End of Empires - N3S III

All shall tremble; peace is lost,
For the River Sesh is crossed.
- proverb of the ancient world (possibly apocryphal)

The hall had two shadows: one by moonlight, and one by fire. For the city burned, and the night-orb shimmered through the smoke and ash, beams of silver playing over the blackened ruins. Soot blew softly in the northern wind, the fine dust driving in a man’s face. The waters were rising, and embers hissed in the oncoming tide.

The scene is set again and again, with the performances uncounted. For civilization has long dwelled in this cradle, a fratricidal birthplace: the sheets are stained with blood. Wars have raged across desert and field, mountain and vale; the graves of the fallen litter the Earth as far as the eye can see. The firelight sets the entire world aglow; the fields are too salty for plants to take root; the king of this world is the vulture.

We have lived like this; we will die like this. And thus the world turns.


Of all the conflicts in the ancient world, the most morally charged is the war between the coalition and the Hu’ut Empire. For there we see all the deepest and most prevalent divides in history: free versus unfree, the periphery versus the interior, the battle between emperor and many nations. It is more or less impossible to stop oneself from taking a side, even in writing a history of the conflict. Let us try regardless.

The eternal hatred between Farou and the Hu’ut had finally swelled into a full-blown conflagration before this period, but it reached new levels of intensity with the entry of Krato into the war. The massive southern empire had only rarely involved itself north of the Kotthorns; now it went on a campaign that some would call only a landgrab, driven by two religious forces simultaneously.

The Farou were determined to free every slave in the Hu’ut Empire, no matter what the cost, for now that they had been brought into the conflict unwillingly, they felt it necessary to see it through to the bitter end.

The Hu’ut, for their part, were perhaps the least noble, but also the most straightforward of the parties involved; no religious piety or idealism was involved. For them, it was a simple war of survival, fought on so many fronts against so numerous a set of opponents that more or less any tactic was deemed fair game.

So it was that the Hu’ut settled a separate, white peace with the Seshweay, retreating perhaps without their dignity, but with a considerable force that they were now able to bring to bear against the coalition. Simultaneously, they recruited a considerable number of war elephants clandestinely from the south, attempting to nullify the Kratoans’ advantage before it ever became a problem. Their navy, meanwhile, was to fight hit and run tactics, delaying the full application of Faron force.

But it was precisely this battle that took place first: the Battle of the Delta. The swift Faron fleet was easily able to catch the cumbersome and completely inexperienced Hu’ut hulks and force them into battle. It was the most absurdly unbalanced of the war, of course, and no one expected the Hu’ut to perform well. In fact, the mere achievement of sinking as many ships as they lost themselves was something that astounded their admirals; in the end, the five hundred or so Faron ships could maraud along the coastline unhindered.

In conjunction with this, the Faron land forces began to advance again, but it was Krato that the Hu’ut focused on first, taking all their southern troops and meeting them in battle near Jahip. The Kratoan force was quite exhausted from their trek over the Kotthorns, of course, badly supplied, and with many of their elephants dead. But the Hu’ut had their own host of problems: badly provisioned, the farmlands of their home country were largely overrun or threatened. They, too, were short of drinking water.

Thus, each army was more than a little desperate, but the Kratoans turned out to be a little more desperate than the Hu’ut, and considerably luckier as well. The superior elephant force eventually began to tell, but what truly ended up destroying the Hu’ut was the much greater professionalization of Krato’s line; they were able to thrash the Hu’ut militia on all fronts, and scored a devastating victory which had the southern Hu’ut forces reeling in terror.

At the same time, the Hu’ut returning from Neruss, even shorter on supplies than their brethren or, in fact, any of their enemies, made a forced march to attempt to catch the Faron behind the siege lines around the city of Salgaron. But the Faron northern force had dogged the trail of their Hu’ut counterparts, and they were able to deploy enough troops to actually match the Hu’ut in numbers – more importantly, they, too, had the advantage in professionalization. Once again, the Hu’ut were defeated.

It seemed as though the end was quite near for the ancient and ailing empire. The Bisrian army soon jumped into battle on the northwestern frontier, and there were even rumors (completely unsubstantiated, but causing some panic) that the Palmyrians were considering joining in as well. The coalition forces joined together and marched against the Delta itself, intending to sack the city of Hiuttu and finally end the tyrannical regime forever.

And against all odds, the coalition was defeated. Most attribute the Hu’ut victory to sheer weight of numbers, and indeed there is little else to explain the event outside of sheer desperation to defend their homeland. In any case, they were able to make good use of this victory, pushing back Krato and Faron; in the case of Faron, Subal itself was besieged.

But despite the victory and apparent recovery of most of their land, the Hu’ut nation was closer than ever to failing by the end of the period. The Faron had not tarried in freeing anyone who they saw enslaved in the nation, and given that most of the nation at some point or another had been under the control of Faron or Krato, this meant that most of the nation’s slaves had been set free, and it proved exceedingly hard to recapture them.

Moreover, the fleeing slaves had to go somewhere, and most of them ended up in Faron. Eager to join in the crusade to liberate their brethren, they provided a massive manpower pool for the Faron to draw upon. Simultaneously, the manpower of the Hu’ut was severely drained, and most serious of all, the economy was devastated by the blow; most estimate that the empire lost somewhere between a third and a half of its income from the freeing of the slaves.

On top of this, persistent river flooding had troubled the Had, and most of the fighting had been on prime Hu’ut agricultural land. Every day of battle was another day that the enemy would march over the crops, or forage for themselves.

One of the more interesting coincidences of the war was that the Bisrian invasion sufficiently distracted them that the Moti were able to launch a devastating surprise attack of their own – on Bisria. The desert nation found its mountain defenses wholly inadequate, as the Moti had carefully scouted out the terrain, and were able to cut off isolated fortresses; indeed, in many places they occupied the forts and used them against the very forces that had been assigned to them. And with the resurgence of the Hu’ut, the Bisrians were forced into a two front war that ended up losing them their capital, and eventually their nation.

But for all its bloodshed, this was not the world’s greatest war...

The rain was coming down swift and hard, lashing against the dry soil with a vengeance. The river was turning brown with mud, and the last few brave boatmen were turning back now, defeated by the current. It wasn’t yet midday, but the waters had grown temperamental in the last few years, and this was not the first time the fisherman had to cut short their work.

Watching the scene from his riverboat, the Duke sighed. That the Weinan would flood, he could accept. That it would flood so fiercely, and choose to do so during his reign particularly aggravated him. Was he to be thwarted in histories by rainfall? Was his rule to be deemed a failure by the whims of the gods? It was a depressing thought.

Three fiefs had surrendered to him, but the pace of expansion was agonizingly slow. Liang still remained only one of many powers, unable to claw its way up the ladder, not even a rung or two. No traders came here, and even if they did, such a tiny realm would never be considered truly great, not against the Union of Aya’se, nor the Trilui. Truly, that land which had once been the land of the God-Kings was all but gone, dissolved into meaningless, squabbling fiefs.

But where the Weinan Valley lingered in slow chaos and repeated dissolutions, the sun was rising over another nation just to the east.

Even winter seemed warmer under the sunrise of recent years, and the Avaimi found themselves under the highly competent rule of the advisor Boyrn, and the new Thorsrdyn, Vtaityn. Implementing a set of reforms, they restyled the nation into that of Evyn. The offices of government were completely overhauled, taxes reformed, a new alphabet instated, and perhaps most alarming to the Evyni neighbors, the army was reformed.

It was with this same new model of army that Vtaityn came crashing through the unsuspecting nation of the Prokym, cutting through the largely barbarian army with ease. The nation was quickly pacified, and the idols of this people’s creed were burned, for Vtaityn had also inherited a religious fervor unmatched by any other ruler in the north.

Alas, the Prokym had just signed an alliance with the Ritti, and that colonial nation was thus obliged to go to war. Meeting in the field of battle, the Evyni once again routed their foes, finding little difficulty until they ran into the walls of their opponent’s cities. It seemed that somewhere along the way, the Ritti had conquered the Rutto; now both nations, rapidly ascendant, battled each other for control of the north.

For their part, the Ritti had been far from idle during the time period. Their conquest of Rutto, of course, had brought new lands into their growing colonial empire, while the simultaneous peaceful expansion of the Adua colony would, it was hoped, bring in new riches as well. Somewhat confusingly, the ruling family converted to Maninism, as did the majority of their population, but at the same time, they signed a commercial treaty with the Union of Aya’se, which would have some repercussions later on down the road...

As for the smaller nations of the north, they carried on largely as before. The Lor expanded somewhat as their singers and bards spread tales of their legendary warriors to the neighboring tribes, some of whom were impressed enough (and, more pragmatically, desired to be under the protection of a large and powerful nation) to join them. Acca expanded somewhat, as was their custom. However, their new and considerable minority who followed the creed of Seshweay Ancestor Worship were proving to be something of a hassle, which would certainly have an effect later on in the period.

Kedoy, for its part, had an uninspiring set of years. They expanded decisively past the Ederru frontiers, and looked poised to nab most of the rest of the island, but as they were still reticent to attack the Ederru (or vice versa, for that matter), political change was extremely slow to come to the island.

The great powers of the north, of course, were still Gallat and Ferman, and now the rivalry had turned considerably more bitter. Ferman had enlisted the help of the Union of Aya’se, and each signed a series of trade deals. While initially they might have been subtle, in time it was obvious that they were colluding to reroute trade around Gallat, and destroy this religious rival to the Union and political rival to Ferman simultaneously.

Though there was a considerable spike in piracy on Ferman during this time, the policies were mostly effective; Gallat began to spiral downwards into what looked like an irrevocable recession. It was perhaps due to these economic hard times that the kingdom was finally overthrown by the zealous priests of the Faith, who turned the state into what was effectively a theocracy. Persecution and missionary efforts reached new heights with the change in regime.

One of the more important conversions was that of a Nahsjad tribe in the south. Though the Gallatenes had been eyeing the Tehabi for some time as potential converts, they failed to take into account that the Seshweay were also competing for influence there; moreover the Tehabi had risen to power mostly as a reaction against Maninism in the first place. However, they found willing converts in the Sira tribe, which was able to rise quickly. Indeed, with events elsewhere in the world, their rise, and Gallat’s recovery, seemed almost assured (see below).

As for Ferman, it toyed with its own new religion, that of Alta. Based off of the teachings of the prophet Borandi, its central focus is that of the ten children of God, who watch over the world; offerings are made to these, the so-called “shepherds of men”. It was not, in any case, the sort of faith that would get into violent conflict with Maninism – yet. For now, there was relative peace...

But elsewhere, there were storms.

The tempest was swift over the water, crashing into the shores of the Spice Island with a demonic fury. Half a dozen merchantmen were dashed to pieces on the rocky coast; a few weeks later, goats would gaze idly at a massive hulk that had been pulled far, far inland of where it should be, and months later still, men would gaze upon the ruins of a village, almost indistinguishable from the mud of the seashore by now.

But the storm did not stop there; it bowled over the grasslands and forests, plowing into the hills. Their slopes were quite bare, as the trees had been cut away for the great merchant fleet years ago, and the rain sliced open the hillside like warm butter; the sand and rock coursed down in massive floods that buried many a pastoral village. The mudslides and rising waters proved the grave of many men that year... And so it would continue the next year. Another storm, another danger. The very gods themselves seemed to have turned against the Opulensi.

This was a resilient nation, however, and though the weather had turned foul the people rebuilt. Indeed, the increasing rains were a boon when they did not grow into floods; the Spice Isles were more and more healthy for crops, and the nation grew stronger. With more people, a strong military, and an increasing appetite for new markets, it was no wonder that the nation would look for opportunities to expand overseas.

In the peaceful sector, this meant little more than a concerted effort to expand the trade network eastwards. Of course, they had been attempting to do this since the beginning of time, but with the waters more favorable, and a bit of luck, they were actually able to do it now, and made contact with numerous nations to the East. Some of these, like Tars, were descendants of the people the Opulensi had themselves attacked and were quite hostile, but others would surely make viable trading partners – especially the far off city-state of Leun. That is to say, if the Trilui did not get there first, for they, too, had recently charted the eastern waters...

Their first target was the sacred home of Indagahor, Dinyart. Though the island had hitherto been quite peaceful, the forced opening of its ports to the merchants of the Trilui had simultaneously closed it to those of the Opulensi. This was, of course, unacceptable, and so, naturally, the Spice Islanders attacked and crushed the island state with fairly little bloodshed. This raised the ire of some of the Trilui, of course, but it did not lead to open conflict.

What nearly did lead to open conflict was the planned Opulensi invasion of the Stad Men. Though this peninsular nation seemed to be a quiet backwater, it soon transpired that not only had the Opulensi intended to conquer it – others had as well, and they got there first.

So it was that the Trehan fleet (reinforced by a Trilui squadron) were able to destroy the Stad Men nation in a series of concerted attacks that confused and eventually collapsed the enemy army. Within the span of only a couple of years, then, both the Opulensi and the Trehans had carved empires for themselves... and yet, despite the tension and ongoing rivalry, neither state ended up attacking the other one.

All this turned out quite sour indeed for another party, the far off Seshweay. For the Westerners had intended for a considerable time indeed to attack the Trilui Empire, to catch it off guard, but they had been waiting for some kind of Opulensi movement first, so that they could take on the Empire from both sides. By the time they realized that no war was forthcoming, the Trilui attacked them first. For both sides had intended to destroy the other; the Empire simply got there ahead of the Union.

Initially, the war went poorly for both sides. The Trilui troops bungled their mission near Cyre, utterly defeated by a rising star in the Seshweay army known as Aya’se. Well drilled, the Union armies were able to make their way unhindered to Kargan itself, for they had cut a deal with the Hu’ut. There, however, they found a city well guarded, well garrisoned, and well stockpiled, unassailable but by water.

Thus the Sesh fleet sailed to meet that of the Empire in the Straits of Kargan, and so in the year 144 by the Seshweay Calendar one of the greatest naval battles of ancient times took place. One hundred and seventy ships sailed into the rising sun, but they were facing an Imperial force of some three hundred and fifty – double their own numbers.

The Seshweay had a trick up their sleeves, naturally: fireships. Suicide warships that would crash into the enemy fleet, spreading flame and death wherever they went, they were quite effective – when the wind was on their side. The Seshweay, however, had a massive bit of ill luck in that the Kargan straits had a rather strong westward flowing current, and the fireships could never be effectively utilized; moreover the swift Trilui ships were able to ride the current and bypass the problem of fighting in the confined straits entirely.

Instead, they engaged their enemies in the open waters, and the result was utter disaster for the Seshweay fleet. The entirety of their fleet was mangled, at the cost of only ninety Trilui warships; the fabled invincibility of the Trilui navy lived on. It was an unmitigated fiasco of truly epic proportions, and if one had to point to a single event that ended the era of good prospects for the Union of Aya’se, it would undoubtedly be the Battle for the Straits.

For the fleet was not all that the Seshweay lost. It was also any hope of challenging the Trilui dominance at sea. Indeed, the Trilui were now able to completely strangle the entire Seshweay trade network (quite an extensive accomplishment, and replace it with their own. At least, partially, for they still had quite some work to do raiding the Seshweay coasts and fighting the battles on land – indeed, the Union of Aya’se was still quite handily winning the terrestrial arm of the conflict.

But the dichotomous nature of the war began to exact its toll on the Union’s colonies as well. Unable to support them, they were utterly helpless when conflict began to press in from every side. Gallat (more than a little irked at the Seshweay attempt to destroy their own trade) was able to bypass Union trade routes; Imperial ships docked directly in their harbors to both parties’ benefit. The little nation of Kardil was firmly taken over by the Maninist faction as the Ancestor Worshipers felt distinctly demoralized.

Perhaps the most dramatic action taken was that of Acca. With a lethargic leadership, an enterprising Accan general took the initiative and invaded the nearby Seshweay colony without authorization, initiating yet another conflict – not that the Accan leaders were likely to object, what with the recent trouble stirred up by the Ancestor Worshipers among the slaves in the south of their own nation.

But the Union was still quite alive, for the mainland remained intact. And even as their nation seemed close to breaking, new signs of life were beginning to show. The famed and beloved general Aya’se was married to the unapproachable (indeed, almost unearthly) maiden Matah; each was regarded to be so immaculate in reputation that they could only be Ancestors reincarnate. And so it was in these latter days that the Revelation came upon Aya’se.

For the general was far from just that, he was the reincarnation of the ancient Aya’se, the man who, all those years ago, had forged the Seshweay into one again, and so it was his task to forge all Ancestor Worshipers into a single nation. His divine bride, the Matah, conceived in their first year of marriage, and many great portents were said to be in the sky as the Scion of Aya’se was born. Some even whispered of this infant as a divinity made flesh, a position that was most alluring as the years passed.

After all, the Seshweay were hardly untroubled in this period...

The mountains glittered in the rising sun, the soft shimmer of dawn playing over the valleys. The Redeemer surveyed the pass with some disdain. “This is a mountain pass?” he asked scornfully. His breath misted in the cold, cold air, and a few crystals of ice fluttered in the air before him. “We go forward; Tael is not far.”

The pines were bristling and bent, flagged against the wind. It was an utterly alien sight to the Satar as they trotted by, as far removed from the steppe as one could be. But it was not foreign to the men who lurked in the trees, who shadowed the horsemen from the foothills to the high passes, who knew these ridges and rills as well as any land on Earth. Their step was light, and they made no mark on the passing ground. But it would not have mattered. The Redeemer was convinced that the Oscadian border was unguarded.

And where the pass narrowed, where the rocks reared high like the clashing swords of some great and ancient cataclysm frozen in stone, there the Satar slowed, and their shadows began to move with a purpose of their own.

Hissing out into the valley, the arrows were too numerous to count. The Satar were trained men; they knew with the first arrow’s sound that they were being ambushed. But there is little and less that even the most trained men can do to repel surrounding and devious forces: the horsemen fell like flies, their fingers stiff from the frozen air, their steeds horrifically huge targets in the snow. Mist closed around their ankles like a rising tide, and even the hard-eyed men of the steppe were taken with some fear.

But the Redeemer did not falter, and he barked out orders. They moved with the nearly mechanical efficiency that only terrified professionals can achieve, scattering, finding their targets, and responding to arrowfire with their own bows. Now it was the hearts of the Oscadians that raced with fear, as the cold steel rained around them, scraping off the rocks with ten thousand sparks.

Broken and panicked as they were, this was their land, and they could find even the most obscure passes without difficulty. They melted away into the daylight, the white blinding snow throwing off the aim of even the accomplished Satar bows.

It had been a costly battle, but the Redeemer and his men learned quickly: this kingdom was not a terracotta construction, but a steel knife all too used to fighting. The Satar scouted every pass before them, and though the march was grueling, they were not fallen upon again. Indeed, the mist was now their greatest enemy, as any men who went out to forage were never seen again – slain, perhaps, by some vengeful shepherd who could not bear to see his land so oppressed.

Even the most grueling marches must come to an end, and within a week, the sunrise over Tael spilled over the snowy valley, revealing the horses of the steppe. They had come to break the world.

Tael was like no city anyone had seen; white on white, a marble and granite construction that molded to fit the valley, its roads running in tiers up across the mountain like ripples on a pond. And it was empty.

The walls had men upon them, yes, but the streets were completely silent. The Oscadians had left the city to the vagaries of war. But the Redeemer calculated that they could not possibly have removed the plunder from the city in that time; he ordered his men forward, and they surged over the ramparts like a wave shifting the sand at a shoreline. Back and forth they moved, until at last with a great shout the city fell, and the city of the eagle was laid low, its golden blood spilling out into the hands of the treasure-seeking Satar.

They had accomplished their purpose, and but for the great ambush in the passes, they were relatively unbloodied. The Redeemer declared that this land had been humbled, and they would need to seek greater foes. So the tide of the steppe fell away.

As one end of the empire receded, the other advanced.

Atraxes, son of the Redeemer, had led his army through the spine of the world, snaking through the shallow mountains that had always marked the south of the Rath Satar. They were leaving sacred ground, and the earth showed it. Even the grass began to thin; the horses stumbled in the increasingly sandy soil, and the air took on a hazy, shimmering quality. The world narrowed to a shallow desert, the sky pressing in alarmingly close.

The son was careful and cautious; he had already learned of the troubles his father had with the mountains, and he left nothing to chance. Water was amply provisioned, and neither horse nor man went thirsty; the army snaked its way across the desert. Indeed, perhaps he was too cautious at first: the Katdhi were surprised by the invasion, but had enough time to prepare the defense of their capital.

Difficult though it was to subdue, Katdhi fell in the end, with the horses crashing through the gates and tearing the city to pieces. The golden spire that had been set in the center of the valley was toppled, and its gilding was shaved off and given to each man as a reward. Blood was everywhere, and the screams of the raped and wounded – it was too much. Atraxes nearly went mad; indeed, by the established rules of the Satar, he did.

“Tell them to stop,” he told Isal-ha. The lieutenant did not understand. Stop what? Stop the attack? Retreat? Atraxes ran out of patience, and galloped to the nearest of the villains, and clove him in two with his own sword. The city burned, and the Satar stopped.

The valley called the “Bowl” by the Katdhi was quick to fall when its king and army were slain, the remaining tiny tribes providing all too little resistance to the charge of Satar horsemen. But never again would the army run wild; Atraxes kept the tightest of reins on his host, and they followed him through to the end.

And so the force snaked out of the valley and into another...

The air rose with that curious rippling stillness that only broiling heat can bring, obscuring the hills and shrubs alike in its haze. Approaching the river with caution, Atraxes saw that it was much wider than his scouts had said; almost too wide for them to ford. They must go up the river, even further towards the headwaters, lest they find themselves swept away by a malevolent current. And the Satar rode west, and the Sesh was crossed.

They came like a wind out of the mountains now, crashing through what few watchmen the Bahrai had placed to guard from the marauders that would come out of the hills, sweeping the land like a furious sandstorm. The old realm was scoured, its defenders brushed aside like shards of disused glass on a dusty floor; the campaign could barely be spoken of as a series of battles. It was more a chain of disasters, each one going against the slavers.

Magha, too, fell easily. The army plowed through the gates, and entered the city in good order, massacring the warriors but none else: it was taken in the fashion of the Silver Prince.

But this was almost ignored by the world, the lightning maneuvers of Atraxes being utterly overshadowed by another set of brilliant attacks hundreds of miles away. For another storm was falling upon a far more prominent shore.

They came out of the sunset, crimson riders under crimson clouds, a horde moving with hell’s fury unleashed. Over field and desert they swept, riding hard. And upon the city of Paasa they fell like wolves upon so many sheep; the city gates were barely closed in time before the invaders, and even then they were broken only minutes afterwards. The Satar stormed the city. The rawly recruited militia – still being drilled on how to hold their weapons – were slaughtered to a man.

And this was not one of the precise strokes that Atraxes had landed, no. The Redeemer’s army was a wave of fire that tore through the city, snuffing out the lives of the citizens as if they had never been. It was doom they brought, and it was only when the population was utterly spent that they moved on, roaring southwards along the briny coast, leaving a shattered hulk of a city in their wake.

Shal was the next city in the path. Built within a day’s ride of much older ruins, the people had been mindful of destruction, and their walls were well sighted. But the Sesh had grown fat and prosperous; it had been so long since someone had touched them that they no longer remembered that anyone could touch them. And so they died, their walls undermanned, their city consumed in another raging inferno, so vast that it confused passing sailors.

But it was not the end, either. For one city was left. The greatest city in the world; the city of men’s desire. Seis.

The Sesh knew now that the enemy were coming, of course. Troops were reshuffled. Word was even sent to Aya’se, but of course he was too far away to reach the city in time. The creditors of the city were plied to supply the resources for a massive army to defend the banks of the delta, determined to stop the invasion before it ever descended on Seis. And perhaps they might have held them back, even indefinitely.

But mere days later, the arks appeared. The Sesh navy was far away, and the men could only watch as the ships landed on the delta, disgorging a new horde. For Atraxes had come, and the grand pincer movement in the Satar plans had finally come to fruition. Every flank was turned; they were surrounded, and in the confusion, the Trilui navy arrived, fresh from their victory at Kargan and more than willing to ferry the Redeemer’s host across the Sesh.

Perhaps the Sesh might have turned and beaten each army in turn, but the Satar were far too well coordinated, and their parallel attacks took the heart out of the newly raised militia, who broke and fled behind the capital’s walls itself.

But as the Satar well knew, the militia trapped in Seis were far from the only defenders that the realm might have. While Aya’se was far off on the fields before Kargan, the Union had left some forces in Jania, and it was these soldiers who turned about and rapidly marched back to help defend the city. The Satar had taken both sides of the Sesh, but their presence on the eastern bank was limited to a garrison at Pa.

The Seshweay general, Kes, had been raised in the ancient valley tradition of generalship, but he was quite unused to the steppe warriors. His army advanced cautiously, but their slow speed meant the Satar were well aware of their approach. But Atraxes was reluctant to take away troops from the siege of Seis, and regarded the river as a better barrier than anything else; he ordered his force to mostly withdraw from Pa entirely; only a token army was left behind to cover the retreat.

The Satar force of five hundred died to a man, but they were able to slay six hundreds of their foes, and the bridge of boats was burned behind the main Satar armies. It seemed as though the army of Kes would have to look on as their capital was burnt.

But the Seshweay had always been clever inventors. Improvised fireships were launched from the right bank, and drove off many of the Trilui ships; under cover of a foul storm, he managed to ferry across many of his soldiers with the merchant vessels trapped in Seis. It was crude, and some died on the crossing, but the army was behind the enemy siege lines, and mostly intact. He drew up his soldiers and prepared for a titanic clash.

Yet even as he was readying for battle, more Satar arrived from the north under the command of the Redeemer. Arastephas had sacked the minor city of Shal and left a trail of destruction down the coastline, and the Trilui had agreeably allowed his army to cross; the Satar forces were nearly double their former strength now, and they had more than enough to both cover the city and face Kes in battle.

Aware of the impending battle, Kes had his men dig into the earth before them, trying to turn the Satar advance with sharpened stakes and deep pits. Then there was no time to prepare any further, for the Satar were upon them.

The Reedemer had never been described as a cautious man, but he was prudent in the heat of battle. He did not sound the charge, as so many Satar generals might have, noting, “Though we have trampled the Sesh like a thousand blades of grass thus far, tens of thousands remain. The grasses of the steppe are innumerable; we must be clever.” And so he ordered his men forward, and they darted here and there, frustrating the archers of the Sesh who could not keep up with the dancing and scattering of their foes, and all the while keeping a hail of arrows raining upon the Sesh line behind their sharpened stakes and ditches.

It was too much for some of the levies, who broke and ran, but the professional line managed to hold itself together; it was evident that something else would be necessary. There was no room to maneuver here; the hedges were planted thick and close, and the roads were confusing to the invader. It was a deadlock... but it was a deadly stalemate, with the Satar arrows felling many of their opponents, and few, if any shots finding their targets the other way around.

It quickly became apparent that the battle could not continue like this for the Sesh, and the commander ordered his troops forward, making full use of the difficult terrain to surprise the horsemen at every turn. But surprise was not enough; with the Union’s troops forward of their entrenchments, it was all too easy for the Satar to find the vulnerable points and gradually push them back. Though the battle cost them dearly, in the end the field belonged to the horsemen.

The city of Seis was one of the largest in the world, with more than a hundred thousand behind its walls, but now the massive size proved much more a problem than an asset. All the mouths had to be fed, and the way to the sea was cut off entirely. No supplies could get in: even the water was undrinkable, for the Satar army was dumping its sewage into the river. It was only a few weeks before the city fell into fractious squabbling. Their spies well aware of this, the Redeemer and Atraxes sent forth the horde, and the greatest city in the world fell, as the Silver Prince came through the southern gate and the Redeemer entering in the north.

The city burned, a crimson that seemed to reflect off the moon itself as the tide came rushing in. And those who watched the conflagration did not miss the significance. They were watching the death of a nation, the oldest in the world. For how could the Sesh survive without their homeland, their fleets routed, the seas controlled by their mortal enemy, the land ravaged by these horsemen from the west, their colonial neighbors alienated...? If the Seshweay system was a three-legged stool, then two of the legs – the sea and the mainland – had been cut away already.

And the smoke of Seis rose, thick and black; the column could surely be seen for miles around. The ash would drift into the Parda Hills, and villagers a hundred miles away would wonder idly why the hues of the sunset were so brilliant. The blood from the slain turned the Sesh red, and trade ships would encounter driftwood bearing the engravings of the Exchange House for decades afterwards.

The loss itself reverberated through the world, and echoes of the sack frightened men as far away as Trovin. For the greatest city upon the earth had fallen, was razed, and all wondered where the Exatai of the Satar would turn next. Would they push onwards into the Pardas, and destroy the last remnants of the Neruss, which struggled to maintain unity with their brethren on the Kern Sea? Would they push south, and bring war to Moti, or Krato? Would they tumble east, and conquer the already blood-drenched land on the Had River?

Soothsayers the world over foretold the doom of a hundred nations, and many were eager to flee their homes to find safer havens, away from the ruin that the cradle was becoming. But there were other dangers beyond the shroud, who might come and bring down chaos upon civilization. The end of a golden era seemed to be at hand; sunset was falling over the earth.

And ever present was the sound. In the north, it rang through the conifers and echoed through the misty forests as wolves called to each other from hilltop to hilltop. In the south, it rolled over the ocean, ancient and broad, with the low rumbling that seems more like a quake than a noise. In the East it came with the landslides that were plaguing the hill-side villages, and rose with the floodwaters that threatened to sweep away civilization, and in the west it came as the far-off thunder of strange hordes as yet unknown.

It was the sound of drums, pounding the doom of mankind. And so men die, and their graves grow the grain that feeds the next line. On and on, the world turns; humanity walks. One foot, then the other, then the other...
Maps


Political ------------- Religious

Casualties



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Ignore the asterisks, they’re leftover from untidy bookkeeping.

Story Bonuses:



OOC:

I have stayed up very late, working like a good little elf. I would be most grateful if you could overlook some glaring omissions that I undoubtedly made somewhere along the way, and the fact that at least one major war was more or less glossed over in a rather rude fashion because I was getting tired.

Story bonuses will be limited to 2 per nation next turn. This should only impact people with an insane amount of stories, and I doubt they are really writing for the bonuses at this point anyway. As a side note, this hits das quite hard, given that he managed to post the vast majority of his stories after the point when I said they would no longer count. Alas, I will make it up to him somehow.

The order deadline is December 30th, 6:00 PM, EST. No exceptions, period. I’m not letting what happened last turn happen again. Please do not test my patience.

Stats are not up. It is 4:30 AM or so; I am not staying up later. They will be up... let’s say, Friday. You can probably infer what they will be looking like from the update anyway. They’re actually all done but for the bonuses and the casualties, but they might be misleading because of that, so I won’t post them quite yet.

Slavic Sioux said:

I thought north king stated not to post new stories, or am I wrong?

Click to expand...

While I would be (pleasantly) surprised if the stories posted after the very final deadline were to be counted, I think he was talking about the orders. Because, yes, some people do send orders that late.

10. Frono War-Bull Ascends.

The bandits did not follow any laws but their own, and obeyed no chief above their leader; for that exact same reason, however, they obeyed their leader without question except when he was shown to be clearly unworthy; and they obeyed Yereti seven times more, since he had conquered their veneration and respect through his wisdom and shamanical magic. Therefore Yereti alone designed the war-plans of the bandits, like he alone previously used his knowledge of what is and what shall be to organise their raids, and all that the bandits did they did by his orders.

Raiders came back from the north and were given a day to rest; afterwards they were sent to fight in the south; there the bandits still made raids against caravans, but their main business involved raids in and near the human-family campsites. Other bands of warriors harassed Frono's main army and lesser bands of godlikes and their allies wherever and how ever they could. The Inu human-family fought off the first bandit attack, and the other; but with ever more men dead, godlikes nowhere in sight and herds dwindling due to cattle raids, the Inu human-chief soon found himself exiled and his successor soon declared the Inu to be in rebellion once more, at which point bandit attacks stopped and some of the cattle was even returned as a gift. This time bandits continued moving through Inu territory, and even settled down near the campsite itself, with the human-chief's grudging permission; from there, they launched new raids into nearby enemy territories. At this point the godlikes would ofcourse have responded - had they not been busy fighting off and hunting down the smaller warbands that attacked from above the mountains and from below the grounds, and from behind the bushes and from inside the shadows; but as it was, Frono found it impossible to send any band there: too many warriors would have weakened his main army too much and too few might easily be slaughtered, and besides, away from his steady hands the godlikes tended to do foolish things and so often fell into ambushes - sometimes, it is true, they could successfully fight their way out of said ambushes and even destroy all their would-be killers in a frenzy, but in the end detachment was always the same thing as a loss. So instead he left a few warriors to guard the Torta human-chief from himself and his family, and moved with the rest to the Arti human-family campsite, where he expected an attack.

Kirti, who had already fought in several bandit raids since joining, also expected an attack there and asked Yereti for the right to lead it; Yereti refused and forbade him to leave the bandit-camp, instead ordering him to train and instruct the bandit warriors that had now arrived from the north. No attack on the Arti human-family campsite came; the other campsites were also mostly ignored; instead, the raiders went back to attacking the caravans. The godlikes did not protect them; the humans began taking large tolls when they did not simply kill the traders themselves and take all their goods for themselves. The great eastern trade routes soon dried up; neither foreigners nor people from Moti-city dared come into the Inner Mountains, but for the bands of few brave and greedy men who rarely had much success in their enterprises until now - those of them who survived soon became fortunate, and others have taken this for a sign, but this did not make Frono War-Bull any happier, for to him the full extent of Yereti's plan now became apparent.

The plan was to force the godlikes to defend and not to attack, by means of raids on the human-camps and the richest caravans, and harrassment of the godlike host whenever it was on the move in the lands that the bandits knew from their birth and most godlikes from two months ago; it was now clearly necessary to defend and impossible to attack the bandit-camp, which could be reached only by an army that would then be unable to take it or to return alive. Furthermore, the godlikes were soon forced to defend themselves and not their allies, as raids and ambushes took their toll on their limited numbers and forced them to gather together at one spot for self-defense; then the bandits set their minds to killing or expelling all the foreign traders, who were Frono's main supporters and also his main source of wealth. The trade routes having all but disappeared, Frono was unable to hire any mercenaries or draw any more godlikes to support him, especially since the Cow Family-Chief now had even less reason than ever before to allow anyone to help his son. Ofcourse, Third-Frono could not make peace with Yereti; but if things were to Besides, the warriors were about to run out of food, and provisioning was all the more difficult thanks to the poor harvest, which too was a result of Yereti's magic and prior raiding; and so, before long, Frono had to set out despite the obvious risks and the clarity of the enemy's plan for such an event - or, rather, because of it.

It must be said that Yereti's plan had one crucial flaw, apparent to Frono; this flaw consisted in that the plan did not take into account the fact that Frono War-Bull too was a sorceror. Indeed, that was difficult to expect, for it is quite rare and indeed forbidden for godlikes to learn the use of magic; but it so happened that from his youth Frono War-Bull was very fond of his monstrous bronze sword and disliked foreign traders, and obeyed his gods over his father and himself over his gods.

Once, a trader from southern lands had come to the campsite of the Cow Family godlikes and brought before the warriors new iron swords; in those days iron tools and weapons were already widespread, but those iron swords were still somewhat rare, as the godlikes of the Cow Family held using swords forged by humans to be beneath them and themselves only forged bronze weapons as per tradition. Frono War-Bull did not care much for tradition; but when the trader claimed that iron swords were better than any bronze swords and glared at Frono's own bull-sword, Frono's patience, then much shorter than it had become with time, had quickly ran out and he unsheathed his sword and landed two blows: the first shattered the iron sword that the panicked trader picked to defend himself with, and the second shattered the trader's brains. Frono then laughed and said that clearly the trader was either lying or trying to sell poor quality produce, and that whichever it was, he clearly had it coming. The others laughed at first, then backed away, because had anyone else done this, he would immediately have been killed. Even before he was Chief, Third-Frono had personally killed two of his previous immediate sons for nothing more than killing a foreign friend of his elder brother Cow Family-Chief Second-Frono. But it so happened that Third-Frono feared nothing - except for his eldest surviving son, who somehow always frightened him. So there could be no thought of killing him, especially since it was not inconceivable that Fourth-Frono would kill his father and not the opposite. And yet, even though it was his and nobody else's friend that was killed this time, Third-Frono felt it to be unacceptable that someone could murder the personal friend of the Cow Family-Chief and go on unpunished. In the human family-laws, the punishment for such an act was exile, and so it was in the Cow Family-laws, but evil has permeated the world and therefore the written law and the law that was carried out were often different, and in particular the godlikes have not been exiled as far as even the oldest alive could remember. So it was that Third-Frono was pondering putting Fourth-Frono on trial where he would likely be acquited out of friendship, respect and fear, when his two younger immediate sons, Itono and Kono, ran up to him and suggested that Fourth-Frono be forgiven on the outside, whilst being sent by the Cow Family-Chief's order to Moti-city, and thus being dishonoured and cut off from those who would support him. Third-Frono eagerly agreed, assembled the family-council and sent Fourth-Frono to Moti-city to seek the horns of the Cow-Father's first wife; and although obviously there was no such thing in existance, Fourth-Frono swallowed his pride, knowing that none would support him if he were to refuse even by such worthy means as killing the Chief, and agreed.

And so for seven years he lived in Moti-city at the local Cow Family house, though often leaving the city for months or years and travelling across the northern lands, supposedly in search of the cow-horns, but in truth searching for allies. It was there and then that he had become the leader of a small warband of foreign bandits and made it large, and he did many other things as well; and he also encountered a great teacher, a man named Kleogog, of whom more might perhaps be said later, who taught him the wisdom of south wise-man Kleo and also many magical secrets; and it was only when some of his bandits sent to gather knowledge about the east told him of Kono's actions in the east that he decided that the time has come to depart and to go back to the Cow Family campsite to learn more of what was happening; and as to what had happened since then, it has already been told.

In any case, when the shadows themselves attacked him in his tent Fourth-Frono was aware, ready and armed, having been warned by shades in his own service; he caught them in his tent and had it surrounded with other warriors, and before the shades could escape he spoke strange words and turned them into humans; and then he killed two of them and interrogated the others, using another spell to remove the power that binded them against answering truthfully to their captor. He then tortured them until they revealed the location of the second entrance into the bandit-camp and Fourth-Frono set out towards that camp as fast as he could, going by hidden paths (such as those revealed by the banditsl, but mostly the ones that were discretely scouted out by his most able warriors beforehand), with his army of godlikes, foreigners and the remaining penitent humans, and with the captured bandits in tow.

---

Yereti's bandits continued hunting down the few remaining caravans and also returned to raiding the loyal campsites; now that the Arti human-family campsite was abandoned by Frono, they attacked it too, but were driven off, as all too few warriors attacked and also because they were entirely too certain that there would be no battle - so human-chief Fiti allowed half their group in and then had it slain and the others picked off by archers. A second attempt was not undertaken, and Kirti was once more denied his chance to attack, for Yereti feared that Kirti would then become the human-chief: who could know what he would do then? Besides, the bandits were now busy searching for Frono, who used various talismans and deceptions to throw them off their trail. Once he was found by a bandit scouting party, whilst approaching the closest entrance; he slaughtered them and moved on forward, and Yereti ordered Kirti to prepare an ambush on the way. Frono did not attack then, and instead raided the Inu human-family and forced it to give him all of its food as a sign of its repentance; the Inu rebelled again as soon as he left, but could not say in which direction he went.

On the next morning, a bandit scouting party of seven set out to find him, and two days and one night after that the bandits came back at the northeastern entrance and were allowed back in by the guards, who were beginning to get impatient. The bandits went through the secret underground path and emerged on the surface; then their leader was stabbed in the back by the one who stood behind him, and the rest cast off their bandit leaf-cloaks. Other godlikes soon followed them in, whereas their leader and the five of his most trusted and experienced warriors, who were the first to enter after the captured bandit leader, charged and broke the barely-formed guard line; few managed to escape, others were soon cut down.

The bandits that gathered to greet their brothers gasped and screamed: Frono War-Bull has ascended into the bandit-camp!

---

It was early in the morning, and Kirti was already awake. He quickly grasped his sword as soon as the alarm sounded and ran out of the barrack where he and other novices lived, discernng what had happened as he ran. He also cut down a few all too rush godlikes on the way; soon, however, the bandits he tried to rally were mostly slaughtered or scattered in a skirmish on the way to the north-eastern entrance. The bandits ran wherever their feet took them; Kirti ran towards the warrior-grounds. The confused bandits from the other parts of the camp have gathered there; Kirti shouted: "Frono has attacked!" and they agreed to let him lead them into battle. This was timely; Frono and some twenty other godlikes had made it there as well, and though Kirti had no time to give any orders the bandits soon engulfed the attackers. The bandits fought like brave warriors each; but those whom they caught fought like the gods; also, more godlikes arrived at the defenders' side and before long the surviving bandits were forced to retreat, fighting back as they did so. They tried to retreat to the bandit-leader-longhouse; along the way, though, their lines, fragile as they already were, broke due to incendiary arrows and the sudden, intermittent darkness that fell over the campsite. This darkness confused the godlikes as well, and their lines soon broke as well; instead, all turned into chaotic duels and charges, as everyone fought for himself.

Kirti sought out Frono and finally came face to face with him as the latter went ahead of his warriors and approached the bandit-leader-longhouse; neither spoke a word, but Frono laughed and quickly attacked. Kirti dodged the first two heavy strikes, and counter-attacked with his iron sword; but Frono deflected the blow just in time and went on the offensive again. Now, perhaps Kirti had not heard the story of Frono and the Sword-Trader, or perhaps he had forgotten it in the heat of battle; but he tried to meet Frono's offensive head-on with his sword and for a while held him at bay; then Frono roared and struck with such great strength at Kirti's sword that the brittle blade was shattered in twain and the larger part fell to the ground and broke into smaller pieces still; Kirti's face took the look of complete disbelief, and the hilt with the smaller part of the blade fell from his arm. Frono smiled; Kirti jumped away, but not before being struck on his side by the bronze bull-sword and flying a small distance to the side. Kirti fell to the ground and Frono turned around and stepped into the bandit-leader-longhouse.

---

As Frono cautiously walked across the longhouse and up the stairs, all was quiet and it seemed as though it was empty, or as though Yereti was asleep; it was indeed empty of men but for Yereti, and yet Yereti was not asleep and neither were the shades who guarded him. Indeed, as soon as Frono climbed to the upper part he was immediately set upon by the shades who tried to tie him down; but he swung thrice and soon the shades all fell to the ground and turned into human corpses.

"Come here, shaman!" - shouted Frono - "I can see through all your spells and destroy all your monsters; fight me yourself if you are here and have not yet fled."

"Then fight you I shall!" - proclaimed a booming voice, and Yereti came before Frono's sight. No torches were lit; the longhouse was dark but for Yereti, who stood tall as seven men and wore the furs of a great grey wolf and radiated a horrific white light. Frono fell to the ground, but stood up and walked closer to Yereti; he saw that the shaman's eyes were full of the madness that comes either with godlike blood or with rare herbs and roots that Frono had been told much about by his mentor.

"I do not fear you," - said Frono - "for all you have is magic, and magic is naught but the art of deception. I know full well that you are but a frail old man and not a giant god; and that this is morning, and not night; your deceptions cannot stand against the divine truth!"

And with that he raised his sword and charged; Yereti disappeared before his eyes and instead appeared a bit farther away, now in a more human size but no less horrifying for it.

"Lies and deception is your magic," - proclaimed Yereti - "But mine is more true than truth itself! You say that I am not a god; that is true, but I serve a god that is greater than all your gods!"

The bandit-leader outstretched his hands, and light spread through the room, blinding Frono, and a horrific force hit him, and he fell to the floor. Yereti gloated; Frono was being thrown around back and forth, and he could only barely advance, even as his sight returned. Yereti must have noticed this, for at that very point a lightning bolt fell from the roof (which turned into the night sky) struck before Frono, and the howls of a thousand wolves deafened him. Still, the War-Bull soon understood that the shades were attacking him once more and Yereti was simply trying to distract him from them; so he struck some of them down, but was wounded and collapsed to the ground again, the light and the howling of the.wolves bludgeoning his senses.

For a brief moment, Frono War-Bull felt the feeling of despair and powerlessness; for while he was a great warrior, Yereti had easily surpassed him as a sorceror, and this he had not expected. But he steeled himself and waited. Yereti turned into a giant grey wolf and approached him; it was then that Frono War-Bull jumped to his feet and roared, turning into a bull and ramming his horns into Yereti's side, at which point the howling and the lights disappeared. Yereti tried to retreat; Frono caught up with him and charged him again and again, goring him with his horns and kicking him with his hooves, and Yereti soon turned back into a human. Yereti then stood up and tried to become a shade, but before he could do this the War-Bull charged him again and made him fall to the ground.

Frono War-Bull stood upright over the broken and bleeding old body of his adversary, with a calm satisfaction on his face despite his own wounds. Truly, Yereti was a great sorceror! But Frono had by far surpassed him as a warrior. He then sat down and tried to bind his wounds and catch his breath.

Five other godlikes, battered and bloodied, had reached him not long after and called him to return to the fray; the battle has fallen apart into many lesser battles all over the camp, and each was desperate for both sides fought without yielding or retreating, and neither could quite gain the upper hand. Though he himself had only barely rested, Frono ordered the four of them to tie up Yereti and bring him out for all to see, and ordered the fifth, who was their captain, to tell him what was happening while they hurried outside. The captain was tired and bleeding from his side, but spoke for as long as he could, detailing the battle in the center of the camp and the arrival of fresh bandit reinforcements; he looked about to collapse when they reached the entrance, so Frono ordered him to stay and to patch himself up. Then the War-Bull ran out to the man-made elevation before the bandit-leader-longhouse; he roared with bull-fury and raised his sword high, and to those bandits who saw it it was as though he had blotted out the sun; night fell before their eyes and dug into their minds, and soon they began to break; and those who still fought fell when they saw Yereti, tied to a large wooden stake in front on the bandit-leader-longhouse. Even those who did not see it shuddered then, if not because of that then because Frono, having finished killing the bandits who were closer to their warrior-grounds, now charged at those who had gathered in the other part of the camp, and was followed by all the godlikes who had followed him. In this last battle, the bandits were actually more numerous, as all the survivors had gathered up here; but fear had made their spirits brittle and they broke and ran, and those who would otherwise have fought on followed them from despair and indecision, and most of them died then and there; only their leader, Durom, and his brother held out longer than the most - but they were surrounded and cut down.

After this slaughter was done, Frono was abandoned by his bull-fury and nearly fell to the ground; his companions rushed up to him, concerned, but he stood up again by himself and walked steadily towards Yereti's stake.

"You are defeated at last, shaman; and this is all the better for I know that you are the one with whom rests the blame for the original rebellion." - said Frono - "Do you repent?"

Yereti tried to spit in his face, but only sullied his own beard.

"No, I do not! For even though I may have failed you shall never succeed either!" - screamed Yereti, madness once more filling his eyes which bulged and rotated wildly - "I serve the power that is greater than all that you could ever gather; I will soon die and my defeat will become truth, but before I am dead I still can condemn you forever! Know that all that you create..."

Frono cringed with pain and even moreso disgust, and quickly slit Yereti's throat with his dagger before the shaman could finish his curse.

"He had deceived us all for long enough," - he commented.

"Spread the order: drag out the corpses of our brothers and set the camp on fire," - he then told those godlikes who had followed him - "Then leave. Evil must be destroyed to the last trace."

As he left the camp, he looked at the sky and smiled; whether it was thanks to the sacred fires that even now spread across the camp, in return to his prayers or because of Yereti's death and defeat, the sun had risen and the sky has cleared of whatever tried to hide it from his sight. This sight and the fresh forest air cleared his mind and renewed his strength as he rejoined his main army that was picking off the stragglers.

---

The bandit-camp began to burn much earlier, and by then the stragglers and survivors who had left the camp by secret and uncovered exits were already many but not yet far away enough. They saw this horrific sight which had illuminated all the forests and the mountains, and which was as the burning of the Evil Family-campsite, though to many bandits it must have seemed this much less just; and it was the end of all confusion and second thoughts for all of them. Some hid or lied down and pretended to be dead; others ran as fast as they could; others still simply shambled, sometimes with some semblance of purpose, sometimes without it. None stood their ground, because their ground has already been stood and their stand had failed; and some may already have started to yearn for revenge, but for now found in themselves neither the strength nor the folly needed to seek it.

Bit by bit, the surviving bandits banded together, scarcely saying a word to each other but knowing that the truth that brought them to this near-doom was true nonetheless: many can survive more easily than one, and one can survive more easily in a band. Still, the world has become broken and the truth too has been shattered, and therefore it often failed to ensure success; instead, godlike patrolsmen, having killed all they could at those exits that they knew of, took to massacre bands and solitary stragglers alike, from afar with their bows and close by with their spears and axes and swords.

The bands that had been able to escape farther away seemed safe, though, and Kirti, still half-senseless and thoroughly dazed and downcast after the battle in which he barely survived and did so much less than he had hoped, followed them beyond the woods and across the plains. Unbeknowst to him, Frono and several followers had rode up to a hill and, though they did not spot Kirti, one of his aides asked him: "Shall we not chase them down, brother?"

"By no means," - replied Frono after a moment's hesitation - "They are merely pathetic and cowardly cats now, bereft of leader and fortress, weapons and magic. What glory is there in defeating cats?" Besides, Frono was well-versed in the directions of the nine winds, and he knew that the bandits were heading way from the Cow Family lands and into the lands of the Elephant and Sheep Families. Also, despite everything he still was rather tired, and so felt that he had done all that was needed, which was not at all untrue.

"As you say, brother." - agreed the aide.

Frono and the others than rode off to rally their army and, in avoidance of looting and disorder, brought it back to force the Inu Family back into submission. With Yereti dead, the evil magic that had bound the rebel human-families to the bandits had disappeared, and all the humans hurried to offer their sometimes renewed repentance and many gifts to go with it; in their regard, Frono was merciful. Not much later, Frono learned from his spies that the Cow Family-Chief had died from sorrow at the death of Itono and the survival of Frono; therefore he soon had to go back to the Cow Family campsite, where he killed his uncle and his immediate cousin and by so doing managed to become Cow Family-Chief Fourth-Frono, and as such he introduced new and benign family-laws and led the Moti Great Family to a glorious war where he won many great battles and freed many cows and lands from foreigners, before dying due to betrayal.

As for Kirti, he and the other stragglers eventually headed towards the Outer Mountains; and what happened to them there will be described later.

Famous Epigraphs of the Ancient Times

"Fair anguish in these sorrows of our epoch/shall bring cathartic pain to all who flee/from every sting of foul inequity."

-Translation, 1:1, Slave

"Power ordained is majesty; power exerted is justice."

-Rock carving, northern Kafin Desert, Hu'ut

"Lower your head, till the fields."

-Palmyran proverb, discovered in the Leisai clay tablet cache

"The man's life is the arc of the sun. His rising brightens the horison, his falling brings color and reflection."

-Arch mural, Trovin, Old Trilui

"Watch the wind and mark the direction."

-Satar saying (possibly apocryphal)

Miriya’s Wisdom and Palmyra's orgins.

The Palmyran laws, genetics, social structure, code, and conduct was set about in the nation's past based on the book Miriyan. The Miriyan was said to be the words of the divine trinity. The book itself was named after the old woman who found it within the middle of a meteor that shattered on what is now one of the holiest places known to the Palmyrans. It was said that when this meteor crashed, a rainbow of colors had blasted out from the epicenter. The locals were amazed at what had come and had crashed into one of the most desolate areas within a hundreds of miles. The locals had came and seen the meteor but several bandits sponsored by a foreign power had come to stop these pilgrims from coming because of the healing powers that this rock seemed to have. These bandits had blockaded the meteor from outsiders and were intending to steal and sell it.

This is where Miriya came into play as she was the oldest, most homely, and pathetic of the tramps came to the rock to try to heal her sick baby. The guards told her “get away from the rock now! Or else! She ignored and couldn’t hear the commands and she was deaf. “That’s it you damn hag, guards! Beat her until she leaves or dies!” Then she was quickly and brutally harmed by the guards who clobbered her to an unconsuos state. But this is when she was taken by one of the bandits and slammed against the rock in which she died very quickly.

However, when she was killed, the rock split open releasing so much light that it made people worldwide temporarily blind. This ghost of the woman was taken and flown up into the sky with the help of the cucuburra. In this the cuccuburra said "Ah, Miriya, we have been waiting for you to come here for so long. We predicted that your daughter will lay the foundation for the future Palmyran Dynasty. It was coincidence that this would happen, as it was planned and predicted by us to happen.” Miriya responded “Why me though? Why, out of all of the people in the world I was the one chosen to suffer this fate? “You may have suffered but your ancestors will thrive in a new, better world because of your work and pain.” “I still don’t understand what I am up here for.” Questioned Miriya.

“Miriya, we have brought you up here because of the fighting within local tribes and there is no central body of law, or code of ethics. We have made you the one to experience this fate because we know that you shall leave the remains of your legacy for eons to come. Your son, will be born not in the human form, but shall live as the divine word of the trinity.” The trinity lectured to Miriya. Before she could speak though her soul flew from her body to the skies above where she became the sun, and her son the moon.

Back at the mortal realm the humans just got their vision back after the burst of light. One of the bandits said “Umm, there’s a book that lies in the rock quarry. Should we remove it?” “Sure, you can remove it from it’s place.” Replied the leader of the Bandits. When the bandit opened it, it began to rain, very hard, and fast. It also changed the bandits mood as they no longer felt any hostility to the locals and then before long went to the home city of which they belonged and asked for the monarch (insert name) to abdicate and declare a ceasefire with the future Palmyrans. He agreed which then allowed the city to be in a joint alliance with the Palmyrans and thus build up their nation which then it flourished.

WHY DO YOU POST STORIES AND MAKE ME THINK THE UPDATE IS UP?

Oh well.

lord_joakim said:

WHY DO YOU POST STORIES AND MAKE ME THINK THE UPDATE IS UP?

Oh well.

Click to expand...

It's because the person (das) above my post enticed me into posting my own story after he did his. I was against it and reluctant beforehand but now just to get it over with I chose to post it regardless.

11. Kirti Slays a Godlike Bull.

In the very center of the world there is the feast-tent of Eso Kotuu, and around it are the plains of the Moti. The plains are then surrounded by mountains, and the mountains come in two rows - the Inner Mountains which are closer to the tent and the Outer Mountains, which are farther away. Beyond the Outer Mountains begin the foreign countries, then comes the sea and beyond it some more foreign countries, up to the edge of the world. Now, before the world was broken it was perfectly round and all those lands and seas and mountains were round as well, just like the feast-tent of Eso Kotuu; but now its shape has become distorted and unclear, places appear out of proper sequence and in strange form; and also, since during the Good War mountains crumbled and oceans flooded around the world, sea has now appeared to the south, and the mountain-ring was broken in many parts, now only existing to the northeast, and then in a confused and intermixed form.

Also, in the reign of Eso Kotuu the Outer Mountains and everything beyond them was not inhabited, but now foreigners had appeared; and so the Outer Mountains were now inhabited by bandits and other foreigners. That said, the foreigners here did not have empires and most of them were not rich traders but rather were few and poor; and the bandits here too were much less numerous and much poorer than those in the Inner Mountains - for this reason no families saw fit to fight them, as well as because the Outer Mountains were, after all, quite large and covered many lands, and so the bandits had many hiding-places to be rooted out from. The land here was much more barren than in the Inner Mountains, though, with infertile soils except in some valleys desecrated by constant war and little prey except for the occasional caravan decked out like a hedgehog out of fear of raids, and therefore the bandits and the foreigners alike remained as few and as poor in the times of Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci as they were in the times of Chief-of-Chiefs Frei.

Now, however, was the forty-eighth year of the reign of Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci; and so the bandits and other humans that had fled from the Cow Family and survived the journey through the inhospitable lands of the Sheep Family and the just, yet hunger-struck lands of the Elephant Family had now arrived to the Outer Mountains. Many of them had died along the way for various reasons, but even more had survived; and one of those who had survived was once Kirti, son of Yereti.

Truly horrible was the death from hunger, a death both dishonourable and torturous for mind and body alike; yet how much worse it was to survive when survival meant life as an outcast! For it is known: the lot of an outcast is a miserable one, and though some may say that an outcast is a law-breaker and therefore deserves every evil, what is to be said of those exiled for rising up against injustice? And even the others are, in truth, quite deserving of pity and compassion. Those of them who were humans had lost their families, ancestral gods and homes, and most of their property and friends, as well as most of their conscience, for which reason they now lived off the land as they went; and those of them who were born bandits were no better of, for what is a bandit-pack if not a twisted family? And there were also those who had been humans and had since then become bandits; and they have now lost their second home and their new comrades as well as their old friends, and in a way it was the easiest for them, yet it was also perhaps the hardest, and those of them who lived all the way to the Outer Mountains had fared well enough, but many had cut their wrists to bleed to death or jumped at patrols long before then. As for Kirti, he was a fortunate and skilled hunter, and he had travelled far before, and he proved himself well to the band that he had joined, and both survived and helped others survival; but his mind was half-dazed after the fateful battle and empty and detached for days afterwards, and only gradually it returned from the brink of the oblivion that awaits the foolish after death to the broken, yet still somehow living world. And when it did return, he wailed and gnashed, and some thought he would kill himself there and then, but instead he calmed down and went away to hunt as usual, and the same thoughts that struck him back then followed him whilst away on the hunt, and those thoughts were as follows.

He was once Kirti, son of Yereti, and he was of the Arti-family; and together with all of the Arti-family he rose up against injustice when his father, the human-chief, was exiled; and then Kirti led warriors to battle against the Cow Family godlikes who fought for injustice, but in the end the rebellion was defeated and the Arti-family became once more the Arti human-family within the Cow Family, even though it had been said that Arti, the ancestor of the family, did not descend from Tikhupata Afono-Gog, ancestor of the Cow Family, and as for those who still tried to fight on, they were exiled, and Kirti was exiled as one of them, whereas his brother Darti died not long before the family that rose up had chosen to sit back down; and since then Kirti was an outcast. Kirti was followed by friends to the Great Wolf bandit-camp, in search of allies with whom to continue the war against the Cow Family and to help the Arti human-family rise up once again; and the bandit-leader, who turned out to be his father Yereti, did agree and did rise up, but himself was so treasonous and predisposed towards use of black magic that all the gods and benevolent spirits turned away from him and Frono, who led the godlike warriors, had killed Yereti and destroyed the camp, and also destroyed Kirti's sword and made him flee away from humans with other outcasts and double-outcasts. And so by now he had lost his family and his bandit-camp, and all his friends and comrades; and he lost his immediate brother, though he was devious, and his father, though he was evil; and he lost even his enemy-friend Sirti, who turned out to be Frono, for Frono decided not to chase down the refugees; and so he also lost the war that he had started, and so had no opportunity to finish it in any way. What had he now? But rags on his back, and a broken sword, and two hunting knives and a talisman, but that talisman he was quick to throw away, for it was supposed to give him luck and it did not do so - clearly, it was a deception. He had little, and even his name lost meaning; but he kept the name regardless for ease of conversation, though the people he now travelled with did not seem to remember him from before, and possibly did not know him at all, although he had trained many warriors at the bandit-camp back during Yereti's war.

He lost everything! But then he found a deer, and quickly killed it, bringing its meat back to where the band made camp; and he also found that it was still to early to die, for if nothing else he still was part of this band, formed by twenty-four men and led by one Guroc, an often-scarred warrior of the Great Wolf camp, and so was not without allies; therefore he began to think of revenge and continued war once more, but stopped, having realised that distant and unfulfillable dreams distracted from the purpose at hand, and that purpose was continued survival by means of hunting and scavenging.

Before long, they had reached a land with tall treeless white mountains, and several narrow valleys in between them, and Guroc said that those were the Outer Mountains.

---

As already said, the Outer Mountains were inhabited by bandits and foreigners; now many more bandits had arrived in bands, and soon they began to set up poor, temporary camps and fighting each other and those who had come before them. Of those who came before, the mountain bandits retreated to their strongholds and attacked the newcomers at night, and sometimes they slaughtered the newcomers, and sometimes the newcomers drove them off, and sometimes they even managed to follow them and to seize their strongholds, and so after a hundred skirmishes and raids the upper lands came to be divided. As for the foreigners, some of them were bandits and fought as other bandits, only with less mercy; some of the others have been exiled from other lands for various crimes, low standings and blasphemies as well as truths; most, however, were the Sand People, and many amongst the People say that they were the bastard offsprings of one ancestor god or the other; as for the Sand People themselves, some claim to be descended from other ancestor gods on the Good Council, but most know that none will ever believe that and instead say that they were born from the copulation of the Blue Sky and the Sandy Earth, and for that reason they are called the Sand People; most of them are slaves in deed as well as in name, but in the Outer Mountains there were no godlikes and therefore even the Sand People were as though free men.

Guroc's band had soon fought another band of thirty-nine, who had occupied a safe valley that was almost round in shape; Kirti killed two enemies, whereas Guroc killed the enemy leader and took his bracelet, and by the bandit laws that meant that the survivors of both bands now followed him, and they all settled down in the same valley; before long, Guroc learned that there was a much larger and probably more fertile valley not far from the new camp, only it was occupied by the Sand People, who had built their village there and had driven off the now-joined band in the past. Guroc shrugged, but later in the month he had gained another bracelet, and then another was given to him freely, and it became apparent that the food the bandits had was not enough, whereas according to the scouts the natives had enough food to store it. The first raid was driven off with losses, as the natives attacked from ambushes and used traps. Guroc then attacked with full force in the second raid, hoping to make the natives pay tribute; but though he, Kirti and five other warriors managed to break through the confused and unskilled natives and even killed their chieftain, the Sand People here had different customs than elsewhere, and instead of giving up their men retreated to their villages, where more men as well as their women had joined them with weapons, led by their chieftess; that chieftess was as beautiful as the valley in which she was born and as spry as a doe, and she fought like a lioness protecting her cubs, and the surprised bandits, who thought the battle to be already won, had to retreat again. On the way back, some grumbled against Guroc, but others remained loyal and made them shut up; as for Guroc, he became thoughtful.

---

For five days the bandits got by with hunting and raids against weaker neighbours, but this was scarcely enough and the Sand People camp with its wealthy stores still cried to be looted.

On the sixth day, they held council and resolved to take the valley no matter what comes.

On the night after that, Kirti had a strange dream; he saw a majestic being, half-man, half-beast fight against a huge and ferocious dark enemy, and fail to win, and yet fight on, jumping forth to evade the enemy's blows; the being tried weapon after weapon and trick after trick, before finally finding a black blade in the grass and striking at the darkness, shattering it and expanding the world. He woke up - and regretted having been exiled, since it meant that he had lost all contact with his god Arti.

On the seventh day the bandits left their camp and set out for the valley.

---

They departed on the morning and abandoned the camp completely; and soon after having left it they divided into two groups, as was agreed upon during the council meeting. Guroc took most of the warriors with him and moved towards the narrow eastern pass leading to the large valley; thirteen other warriors went with Kirti, who led them to the wider pass in the southeast of the valley, through which they had attacked the Sand People in the past. The warriors advanced without any undue caution, and came within the sight of the village by the time Kirti heard the not so distant roar of a bull. His blood became cold, and his mind was briefly seized by panic: Frono!

The other warriors too must have heard this, and so advanced more cautiously now, keeping their backs to the hills and lesser rocks on the nearer side of the valley. Kirti looked and listened, but could not find the bull again; and yet, it was not a mere deception, for just then a huge black bull charged - almost flew - at the bandits from behind them, and he was like a god, with bronze horns and hoofs. Those who could jump jumped away, those who could run ran away, but one of the warriors was gored to death by the bull's bronze-like horns, and another was Kirti, and Kirti was unable to do anything but fight, so fight he did, whilst thinking: "This is not Frono. But this is one of his brothers, and so now he knows! He knows!"

Kirti dodged attack after attack, just barely so, whilst trying to hit the bull. The bull was huge and did not seem too agile, but his hide was tough, and Kirti soon understood that his knives were useless; he threw them at the bull's eyes, but the bull easily parried them with his horns. Kirti used the time to jump back and take out his axe; he then jumped at the bull and tried to strike at his forehead, but the bull suddenly lunged forward and almost caught Kirti in mid-air, bruising his legs. Kirti fell to the ground and stumbled; he stood up again and threw his axe and finally injured the bull in his side, but it was not enough, and besides the bull then charged him and threw him aside again with force, and Kirti rolled down the grass, and the bull followed.

Kirti somehow managed to stop himself and stand up yet again, just in time to dodge the charging bull. He looked around with despair; neither did the natives attack nor did the bandits assist him, and he could see none, though they were all clearly nearby. He did, however, spy a glimpse of something dark in the grass that lied ahead of him - and behind the bull, who turned around to face him.

The bull charged him again; Kirti readied himself, then grabbed the bull's horns and jumped around the enraged animal. He then lunged forth with as much strength as he could find towards the dark thing in the grass.

Kirti grabbed the sword; it was made of iron, but was unusually long and sharp, and slightly curved, and black in colour, and its hilt was also black, and it ended with the head of a horse. He remembered his dream and dismissed the memory again; there was no time to ponder this matter. Kirti turned around and faced the charging bull, striking it on the forehead. The bull fell to the ground; Kirti then cut him again, and again, and the bull died and bled out into the green earth. Kirti at first looked as though he was about to collapse, breathing heavily and shaking, and several other outcasts ran up to support him; but instead of falling, he laughed and stood forthrightly, raising his sword in salute to the dying bull and the rising sun before tending to his wounds.

It was then that the Sand People, who had been watching from behind the bushes, rushed up before them, led by their chieftess; they bowed before Kirti and began talking in their dialect, and though none of the bandits who had by now all gathered by Kirti's side knew this bird-speech, it was obvious that they too were awed by Kirti's skill and fortune; and rightly so, for it surely took a lot of fortune to find a sword in the grass and a lot of skill to survive until then.

---

Whatever or whoever the bull was, and no matter how his appearance and actions could be interpreted, it clearly was a rare event of the kind that stops battles; and regardless of that, Kirti's deed was apparently a one that turned enemies into feast-mates. The Sand People were awed by Kirti, and the bandits were awed by the food and drink that they had brought out; and before long Guroc, who had been held back by a sudden skirmish with other bandits, was also talked into leading his warriors into the village - not to pillage, but to make peace and so receive food for free, and such an invitation would have been both unwise and dishonourable to refuse; so Guroc grumbled, but then came towards the fire as well.

As for the feast itself, it was a one that lasted for the entire day, and at the beginning of the day native healers only grudgingly agreed to help heal Kirti and his fellows, but by the end of it, the bandits and the Sand People had reached an agreement: the bandits were allowed to settle in the valley, but were to help defend and extend it against the other nearby bands and villages, and also they were to take wives from amongst the village to bind the alliance and to grant them lands without taking them away from the family; and also because the bandits had no wives whereas many of the native men, in this village and other nearby villages alike, had somehow died over the last fourteen months, and especially since the arrival of the bandits; and as for the chieftess, she was also the high priestess of the village, and so became the wife of the Bull-Slayer, as the Sand People had come to call Kirti.

As for Guroc, he thought about many things over the days, and so on the next day he ordered that all the bandits assemble outside of the village, completely armed; and he stood impassively until everyone gathered, at which point he examined their weapons and the village, and finally said: "Our brother Kirti has slain the bronze-horned bull and has become the chieftain of this people; clearly he has great fortune with him, and it is known that the fortune of fortunate men passes on to those who follow them. When I have become the leader of this band, I have sworn to bring you well-being and luck; now I have finally found a way to do so."

And he motioned for Kirti to approach him and gave him his bracelet. The two outcasts nodded to each other, and then everyone went back to the village.

For the next several months, Kirti ruled as both the bandit-leader and the Sand People-chieftain, and had carried out his part of the agreement to the full, allowing the village to survive its hardships and fully regain its prosperity and power; and some bandits said that he became too close to the Sand People, whereas some Sand People complained that he broke their customs and seized undue powers, but most were more grateful than alarmed.

As months and years passed, however, everything in the Outer Mountains and in the valley had changed in such ways that few could have expected; but what is known of that it would be best to tell later.

Even though it's a nice read, I know that you only do that to torment me.

Subcompletelycorrect: I am also doing this to see if North King will put up another placeholder post at some point, and if so, then on what page.

Besides, I should have just one more chapter to write and post before reaching my original goal, and after that is done the main plot would become essentially impossible to advance without North King updating first. Though if it takes too long for North King to update after that I guess there are some things I could come up with for then.

12. Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci Plans for Justice.

Many days and weeks to the north and then some to the east of the feast-tent of Eso Kotuu and the principal campsite of the Elephant Family is where the Outer Mountains are located, and on the way there lie many hills, forests, plains and valleys; and sometimes it might seem difficult to believe that events in the heartlands of the Elephant Family could influence the course of events in the Outer Mountains, for are they not a distant province and is not the Chief-of-Chiefs often kept from righting injustice even in the closest lands by the power and pride of the godlikes? So believe the godlikes themselves, and many foreigners as well; and yet it is not so, for the entire outer world is the reflection of the feast-tent of Eso Kotuu and radiates from it, and the Outer Mountains are but the reflections of the reflection of the heartlands, and nothing could happen in the heartlands of the Elephant Family without affecting the course of events everywhere else, for it is the center of the world and the world is in its nature not unlike a pond: throw a stone at the center of the pond, and the ripples will spread everywhere and remake the pond.

For those reasons, before one would talk of the events in the Outer Mountains, one must first talk of the events in the Elephant Family campsite; and this is all the more required in this story as a form of penitence, for alas! The events in the Elephant Family campsite had been woefully neglected throughout the account of Darti's uprising and Yereti's war, and Kirti's bull-slaying and other adventures. That is an injustice that must be righted.

---

In the forty-seventh year of the reign of Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci, a well-known group of hunters in grey woolen capes arrived at the campsite and was allowed in; though the godlikes of other families considered those hunters bandits and killed them wherever they could, the Elephant Family considered them to be the personal friends of their Chief, and so gave them gifts and held a feast in their honour at the chief-tent (a veritable palace of wood, marble and mortar, built not without the help of wise architects of Krato and farther lands fstill), presided over by the Chief-of-Chiefs himself, though he was ailing, and for this reason retired soon after his immediate brother Tarti became drunk and began bellowing the Song of Kijit Kotuu. Siksti, the leader of those hunters, inquired of the reason for this and when he was told of Gaci's illness, he became horrified and said that surely, that is the cause of the suffering, misery and injustice that he and his men had seen while travelling in the east; their father was struck by an evil illness! The lineage-heads became curious and inquired incessantly of what they had seen; but Siksti remained anxious, and demanded that he be allowed to look after Gaci, and none dared tell him nay. Besides, his men were more than eager to speak of the various crimes and miracles they saw in diverse lands.

Siksti was a towering man and everything in his figure and his countenance implied that he was a man of fight rather than of thought; and his manner of acting likewise made him look dumb, unwise and inexperienced in the ways of governance and negotiations. In truth he was quite clever and for that reason was one of Gaci's most trusted spies. So Gaci reclined upon his bed in the inner chamber and Siksti reported to him of all that he and his men had seen and heard in the Inner Mountains: the injustices and crimes of the godlikes, the affluence and greed of the foreign-traders, the recklessness and impiety of the bandits and the growing dissent and unhappiness among the humans; and in particular he spoke of the Arti human-family, where a shaman named Yereti became human-chief after his predecessor was exiled by the godlikes; this Yereti was an evil and cunning man of much apparent virtue and magical power, he appeased the godlikes with many gifts whilst using his powers, as well as the reports of his family's many skilled hunters, to divine the situation in the Inner Mountains and used this knowledge to raid some foreign-trader caravans and to trade with other traders and bandits. This trade with the bandits was made this much easier because he secretly took charge of the nearby bandit-camp, having used his powers to seize the unfirm minds of bandits and to turn them against their previous leader. Siksti concluded: "It is doubtless that this Yereti is plotting a rebellion, for his secrets are many, and soon enough they will become clear to the godlikes or to his own family, and then he will have to fight for his life; and therefore he is already fighting before the other sides have joined the battle, for what other need could he have for the bandits? And those bandits are not weak and frightened as they have become in the west or the south; they are unbroken and can set all the forests in the Inner Mountains on fire, and on Yereti's order they will do exactly that, and then they will fight the Cow Family and I know not who would prevail."

"Those bandits would not defeat godlikes." - finally spoke Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci - "They would only arouse their fury and bloodlust with the initial battles, no matter who wins, and then they will be defeated like bandits elsewhere, because one bandit-camp cannot stand against seventy campsites, even if some of them are temporarily struck by rebellion; and that rebellion will be temporary because human-families are by their nature disposed towards peace more than towards honour, and also towards justice, whilst understanding that it is not just for families to be destroyed for the private passions of some of their sons."

Siksti shrugged.

"Thank you for what you have told me, Siksti." - said Gaci - "Now leave, for I am ill and do not wish to see anyone."

Siksti bowed and left Gaci to his thoughts, and those thoughts were bitter and sorrowful; for he was like the human body of the Great Family and the Great Family was being torn apart by numerous illnesses and predisposed towards bitterness and sorrow as evil and injustice prevailed.

---

His thoughts, however, were such: "All that has been happening for those last few years had happened just like I had planned it; and yet I am distraught and unhappy, because I am unable to restore justice, rein in those who declared themselves godlikes and relieve the misery of my children. That is because those are evil times and the minds of chiefs of all the great families are all tainted by evil; therefore they act in accordance with their pride and greed, without regard for laws, customs, the wellbeing of the lesser families in their charge and even their own interests: they had been blinded by the times. They will listen to neither reason nor piety, and will only listen to force; and I and my family have not this force. If I were to fight against one family, I would probably win; but if I were to attack any of them the others would rally against me and then I will either have to abdicate in the favour of one of the traitors among the Elephants or will turn out to have been an impostor and an usurper; and no family will be goaded into attacking me, for they are evil and mistrustful and will not trust the others to follow them and also those families they call their adapted human children will also seem untrustworthy, although that, alas, is not on the whole deserved; and yet they will not carry out any laws I give them if they do not decide them to be profitable: such things already happened in times of Frei: many laws were declared and jubilantly adapted, but they were immediately subverted or ignored.

"Nonetheless something must be done. To restore justice in full is exactly the same as to restore the unbroken world: to be desired but impossible, or entirely possible but undesirable. But if things are allowed to proceed as they are now, evil would continue to grow stronger and stronger: the abuses and the recklessness of the godlikes will multiply, as will the suffering and misery of their human children; wealth of the godlikes will increase just like the poverty of the humans; whereas my power and the power of my successors will decline, and in the end the Moti Great Family will cease to be and the weaker families will not outlast it, whereas the stronger will set up evil and injust states far worse than the evilest and the most injust states to be found in foreign lands, for the godlikes are more accustomed to evil than anyone else in the world and will then no longer be bound by anything, for they will have destroyed my family as soon as they become reckless enough to severe all ties with it; and with our family they will destroy all that ties the people of today to the times of Eso Kotuu.

"I do not have the power for I am but one and even with all of my own family I will be outnumbered by the godlikes; but the godlikes are outnumbered by the humans, and fear of the humans is what keeps them from rebelling. The humans have the power to force them to follow my laws and in so doing reinforce the Moti Great Family; but they are good and dutiful, and therefore will not act against their adapted parents and their own best immediate interests, yet nonetheless they could be pressed to rise up against injustice if injustice becomes too unbearable and too quickly. Therefore a lesser evil must be done to prevent a greater evil; therefore I will encourage the godlikes to introduce new and more severe laws and will raise the taxes to make them extract more gifts; and when this causes a rebellion, it will flicker and frighten the godlikes before being crushed due to the peacefulness of the humans; and so more and more humans will be exiled or will flee, and they will join bandit camps; and then my warriors and the warriors of the godlikes will begin to fight the bandits and will eventually expel them to more distant lands; then the godlikes, tired and frightened by human uprisings and bandit wars, will be forced to give me greater respect and to treat their humans with greater lenience, whereas the bandits, forced out of harm's way, will become the adapted children of the Elephant Family, and with their help my descendants, for whom I shall win time, will be able to do that which I cannot and will save the Moti Great Family from its doom."

Thus he thought, and thus he acted; and in the meantime his spies traveled throughout all the lands of the families and reported to him as his plan, adapted many and then some years ago, was beginning to bear fruit.

---

Later in that same year, four bedraggled and pathetic-looking humans reached the Elephant Family campsite. Their leader was Urti; he and his men came from the Arti human-family, and travelled along the longer and more secret paths from their family's campsite through the lands of the Cow and the Goat families in avoidance of patrols, and they did avoid most patrols, but often had to fight their way through bandits and wild animals, and for that reason there were fourteen when they set out and now there remained four.

They gazed at the Elephant Family campsite and gasped, pondering its immensity and beauty, and one of them said: "Truly, this is the center of the world!" The Moti-city, which they did not enter but which they recently had passed, was not much larger and not nearly as resplendent. Walls of sandstone, temples and houses of strongest and most precious wood; and the chief-tent of wood, marble and mortar towered over all, yet the greatest part was within it: the feast-tent of Eso Kotuu, which had taken the shape of the feast-hall but retained its distinctive markings and decorations and its incredible connection the unbroken world, manifested in the wisdom and justice that permeated the very air within it. The guards refused to let the vagrants in at first, and Urti dropped to his knees and cried, and begged them to let them in to speak with their father and god; and he begged so from the time the sun first appeared on the horizon and until it climbed the first two steps out of the fourteen that are above the ground. At that same time Tarti, immediate brother of Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci, climbed on top of the walls, and told the guards to open the gates; for the Chief-of-Chiefs wished to hear them out. Gaci was, after all, omniscient even when asleep; and as for Tarti, he hated the godlikes with a passion and knew that letting humans from one of their families talk with the Chief-of-Chiefs would doubtless hurt them in some way.

Urti and the others bowed before Tarti in thanks; Tarti commanded them to rise, for they were of the People and all of the People were brothers and did not need bow before each other. He led them along circuitous paths along the campsite towards the chief-tent, and along the way had Urti tell him all about the purpose of their visit, and the more Tarti heard, the more he liked his decision. By the time they arrived at the chief-tent, sun had climbed up three stairs more, and Gaci was already woken up by his closest immediate relatives who had heard of the strange arrivals. Gaci was wise and possessed a flawless memory even in the age at which memory tends to resemble a sieve. He got up, got dressed and greeted the Arti envoys in the empty feast-tent. They were awed but overcome, yet nonetheless found it in themselves to tell Gaci of everything: of Yereti and of how he was unjustly accused of plotting a rebellion by the godlikes of the Cow Family, and of Kono and how he tried to kill Yereti but only managed to drive him into hiding and then began to exact unbearable work and countless gifts from the Arti-family, and of how human-child Darti rose against injustice, slaughtered Kono and his godlikes and sent out envoys to nearby human-families and to the Chief-of-Chiefs.

"And why are you here, then?" - inquired Gaci softly after having listened to them without interruptions.

"We are those envoys we spoke of," - said Urti.

"So what have you come to request from me, then?" - Gaci asked, frowning slightly and noticing that Orti, one of his less reliable immediate brothers, was listening, as were others gathered just outside of the feast-tent.

"We request your assistance in the restoration of justice!"

"And how do you expect me to help you now that you have rebelled and killed the Cow Family-Chief?!" - shouted Gaci, standing up from his chair at the great wooden table - "You have risen against your parents and had disobeyed their and mine laws, as well as your own! Had you not done so, I would have asked the godlikes of the Cow Family to relent; but you might as well be bandits now!"

"But... But how could we tolerate the numerous injustices raised against us?" - asked Urti, shocked and backing away - "We had no choice but to rebel!"

"No choice? All men can choose good or evil, and you have definitely chosen evil, because of your impatience and recklessness! The godlikes are greedy and injust, such is their nature and their choice, but you did not have to rebel, and your rebellion, your family-war will only make things worse!"

Urti forgot about what Tarti previously told him and fell to his knees again - "Grant us mercy, father! We have been in error, but we did not know it!"

"Mercy?! Mercy?! Very well - your father shall be merciful. I should kill you where you stand, but instead I will send you to the Cow Family godlikes and ask them to show all the mercy they could muster."

Urti fell silent and the humans were led away to the dungeon, whereas Gaci's closer relatives scattered away, and Tarti fumed and seethed outside of the tent, whereas Orti had one of his foreign slaves write a letter to the Goat Family-Chief informing him that the Chief-of-Chiefs was not disposed towards assisting rebels despite not wishing well towards the godlikes of the great family (as if those godlikes could believe that he could wish them well!).

Meanwhile, Gaci retired to his bed, but not before telling Yenci, his close friend but not a relative, to visit the dungeon as usual.

This Yenci was a foreigner; he was short, but not too short, and clean-shaven, and seemed frail to the ignorant, but was a strong and skilled fighter who humbled even the Lion Family warriors during the customary fights before the annual Councils-of-Chiefs. He arrived from a distant land in the north long ago, and he became a close friend of the young Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci, and remained such; and it was to him that the Chief-of-Chiefs, wary of treason in his own ranks, had entrusted the supreme leadership of the spies, despite personally receiving the most important reports. The godlikes did not know that, however; instead they knew that the Chief-of-Chiefs had entrusted him with sundry other tasks that involved negotiations with foreign and related traders, hunters who brought food for the feasts and various bandits, as well as the godlikes themselves; and that too was true. Yenci was a foreigner; nonetheless he was most adept at the speech of the People, and also knew well the various diverse written and unwritten laws, and for those and other reasons was found by Gaci to be very useful and relaible in a way none of his relatives could ever be. Also, because he spoke so often with hunters and traders and travelled all over the land, he was very good at traveling.

Many rumours had spread about him over time, especially in Moti-city but also elsewhere; they said that he was a shapeshifter and a sorcerer, and claimed that he could turn into an eagle or a rabbit or a snake; and some also said that he was once a king in the north before being expelled either due to his evil ways or because he was just whereas the foreigners, as ever so often, turned out to be quite evil. But such is the nature of our broken world that many rumours are passed along and many of them are untrue, and most of them are imposible to verify. Also, those rumours travelled far; but Yenci was not known of by the Arti-family, since it lived in the middle of a forest in the Inner Mountains and did not even have a house in Moti-city. Therefore Urti did not at all recognise him when Yenci approached his cell.

"You are distraught, Urti of the Arti; it is as though something had happened entirely not as you intended."

"Why have you come here already, tormentor? And yes, things had gone badly; I had been sent by my brother and leader to receive the help of the Elephant Family against the Cow Family, against which we have risen, yet instead of receiving support we were scolded and thrown in here and will be sent to the Cow Family!"

"And what had you expected?" - smiled Yenci; Urti did not like that smile.

"I had expected our father to rectify injustice and to call the Cow Family godlikes to answer for their crimes!"

"For what crimes? For your killing of your legitimate brothers and among them the immediate son of their chief?"

"They had commited their own crimes before that!"

"To be sure; but you had done no better, and now you have become, by all laws, bandits and outlaws; how would it be just to punish the godlikes for any wrongs they had inflicted upon bandits?"

"But their injustice is what pushed us to rise up; otherwise we would not have done so!" - insisted Urti.

"By rising up you placed yourself outside of the protection of the law," - patiently explained Yenci - "If you had truly wanted the Chief-of-Chiefs to protect you, you should have petitioned him first."

"But we could not have..." - started Urti, then stopped himself and jumped to his feet - "Bah! You are just twisting words and truths, just like the Chief-of-Chiefs! Truly, this place is beautiful, but even it has become infested with evil and deception!"

"Deception is indeed what had happened here," - said Yenci, and smiled again, but now his smile was a different one and his voice turned from that of a conniving foreign-trader or a city lawsman trying to persuade, but that of a warrior giving a speech - "And evil does indeed lurk here. The Chief-of-Chiefs, who had sent me here, had deceived you in the feast-hall, and he also deceived the godlike spies lurking nearby. It is true: the law cannot protect you for you had broken the law; but you had indeed risen against injustice, and justice is above the injust laws, and the Chief-of-Chiefs, though every day he and his relatives are weakened and addled by the poisonous intrigues, lies and plots of the godlikes, does intend to do what he could to reinforce it. Evil is strong, but good is not yet defeated, but is merely forced to fight back in cunning rather than straightforward ways.

"The Chief-of-Chiefs could not punish the godlikes by law, because the accepted law does not give him the right to do so, and because the godlikes of different families have many disagreements but will band together to keep him from doing any such thing for the fear that the Cow Family would be first and any other would be second, as they all have commited many injustices and are brought together by them as bandits. Besides, your family's rebellion will burn for months due to the valour of your brothers, but in the end it will succumb, for the godlikes are relentless; and to support it would be to act rashly and impatiently, going after a petty injustice as after petty prey and failing to catch it and right it, and thus also to frighten the big prey that would otherwise fall to the traps that the Chief-of-Chiefs had set up for it, for that indeed is his true plan and through it evil will be defeated and injustice will be righted."

"So that is what had happened!" - exclaimed Urti in surprise and smiled, then frowned again - "But even if it is so, you shall not help us?"

"I cannot help your family yet, and neither could the Chief-of-Chiefs."

"Then this has been for nothing?"

"Perhaps so; there is something I could do for you and those who came with you, though."

Urti listened intently.

"Tommorow you and your followers will be sent with an escort to the Cow Family campsite, but you will be attacked by bandits; the escorts and the bandits will fight for a while, and some light wounds will be inflcited, but none would die for the bandits will quickly overpower the escorts and hold them for ransom, whereas you will be set free and given a small parchment. With it you will be allowed to enter Moti-city, and the leader of the guards there will tell you what to do from the on. It is not much; but in this way you will gain a measure of livelihood and will be allowed to help the Chief-of-Chiefs in his plans; and who knows? With your knowledge of your native lands, perhaps you will be able to help your family as well."

And as he said, so it happened.

---

In the forty-seventh year and in the forty-eighth year of the reign of Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci, many rebellions occured throughout the land; humans outraged by the abuses, extortions and injustices of the godlikes rebelled, and bandits helped them as well, sometimes fighting alongside them but usually holding them in contempt and raiding the loyal human-families until they rebelled. In the eastern Inner Mountains, the bandits even fought on their own after the Arti-family rebellion had been stomped into the dust; but eventually they were defeated and their camp was torched, and same happened to many other bandit camps in the following months, though others held out well or were avoided in the first place. All the great families but two - the Lion Family and the Pig Family - suffered from some rebellions; those two avoided it because the Lion Family killed futre rebels before the thought of rebellion had even reached their minds, whereas the Pig Family always treated its humans well because it had too few of them and was itself too weak; regardless, both were also attacked by bandits.

The Chief-of-Chiefs blessed the godlikes who asked for blessing and granted to the Lion Family-Chief the right to lead united familial armies against bandits and rebels, on account of his wonderful success against both; nonetheless it was rumoured that he helped the rebels in secret ways and possibly was behind the rebellions, and many claimed to have seen Yenci - in his own form, or in that of a snake, or an eagle, or a rabbit - fighting alongside the rebels or wrecking havoc with his sorcery amongst the godlikes. Others reported that Siksti, a known friend of the Chief-of-Chiefs, was the one who snuck in and set all the storehouses in the Sheep family campsite on fire and escaped during the confusion to lead his band in other raids and skirmishes. The Inu human-family chief, the one who at first made peace with the godlikes after his predecessor's rebellion in support of the Arti-family, then rebelled in alliance with bandit-leader Yereti, then reconciled with Frono War-Bull, the new Cow Family-Chief, and became his most ruthless ally, was killed; the one who killed him was said to have been one Urti, formerly of the Arti-family, who had allegedly escaped the Elephant Family escort bringing him to be executed by the Cow Family godlikes for rebellion with the help of Yenci himself or some of his hirelings. There were many other rumours of this kind; but the Chief-of-Chiefs denied it all and as proof sent his brother Tarti, a great warrior, to lead the Elephant Family forces against the bandits in the near north, who attacked traders and Goat and Pig Family campsites there indiscriminantly. Tarti promptly defeated the bandits again and again and forced them to flee southwestwards to join their comrades fighting the Lion Family.

For a while it seemed that the time of vengeance and of restoration of justice had arrived, for the godlikes lost many of their numbers in ambushes and battles alike, and were constantly taken by surprise and fooled by more cunning human rebel leaders and bandits. But before long things had changed; the godlikes, who had at first underestimated their enemies, now sent out larger armies that were ready for the human tricks, and it turned out that those tricks were not as varied or as efficient as at first seemed, and besides were not much use when campsite after campsite was taken - and they were easy to take, for when godlikes did not find some way to simply destroy the frail walls or sneak into the campsite, they merely set up siege and before long starvation set in and the humans rebelled against rebellion and the injustice of starvation it had brought upon them. The more far-sighted human-chiefs soon began to defect back; the less far-sighted were overthrown. The ones living in the central lands, with plentiful herds and fields, were usually quicker to surrender than those in the wilderness, where the people were more used to starvation and did not require as much food being less numerous and less spoiled; but those too had soon found that to give gifts and to exile main rebels was a lesser price than the constant threat of starvation and interruption of trade on which many of the hunters and the tin-gatherers had come to rely.

Some said: the humans would have won had they fought in a more organised fashion, formed proper alliances amongst each other and went on the attack like the godlikes did, instead of trying to delay their defeat through raids and ambushes; but while the godlikes, with their great wealth and their storehouses and their freedom from labour could afford to fight on for as long as they found necessary, the humans were not warriors and their main occupation was survival, and so they could not fight away from their own lands for long; and so the longest rebellion had gone on for seven seasons, mostly because the godlikes did not find out about it until then, whereas all the others by this time had already bowed before them out of starvation or fear of starvation.

Now, the bandits were more used to distant raids and constant warfare, and sometimes they even formed alliances with nearby bandit-camps, and so many of them managed to survive the attacks of the godlikes, but even then had to lie low. They still lost or failed to win the bandit-wars, because the godlikes were richer and better-equipped than they, and also because the godlikes were more relentless and persistent, and whereas the bandit way of war consisted off raids, the godlikes sought decisive battles and sieges, and since they held much more land they usually were able to find those in the end - and win them, for they were better suited towards it.

Thus the rebellions flared up and simmered down, although battles with the surviving bandits continued long after then. The godlikes had definitely won; nonetheless they were alarmed of those casualties and apprehensive of possible rebellions in more unconvenient times, and so decreased the demanded amounts of gifts and eased some of their laws, and even allowed some of the outcasts to return.

---

In the forty-ninth year of the reign of Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci, Yenci had returned to the Elephant Family campsite from his previous journey in the far east and came before the ailing Chief-of-Chiefs to report.

During the rebellions, many humans fled to the bandit-camps; then many bandit-camps were torched, and humans and bandits alike fled to the surviving bandit-camps, but more often to the outer edges of the Moti Great Family lands, and especially to the Outer Mountains and the Eastern Plains. Few lived there and the godlikes were not curious bout those lands; and those outcasts fled there, only to find out exactly why those lands were so sparsely populated. They suffered terribly and many of them died of starvation, and Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci, though at first stern towards those evil ones, eventually was moved to pity, for they were truly pitiful. Therefore he said, despite the protests of the godlikes, that they had been punished for their rebellion well enough, and had deserved forgiveness; but he did not insist on the godlikes forgiving them, and so they did not. Instead, he subtly sent out Yenci and other trusted men to negotiate with those people - those bandits, if truth be told - and soon many of them agreed to becoem the adapted sons of the Elephant Family and received its protection by law and by force, as well as food from its storages and cattle and food with which to establish their livelihood.

In the Eastern Plains Yenci was quite successful and won over many; in the Outer Mountains the going was slower as the bandits were more difficult to reach and more used to attacking traders and envoys from any other lands indiscriminantly, and several such bandit-packs had been parituclarly successful and became particularly powerful, and so continued to remain independent and to wage war with each other and the adapted families alike: therefore their complaints began to reach Gaci, and having accepted Yenci's report Gaci told him, in few words between his now nigh-incessant coughing, to investigate and resolve this situation by whatever means he sees fit.

And so Yenci set out with forty-nine trusted retainers, and they travelled many days and weeks to the north and then some to the east, across the hills, the forests, the plains and the valleys; and their journey was as a ripple in a pond - calm and peaceful for them, but disturbing to the godlikes and others they had passed by, for they knew not its purpose but did not doubt its significance; and at last they had reached the Outer Mountains, and of what they had found and done there it shall be told later.

---

Seven days later, Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci died of old age. His younger immediate brother Daci and First-Gaci's favoured wife Jurcig urged the lineage-heads of the Elephant Family to recognise his eldest son Second-Gaci, on his nineteenth year, as the new Chief-of-Chiefs, but First-Gaci's other immediate brother Orti urged them to recognise him instead and won over many with his charm and gifts; and things became even more confused when Tarti the brother of First-Gaci returned to the campsite with his retainers and, upon hearing of what had so far happened, attacked and nearly killed Orti, and for a while evil and fear reigned within the Elephant Family as Orti, Tarti and several others gathered their supporters and prepared to fight each other for power. That surely was a sign of the times! Nonetheless, in the end human-mindedness, goodness and the written law prevailed: Orti and Tarti made peace and swore filial allegiance and piety to Chief-of-Chiefs Second-Gaci, who was a sometimes rash, but capable young man and who quickly made clear that he had taken power by making all the other pretenders swear to him as well, and then by summoning the godlike-chiefs to do likewise. In so doing he fortified his power and ensured due respect and piety; and he spent little more than a year at this task, because for a while evil had relented and the godlike-chiefs, distracted and made anxious by constant uprisings against them, were not disposed towards rebellion of their own. First-Gaci's plan, however, was forgotten - as far as those few who were in the know could tell, for, as they sometimes complained, Second-Gaci did not often share his thoughts with them before acting.

13. Bandit-Leader Kirost Invades the Land Beyond the Mountains.

So it was that Yenci arrived in the Outer Mountains, and he thought that it was the fiftieth year of the reign of Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci, but in truth it was the first year of the reign of Chief-of-Chiefs Second-Gaci. He had with him forty-nine men: all were well-equipped and skilled, but in different ways: most of them were men of the Elephant Family, who were good in open battles and personal combat, but there also were foreigners skilled at assorted trickery and sieges, and there were outcast hunters who were skilled at scouting, patrolling and ambushing the man-like prey; and they were followed by assorted traders, and some of them were simply the dirt that sticks to all marching armies, whereas others were also Yenci's spies; and so Yenci sent the traders to the campsites of the adapted families and the hunters to look for the bandit-camps, and himself made camp with his foreigners and his Elephants at the base of the great mountain Tikhai, and all the other traders who passed through the region went there to receive his writ of protection, and before long the leaders of bandit-camps had found it too, since they attacked the traders nearby; Yenci hunted them down and captured as many as possible, and he brought many bandit-leaders back to his camp, and some of them did not come back, whereas most others returned as human-chiefs of the adapted families, dividing the lands and the followers of those who did not come back among themselves and so achieving satisfaction. Soon many began to come there peacefully and of their own free will; in the meantime, Yenci heard out the reports gathered by his spies over the month.

The traders told him that the men of the earliest adapted families were loyal and prospering, for having made through the initial hardships they had learned how to survive and even thrive in the mountain valleys from the spirits of their newly elected ancestors (for they elected their ancestors as they elected their chiefs, at the justice-place and for the length of their good fortune, understood as the ability to carry out their duty) and also from the Sand People, with whom they had intermarried after either having signed a special treaty or having killed all their men. So they began to dwell in buildings warmed by fats and furs, and to grow the native crops alongside their own; but in other regards they maintained good Uggor customs and honoured the Chief-of-Chiefs as their father and the father of their elected ancestors, and they had achieved a just order wherein the families are small, but prosperous and uncorrupted by greed, and generous when purchasing seeds and tools, which Yenci's loyal traders brought per his advice. Yenci smirked, but nonetheless said that their piety and prosperity are surely the signs that the Chief-of-Chiefs was as wise as is due and moreso in having decided that their sins were cleansed and that it would be just to adapt them. And so both the traders and the adapted men became loyal and devoted to Yenci, and often complained to him about each other, for soon the profitable trade in tools and seeds had somehow dried up, and the adapted families did not want to buy trader luxuries and charged high prices for furs, whilst killing those traders who tried to take up hunting in the familial lands. As for Yenci, he let them be for the while, and instead heard out the hunters.

The hunters told him that before the new arrivals there already were several bandit-camps, but little remained of those foreign-bandits and near-foreigners of old; their campsites, all but one, were found and captured by the newer arrivals, since the new had better weapons and greater numbers, but appreciated the mountain strongholds as much as their predecessors and often were trackers by trade before exile. And now six out of seven such camps were held by bandits, who raided other bandits and adapted families in the valleys alike; those highlanders did not attack each other, though, and instead acted in a concord of sorts. Instead, their most bitter enemies, until Yenci's arrival, were the bandits that settled in the valleys and were indeed more like foreign peoples than bandits, different from other families only in that they were not part of the Moti Great Family and so did not restrain themselves from attacking other adapted families. Some of them were not reached by envoys until now, because they killed those people, who seemed to them like strange outsiders and spies from other camps and families, on sight; others killed them during failed negotiations, but certain of them accepted envoys and carried on negotiations: the main point of disagreement was that of familial lands, and Yenci did his best to find a way to satisfy the most by destroying the recalcitrant some, forming coalitions with the adapted families and friendlier bandits to this purpose, and in so doing won over many of the smaller, poorer and more nearby bandit-camps.

The richer and larger bandit-camps were situated further in the mountain valleys, and their leaders either refused to join the Moti Great Family or demanded unacceptable permissions; most of them, though, killed most envoys that went to them and killed those who reached them as well. Their leaders were men of great pride and evil, powerful shamans and warriors, who were called awe-inspiring names by friends and foes alike; and the greatest of those leaders was the man who was often called the Mountain Lord, for he had conquered several bandit-camps and added their survivors to his own number, whilst settling some of his number in the camps to keep watch for him in there, and during this year he had conquered two of the great mountain camps in this way. His was a strange bandit-pack, for if the ordinary bandit-pack was like a human-family, his was like a great-family, but a one in which there were neither godlikes nor humans, but only bandits. And indeed, this man himself went by the name of Horse Family-Chief Kirost, and called his bandit-pack the Horse Family: because in the early days of his leadership, his men had attacked a strange trader caravan and captured a splendid stock of horses, who were shorter than those of the plains, yet powerful and well-suited for the mountains, as well as for war; and those horses multiplied by raiding and breeding, and though they still were few a few brave horsemen on a few good horses have turned out to be able to conquer entire valleys by themselves, as in the tales of old.

Yenci became most curious and sent out envoys to this Kirost - along with a large army of adapted families and his own retainers and mercenaries, so that the envoys would not be killed during the journey.

The hunters also told him of a large, wealthy and poorly-guarded land to the northeast, which the bandits sometimes raided, but Yenci was not too interested in those reports, having already explored the narrow pass that led to that land earlier - more exactly, fourteen years ago.

---

The amount of camps and valleys conquered by Kirost was respectable, and the treasures he had plundered over the years that passed since his ascension to leadership were enviable; nonetheless the Outer Mountains were still rather poor and newly-settled, and therefore his main camp, built in a large mountain valley previously shared by several villages of the Sand People the people of which the Mountain Lord had adapted early in his conquests, was large but dirty and not too decorated, and made mainly of mudbrick and wood; the great house of the bandit-leader was a more impressive building, but nothing compared to the chief-tents of the godlikes, both from the inside and the outside, although over time it accumulated some of the plunder. Nonetheless this camp was the greatest of all true settlements in the Outer Mountains, and therefore even though the mountains seemingly hid it well from prying eyes, in truth all in the Outer Mountains knew the route to it, and Yenci's men, led by one Konu the envoy, went by that route, not willing to hide themselves. Now, many said that the Mountain Lord was the son of a great shaman and himself omniscient; whether or not that was so, he had many spies both from among the number of his bandits and otherwise, and they were quick to tell him of this armed embassy, and Guroc and Socto, Kirost's two closest advisors of whom each claimed himself to be the Horse Family-Chief's right hand, were there too.

Kirost heard out the reports about the large army heading in the campsite's direction and the reports about Yenci's embassy, and concluded that the two were one and the same, as the mountain routes were dangerous in those times; and then he asked his advisors for their opinions.

Socto said: "It would be both unwise and impolite to turn down such a large embassy, and besides are we not all children of the Chief-of-Chiefs? If he adapts us we will be able to seize the rest of the Outer Mountains without fear and in due time we will be recognised as a great family in our right! Is that not something worth seeking, and should we not accept it if it presents itself at once?"

But Kirost replied: "Yenci is not my father and the man who sent him is now dead."

"Indeed," - cunning old Guroc was quick to agree - "And besides, do you not know that the adapted families of the Elephant Family are as the human families under the injust yoke of the godlikes? We shall have to pay tributes called 'gifts' and we shall be restrained in our laws and our justice, and we will be kept from raiding the other families in the mountains as well as the traders associated with Yenci; those traders have doubtless already spread much libel about us, and so even if Yenci is as just as his friends say, he still could not help but be injust towards us!"

"How would you know this?" - inquired Socto angrily - "Yenci is indeed both just and wise, and he shall doubtless see that with our help he could rule over the Outer Mountains as he will please; and then he will gladly let us retain our freedom and grant us all the privileges we want in exchange for our help."

Guroc simply sneered.

"Thank you for your sage advice," - said Kirost and told the envoys to tell the warriors not to ambush the embassy as it traveled to the camp.

At the camp gates it was greeted by guards commanded by Guroc and allowed to enter; at that, it was nothing incident: Guroc asked the embassy to give away its weapons, but it adamantly refused, and a battle could have happened if not for Socto and the followers who came with him when he joined Kirost's growing band and now followed him as he approached Guroc from behind and brandished his axe. Guroc noticed this and relented, lest the camp be split into infighting too early.

The new arrivals wanted to enter the great house to talk with Kirost immediately, but Guroc protested there was not enough room for them and for the greatest prominents of the Horse Family; Socto hesitated at first, but could find nothing objectionable with this protest. In the end, they talked with Konu the envoy, and agreed that he and a few of his prominents would be allowed to meet the bandit-leader and the prominents during the feast on the next day, whereas the rest will stay outside, and Konu too eventually had to agree, since it was late; and he went to talk with his men, whereas Guroc and Socto went to talk to Kirost. Guroc simply told Kirost of Konu's arrival, whereas Socto, somewhat surprised by this, only explained the agreement they had reached with Konu. The two went away; Socto went to inspect the storehouses, which were in his charge, but somehow ended up drinking and talking with Konu instead, whereas Guroc went to inspect the western walls; and that was just what he did, until a short time later when Kirost arrived to talk with him, as per Guroc's secret signal. They met within the sight of the guards; and the guards were a bit surprised, since Kirost did not often leave his great house except for raids, battles and ceremonies and the occasional hunt, but were loyal to Guroc and did not hear anything, and therefore did not tell any of this to Socto, though all things considered Socto probably would very much have liked to know this.

Guroc said: "Socto went to talk with Konu, and before that he also defended him from arrival and kept me from disarming him and his men, although this meant bringing armed warriors, for most of them are indeed warriors, into our camp. It seems to me that Socto either already knows Konu or had already reached an agreement with Yenci; in any case, he seeks to betray us and to seize the camp, which he definitely could do with his loyal men and with Konu's retainers. As for Yenci, he definitely aims to do the same, for why else would he send such a large army? A few armed men, equipped with his banner, could protect themselves easily enough and are a much more believable embassy at that; such a large army would gain the attention of the more powerful bandits who know that such armies mean rich treasures. Such an army is only needed for war. Yenci doubtless intends to remove you and to elevate Socto, so that Socto would bring the Horse Family into the fold and with his help Yenci would indeed be able to rule the Outer Mountains as he pleases, whereas you would only get in his way..."

---

And in the meantime, Konu, having become drunk, told Socto: "Yenci, who had sent me, wishes to rule the Outer Mountains, for First-Gaci had died and now he could not trust Second-Gaci, with whose mother he often quarreled. But that is a venture which could not succeed if he is forced to defend himself both from Second-Gaci and from Kirost, and a venture whose success will be assured if Kirost were to become his ally instead! Yet if we talk here, Kirost could simply agree to our terms and then ignore them, or he could just kill us; therefore we came armed and in such large number."

Socto nodded approvingly and smiled through his beard.

"Now, do not fear us; we do not intend to kill Kirost, for while that too is a solution it is a far less prefferable one. Rather, we are to seize him and to bring him to Yenci, where the two will talk and doubtless reach some agreement, whereas we will be handsomely paid and rewarded! Your Guroc had kept us from meeting him in full number, though I do not doubt that your great house could surely fit us all in, whereas I very much doubt that your prominents are needed for anything other than defense; but that makes no difference, for we already came up with a new and better plan: most of my warriors will cause havoc throughout the camp, whereas I and my best will attend the feast and in the confusion we will capture Kirost and escape. Now, here is why I am telling you this: I see that you are our friend, whereas Guroc is our enemy; so why won't your followers add to the chaos in the camp? In exchange, we will either kill Guroc where he stands or take him along with us to be executed by Yenci; and you will doubtless be greatly rewarded as well in the end of this. We could do this without you; but with your help, we will surely triumph!"

And it was only then that Socto became very much concerned, for that was not quite his plan. He nodded and said that he needed to make the arrangements for it, and walked away, his mind in chaos, whereas Konu continued drinking.

Socto ran to the great house; Kirost had already returned and it seemed as though he had not left. Socto told him everything he had learned, but for what Konu said about Yenci's plans, for the fear that Kirost could decide to go along with them, in which case Socto will have made a mistake in coming here in the first place.

"I know that some have been besmirching me before you, but I so swear: I knew nothing of this plan at all, and have I not come to warn you of it now? Such treason cannot be allowed to triumph! I urge you, take measures to prevent it!"

Kirost agreed and told Socto to instruct his men accordingly, so that they will at first pretend to go along with the plan and then will turn on Konu's men; Socto ran off to do so; then Kirost sighed, for he had hoped Guroc would not be right, and yet it seemed he was.

Guroc, who was hiding near Kirost's throne since Socto came in, now went out, having heard everything.

"Doubtless this is a deception behind a deception, for why would Yenci want you alive? Only for a public execution. And their plan must be somewhat different, since why else would Socto tell all this to you? You will have prepared for one betrayal only to be faced by a different one. There is a thousand different things they - Socto and Konu - could do in the morning or later, all of them bad to us, and neither I nor you could quite predict them. But why wait until morning?"

Kirost pondered this and agreed. He and his own closest retainers readied for battle, whereas Guroc raised his guards. During the night, Kirost and his retainers and most of Guroc's guards went around the dwellings given over to Konu's men for the duration of the embassy, and liberated those dwellings by putting everyone inside of them to death; Konu himself and several others made some effort to resist, but were easily slain, being off-guard and also drunk. Their possessions were distributed between all those who participated in the slaughter. Meanwhile, Guroc himself and his guards went to meet Socto, who was returning from having raised his followers, and quickly cut him down; Socto's followers were taken aback, but soon realised that it was worthless to follow a corpse and agreed to follow Guroc instead.

On the morning, the corpses were all carried away to the wastes as a sacrifice to the carrion-gods, honoured by the Sand People who lived here - and now by the bandits as well.

After the sacrifice, Guroc said: "Yenci is a powerful enemy, and he will not relent so easily. He has already brought down many bandit-camps by allying with the adapted families and other bandits; now he would try and do the same against us. He is a cunning man; he and his allies will keep us from raiding the trade routes that go through their lands, where they will be at an advantage, and will also launch raids against us in concord, and so gradually put us under a siege without a siege, which we could not disrupt; and then he will gather all his armies and destroy us here."

"We could retreat to the mountains and fight on from there," - replied Kirost - "There is plenty of dwellings left in the camps we had conquered, so we would not need to leave many people behind."

"But in the mountains there will be no pastures and our horses will die out, and besides we will be unable to live off the raiding alone, for we are much more numerous. Leader! We need to seize lands on the other side of the mountains. There is a land in there called Bisria; it is large and wealthy, and its fields are fertile, even in the nearby mountainous regions. There will be pastures enough for our horses and fields enough for our men; and we could also raid the caravans there in safety from Yenci and his allies."

"Yet what of the foreigners who live there?"

"They are numerous, but not difficult to evade, and most of them are farther in the country and not overtly concerned about the borders; many other bandits had been raiding their settlements for months now. Leader!" - Guroc was seized by a sudden inspiration - "One bandit-pack could never truly rule the Bisrian foothills; but if we all ally, we would surely be able to rule it together, destroy all those who dare stand against us and extract tributes from the Bisrian villages! Surely, they would realise that this is profitable, and in so doing we will also win over many allies and keep them from allying with Yenci. There are still many untamed bandit-camps at the border between this land and the Bisrian land, they will surely be glad to ally with you if you were to offer them this plan!"

Kirost agreed; and while the Horse Family moved to its more distant and well-defended settlements, envoys bearing its banners of horsehair approached the remaining great mountain camps, and the camps further to the east; and some of them refused and killed the envoys, but the rest agreed to the plan which was expounded to them, and ceased the western raids, and instead launched new raids to scout out the east. Within the month, bandits who had accepted the supreme leadership of Kirost moved across the border into Bisria, the land beyond the mountains; and what happened to them there will be described shortly.

---

And as for Yenci, though for a while he had contemplated remaining in the Outer Mountains in power and security ever since weeks ago when he had first learned of the death of Chief-of-Chiefs First-Gaci, his friend and protector, he was discouraged from this by the summons of Second-Gaci and the reports of his good will towards his father's friends, and when the embassy to the Mountain Lord failed, Yenci said that it was not to be and departed soon after with his closest retainers; and sure enough, Second-Gaci greeted him as an immediate uncle, and treated Yenci as well as his immediate father did, for he was a pious son, all things considered, and also had much use for spies.

So....Who agrees with me that the Moti deserve to be genocided : p?

The Fish Family, presumably.

14. Kirost Raises His Sword Against Bisria.

When Kirost first went down into Bisria, as many had followed him from among the remaining tamed bandits as refused to; and there were many bandit-packs large and small, going into raids under their own leaders and often alone or in small confederacies - which nonetheless all recognised that it was Kirost who made those raids possible. Over time, finding it indeed more convenient to till the natives and harvest tribute in larger groups, the confederacies turned into larger bandit-packs or joined those already in existence; but from the outset the largest bandit-packs followed Kirost and sent representatives to his war-councils, and they were the ones who fought the strongest of the native bandits, village militias and the then-meager patrols in concert with the Horse Family. At first there were six of those great bandit-packs: five from the mountains and one from the valleys beyond the great seven Divine Peaks and closer to Bisria; but later there became thirteen as new bandits arrived and old ones united. Still, among them three were and remained most prominent: the Reflected-Wolf-Pack of Surtu, the Sacred-Mountain-Army of Onu and the Pious-Orphans-Pack of Lerti; and when, some days after the third raid and the ordainment of tribute, the foothill villages subjected to it formed a battle confederacy and had their militias defy the tribute-gatherers by killing them and then slaughter several smaller bands that tried to get revenge, the Horse Family and the other three great packs marched together to scatter these united militias to the nine winds and collected a new and more severe tribute, dividing that of the slaughtered packs among themselves - and that was the start of a great time of thrift and prosperity and all-around happiness for the bandit-camps of the north-east.

So then, the packs raided alone and together, and plundered the wild villages until they became tame, whilst collecting tribute from the tamed villages; and after a while many of them began to move into the lands which formerly belonged to the villages and took them for themselves, establishing their own settlements and claiming the nearby pastures. The Horse Family also claimed several pastures, but apart from that the great packs preffered not to establish any permanent camps too far into Bisria, as those were prone to being attacked and burned down by villagers. The villagers were not much of a threat to the great-packs ever since their last defeat, though.

Now, Bisria was a large land and it consisted of many cities and districts; and the supreme ruler of the local foreigners was called the king and the chief of the families, and he resided in the largest city in the middle of the country. The Bisrians boasted: "Our land is as one family", and thought themselves greater than the People for having one chief instead of many, saying that their king was much more powerful and that none could say him nay in his lands. But in this they were not right: one man, especially a flawed and greedy foreigner, could never reign alone, and so while the Bisrians had but one chief, in truth they had many rulers in different cities and districts, and those rulers were called governors; they were in words as much the children and subjects of the king and chief as any others, but in truth they were the ones who reigned in their districts and so took for themselves sometimes even greater powers than those taken by the chiefs of the People. And so it was that one such governor, who reigned over the district of the source of the great east-river Had, began to receive more and more rumours and reports about greater and greater raids in the mountain regions, instead of the king; and when the rumours and reports became those of a bandit invasion from the Outer Mountains, it was this governor who sent an army to deal with this; but since he did it, and not the king, that army was of local men who could gather quickly and fight bravely but were less numerous than the Horse Family and also inclined towards tilling the soil, much like the human-families of the Moti Great Family which rebelled between working in the fields; and there were also men from the small nearby towns, who were less preoccupied, but also less eager to fight, being rather inclined to trade and craftsmanship and other such things.

Nonetheless the Bisrian army set out, but did not achieve much for the first two months (for the bandits successfuly slaughtered the Bisrian patrols when they were weaker and evaded them when they were stronger), until the old commander was sent away and replaced by one Wel'teq, a relative of the governor. His mind was divided into equal parts by the good of his own virtue and the evil of his land's and people's many vices, and therefore he was doubtless a very virtuous and at the same time cunning man, a skilled warrior and a pious though ignorant son. He was wealthy and used a part of his wealth to buy up better weapons for his army and to pay his warriors while they prepared to attack the raiders; and as his scouts, taken from the villages of the foothills and also from among the sympathetic traders, learned more and more about the raiders, he came up with his plan to end the attacks. He said: "The main strength of these invaders is in their ability to move quickly and to evade pursuit, but their main weakness is in their division;" and for that reason he sent men to spread rumours in those mountain and foothill villages which had stopped paying the taxes to the governor and instead began to pay them to Kirost, that there were quarrels among the bandit leadership and that Onu and his Army were planning to betray Kirost, as was Surtu and his Reflected-Wolf-Pack; and before long those rumours spread among the bandits as well.

When Onu heard of those rumours, he became concerned and decided to visit Kirost personally; but he was reminded to be mindful of Guroc, who was a cunning man and had a quarrel going on with Onu ever since Onu poisoned his native wife in revenge for Guroc's killing of his two immediate brothers, months before the bandit-alliance was formed. Therefore he took with himself nine of his strongest retainers (for Onu's bandit-pack believed in the sanctity of number ten, and was indeed as much a bandit-pack as a heretic-sect, for what is worship of number ten but heresy?) and put on his bronze armour underneath his usual cloak, and made sure to take with himself various weapons. Now, when Onu and his men arrived at Kirost's mountain-camp, Guroc complained that they were armed and armoured and meant ill; but Kirost said that it was their right and told the guards to let them in. Onu entered the mountain-camp and entered the great house, which was somewhat humble from the outside and admirable from the inside, and came before Kirost: and all of this was allowed. Onu delivered with him many gifts and assured Kirost that the rumours about his plans were unfounded, and Kirost assured him that he knew no such rumours, though it was not so; and afterwards they held a large feast in the honour of Onu. But alas, the Evil God was watching and growing envious of Kirost; and so during the feast, after Kirost had left to hear out a scout returning from one of the wild villages, one of Onu's men started an argument with two of Guroc's guards, and then drew his sword. Guroc was nearby and panicked, and ordered the sober guards that he had nearby to restrain Onu's men; and when Onu saw this, he decided that Guroc had decided to kill him, and so he and his guards began to fight back, killed many of Guroc's guards and, after failing to catch Guroc himself who spryly ran away to call for Kirost's help, fought their way from the camp. When Onu returned to his camp, he killed the Horse Family representative there and had his men set up - or, rather, restore - the traps on the road between it and the Horse Family camp; then he sent out envoys to the camp of Wel'teq, with whom he had fought a week ago. That envoy was well-received and returned with many gifts, and before long Onu stopped raiding the wild villages and started raiding the villages that had been tamed by other bandit-packs.

Before long Kirost and Lirti, and the leaders of several other bandit-packs became fed up with this and attacked Onu's camp while Onu and most of his army were out raiding; the camp was taken and burned down, and the treasures were repartitioned among the winners, and Onu had no choice but to move further into Bisria and hire the remains of his army out to Wel'teq as mercenaries. In the meantime, Surtu became concerned, for he was told by his advisors that Kirost and Guroc, themselves once bitter enemies of the Reflected-Wolf-Pack in its failed struggle for supreme leadership over the Outer Mountains, had attacked and destroyed Onu because of his power; and so he too sent envoys to Wel'teq. And after that Wel'teq moved his camp forward and liberated several tamed villages, defeating a major Horse Family raid.

---

It is said that from then on, the times of thrift and prosperity had continued, but the greatest boon had passed away. Wel'teq proved a far more skillful opponent than his predecessor; he set up caltrops and other traps to protect the villages, and taught his warriors to fight in lines and to use strange long spears, and in so doing inflicted several defeats on the Horse Family, once beating back and almost capturing Kirost himself, to say nothing of his lesser enemies, except for Surtu who succesfully kept him away from his villages. But the greatest strenght of Wel'teq was said to be in his sorcerous ability to predict the times and places of raids, no doubt aided by Surtu, whose representatives participated in war-councils; and in so doing he advanced across the foothills and through the Bisrian side of the Outer Mountains towards the Divine Peaks.

Kirost was not unaware of Surtu's tricks, but at first gave it no heed, thinking it good and just that Wel'teq would put up a worthy fight and help keep the bandits in shape; but after that battle during which he was wounded and nearly captured, he began to seethe, for he knew that to confront Surtu at this point was to shatter the alliance - after all, unlike Kirost, Surtu was never beaten by foreign landworkers! And yet, the same would also happen, only later, if things were to go on as they were. So Kirost thought and pondered for seven days, but at last he came up with a plan.

At the war-council, he explained in great detail his plan to launch a new grand campaign of raids against the liberated villages, for the purpose of which a central army composed of the best men of the three surviving greatest packs - Horse Family, Pious-Orphans-Pack and Reflected-Wolf-Pack - was to be assembled. This army was to attack several villages and then, thanks to its seemingly small size, would have lured Wel'teq towards itself - but by the time he arrived, the main armies, which would be nearby, would arrive as well and Wel'teq would trapped and slaughtered. All of this was then related by his representative to Surtu, who became anxious, but informed Wel'teq. Wel'teq said: "A thwarted ambush is the greatest of all disasters for those who have endeavoured it".

---

All went according to the plan of Kirost and to the plan of Wel'teq for the first two weeks; the bandits attacked, plundered and subjugated, and the Bisrians retreated in good order, gathering their forces and allowing their enemies to stretch themselves thin. Kirost, Guroc, Surtu and Lirti took the most trusted and most able of their men and gave them the best available weapons, armour and horses; this small force overwhelmed villages with ten or twenty times as many people and valorously, yet effortlessly crushed local militias and Wel'teq's guards alike. Finally, this force advanced particularly far ahead of the main army, into a narrow valley where it ransacked a Bisrian temple, but not before allowing several priests and worshipers to escape - Kirost ordered the men not to chase them down, just in case Surtu would be overcome with fear or loyalty at the penultimate moment, which he was not, although he did express worry: how would they get the reinforcements here in time? Kirost laughed and said: "We have driven all that dared stand against us before us! We need no reinforcements! And besides, when truly had numbers won battles? Battles are won by good warriors and good plans: and here is my good plan..." And so he told Surtu to stand watch on the other end of the valley, to hide until Wel'teq and his army arrive into the valley and then to strike this army in the rear while the others will strike from the front. Surtu looked calm, but in truth became frightened; he carried out the order, and while his men scouted out the new positions he was in the grip of fear, not so much despite as because of the fact that this would grant him a wonderful opportunity to link up with Wel'teq. Kirost was clearly on to him; and so he was: as soon as Surtu left, those known as his spies were sent out on various different tasks, and Kirost laughed and explained to the other leaders, befuddled by this seeming folly, that in truth, his good plan was different entirely.

So sure enough, Wel'teq arrived at the valley with his most reliable warriors: mainly mercenaries and townsmen, whom he had forged into warriors over the months; the lesser, but better part of his army prepared to enter the end of the valley which was nearer to him, which was carefully observed by Surtu's men, whereas the rest marched around it by means of a mountain pass, making haste to secure the distant end; and Onu was with them. Surtu cursed himself for trusting Wel'teq; he had asked him not to send Onu to this battle, for Surtu and Onu hated each other since before the exile and all the more strongly afterwards, and Surtu was originally supposed to be within the valley, and also because after the fears he had undergone he had already decided to follow through with Kirost's plan; and so he sent messengers to sneak through to Kirost and inform him of Wel'teq's arrival and of his maneuvers. Kirost laughed; and from this laugh Guroc judged him mad, but not for long, as soon enough Kirost reminded him of his plan. Then Guroc judged him wise and brave, and as Kirost and his men retreated to the end of the valley which was more distant for Wel'teq, abandoning the temple's ruins and their temporary camp, Guroc rode ahead of them to take command of the main bandit army.

Thus a day and a half went by in ominous and strange maneuvers, scouting raids, intrigues and skirmishes. But at last Wel'teq received the confirmation of his main army's having crossed the pass, and hurried to move forward into the valley.

Everything after that happened quickly and confusingly, but by the time Wel'teq and his footmen drew up a battle line in front of the ruined temple (on the side further from them) and Kirost and his warriors formed up in front of them on foot, and the armies saw that they were about equal in number and in valour, Surtu and his men had already blocked Wel'teq's retreat path, whereas the main Bisrian army first failed to show up on time and then was revealed to have been slaughtered; Guroc and several bloodied retainers rode up to Kirost and reported of the triumph of their ambush on the tired, surprised and poorly-positioned warriors, and Guroc raised high the severed grey-haired head of Onu, his enemy. And Wel'teq frowned, for it became apparent to him that the gods had turned away from him, and that he and his men were trapped and outnumbered, and that his ambush was thwarted, which was the greatest possible disaster that could possibly have occured to him. He and the footmen steeled themselves and prepared for battle to the death; but before either they or Surtu's men could start it, Kirost had one of his men lead up his pitch-black horse, and climbed on it, and rode up towards Wel'teq, weapon sheathed, yet brandished. Kirost did not know the Bisrian language, but Wel'teq had learned a little of that of the People, and he knew that this language consisted of words and gestures, and this was a gesture: they will fight, and if Wel'teq dies his men will join Kirost, but if Wel'teq wins he will be allowed to go away - and nothing more, since the bandits had sworn to never follow foreigners, an oath unbroken even by Onu, whose men followed him alone until now.

Wel'teq nodded and left his battle-line, and took out his sword; that sword was passed on in his families for generations, and it was mighty and lengthy, and it shined brightly, for the sun admired it and saw in it its own reflection. Kirost jumped off his horse and unsheathed his sword: he found it in the mountains, shortly before he became the bandit-leader and took the name Kirost, and it was blacker than his sword and long and sharp and slightly curved, and its hilt ended with the head of a horse, and those who gazed at its blade saw despair, for that sword was an alloy of iron and death itself.

Kirost and Wel'teq waited for each other to make the first strike; at last Kirost charged, and swung his sword, but was parried by Wel'teq. Wel'teq swung and nearly hit Kirost, and Kirost took a step back, surprised by the heat of the blade as much as by the speed of the swordsman. Wel'teq started to attack him; Kirost barely fought off thsi furious onslaught, retreating and regaining steadiness. Then Kirost went to attack again, and it was Wel'teq's time to parry, dodge and retreat.

So the battle went on for some time, both men unable to win, and warriors Uggor and Bisrian alike gradually left their lines and moved closer to watch them fight, but the sun was high in the sky and it bore down on both, but moreso on Wel'teq, due to his heavier armour and also because the sun burned stronger closer to the center of the world, which was not far from where Kirost was born. And Wel'teq came to realise as much, and took a risk; he lunged forth and struck, and did so with such strength that he pierced Kirost's leather armour and Kirost's left side; and had Kirost been a little bit slower, he would have pierced something far more valuable. Kirost bled; but he too was desperate, and at the same time as Wel'teq struck him in the side he used his enemy's recklessness to strike him in the head with his dreadful black sword, and the good parts of Wel'teq's mind then went straight to the Good God, whereas the evil parts of his mind went to the Evil God, and the dueling gods were so startled by this that they stopped, for the while, their eternal battle and went to investigate the cause of this strange occurrence; and when they had learned what had transpired, they held council, and what they had decided, with all of its consequences, will become apparent later.

As for Kirost, he frowned, for he rather hoped to have the head in a more presentable shape, but soon realised it was not important and raised his sword high, and the Uggor cheered, whereas the Bisrians became sullen, seeing the horrifying sword raised against their land, and their greatest leader dead on the ground. Afterwards Kirost tended to his own wounds as was his wont, and was quickly acclaimed by all the surviving bandits, including the ones that until now followed Onu. Guroc suggested that he also adapt the followers of Surtu; but before Kirost could kill Surtu, Surtu came by himself and without weapons, and confessed his misdeed, and offered his penitence - and Kirost relented, saying that Surtu had served him well, and expressing the desire that he would serve him better and of his own will in the future, and Surtu swore on his sword and his right hand. As for Wel'teq's men, most of them went with Onu and died, but some were taken prisoner, as were those who followed Wel'teq himself into the valley, and all those of them who were still alive were offered a chance to join the Horse Family, for they and their leader had shown valour; and those of them who agreed were adapted, whereas those who refused were killed quickly and painlessly. Many refused, but many agreed, especially when Kirost, after having talked with one of them, promised not to make them fight against their former families when they could clearly point such out, for the Bisrians meant by the word "family" that which the Uggor mean by the word "immediate family", and also promised to spare those families when such were pointed out from tributes and other punishments, except when members of those families gave him a good reason not to. Some said he was too lenient and trusting in doing this; but many of those men later proved themselves great and skilled warriors, and their knowledge of Bisria and Bisrian customs helped Kirost and his other men immensely. Already then, he summoned some of them and asked them questions, and as many things became clear to him began to make plans for future raids and other things.

Later that evening, Guroc told Kirost: "You are truly fortunate, leader; this battle has shown this even to those who did not believe it before. Bisria is a large and wealthy land; since it is wealthy we could live off its inhabitants and their wealth for many years to come, and since it is large we could evade any new evil sent at us by those foreigners as long as we do not become unduly greedy and impatient and do not bring down the wrath of their king himself upon us."

Kirost replied: "We have come to this land on your courageous advice, and it was good and gave us success; but now your advice is cautious, and if I follow it we shall remain nothing more but bandits living in fear for our lives and wealth, and the same will be true of our descendants; and besides, if I do as you say, we shall prosper in peace for two or three years, but afterwards our luck will surely run out, for their warriors will learn to fight us and will march against us in greater numbers: and the people of this land are as plentiful as their food. Courageous advice guides towards success, whereas cautious advice guides towards eventual failure and misery; and if you would not give me courageous advice then I will do as I see fit."

---

On the fifth year of the reign of Chief-of-Chiefs Second-Gaci, the Chief-of-Chiefs was visiting Gaci-city, the fortress built by his orders in the Outer Mountains to defend the traders going by the mountain passes from the bandits. There he listened to the grievances of the chiefs of the outcast families adapted into the Elephant Family by his immediate father and himself, and meted out justice; also he listened to the grievances of the traders and resolved to frighten the unrepentant bandits into submission, leading his retainers and the adapted warriors to do battle against the largest bandit-pack in the north-east. The Chief-of-Chiefs' men prepared for battle and the bandits prepared for battle, and Second-Gaci was surprised to see that the opposing side looked no worse in weapons or in discipline than his own army, though it was larger. The Chief-of-Chiefs' men charged and the bandits charged; the Chief-of-Chiefs' men fought and the bandits fought; the Chief-of-Chiefs' men broke through and the bandits scattered, fleeing along the narrow passes. Now, both the bandits and the adapted warriors walked on foot due to the rarity of good horses and also because the battleground was to their knowledge ill suited for horseback fighting, but the Chief-of-Chiefs and his retainers were on horseback, and so they chose to pursue those bandits who were fleeing into the nearby narrow valley, and before long they entered the valley - and were attacked by the hundreds of bandits who were lying in wait, and though they fought valorously some of them were killed and most of them were taken captive. The Chief-of-Chiefs was upset, but remained dignified.

The captives were tied up and blindfolded, and the blindfolds were taken off when they were brought to the secret bandit-camp. The Chief-of-Chiefs and his retainers were brought before the supreme bandit-leader, who was a mighty warrior of the People, clad in leather armour and armed with a long black sword at his belt; before the captives were brought into his great house he was sitting on his fur-padded wooden throne, and when they were brought before him he quickly stood up and approached them; and if he was anxious, then he showed it no more than the Chief-of-Chiefs, who was in truth quite tense and concerned.

"Untie them," - commanded the bandit-leader; and the captives were untied - "Truly, Father-of-All, I and all of my children are honoured by this visit."

The Chief-of-Chiefs eased somewhat, but did not reply.

"We have heard," - expounded the bandit-leader - "That you have come to this land, and all grew excited and eager to see you and to have you feast with us; and likewise all of us were greatly alarmed and aghast when we had learned that the foreign-traders, adept in trickery and prone to calling things by false names, had deceived you by calling us bandits and by claiming that we attacked your friends and our brothers. Surely, this wrong had to be righted, and so I had you brought here before me. For you have visited many other families within your family, and heard out their grievances, and brought them justice; hear me out, then, my father."

"I shall."

"I will not waste your time with the petty injustices of traders, father, for you have already learned of them and doubtless will see through their foolish ploys in due time; but instead I must tell you of the great injustice that reigns over our entire family. The godlikes of other families within it oppress their human-children and treat them as though were not their children at all but rather their tributaries or slaves, and they demand an unbearable tribute they call gifts so that they could trade them with the foreign-traders and grow richer, and that is because their minds are tainted by pride, greed and other evil; they spread injustice and exile those who rise up against it, and thus fill the forests and the mountains with bandits and outcasts, and multiply the misery of all but themselves, and that is because they have animal minds; and at the same time, for all of those reasons they themselves have grown rash and impious towards you and the Elephant Family. The weaker and lesser of them seek to shirk their duties before the Great Family; the greater and stronger of them seek to take power for themselves and so wrong it further still! By those various means they degrade the unity and fraternity of the Great Family, indeed as in the times of the Evil Family, and if it continues like this for many more generations, nothing shall remain of what had once been preserved.

"Father! There is an old way to fix those ills, and it has been used in the times of Chief-of-Chiefs Frei. When the godlikes had grown greedy and proud and began to shirk their duties before the Great Family and to oppress their human families, the Chief-of-Chiefs Frei had led them to conquer the families of Lumada and the lands of the eastern Sand People; and if truth be told, those lands were not too large or too wealthy, but that conquest had greatly reinforced the unity of the Great Family and multiplied its wealth and power, reawakened that which is good and human in the minds of the grateful godlike chiefs and restored to the Chief-of-Chiefs his rightful power and respect; and for this reason it had lasted well to this day, but now is once more threatened by the same ills.

"I shall not lie: I have been a bandit, though it was only because I had risen against injustice and was cast out when the uprising was defeated; and when our bandit-camp was scattered, we had all fled to the Outer Mountains, as had bandits from many other lands. But though we had been cast out, we remained your father's and your sons, though wayward, and we yearned to gain your forgiveness and repentance, and those who had received it became the adapted families. Before us, there were naught but foreigners and bandits in the Outer Mountains; but now your waywrd sons have conquered those pitiful lands in your name, and have become both prosperous and pious; and you will not find more staunch supporters anywhere in the world. The conquest of those pitiful lands already gave you and the Great Family much; know now that in the early years I and my followers had spent here, we had found a far greater and wealthier land. This land lies beyond the mountains; we have traveled in it often, and we know the passes that lead to it and we know the paths by which one must go to evade or confront its armies and to conquer its cities. This land is populated by many foreigners, and many of them are good warriors, but their various unjust foreign customs weaken them, and so we have been able to defeat or evade them again and again, though we are but one family. Father! If all the families of the Outer Mountains were to follow us, we would pillage half that country, Bisria; and if you were to lead the entire Great Family in a war against it, as Chief-of-Chiefs Frei led it against Lumada, then we shall surely conquer it, ransack its injustly wealthy cities, enslave the evil foreigners and redivide its lands amongst the most valorous families; and if you do so, then this will rectify injustice and fortify the Great Family. And besides, it would be the best and most glorious war since the days of the Good Council, and the memory of it shall live forever among the People."

At the start of the speech the Chief-of-Chiefs was confused and listened on sternly; but by the end of it he eased entirely and his eyes grew wide; and afterwards he and his retainers feasted with Kirost, the mighty warrior, the loyal and pious son of Second-Gaci and in a few months the supreme war-leader of all the adapted families in the Outer Mountains.

---

Many more stories within the story of the Moti-hero Kirost remain to be told; yet before that is done, let this be reaffirmed for eternity: it was in the ninth year in that same reign of Chief-of-Chiefs Second-Gaci that the warriors of all the families within the Moti Great Family fell upon Bisria like an avalanche, led by War-Chief Fourth-Frono, Chief-of-Chiefs Second-Gaci and Moti-hero Kirost, as well as many other great and prominent chiefs; and this was the start of a glorious war the likes of which have not been seen since the Good War and the songs sung of that war and those who fought in it on both sides shall never quiet just like those memories shall never fade.

OOC: [Dawn of War]I am UNSTOPPABLE![/Dawn of War] Although actually, I'll stop for now; the decision of the Two Gods will become apparent in the update, ofcourse.

The bits on Bisria are mostly conjecture and Moti perspective, so feel free to disregard it as that, Sheep. I would however like to ask you about the actual nature of your political organisation, as neither North King nor myself seem to know all that much about it.

Also, rest assured that this was planned from the point when I joined and is in no way personal (North King could attest to the fact that I have been scouting out the mountain passes and the nearby parts of Bisria during the previous turn in particular); I'm just opposed to abandoning plans on the ground of meta changes such as a new player joining. Here's to a fun war.

Anyway, as promised...

IC:

The Parchments Containing "The Story of Moti-Hero Kirost", as Published by High Historian Va'den in 1892 RA, Part the First.

Contents:
- "0. Preamble", containing Musings on the Nature of Stories and an Account of the "Shattering of the World";
- "1. Evil Corrupts the Families", containing a History of the "Great Family" and its "Chiefs-of-Chiefs";
- "2. The Godlikes of the Cow Family Eat the Flesh and Blood of Their Brethren", containing a History of the "Cow Family" and an Account of its Diverse Abuses;
- "3. Human Child Darti Rises Up Against Injustice", containing a Description of the "Arti Family Within the Cow Family" and the Beginning of its Rebellion, as well as the Introduction of Kirti;
- "4. Godlikes of the Cow Family Swear Revenge", containing a description of the "Campsite" of the "Cow Family" "Godlikes" and their Plans against the Aforementioned Rebellion;
- "5. The Human Rebels Prepare for Battle", containing the Plans of the "Arti Family" Rebels and an account of the Measures they had taken;
- "6. The Family-Council Dismisses Wise Advice", containing the Introduction of "Sirti" and Various Other Events of the Early Rebellion;
- "7. Sirti Speaks", containing Various Further Events of the Rebellion, up to Itono's Attack on the "Arti Family" "Campsite";
- "8. Kirti Departs", containing a Revelation and the End of the Rebellion;
- "9. The Bandit-Leader Declares War", containing a Description of the Moti "Bandits" and of the "Bandit" "Great-Wolf Camp" in particular, as well as another Revelation, a Desperate Exhortation and a Speech;
- "10. Frono War-Bull Ascends", containing an Account of the "Bandit War" and the Battle of the "Great Wolf Camp";
- "11. Kirti Slays a Godlike Bull", containing a Description of the Outer Mountains and an Account of the Arrival of Refugees there and their Early Actions, as well as the Ascension of Kirti;
- "12. Chief-of-Chiefs Gaci Plans for Justice", and its Second Part, containing an Account of "Chief-of-Chiefs" Gaci I's Ideas and Plans for Social and Political Reforms, and His Actions to that End, as well as the Introduction of Yenci;
- "13. Bandit-Leader Kirost Invades the Land Beyond the Mountains", containing an Account of Yenci's Arrival and Deeds in the Outer Mountains, and a Description of the Local Order, as well as the Unfortunate Occurrence at the "Bandit-Camp" of the "Horse-Family" and its Consequences;
- "14. Kirost Raises His Sword Against Bisria", and its Second Part, containing an Account of Kirost's War with the Bisrians and its Temporary Resolution, as well as the Origination of the Greater Conflict.

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So, then... Any comments? Questions? Complaints?

@das, if you are still itching to type some more, would you like to type few stories about opulensi for me? I'm too lazy to do it myself