered a threat to any of the world's true powers, but at the same time were too strong to make conquering them worth the cost. And Golden Orochi was not Mnemon; the threat to his house from the young upstart was removed, and so was not worth bothering with.
That wasn't to say Ragara let its guard down, far from it. Golden Orochi simply had bigger problems to deal with in his expanding southern empire… and if that ever changed, well, V'Neef had never actually sealed off Sunken Elha...
V'Neef encouraged this view of her house whenever the topic was broached. She didn't put up more than token resistance to most requests, and when she did it was under the notion that someone else would attack and she'd stand no chance. The Baihu League, the Incarnidine Empress, Mnemon, Tepet… all of their ambassadors were welcomed and treated well, for the kindly matriarch had no desire for conflict with anyone.
There was only one exception… one glaring, obvious exception.
Peleps.
Oh, no formal declaration was ever made. V'Neef was not foolish enough to bring the wrath of the world's navies upon her again. Peleps scions were able to dock in Eagle and drydock in Tempest's demonic shipyards. Dragon-blooded were given proper deference due their station. Moreover, they were united with Cathak now, and V'Neef did not have the strength to turn away from her alliance to the Immaculate bastion.
And yet…
Peleps were thrice-damned traitors. And no one in Eagle ever forgot.
No matter what they said, what they did or what overtures were made, no matter how they insisted they had gotten all they desired from the once-great house, no one in the city would deal with them unless forced. They weren't allowed to leave the city in anything but a ship. Criminals and vagabonds would target them alarmingly often, and the guards provided only token aid. They were not welcome, and all knew it. The one time Peleps tried to send a diplomat (Peleps Raptor was specifically selected because of his sworn kinship with V'Neef Shima) he was given quarters that amounted to a prison cell with wallpaper. He did not stay long.
This made relations with Cathak's new Immaculate empire... not openly hostile, but incredibly uneasy. The former Realm navy and the new bastion of the Immaculate Philosophy were too closely tied. On this matter, however, the matriarch did not budge an inch. As far as she was concerned, Peleps deserved nothing but scorn, and they would get nothing but scorn. They hadn't "retrieved" the Merchant Fleet through honorable combat, legal wrangling, or even for the good of the Realm; they had betrayed their erstwhile ally and come under a veil of darkness. Their decision to latch onto a more honorable name than theirs to protect their own image did not change that. It would take centuries for that rift to heal, if it ever did.
Amon Hisani wasn't… entirely happy to have his men and women play bodyguard, but as the Blessed Isle descended further and further into chaos, the need for such a duty became all too apparent. With the Solar Anathema returning, the Silent found plenty of opportunity to whet his blade against ancient foes that any dragon would be proud to stand against. He eventually wed into V'Neef's house, to one of her own daughters in fact.
Tepet Igan was eventually allowed to return to Eagle on a more permanent basis. His wife was safe, and so were their children; it was all he could've hoped for. Their reunion was, uh… to say it was 'vigorous' would be like saying a flood is wet. He took his position again as V'Neef's spymaster, this time staying close to her whenever possible.
Dancing Boar had managed to make an honorable name for himself in the war. While other houses had vied for dominance, he had been slaying Fae and putting down pirate rebels. He took up instructing the students from Pasiap's Stair that chose to come to House V'Neef, instilling in all of them a strong sense of duty and restraint. V'Neef Noma, on the other hand, was the same brutal woman she'd always been. But her time in the south had left its scars upon her; she refused to deal with demons whenever possible.
V'Neef Agayo lost her place as a shipwright. While V'Neef's harbor maintained the Willow Fleet for guarding Eagle's shores, the House no longer had any great ambitions for it. Her time was spent summoning demons for the new guarded trade routes.
As for the matriarch herself… Her desire to see a Realm restored and resurgent was dead, and with it went much of her naivete. Her concern was always for her people first and foremost, and in that respect, the outcome could've been far worse. She had plans, and many of the things she tried went awry, but those tales are for another day.
On a wind-beaten rock jutting from the grey waters of Iora, Riven Dusk kneels, and prays. The words come to her lips easily, tongue slipping into grooves of language worn deep by centuries of repetition. As always, she tries to remember what the words mean, and what gods of her people they invoke. As always, she can't, and she never will. The prayer, a sound without meaning rattled among grave-mark swords, is all that remains of a small, north-eastern tribe into which she was born, from which she was taken to the harsh halls of Pasiap's Stair, and which her new homeland eventually destroyed. If not to history, they certainly belong to the past now, and in all of Creation, she is the last one to remember the words of their prayer, even if not its meaning.
In the centuries between being ripped from her homeland, and her prayer at this forlorn monument to nameless soldiers, many have asked what was it that made her stay with the ambition-mad failure who was Berit, and she made it her personal triumph to never divulge to them the truth of the matter. The scars on her back from where the teachers at the Stair scourged her history and her family still mark her flesh, as do the fears and wounds of her soul. But Berit knows of her prayer, and has never once remarked on it. To say that it is much is to lie, but it means everything.
And now, it is about to end. Over her shoulder, the House of Rusted Swords looms above the island of Iora, distant and dark. But it is not to stay that way for long. The night is almost upon the Isle, and the stars are right. The preparations are well underway. In the chamber below the tower, her lady Berit is being anointed with profane blood and readed for the altar of her own making. The elements tense in anticipation of that sacrifice; she can feel it in the thrum under her feet, and taste them on the sea-breeze: the sharp tang of a coming ascension.
Berit, who allowed her to keep that littlest bit of herself, is to end tonight, and Riven Dusk can't help but to feel again like she used to all those centuries ago: like something valuable is being taken from her.
A black bird lands on one of the grave-marks with a flutter of haggard wings. It looks at Riven Dusk inquisitively, and matching its jet eyes, the Dragon Blood realizes that she will not live to see the aftermath of the night.
"This is not a breed of this land. Your masquerade is paltry," she sayss. In a way, she is almost thankful to that monster. It offers her a kind of liberation from her true fears. "Know this, Anathema. My death will not be unnoticed."
The bird pecks its head, the joints of the neck bending far beyond what any living bone should allow. Then, it laughs.
"How delightful," it declares, voice like jaws snapping shut around Riven Dusk's side, "that you think I am here to kill you."
***
The Chosen of Luna do not traffic in justice. That is the domain of the Sun, and its Exalts. The ones kissed by the Moon deal instead in retribution. The two are easy to mistake, and many believe that balancing the ledgers is what the latter means. Death for a death, calamity for calamity. But such trade is beneath Luna, who instead teaches magnanimity in vengeance.
They say: "Find those who hurt you, and unmake them."
Many believe - and many Chosen too - that it is a dispensation to inflict devastation. And that is not wrong: to destroy is certainly to unmake. But Raksi, the Queen of Fangs, has seen the aeons turn and ages fall to dust. Such banal revenge is beyond her. No, hers is a sublime kind of cruelty we know as change.
***
"If you think I will betray her," Riven Dusk says, hand on a pommel of a grave-sword, already prepared to draw and go down in one final blaze of glory, "you must not know anything about me."
"Oh, Riven Dusk, whose birth was blessed by all the skamas of the open sky," the Lunar replies with a name that the Dragon-Blood has forgotten, and the memories smash into her like an avalanche, "I know you better than you do yourself."
***
The slaying of Lovisa Swallows-the-Sky made Berit a hero, and in doing that, made her an exile. To kill Raksi's favoured student undid her. But that was not enough, and in the centuries hence, the Queen of Fangs never stopped to look for an opportunity to inflict retribution upon her adherent's slayer. And when it finally arose, it was well worth the wait.
***
Riven Dusk can't believe herself that she is listening to the Lunar's offer, and considering it. The wickedness of it is that it is not even a treachery; that she is not being asked to go against her heart and loyalty. The wickedness of it is that the Lunar tells her the truth.
"Berit does not know herself."
***
In the chamber of the Thrice-Wound Omphalos, Berit kneels naked, arcane glyphs blood-red on her pale skin. The air is thick with potential, and her soul at ease. In front of her, laid out in a neat row, five nails of jade wound in star-metal wait. The implements of her ascension; the instruments of her execution.
In the moment, she allows herself a dream of victory: of rising above the Daoshin, ascendant and almighty, and of proclaiming it her domain forever and ever.
She doesn't know she has already lost.
She doesn't know it is the best thing she could have hoped for.
***
Raksi's trick is simple. The sabotage, the usurpation of Berit's network, it is all smoke and mirrors, never meant to really work. It is meant to distract away from the real design being woven, a ritual within Berit's own, meant not to disrupt it, or unmake it, but to amplify it.
And the beauty of it is that none of that design is made with her own hands.
"So they have all turned against her," Riven Dusk whispers, almost impressed, "even Smile-of-Skies. She loves her!"
"It made her really easy to convince," Raksi nods.
***
At first, all goes according to plan. Riven Dusk hammers the nails into Berit's chakra with a steady hand, and with each nail, the line between Berit, and the very geomancy of Daoshin blurs. The power is now at her fingertips, and she can already sense the land responding to her presence. The seas roil; the skies rain fire. The Heavens shake. It is all coming together.
This much power flowing into her is bound to destroy her; it is a part of the design. She dies, and is reborn within the geomancy, for once and future a part of it, and the power of it. So she ignores the pain even as it tears her soul asunder. She screams and cries, but there is joy and triumph in it: in her death, she seizes her triumph. She doesn't have to live. She only has to contain it.
Then, Riven Dusk slips the last nail in, and before the hammer comes down, whispers a silken-soft plea:
"Forgive me."
The soul of the land rushes into her, and it is too much. The cup spills over.
The world stops. The pain dissipates. The time loops on itself, and Berit is suspended in the split second between death, and ascension. She knows she has failed. She knows she has been betrayed. She tries to rage, but she can't. She is nothing, but a shard of a fading consciousness being pulled apart by the forces of life run rampant.
But the end does not come. She fades, and fades, and fades, and yet remains. Power surges through and she is its catalyst, but not at all a vessel. She feels the Daoshin turn, unmade by her ambition, transformed by her designs, the failure of her hopes and the success of her power.
It doesn't end. She is not allowed to pass into nothingness; she is made into the power destroying everything she had cared for. Her essence remakes, refashions, refracts. The sky is inverted, the sea marches against the shore, forests offer their dumb tribute to their mute draconic goddess. Her skin breaks, her bones twist into roots; the House of the Rusted Swor erupts in a shower of brick metal as a tree bursts from its depths, its canopy scraping the firmament. All of it happens through Berit. None of it happens because of her will.
She is all power, and no will.
***
From high in the sky, Raksi laughs at the calamity, and hopes the lesson will take.
***
In the eternity of the moment, it takes Berit all her life, and more, to learn how. In her dumb expanse of might, she feels the places where her design has been alterted, cut, adjusted. Never by an outside hand, always by someone she had trusted. And never in a way to threaten the ritual, always to amplify. Cynis Liyanna, Stands-Against-Many, Smile-of-Skies, even her Riven Dusk: their handprints are all over this disaster.
She finds their souls in the roil, and though she could, she does not destroy them: she must know how. This, she is allowed.
"Because I wanted to be with you forever," Smile-of-Skies weeps with fear and elation.
"Because I couldn't bear to stay human," Cynis Liyanna explains, watching herself remade into a serpent of braided vines and ever-blooming-flowers.
"Because I have always wanted to destroy your Realm," Stand-Against-Many proclaims, watching the Cathak heartlands turn into a panorama of living fire.
"Because the wild calls to me," his sister Laughs-At-Calamity adds, staying true to her name.
"Because, my Lady Berit," Riven Dusk says, heart-broken, but full of conviction, "you have to stay true to yourself."
In the eternity of the moment, Berit considers those words, like she has never before. They have always been her servants: now, they unmake her. Treacherous, unfaithful, unworthy of her love.
The last thought hangs in the fading storm of her consciousness. She turns it, and remembers the words being spoken at her, long ago, by the one woman Berit could never match.
And then, finally, she understands her folly, and the weight of history's repetition.
Berit sheds her dream, and the work is complete.
***
Raksi turns away. Her work is complete.
***
There will be no Dragon Sanctuary, protected by an all-powerful geomantic spirit. Berit will not make an appearance to the people of Daoshin as an enormous visage of a serpent, promising them safety, if they stay loyal to her. She will not elevate her companions to positions of power and make them heads of new Houses of her own design.
There will be no repetition.
***
Pillars of white jade thrust from the soil at the edge of the Daoshin Peninsula, bones of the very earth rising high up to the sky, and written on them in burning script there is a promise:
Forget your kings and your chains, you who enter, and make your home among the Dragonssoul.
The promise is upheld.
The first refugees cross into the devasted Daoshin out of desperation, pursued by bandits or soldiers (who can tell the difference in the waning years of the Civil War). They are afraid of the land, but what they leave behind is worse. They are offered a home.
The soldiers who cross after them are offered a choice. They choose wrong, and are unmade.
No matter what empires rise, and what course the history takes, what remains of Daoshin is taken out of its usual course. The Dragonsoul does not rule, nor do any of her draconic servants. She only makes sure the land stays unmasertable and ungovernable, that it does not become a seat of any power, or home of any violence. Because its purpose is to be a refuge for all those who cannot bear the weight of history's incessant repetition, and who would rather brave a land where the trees walk among dragons and the waters court flame, rather than live in bondage. There, they are offered a home, and a freedom that is nothing soft and sweet.
No matter what empires rise, the Daoshin Refuge will stay a reminder that they are not inevitable. That a different life is possible, and that not all dragons seek the throne.
And in distant Mahalanka, Raksi, the Queen of Fangs, contemplates the meaning of retribution, and celebrates the memory of Lovisa Swallows-the-Sky whose death was, in the end, a triumph.
And so what are we to make of this Incarnadine Empress who stands before us? Certainly, many of the accounts we have of her rise to power and reign come from the quills of those grinding personal and ideological axes so transparently as to destroy all credibility, and as the centuries pass historians have increasingly come to believe that she is almost certainly innocent (absolute certainty in matters such as these being nearly impossible) of many of the charges laid against her. Responsible scholars have noted that it took decades for her to be mentioned as a suspect in the death of Cynis Jehanes, the disappearance of the Scarlet Empress, and the enigmatic events that overtook Daoshin, and that when she finally began to be discussed it was by propagandists and sensation seekers.
If the Incarnadine was less than the monster she is commonly remembered as, it is equally impossible to declare her an innocent victim of slander and distortion. Certainly, she seems to have been capable of monstrous actions, having defeated enemies buried alive and unruly slaves torn apart by hounds. And yet. And yet somehow she has struck deep roots in the world's imagination as something more, or at least other than, human. A kind of sacred monster, as pitiless as a viper, a killer not only of enemies but of the utterly innocent, yet at the same time the magnificent centerpiece of One Brass Sparrow's larger than life portraits. She has held the world's interest in part because of the question of how such a gifted and fortunate woman could have committed such crimes. And because of the related, troubling question of how it is possible for such a thoroughly vicious character to be so......attractive.
- excerpt from The Cynis: The Complete Story Of The Blessed Isle's Most Notorious Dynasty by Braeden Jormung of Medo-On-The-Crossing
Article:
I have seen the face of war, and She is beautiful. So run the opening lines of Reflections On Killing, that famous work embraced by many sects within the Siakalan Creed as a holy text and condemned by many more as rank blasphemy. Popular tradition holds this peculiar combination of military manual, theological musing, and romantic sonnets was penned by the Incarnadine general Cynis Tamaz during the Age of Broken Thrones. Not content with claiming such an polarizing figure as the works author, they further claim that the geographical feature of the northern Isles known today as "The Bite" is no less than a physical manifestation of their goddess divine wrath.
According to this colorful belief, which it must be said is shared by many of the treasure divers who to this day practice their old folkways along the shores of Hawk, the Dejis Province was sunk beneath the waves not by sorcerous mishap or by an alignment of natural forces, but by the Cynis warlord enacting some rite or sacrifice Siakal found so pleasing that she smote his enemies living and dead alike, reducing the fabled utopia to its current condition of a jagged rocky island barely rising above the foaming torrent.
The nature of the sacrifice varies from sect to sect, with some claiming the warlord offered up his own flesh and willingly flung himself into Siakal's vast maw, while others believe his offering of flesh was somewhat more metaphorical and perhaps even romantic (if one's ideas of romance are fairly broad minded) and point to the hereditary bloodline who to this day nominally lead the Carcharian Order as proof of their intrepation.
- from Raider, Trader, Undertaker: The Rise of The Siakalan Creed In The Blessed Isles
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Kasskashu We
Eldest born
Blade wielders
Victors still
- translated war cry of the Kasskashu, the famously savage necromantic light cavalry so memorably and effectively employed by the Incarnadines in their conflicts with House Tepet and House Saloy
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The Blood Cranes? You came a long way to chase nonsense, friend. I mean, really, some kind of criminal gang stretching all the way from Taira to New Halta, founded centuries ago, and it's around to this day? Sure, of course it is. And this rag I'm wiping down the bar with is Cainan The Blessed's personal prayer cloth, look, it's got some of his sweat still on it. Sell it to you for just a very reasonable amount of Prasadi scrip.
- written record of an unsuccessful interview found among the effects of itinerant scholar Heklo Arikan, following her death in an unfortunate tyrant lizard related accident
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".....in truth, calling these assaults on the Caul 'crusades' is an insult to Gens Mnemon's far better funded, far better organized efforts on the Isle itself as well as the Blessed Realm's own expedition that settled Caul in the first place. They are better understood as massive raids for slaves and plunder, waged by Anathema seeking to indulge their bestial appetites more than any true religious feeling, and if anyone believes that none of this was aided or abetted by Gens Ragara I'll have to ask how in the name of the Dragons a helot got into this lecture hall."
- excerpt from Why They Hate Us, series of lectures given at the Lookshyan Collegium of War by General Teresu Bhalel
"....assure all interested parties that rumors of General Bhalel's resignation being motivated by pressure, financial or otherwise, applied to the Collegium's donors are completely false and an insult to the honor of our venerable institution if not the nation itself. He has decided to spend more time with his family, a very praiseworthy ambition I might add."
- statement issued by the Lookshyan Collegium of War prior to General Bhalel's death in an unfortunate zombie tyrant lizard related accident
They had begun work on the foundations earlier that day. A throng of labourers and workmen leaping at the task with relish, or so Yueh Xuan was inclined to record it for posterity.
From his vantage point atop a nearby hill, he had a splendid view of the sea, the Radimel river, and the two teams working away on opposite sides of the river. A light breeze blew inland from the coast, and he closed his eyes and enjoyed the feel of it for a moment.
Only last year the river was a pathetic thing, their allies having barely been able to coax forth a small stream, or so the Ragara savant had described it. But geomantic expertise and diligence had gone a long way towards undoing the harm caused by the Lunar Anathema, and this section of the island was well on its way towards recapturing its former beauty and bounty.
All of Radimel's former western cities had been depopulated thanks to the Lunars. Tragic, but it offered plenty of opportunity for new endeavours now that attention had shifted to reconstruction. And both the Baihu League and the newly independent Ragaras were keen to capitalize.
South of the river, his house had laid plans for Yueh-on-Radimel, a new city for a new era. Excavating a deep-water port on Radimel's, at incredible expense, had been a priority for the Baihu League.
To the north, Ragara-on-Radimel was their ally's contribution to this project. If he knew them at all it would probably be a geomantic marvel, and they intended it to serve as their administrative centre on the island.
Xuan grinned at the thought. He did not envy whomever would be left behind to run these two cities, when all was said and done and the festivities concluded. Haggling over which municipal authority had rights to the river, and other resources held in common, sounded like it would prove to be a right pain. He would be home by then, of course.
Of course, the powers that be had agreed on two cities. The symbolism, as it were, was too good to pass up. Sister cities, built at the same time, to be joined by a bridge when the river was fully restored. A potent manifestation of friendship, kinship, and mutual interests. If he knew the matriarch, there would be a slew of marriages announced and officiated here when the bridge was complete, between lucky Baihu dynasts and Ragara scions. He would be tasked to record that as well, probably present some poetry at the weddings of the lucky couples.
He smiled. The house was positively giddy with hope and glee for a new era, and he could not help but share in the sentiment.
Daoshin Wyldlands
The Glittering Tree was moored on the periphery of the primeval landscape Berit, in her bid at apotheosis, had created from the wreckage of Daoshin. Ahead of them, where Iora had once stood, the world tree loomed, taller than any other, eclipsing even the Imperial Mountain itself.
Even Sapphire Eye, former outcaste, prone as she was to seeing the worst of things, had to admit it was an awesome scene, in multiple senses of the world. Their captain, Yueh Thanh, had refused to take them any closer than this. Privately, Sapphire Eye had to agree with that decision. If they ventured further towards Berit they might not survive. Even here, the waters churned despite the lack of any winds, rocking the boat this way and that.
"How does it feel to be back?" asked Thanh, shouting to be heard over the crashing of the waves.
"Awe-inspiring, fear-inducing, like I'm staring my death in the face," she answered. "Did I really need to come?"
"Hey, you volunteered, weathermaker," said the captain. "You were quite eager to be away from Nai Lei."
"Dealing with the all the Baihu League representatives is exhausting. I don't know how Luhn does it."
There was a moment of silence. "I used to work there, on Iora," Thanh remarked. "I was stationed at the embassy for a year. Never thought, when I left, that this was how it was going to end."
Sapphire Eye shrugged. "I knew she was planning something, just not this," she said. She glanced up at the tree. It was bizarre thinking that the severe woman with a penchant for black jade was now that thing. It made her even more uncomfortable. Thinking about the reality of what had happened here always did that. "Let's be done with what we came to do and be off."
Thuan nodded, venturing belowdecks. He emerged moments holding a small chest. Sapphire Eye sniffed the air. Sandalwood.
"What's inside?"
"Silver, a bottle of brandy, southwestern fruits," said Thuan, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Each new ambassador would walk up to the House of Rusted Swords at the start of the year and offer a gift to Berit. I remember doing it, scared half to death walking up there."
"So now you… offer it to the tree miles away?"
Thuan nodded, walking to the side of the ship, holding the chest over the water. Taking a deep breath, he began to speak in even, practiced tones. "House Yueh thanks Berit, daughter of the Scarlet Empress, for another year of her friendship. Our warmest wishes to her and her household, may all her ventures bear fruit and only good fortune come to her."
He dropped the chest then, and it disappeared into the water without another sound.
"We've done our job. It's for her to decide if she wishes to respond. In that regard, she's much the same as before."
Sapphire Eye leaned over the ship's edge, eyes fixed on where the chest had disappeared into the deep dark. Nothing seemed to be happening. The same waves rocked their ship, and the airs remained as still as ever. She was about to voice a complaint when she caught a gleam of light in the water.
"Ah, well, that's something," said Thuan.
Something bright broke the water's surface, though Sapphire Eye could not tell exactly what. It seemed at first glance to be an opal, though the way it caught the light reminded Sapphire Eye of materials she had come across as Sky-Seizer. As it bobbed in the water more items appeared around it, an upwelling of exotic baubles and magically potent goods.
"Well, now you have something to catalogue on our voyage home, Sapphire Eye," remarked Thuan with a chuckle.
Nai Lei
"How is life as anathema treating you?"
Sesus Agares laughed. "How is life under your new hegemon?"
Yueh Lan said nothing at first, simply taking a sip of his tea before leaning back in his chair. "Better than many feared, actually. But don't change the subject."
"What's there to say?" asked Agares. "Do you want me to complain about the new tariffs the League imposed on us?"
"When last did you actually pay those, Agares?"
"It's the principle of the matter Lan!"
They held each other's gaze for a moment, before both descended into fits of giggling and laughter. It was a good thing they were alone in Lan's estate, or it might have looked undignified.
"I heard Lady Smoke's wedding was truly something," said Lan when finally he had recovered.
"Truly cheap. Well, I suppose the spectacle of seizing the throne made it worth it in the end," said Agares with a sniff.
They continued sitting there in companionable silence as the sun continued its slow descent over the horizon. From the balcony of Lan's estate, it lent the Meiyu Sea and the cityscape below them a warm glow, as a cool evening breeze blew in from the sea.
It made for a pleasant change from Mnemon-Darjilis and the Blessed Isle campaigns. A return to normalcy, at long last.
Were he to close his eyes he could almost pretend the city was the same as it had been when he had first come here, half a decade ago. The harbour was smaller then, the EATC not yet a fixture in anyone's mind, and the occult market in Daoshin curios most assuredly not yet a thing. Yet, Nai Lei remained staunchly itself, when all was said and done.
"I haven't seen your sister this whole time I've been here," said Agares after a sip of his cup.
"She's an ambassador now," said Lan. He caught Agares' questioning look and grinned. "What, you didn't think we wouldn't have an embassy in the court of the Most Holy Empress, did you?"
"I assume your matriarch's new coronet is down to the same thing?"
"Yes, a symbol of recognition and approval, if you will. But please, I know we have a reputation for it, but must we keep talking politics?"
He drained his cup then and stood up.
"I think I'll retire for the day. Don't keep me waiting out here too long," he winked. "I would like your thoughts on some of my newest poetry."
