Reign of the Taan Empress
Penelope
Empress of Mars
Reign of the Taan Empress
"Not only shall you find me impossible to negotiate with old friend, but you should prepare yourself also for death, for I have never yet failed, fallen, nor surrendered, and I think I shall only do so when the Living Goddess wills it for me."
-Semi-legendary quote attributed to the Taan Empress, allegedly amid her captivity during the Crisis of 1845.
After a military coup brought an end to her short-lived regency, Taan I Navith dissolved the Ruuknan's Diet, beginning a personal rule which lasted until her death in 1849.
As Empress, she made her estate the Palace of Deshanor, as was tradition, though she declined to place her own clan's estates and territories under direct imperial administration. She remained on poor terms with her own clan. Though most Empresses of the day gave kickbacks and corrupt benefits to the clans of their birth, Taan I Navith refused; after her death, Clan Taan faded back into the relative obscurity of the middle-ranking nobility, possibly as a result.
Sannath's Rebellion
Empowered by the Red Planet's stratocratic warlords, the new empress rewarded them continually with legal authority and appointments to high office. These hardline militarists had long sought to undermine the existing political institutions of Mars, and throughout the reign of the Taan Empress, used their growing stature as a means to that end. In 1787, after much negotiation and hesitation, she pardoned Temis Kasann, the Lord of Clan Temis who once attempted to seize power for herself during the chaos of 1785. She held no role in government, but gave true loyalty and deference to the Taan Empress as her liege, and returned to her clan estates in the volcanic highlands north of Deshanor.
During the 1790s, the possibility of open warfare between the clans appeared once again in the Sannath's Rebellion. By 1792, the Martian legislature had been inactive for several years. Sannath, a high lord of Clan Niira, denounced the Taan Empress and demanded the Diet be reconvened. When the imperial government refused, she called her banners. Several clans followed her lead, including Clans Muth, Nari, and Matiiran. Blood feuds and civil war broke out across Sabaea. Sannath won several battles along the Hellas coast. At the Battle of Shin Saraa, where mists from the sea occluded much of the battle from view, she slew two of Naar Nerin's daughters. At the Battle of the Vaand River, she captured Temis Kasann.
Left with no other choice, Taan called on the warlords to come to her aid, intervening directly in the conflict with the help of military hardliners. Kaara Maran, Lord of Clan Kaara, led the forces throughout the war, defeating Sannath at the Sannara Seas, where the rebel lord died drowning in the iron-rich waters. Kaara returned as a conquering hero, which perturbed the royal court and council.
Imperial Reorganization
The Taan Empress, too, grew wary. Fearing that her hold on power might be too weak to survive a true challenge, she called together an unlikely coalition of military hardliners, political reformists, and noble lords from the high clans, appointing them to a special imperial council with a mandate to reform the Triumvirate's political system.
With such powers, the council quickly grew beyond its station, issuing a series of reforms which centralized political authority in Deshanor. It established a true executive bureaucracy, with the Empress at its head, and gave the Empress the power to appoint and dismiss councilors from that body at will. While military clans remained theoretically independent, they bore new legal and political responsibilities under the new paradigm. They owed their loyalty to the Empress not only out of honor and alliance, but under the law, enforceably. The special council pulled the independent militaries of the world under imperial purview.
The Empress approved the changes, but, when faced with a potential rebellion by hardliners, appointed the more loyal among the militarists to sinecures. She divided the Ruuknan into distinct territories, appointing one or more military clans - and their lords - as defenders and wardens of each region. War, for now, was averted. Nonetheless, the sting of betrayal lingered.
Reconstruction of the Ruuknan
One benefit of imperial centralization became quickly evident. The reformists who now counted themselves as part of the Taan Empress' inner circle pushed for the rehabilitation of the world's decaying infrastructure. Throughout the Ruuknan and much of the rest of Mars, highways, railways, power grids, water systems, towns, and even cities had been left to rot in the aftermath of the atomic wars. Any effort at rebuilding the relics of the classic age faced another significant hurdle - 200 years of wind and sand erosion.
In the economic depression which followed the Great Disunity, young people found themselves without steady work, military assignments, or clear positions in family or clan businesses. Many clans had been all but wiped out during the wars, or found their reach and resources significantly reduced. Crime, including banditry and roadway robberies, skyrocketed. To alleviate the growing problem, the Taan Empress issued a decree of forgiveness for any bandits, raiders, and other outlaws who gave a statement of repentance and joined the imperial reconstruction effort. The royal council and its bureaucracy devised an array of organizations to employ, house, and feed young workers in exchange for their labor in construction, manufacturing, and defense.
A particularly important role for these programs was disaster response and environmental reclamation. The system of Ravmist air exchanges, which had helped to prevent abrupt atmospheric collapse in many communities, began coming undone during the 18th and 19th centuries. Following several high-profile disasters in the early 1800s, imperial public works projects pivoted toward reconstruction of the air exchange system, providing several cities and towns throughout the Ruuknan with higher air pressure and more breathable and oxygenated air.
One additional benefit of this project proved itself only decades later. Clans whose children participated in the programs as young adults were far more likely to maintain long-term loyalties with the central government. Through these ties, and a rehabilitated international infrastructure in the form cleared and paved roads, high speed rail, a unified electrical grid, and worldwide system of water collection and distribution, the Taan Empress reunified the planet to an extent not seen since the days of the Ravmist dynasty.
For the first time since the atomic wars, Martians throughout the southern hemisphere experienced a rapidly growing quality of life.
The New Space Age
Martian spaceflight saw a renaissance during the reign of the Taan Empress. Her campaign of international reconstruction led to rapid industrial and technological redevelopment. Many old launch facilities, which had previously laid dormant and in disrepair, were rebuilt through public works projects. Martian launch facilities, which used ballistics to achieve escape velocity, faced less damage from the wind than many other kinds of infrastructure. This allowed clans to quickly resume space exploration. The Taan Empress herself gave the dedication when Clan Muth launched their first unmanned interplanetary mission, a fly-by of Phobos in 1813.
In 1812, two captains of Clan Raana reached orbit, becoming the first Martians to break through the atmosphere since the atomic holocausts. Clan Shuur completed a spacewalk near Phobos in 1819. Clans sought to establish a permanent presence in low orbit, constructing several space stations throughout the early part of the 19th century. Unmanned probes again reached Mercury, the Terra-Luna system, and Venus during the 1810s. Manned missions to Terra and Venus were scrapped in 1815 and 1823 due to environmental catastrophes. In 1822, the imperial council began an effort to unify clans' spacing efforts under one banner, establishing a single, relatively decentralized space program to govern planned missions and monitor all interplanetary traffic.
A manned mission to the asteroid belt in 1826 managed to re-establish contact with Martian spacers, who had been living there since the days of the First Triumvirate. Cooperation between the Ruuknan's high clans, the imperial space program, and Martian belters led to dramatic advancements in the field of interplanetary technology. Manned flybys of Earth and Venus occurred in the 1830s.
Martians retained limited knowledge of landings and return missions. The first expedition, a mission to Venus in 1845, planned to deposit its crew on the planet for a period of four years, providing them with sufficient supplies and rations to remain groundside until a planned recovery operation in 1849. The crew failed to respond to its scheduled briefing with mission control in 1846, leading the government to declare a total loss on the project.
The Late Taan Era
Despite the post-atomic recovery jump-started by the Taan Empress and her government, the Triumvirate struggled to repair the damage to the Martian world-system. Much of the damage appeared permanent.
Several atmospheric and climatological disasters struck during the latter half of her reign. Destructive, world-wide duststorms grounded air and space flights for years, ruined crop harvests, and caused global famines. Death and disease reached Deshanor when a particularly cold winter in 1819 dropped hundreds of meters of snow over the course of four weeks. Even the imperial government found themselves trapped within the Palace of Deshanor. In 1829, the air exchange in Suuran-Nasi city collapsed in an industrial accident, causing the asphyxiation of nearly 70% of the population.
Opposition to the Empress, inflamed by these disasters, reached a boiling point in the 1830s. The Deshanori clique of stratocrats put down a series of rebellions against the Taan Empress, including one which threatened outright secession from the Triumvirate. The warlords too, staged their own rebellion in 1838, when a group of hardline militarists within the government trapped the Empress in her personal residence. Negotiations lasted for six days, at which point war between the imperial militaries seemed likely. The Battle of the Palace saw imperial loyalists defeat the rebels, rescuing the Empress and restoring her to the throne. This did not come free, however, and her militarist rescuers were awarded with special privileges and rights.
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Taan faced repeated attempts to force her hand in calling a new session of the Diet. Opposition groups campaigned for leadership in regions of the Ruuknan with democratized institutions, refusing whatever legal obligations they could. Often, this meant disputing their tributes, taxes, and other financial burdens; resolving the disputes meant years of legal battles, reconvening the Diet to review financial policy, or long, drawn out military campaigns against rebel lords. The administration chose legal battles and military campaigns where possible. Often, as Taan grew older, she simply refused to confront the problem at all, leaving her royal councilors to draw back imperial commitments. Imperial inaction resulted in poor consequences: most reconstruction programs were critically defunded by the late 1840s.
Illness & Death
Taan I Navith, now reaching her old age, appeared disinterested in reform, and refused to placate her opponents by abdicating. Instead, she secured her position through bribery, corruption, and negotiation with bad-faith actors, as many Empresses of her era had done before. Though a transformational figure in many ways, she failed to bring herself out of that particular bad habit of post-atomic government. Suffering and in-ill health, she stubbornly clung to power in the only way she knew how. Symptoms of her life-long abuse of alcohol and drugs - habits she had picked up in her military upbringing, common among the independent warlords and their clans - were slowly killing her.
Nonetheless, obvious heirs escaped her. She had never remarried, once describing the first Muth Empress, her late wife, as the "sole love" of her life. Their sole child, now named Muth Taanda, became a memorist and shrugged off any suggestion that they might want the Obsidian Seat. However, in 1846, their mother - now 86 - fell ill after a fall while on diplomatic tour. In her illness she brought her child to the capital and attempted to persuade them to become her co-ruler. Muth Taanda refused. They made clear to their mother they had no interest in the throne. Taan, a reluctant Empress herself, likely held some degree of sympathy for their child. Muth Taanda did, however, remain in Deshanor as the chief memorist of the royal court. When Navith Taan left the city in early 1849, they remained.
The Taan Empress would never return to her palace. She arrived in the city of Naaf Hara to accept the surrender of yet another rebel lord. On the third day of her visit, a brutal sandstorm struck. The Empress, caught outside on the far side of her town from her pavilion, stubbornly decided to make the trip across town in her motor carriage. While, in theory, her compartment's canopy protected her from the sand, the wind had other plans. A sharp gust of wind burst through the motorcade, pushing the light-weight cars out of rhythm and into one another. Her own fell on its side. She crawled out from the car and attempted to join another, but collapsed from exertion. The storm scarred her throat and lungs, filling them with tiny particles of sand.
The Empress awoke several hours later in the pavilion, but lapsed in and out of consciousness over the next days. She was dying of what post-atomic folk doctors had once called 'sand-lung.' On her deathbed, her military advisors, suffering from shortness of breath themselves, begged her to name an heir. Her last intelligible words were "begone" or "so tired," or possibly, according to a one account -- "No one, or Shiian herself."
The Fifth Disunity began hours later.
"Not only shall you find me impossible to negotiate with old friend, but you should prepare yourself also for death, for I have never yet failed, fallen, nor surrendered, and I think I shall only do so when the Living Goddess wills it for me."
-Semi-legendary quote attributed to the Taan Empress, allegedly amid her captivity during the Crisis of 1845.
After a military coup brought an end to her short-lived regency, Taan I Navith dissolved the Ruuknan's Diet, beginning a personal rule which lasted until her death in 1849.
As Empress, she made her estate the Palace of Deshanor, as was tradition, though she declined to place her own clan's estates and territories under direct imperial administration. She remained on poor terms with her own clan. Though most Empresses of the day gave kickbacks and corrupt benefits to the clans of their birth, Taan I Navith refused; after her death, Clan Taan faded back into the relative obscurity of the middle-ranking nobility, possibly as a result.
Sannath's Rebellion
Empowered by the Red Planet's stratocratic warlords, the new empress rewarded them continually with legal authority and appointments to high office. These hardline militarists had long sought to undermine the existing political institutions of Mars, and throughout the reign of the Taan Empress, used their growing stature as a means to that end. In 1787, after much negotiation and hesitation, she pardoned Temis Kasann, the Lord of Clan Temis who once attempted to seize power for herself during the chaos of 1785. She held no role in government, but gave true loyalty and deference to the Taan Empress as her liege, and returned to her clan estates in the volcanic highlands north of Deshanor.
During the 1790s, the possibility of open warfare between the clans appeared once again in the Sannath's Rebellion. By 1792, the Martian legislature had been inactive for several years. Sannath, a high lord of Clan Niira, denounced the Taan Empress and demanded the Diet be reconvened. When the imperial government refused, she called her banners. Several clans followed her lead, including Clans Muth, Nari, and Matiiran. Blood feuds and civil war broke out across Sabaea. Sannath won several battles along the Hellas coast. At the Battle of Shin Saraa, where mists from the sea occluded much of the battle from view, she slew two of Naar Nerin's daughters. At the Battle of the Vaand River, she captured Temis Kasann.
Left with no other choice, Taan called on the warlords to come to her aid, intervening directly in the conflict with the help of military hardliners. Kaara Maran, Lord of Clan Kaara, led the forces throughout the war, defeating Sannath at the Sannara Seas, where the rebel lord died drowning in the iron-rich waters. Kaara returned as a conquering hero, which perturbed the royal court and council.
Imperial Reorganization
The Taan Empress, too, grew wary. Fearing that her hold on power might be too weak to survive a true challenge, she called together an unlikely coalition of military hardliners, political reformists, and noble lords from the high clans, appointing them to a special imperial council with a mandate to reform the Triumvirate's political system.
With such powers, the council quickly grew beyond its station, issuing a series of reforms which centralized political authority in Deshanor. It established a true executive bureaucracy, with the Empress at its head, and gave the Empress the power to appoint and dismiss councilors from that body at will. While military clans remained theoretically independent, they bore new legal and political responsibilities under the new paradigm. They owed their loyalty to the Empress not only out of honor and alliance, but under the law, enforceably. The special council pulled the independent militaries of the world under imperial purview.
The Empress approved the changes, but, when faced with a potential rebellion by hardliners, appointed the more loyal among the militarists to sinecures. She divided the Ruuknan into distinct territories, appointing one or more military clans - and their lords - as defenders and wardens of each region. War, for now, was averted. Nonetheless, the sting of betrayal lingered.
Reconstruction of the Ruuknan
One benefit of imperial centralization became quickly evident. The reformists who now counted themselves as part of the Taan Empress' inner circle pushed for the rehabilitation of the world's decaying infrastructure. Throughout the Ruuknan and much of the rest of Mars, highways, railways, power grids, water systems, towns, and even cities had been left to rot in the aftermath of the atomic wars. Any effort at rebuilding the relics of the classic age faced another significant hurdle - 200 years of wind and sand erosion.
In the economic depression which followed the Great Disunity, young people found themselves without steady work, military assignments, or clear positions in family or clan businesses. Many clans had been all but wiped out during the wars, or found their reach and resources significantly reduced. Crime, including banditry and roadway robberies, skyrocketed. To alleviate the growing problem, the Taan Empress issued a decree of forgiveness for any bandits, raiders, and other outlaws who gave a statement of repentance and joined the imperial reconstruction effort. The royal council and its bureaucracy devised an array of organizations to employ, house, and feed young workers in exchange for their labor in construction, manufacturing, and defense.
A particularly important role for these programs was disaster response and environmental reclamation. The system of Ravmist air exchanges, which had helped to prevent abrupt atmospheric collapse in many communities, began coming undone during the 18th and 19th centuries. Following several high-profile disasters in the early 1800s, imperial public works projects pivoted toward reconstruction of the air exchange system, providing several cities and towns throughout the Ruuknan with higher air pressure and more breathable and oxygenated air.
One additional benefit of this project proved itself only decades later. Clans whose children participated in the programs as young adults were far more likely to maintain long-term loyalties with the central government. Through these ties, and a rehabilitated international infrastructure in the form cleared and paved roads, high speed rail, a unified electrical grid, and worldwide system of water collection and distribution, the Taan Empress reunified the planet to an extent not seen since the days of the Ravmist dynasty.
For the first time since the atomic wars, Martians throughout the southern hemisphere experienced a rapidly growing quality of life.
The New Space Age
Martian spaceflight saw a renaissance during the reign of the Taan Empress. Her campaign of international reconstruction led to rapid industrial and technological redevelopment. Many old launch facilities, which had previously laid dormant and in disrepair, were rebuilt through public works projects. Martian launch facilities, which used ballistics to achieve escape velocity, faced less damage from the wind than many other kinds of infrastructure. This allowed clans to quickly resume space exploration. The Taan Empress herself gave the dedication when Clan Muth launched their first unmanned interplanetary mission, a fly-by of Phobos in 1813.
In 1812, two captains of Clan Raana reached orbit, becoming the first Martians to break through the atmosphere since the atomic holocausts. Clan Shuur completed a spacewalk near Phobos in 1819. Clans sought to establish a permanent presence in low orbit, constructing several space stations throughout the early part of the 19th century. Unmanned probes again reached Mercury, the Terra-Luna system, and Venus during the 1810s. Manned missions to Terra and Venus were scrapped in 1815 and 1823 due to environmental catastrophes. In 1822, the imperial council began an effort to unify clans' spacing efforts under one banner, establishing a single, relatively decentralized space program to govern planned missions and monitor all interplanetary traffic.
A manned mission to the asteroid belt in 1826 managed to re-establish contact with Martian spacers, who had been living there since the days of the First Triumvirate. Cooperation between the Ruuknan's high clans, the imperial space program, and Martian belters led to dramatic advancements in the field of interplanetary technology. Manned flybys of Earth and Venus occurred in the 1830s.
Martians retained limited knowledge of landings and return missions. The first expedition, a mission to Venus in 1845, planned to deposit its crew on the planet for a period of four years, providing them with sufficient supplies and rations to remain groundside until a planned recovery operation in 1849. The crew failed to respond to its scheduled briefing with mission control in 1846, leading the government to declare a total loss on the project.
The Late Taan Era
Despite the post-atomic recovery jump-started by the Taan Empress and her government, the Triumvirate struggled to repair the damage to the Martian world-system. Much of the damage appeared permanent.
Several atmospheric and climatological disasters struck during the latter half of her reign. Destructive, world-wide duststorms grounded air and space flights for years, ruined crop harvests, and caused global famines. Death and disease reached Deshanor when a particularly cold winter in 1819 dropped hundreds of meters of snow over the course of four weeks. Even the imperial government found themselves trapped within the Palace of Deshanor. In 1829, the air exchange in Suuran-Nasi city collapsed in an industrial accident, causing the asphyxiation of nearly 70% of the population.
Opposition to the Empress, inflamed by these disasters, reached a boiling point in the 1830s. The Deshanori clique of stratocrats put down a series of rebellions against the Taan Empress, including one which threatened outright secession from the Triumvirate. The warlords too, staged their own rebellion in 1838, when a group of hardline militarists within the government trapped the Empress in her personal residence. Negotiations lasted for six days, at which point war between the imperial militaries seemed likely. The Battle of the Palace saw imperial loyalists defeat the rebels, rescuing the Empress and restoring her to the throne. This did not come free, however, and her militarist rescuers were awarded with special privileges and rights.
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Taan faced repeated attempts to force her hand in calling a new session of the Diet. Opposition groups campaigned for leadership in regions of the Ruuknan with democratized institutions, refusing whatever legal obligations they could. Often, this meant disputing their tributes, taxes, and other financial burdens; resolving the disputes meant years of legal battles, reconvening the Diet to review financial policy, or long, drawn out military campaigns against rebel lords. The administration chose legal battles and military campaigns where possible. Often, as Taan grew older, she simply refused to confront the problem at all, leaving her royal councilors to draw back imperial commitments. Imperial inaction resulted in poor consequences: most reconstruction programs were critically defunded by the late 1840s.
Illness & Death
Taan I Navith, now reaching her old age, appeared disinterested in reform, and refused to placate her opponents by abdicating. Instead, she secured her position through bribery, corruption, and negotiation with bad-faith actors, as many Empresses of her era had done before. Though a transformational figure in many ways, she failed to bring herself out of that particular bad habit of post-atomic government. Suffering and in-ill health, she stubbornly clung to power in the only way she knew how. Symptoms of her life-long abuse of alcohol and drugs - habits she had picked up in her military upbringing, common among the independent warlords and their clans - were slowly killing her.
Nonetheless, obvious heirs escaped her. She had never remarried, once describing the first Muth Empress, her late wife, as the "sole love" of her life. Their sole child, now named Muth Taanda, became a memorist and shrugged off any suggestion that they might want the Obsidian Seat. However, in 1846, their mother - now 86 - fell ill after a fall while on diplomatic tour. In her illness she brought her child to the capital and attempted to persuade them to become her co-ruler. Muth Taanda refused. They made clear to their mother they had no interest in the throne. Taan, a reluctant Empress herself, likely held some degree of sympathy for their child. Muth Taanda did, however, remain in Deshanor as the chief memorist of the royal court. When Navith Taan left the city in early 1849, they remained.
The Taan Empress would never return to her palace. She arrived in the city of Naaf Hara to accept the surrender of yet another rebel lord. On the third day of her visit, a brutal sandstorm struck. The Empress, caught outside on the far side of her town from her pavilion, stubbornly decided to make the trip across town in her motor carriage. While, in theory, her compartment's canopy protected her from the sand, the wind had other plans. A sharp gust of wind burst through the motorcade, pushing the light-weight cars out of rhythm and into one another. Her own fell on its side. She crawled out from the car and attempted to join another, but collapsed from exertion. The storm scarred her throat and lungs, filling them with tiny particles of sand.
The Empress awoke several hours later in the pavilion, but lapsed in and out of consciousness over the next days. She was dying of what post-atomic folk doctors had once called 'sand-lung.' On her deathbed, her military advisors, suffering from shortness of breath themselves, begged her to name an heir. Her last intelligible words were "begone" or "so tired," or possibly, according to a one account -- "No one, or Shiian herself."
The Fifth Disunity began hours later.
