Albionic Society
The Alquari were said to have traveled across the seas long ago in the Ages of Twilight, to the island chain the natives called Koaroll. When the Alquari first arrived, they were one people, united under the same leadership. The natives, suspicious of these intruders, militarily drove them into the Far Highlands, where they resided for many centuries until the Age of Dawn, when emerging from the mountains they began to cultivate the earth, and drove back the native inhabitants, who they called Kathqi, or literally fools.
Over time, different men and women came to own the different farms of the Alquari, and those that gathered themselves around these farms in community came to be the serfs and peasants of this ruling caste of farm-owners. Each farm had a large, citadel-like building called simply a House by the Alquari. Eventually, the Houses came to be political and military entities, representing tribes or clans. Each House had a founding family, and followers. The Houses came to fight over the fertile plains of the south, and thus was born the Plain Wars.
The Plain Wars are mostly an oral history, for if scribed archives exist from that time, they have long ago disappeared. We know little of the Age of Dawn, at least in Olren, because the peoples of that land did not develop writing for many centuries, so busy were they in the consolidation of their empires.
What is known is that the Plain Wars normally began in manners most inconspicuous. An insult, a stone. Et cetera. That was all that was needed to turn the already tense Houses against each other. The House of Lornel, one of the Four Newhouses formed after the dissolution of the Oldhouses (late Age of Twilight entities), suffered the effects of the first Plain War greatly. Whereas they once ruled all that was from the Aral River, north to the Mid-Highlands, after the First Plain War, they lost quite nearly all that territory, and were driven back from their capital of Quolsar to the Aral River.
The Second Plain War was fought between Farrmarch and the rest of the Houses, but for the sacked Lornel, still at that time first breaking ground on the city of Lorenn. The result was a Farrmarch victory, gaining them more eastern territories.
The Third Plain War is much shrouded in mystery, for it is quite possibly the bloodiest, and the least-archived. What is known is that the Third Plain War put Lornel in position to create Albion, and did so through one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Twilight and Dawn eras.
The Fourth Plain War, more commonly known as the War of Albionic Succession, created Albion. The Lorneli House-Lord, Belinth, marched out of Lorenn with several convoys made up of many thousand armed warriors into the plains and forests, and went about crushing the Houses, and solidifying Lorneli control throughout all of the lands the Alquari knew as Albi. The only house that failed to be subjugated was Farrmarch, able to defend itself using the mountain chains that rested so close to its capital.
But Albion had been born, and the Alquari of Lornel were not finished upon their path.
.
