OOC: Well-fought, Tyrion; I mean no offense with this story.
IC:
The War-Story.
Out of the Wandering emerged the Rajai, but before them many other tribes emerged and settled along rivers and in other fertile lands. Most tribes were petty, obscure and insignificant; but a few achieved a greater level of unity, not quite as great as that of the Rajai, but still significant enough to allow them to commit blasphemy - to try and build such empires that were not of the Golden Bird.
As the Rajai trekked south, hacking their way through jungles and villages, they found out more and more of the nearest of the Blasphemous Empires - that of the Yuumi. As all the Blasphemous Empires, the Yuumi were neither like the Rajai nor like the petty tribes. For they made no pact with the river dragons, or with other deities; but instead they laid an arrogant and unconditional claim to Mother Earth itself. They were not backed by deities, but still they were a proud and mighty breed, and so they enforced they claim, and under the leadership of Chieftain Duumi begun building an empire self-consciously. Their empire was driven by greed; they sought to claim more and more land and slaves, like the Rajai, but instead of doing it for the Golden Bird or due to a blood pact, they did it for themselves, and their advance was, it seemed, as relentless as that of the Rajai. Yet all in the end, as all the Blasphemous Empires, they were unable to quite compare with the Rajai; for the Yuumi expansion was automatic and organic, natural and soul-less like the spread of moss. They were incapable of making such leaps and strides as the Rajai did; they lacked in higher drive.
So by inertion the Yuumi Blasphemous Empire grew until it was encountered by the Rajai. After the first Rajai raids, the Yuumi were slightly dumbfounded at first, as this has never happened before; but then they decided to strike back, to attack the Rajai as if they were a petty tribe. Yet the Yuumi counterattacks were all met by force; Rajai warriors contested them wherever it was possible. That, too, had never happeend before. And once more were the Yuumi dumbfounded. Villages were being abandoned or slaughtered. A new chieftain desperately tried to respond to the new threat; panicking, he ordered a retreat south, tried to bring in new tribes against the Rajai and even had his priests court a local spirit. The petty tribes, horrified of the pure and uncompromising Rajai march of conquest, joined the Yuumi armies. But those measures were all hastily planned and rashly executed; the chieftain's plan was a plan of a mere animalistic human being - and so, no matter how good, it was no match for the plan of the Golden Bird.
For all was already planned and prepared in advance, many generations ago. Along generations the roles in the plan of the Conquest Proper were passed; for all their previous lives the warriors and their ancestors were preparing for this, as well as other future events. And when the moment came, when the younger warrior-king Rajaraja IV ascended, the Rajai warriors all stood up as one, gathered their supplies and weapons, and reported to the local war-lords. The units divided and united, assembled at border satellites and from there proceeded into the jungles and the valleys, all as per the old order of battle. On the borders the Yuumi were overwhelmed; the Rajai encircled and axed, and speared, and slinged, and knived all the enemy warriors, and proceeded to the villages, guided by the scouts who had for generations scouted out the Yuumi lands.
The Rajai approach was always the same: coordinated, ruthless and silent. With clenched teeth, without any screams or war-cries, the Rajai filled battlefields and villages, advancing from all feasible directions. Those who attacked them were simply slain instantly - quickly and efficiently, the Rajai warriors having been taught from childhood about the vulnerable points of lesser men. Other encounters were knocked out and later tied up; they would be sent to the north, to irrigate the fields with their toil, or perhaps the sacrificial groves with their blood. As for the buildings, these were torched. A few warriors were detached to transport the slaves northwards; the others continued on their way south, advancing without rest as far as they could before setting up camp for the night. The scouts, meanwhile, worked in shifts, and nothing the Yuumi did escaped them. As soon as was possible, the Rajai put an end to the existance of any Yuumi forces in the vicinity.
The Yuumi and their allies retrated. They fell back southwards, and the chieftain, all the more desperate, decided to forge his disparate retainers into a single huge horde. As the Rajai advanced - sometimes preceded by the evacuation, sometimes preceding it to the woe of the Yuumi villagers - the Yuumi too watched their movements, and got ready to face the main Rajai army. Near the central Yuumi settlement, Rajaraja IV, confident that the Yuumi forces were already crushed, was punished for his carelessness in the face of the Golden Bird's instructions for caution. As the Middle Conquest Host readied to overwhelm the settlement, the Yuumi emerged in great force. Their weapons were not as strong as those of the Rajai, their disciplinne and organisation were far inferior, as was their training. But those were the disadvantages of animals; the Yuumi also had their advantages, namely numbers and ferocity brought on by despair. With fierce yells they overwhelmed the Rajai formation and a fierce fight commenced; and the Rajai killed foe after foe, defending stalwartly, but they were divided and increasingly overwhelmed, and to the exultant yells of the chieftain and his allies, a Rajai warrior tumbled and fell, and others followed. And greater still was the exaltation when the Fearless knew fear; when some of the Rajai, desperate and mad at the never-ending tide of incoming enemies, broke and ran, to be killed by the slinged-stones of the Yuumi or by the knives of the Rajai scouts in the forests.
Rajaraja IV stood strong, however, and around him and other war-lords the Rajai rallied, bunching together into small groups to defend their commanders and to watch each other's backs and sides. The Yuumi waves dashed against those rock-like groups, with little or no effect. Arrows flew and warriors threw themselves as the Rajai formations; and sometimes they made dents, sometimes they even slaughtered the groups, but themselves took terrible tolls, as the Rajai parried blows and landed their own. And so it was that some of the battered remains of the Middle Conquest Host fell back to the jungles, and there regroupped; their comrades stayed behind to tie down the Yuumi.
The chieftain celebrated his victory. It came at a heavy price, but the Rajai host was decimated, and the plans of what the Yuumi called the "Great Evil" were thwarted. An epic feast occured, followed by a night of drinking and fornication. By the middle of the next day, the Golden Bird's contingency plan was already executed, and the Yuumi awakened to face their doom. The Middle Conquest Host had reformed, Rajaraja IV having calmed down himself and his warriors and vowing to finish the Conquest Proper now, no matter the losses or his own wounds. The Western Conquest Host had arrived from the jungles. The Eastern Conquest Host crossed the Great River. Formations of scouts covered the remaining paths of retreat or reinforcement for the Yuumi. The chieftain swallowed hard as he saw the banners of blood-dyed cloth surround the settlement. The Rajai rushed in. The chieftain did the best he could to rally his warriors - but now they were tired, and incapable of fighting as ferociously as yesterday, and even in numbers the advantage was clearly with the Rajai. The Yuumi were quickly and easily disrupted as the Rajai overwhelmed them; the attackers gave them no time for anything, simply killing everyone they saw and torching all the buildings.
When the twilight returned, the settlement refused to submit; instead, it burned, a funeral pyre for a Blasphemous Empire to be forgotten by history. With the illumination provided by the flames, the Rajai warriors rounded up their prisoners in the city centre - unusually, this included several wounded warriors that lasted this far, including the chieftain himself. They had trained for this part as well; with sharp stone knives, the veins, arteries and tracheas of the prisoners were all severed, and blood burst out, and spilled, and flowed, and banners and clothes were consecrated, and so the Blasphemous Empire was exsanguinated, and all was made pure, and the conquest was consummated.
For the Yuumi, it was the end of everything. For the Rajai, it was something much greater - the completion of yet another step in the Great Plan of the Golden Bird.