Triumphant Air
Located in the north of the Anarchy, the island of Triumphant Air is a Tepet satrapy and location of one of the major Realm naval bases in the region. From this isle sail out red-sailed pirate-chasing junks, while the new radical abbess of the Immaculate temple dreams of bringing the whole region into harmonious accord. Slaves tend the cash-crop estates of the landowners, while the capital Rising Steam maintains the standards of the Isles for the sake of visiting Dynastic tourists headed off the beaten track of An Teng.
The entire vaguely crab-shaped island is a dormant caldera riddled with magma tunnels, measuring around fifty miles across. The collapse of one of the volcanic walls has made it a perfect shielded natural harbour where Imperial vessels can wait out hurricane season in safety. Neatly stepped terraces line the interior of the caldera, dotted with farming villages that huddle within the many natural magma tunnels that riddle the island. The exterior is more wild, with bamboo forests and natural hot springs interspersed with the estates of smaller landowners and the holdings of freedmen.
Economy
Once a major trading port under the Blue Monkey Shogunate, the Realm seized the island seeking its profits. However, the collapse of the southern districts into the modern Anarchy led to a sharp decline in its fortunes. Triumphant Air is no longer the commercial centre it once was, when it channelled goods to the wealthy cities of the Hook, and now it serves more as a safe harbour for vessels travelling to Realm-controlled areas - or even the Blessed Isle itself.
The island itself grows a number of cash crops in the rich volcanic soil. Historically Triumphant Air has focussed on cane sugar, taking advantage of enslaved criminals provided by the Imperial Navy. However, over the past fifty years a fall in the sugar price in the South West and exhausted soil in the lowlands has led to areas lying fallow and a reduced slave population. The increased number of freedmen and their high-lying smallholdings has led to social tensions, as the freedmen set their eyes on uncultivated lowland regions. In this past year, there have been three riots and the murder of a landowner, which saw punitive punishments.
There are two major economic centres on Triumphant Air. The Imperial Navy shipyard at Cherry Victory has grown over the years and is now surrounded by countless ways for ship-tired sailors to lose their wages. Periodically the admiralty attempts to remove the temptations, but it never lasts long. In addition, captured pirate ships and enemies of the Dynasty are taken here, and enslavement is the fate of those who do not meet with execution, calling slave traders like vultures to rotting meat. Other merchants come to buy the seized contents of these ships - or even the vessels.
The capital at Rising Steam is named for the many heated pools that surround it, making it a favoured stopping point for Dynasts heading south from An Teng who wish to visit the hot springs. Once it was a glorious city of the Blue Monkey Shogunate, but when the Realm seized it from Gens Larana it was sacked and the modern city is only the centre of the older town. Still, its basalt spires rise high above the warm waters of the seaside, while the poorest are banished into natural magma tubes so that they do not ruin the landscape. The more sedate upper levels are the stopping-off points for Dynasts on a trip, while the markets and blue light districts lava tunnels below the city centre are more boisterous and aimed at the common sailor.
Scarlet Point, on the outer rim of the caldera, is technically a mere fishing port. However, in practice it serves as the hub of smuggling on the island. Its position above old lava tubes means there are countless hidden tunnels and secret landing spots. Ships sitting suspiciously low in the water sail towards the coast and vanish into sunless obsidian-walled docks, to be unloaded. The Steel Dragon Society is making blood-soaked moves into Scarlet Point's underworld, and many of the suspiciously large fish-smoking warehouses have new, hard-faced owners. Goods landed here bypass the customs agents on the main docks, and are often shipped out again as legitimate cargo with falsified stamps.
Culture
Through intermarriage and death without issue, the original Gens on the island have been supplanted by minor cousins of House Tepet and allied Lesser Houses. These bonds of kinship and alliance means the satrap has traditionally granted the landowners a great deal of latitude. The nobility of Triumphant Air are somewhat provincial by the standards of visiting Dynasts, hungry for word of the latest fashions of the Isles which they slavishly imitate.
There is enough of the Dragons' blood among these intermarried descendants of the Blue Monkey Shogunate and the Tepet that until five years ago, Cadet House Parmi had their holdings here, with six Dragonblooded members. However, House Tepet's desperation since the Battle of Futile Blood has led them to offer full adoption to every client Cadet House they have and the Parmi accepted. There is now only one member of the new Tepet Parmi family resident on Triumphant Air - Tepet Parmi Alesa, an ancient sorceress who is barely short of her four hundredth birthday who lives in her caldera-top manse with her pet demon-blooded hunting dogs and her familiars. She is getting vague and forgetful, but on her good days she is a fountain of knowledge about the Blue Monkey Shogunate and her younger days when she was one of the great beauties of An Moi.
While the upper classes of Triumphant Air beat to the pulse of the Realm, the lower classes form three separate groups. A small middle class is descended from Imperial sailors who have retired here, accepting land grants as their pensions. Their culture is still distinctly nautical and they and their descendents retain close links to the naval base. As a result, many of them are wealthier lesser landowners and petty bourgeoisie who exploit their contacts with the Navy to their fullest, many of them having gone into trade.
The original inhabitants of Triumphant Air are ethnically similar to the Tengese, but have largely been supplanted. They resent the upstarts but they have lost prestige and form the urban lower classes and smallholders. Most of the traces of their once-Tengese culture have been lost under hundreds of years of Realm rulership, although a small rebel movement has taken up worship of the Pale Mistress and carry out unspeakable rites in a hidden underground temple. Many of the slaves and freedmen on Triumphant Air are from the Far South West and speak a creole of their native languages and Firetongue. Nearly all the slaves on this island are farm slaves working on the sugar and tobacco plantations - house slaves are rare and the preserve of the very wealthiest. The freedmen were granted manumission not for moral reasons, but due to a fall in sugar prices which left swathes of the lowlands unprofitable to farm. These former slaves and their children rent land on the upper edges of the caldera which is too steep for the cash crop plantations of the lower reaches, or take the worst-paid jobs in the cities.
The Satrap and His Affair
Triumphant Air is ruled directly by the satrap, Tepet Linaro. Its relative unimportance to the House can be seen by the fact he is not favoured by the dragons - and is a man as well. Despite his sex he is a capable enough manager, if a little staid and plodding. He has been on this island long enough that he has chosen to shield it from the worst of the recent increases in tributes by selling privateer licenses. Pirate captains can escape the attention of the Imperial Navy and all it takes is six-tenths of their plunder in fees. Unfortunately, more than a few of the licenses were bought by the Lintha family and he has been considering his options for making that embarrassment discretely go away.
His wife died shortly after their marriage when sweating sickness hit the island, and Linaro has shown no interest in taking another wife. In truth, he is all-but married to Maylada Timkul, a married landowner in the east of the island. She has been his mistress for twenty years, and the relationship is an open secret among the upper classes of Triumphant Air. Maylada's husband Joni is fully aware of the affair and although he acts nonchalant his life is consumed with hatred for the satrap. He knows none of her children are his and he spends most of the year away at sea - which only enables the affair.
Linaro finds himself in a pickle. One of his illegitimate daughters, Lilina, by his mistress has just Exalted as an Earth Aspect at age seventeen. House Tepet could use her, but he is fond of her and her mother would protest if he sent her off to the Realm. On top of that, the Navy has its eyes set on Lost Eggs and that he cannot tolerate. If he must fret over whether his family gets her, he will not let some Peleps scoundrel take his kin from him!
The Pirate Chasers of the Anarchy
Three squadrons of the Imperial Navy operate out of Triumphant Air, based in the docks in Cherry Victory. They operate a seasonal rotation, alternating between patrolling the sea lanes of the Anarchy, escorting cargo between satrapies, and remaining in port for repairs and responding to emergencies. As is typical for the South West, the mainstay of the local fleets are two-master and three-master junks able to operate independently or in subsquadrons in blue water for extended periods. They mount a mixture of ballista, catapults and the devastating naval flame weapons of the region, and their marine compliments are higher quality than the pirate scum out here.
Leathery-skinned; hook-nosed; scarred; Peleps Sasimana is the commodore in charge of Tiger Squadron and is a bitter old woman whose once-bright blue hair is now as white as sea foam. Her long cape is made from hand-sized patches of the flags of pirate ships, and her daiklaive Hullwrecker has slain gods and demon lords. Privateers across the Anarchy call the jerking of a hanged man "Sasimana's Waltz". The Southern Navy tries to promote her at least once a year, and every time she turns them down. She would rather die than give up the thrill of the case or the satisfaction of watching proud pirate-princes plead for their lives.
Overweight and mediocre, Peleps Nota is a barely adequate jobsworth who took this posting as commodore of Lion Squadron because it assured her an easy life and frequent holidays in An Teng. Despite her lack of talent at command, she husbands her resources better than the others and so her squadron is nearly at full strength. Both discipline and morale are better than one might expect . As a result, while her tactics are by the book and risk-averse, her sailors carry them out loyally - fully aware that failure might result in them being moved to one of the other two squadrons.
Taym Alou is the Wood Aspected commodore of Bear Squadron, a tall man from the South East with bark-brown hair and blossom-pink eyes. As the only Lost Egg stationed here, he resents the favouritism that the two Peleps commodores get. He is a glory chaser, constantly out to prove himself and angry to be in Peleps Sasimana's shadow. This thirst for glory has led to disenchantment and regret that he took the coin in the first place. He looks in envy at the Raraan Ge pirate lords. If he had been born here, he could have been a prince of the sea, not an officer in a navy run for the Great Houses. No one has come with a better offer yet - and it would have to be a good one because he values himself very highly - but he could easily be tempted by someone offering the right things.
The post's fleetlord fell two years ago in battle against Raraan Ge pirates, and no official replacement has been made. The Anarchy has always existed in the middle of a jurisdictional conflict between the Water Fleet and the Fire Fleet. With Water hard-pressed and the Fleet Admiral of Fire caring more about the vital trade from the Lap, the South West has been left to moulder. Without a fleetlord, the commodore in residence performs his administrative duties. None of them like each other enough to put one in charge, and although Peleps Sasimana has seniority she does not want the administrative responsibilities of fleetlord.
The Abbess and the Centipedes
The Immaculate Temple of Mela's Claw sits high on the caldera, looking down upon the Navy docks. The old structure shows the marks of recent renovations, and the paint in recesses on the walls is less faded, hinting at the statues that once stood there. The past few years have seen enforcement of Blessed Isles standards of worship, though many families still retain their own private shrines for their ancestors.
Historically the island displayed a certain degree of heterodoxy - as common for many South Western Immaculate temples affected by the influence of the Orthodoxy. However, heavy losses sustained in a failed Wyld Hunt against a Lunar Anathema eight years ago has resulted in a culture shift. Mela's Claw was forced to appeal to the Mouth of Peace after the death of the abbot and the arrival of his replacement.
The new abbess, Bright Wind, was born Sesus Rina, and she is every bit as militant as her family name might indicate. At at age when most of her peers were still galavanting around the Threshold, she managed to secure her own temple. Her ambition burns as bright as her faith, and she holds to a strongly orthoprax interpretation of the Immaculate faith that would be considered unbending even in the Imperial City itself.
Bright Wind has therefore set out to bring first Triumphant Air, then the whole Anarchy into harmonious accord with the doctrine of the Immaculate Order. The widespread influence of the Immaculate Orthodoxy with its hero cults, iconoclasm and ancestor veneration is nothing less than heresy, and cannot be tolerated. She has expanded Mela's Claw, training new initiates and recruiting from militant members back on the Blessed Isles. She has already made moves against lesser temples close to Triumphant Air, installing hardliner 'advisors' where they fail to live up to her standards. This approach has led to pushback from other temples who jealously guard their independence from some upstart abbess, and Bright Wind has become certain she will need to make an example of one of them.
Her attention to the doctrinal affairs of the region has led to neglect of the more traditional theological duties of the abbot of Mela's Claw. Triumphant Air is periodically afflicted by magma centipedes; a breed of fire elemental that crawls through the earth dripping molten rock from their many legs. Small ones are the size of a horse, while ones formed from stresses within the earth can reach the size of a caravan train or longer. With the death of the old abbot Bright Wind knows nothing of the mighty elemental Krastion, the mother of all magma centipedes, who sleeps curled up in a vast magma pocket beneath Triumphant Air. When fire twists the earth ley lines, she lays her centipede children to vent the stresses. The old monks knew to placate her and only to slay the centipedes once they had done their work. Bright Wind does not know this, and has dismissed the worries of other monks as shameful elemental-worship. As it stands there is little risk of Krastion waking, but she shifts in her sleep, laying more and more eggs.
History
In the ancient times before man, the demon king Isidoros walked Creation and where he stood the world cracked and crumbled. From that first eruption was born Krastion, the fiery blood of Creation crawling forth as a great centipede to try to tend to her mother's wounds. In time the wound scarred over, and men called the isle Krasta and kept away from it, for they knew of the monster that slept beneath, suturing the world's scar.
But men are short-lived, the gods were idle and the Exalted were betrayed, and Krastion was forgotten by all save Heaven. The princes of the Shogunate came to Krasta and they mined it for its gems and firedust, leaving it riddled with tunnels, and they built a mighty city atop the plateau of Krasta with cunning artifice. Their deft hands could not save them from plague, though, and they died.
When the princes of chaos came to the world, Krastion woke and she roared and burning ash slew the children of chaos. Krasta died too, and all that was left was a caldera where once a mighty island had stood, where the mother of the fire centipedes nested. The most handsome of the gods came to her and lulled her back to sleep with their songs, and she returned below the earth. Fragile life returned to the island.
Then came men who claimed to be the princes of the Shogunate, but their crest was a blue monkey, and they built a trading port afresh where the wealth of the South West came. And many men would come to the place they called Triumphant Air to buy and sell and the city prospered. But the time came when the Shogunate of the Blue Monkey was cast down by the Scarlet Realm and the isle fell into their hands. They too sought wealth from trade, but it no longer came, so instead they left their excess children to rule over it.
Triumphant Air is simmering. The price of sugar drops so its traditional source of wealth dwindles. The princes of this isle - and the satrap who is but a mortal man - all have their own wants, but the Scarlet Realm's attention wavers. The fleet suffers attrition and is not replaced when it should be, the lords of the Realm war among themselves, and the pirate-princes south of the isle sense the weakness of Triumphant Air. They know that this island is where the Realm's retaliation will come from.
:: SIDEBAR - Storyteller's Notes: Crack of Doom ::
Player characters may have the bright idea of waking Krastion as to destroy the major Realm fleet base in the north of the Anarchy. Such a plan will achieve its goals, if it succeeds. The entire island will be destroyed, collapsing into the magma chamber where she sleeps. The Realm's force projection in the area will be crippled.
Now, let's talk about the side effects.
Krastion's enraged wail will be heard from as far away as the Blessed Isles and level trees on surrounding islands. A pillar of black ash tens of miles high will be visible across the South West. Pyroclastic flows will spread out, polluting the sea and leaving nearby islands lifeless shadowlands. Worse, these flows and collapse of the island will cause monstrous tsunamis that sweep across the Anarchy and up as far as the low-lying Shore Lands of An Teng. The death count will be measured in the hundreds of thousands and may reach the low millions. The Lintha will die a final death as Bluehaven is swamped.
Under an ash-choked sky, the Dead will rise. Men and women who drowned on dry land will rise again, their corpses animated by their gasping hungry ghosts. Bloated drowned spectres will crawl out from the shadowlands that the tsunami tears in Creation. With the current state of the Realm, it may not be able to spare the monks to contain the damage done to An Teng, and the empire may wind up effectively abandoning the South West. In the resulting vacuum, the shattered Anarchy will collapse into true, Dead-plagued anarchy.
Across Creation, the sun will dim for several years as ash fills the upper atmosphere. Growing seasons for crops will suffer, causing famine on a Creation-wide scale. Winters will be longer and colder; summers will be cut short. The Dead, the princes of chaos and demons will find it easier to access the world. Some astrologers will take this portent as the end of the Second Age.
Sometimes it's best to let sleeping fire-centipedes lie.
Storytellers, this isn't an instruction that you should never wake Krastion. Players are allowed to be short-sighted. It's just a reminder that the impact of a super-volcano going off has setting-warping implications. But then again, maybe that's what you're looking for. In a Dynastic game set on the Blessed Isle, something like this is a perfect trigger point for the Realm Civil War. In a Sidereal game, dealing with the consequences of an eruption could be the starting premise of the game. And of course, in the aftermath Creation will need heroes more than ever.
However, if you don't want to risk it, it's probably just better to remove Krastion and replace her with a cluster of her eggs that the lesser centipedes hatch from.
:: END SIDEBAR::
