End of Empires - Update Fifteen
Storms Without Calm
Ten Years
510 - 520 SR by the Seshweay Calendar
399 - 409 RM by the Satar Calendar
225 - 235 IL by the Leunan Calendar
We shall cross this river, somehow, until we find our home. – Hashaskor, Founder of the Kothari Exatai.
What hope is there for a twice-chained man? – Slave,
Salai of Therefau
We return to a world we have visited many times before. A world under a foreign sky, under a moon of sulfurs and brimstones, under a starry cloud with a hundred names – Opporia's Eye, the Veil of the Lakatar, Aitah's Cloak. A world washed by a long sea, with canyon-carved cities, blood-soaked harbors, misted vales and red-stone citadels.
We return to a world with a storied past. Already, we know the names of a dozen heroes. Villains, too – they are certainly in great supply. And names that are as yet unlearnt, names of heroes from lands beyond the edges of our civilization, peoples who have never heard our music.
We return to a world in disarray, a world where the hammer-blow is fresh fallen. In the cradle of civilization, that most ancient of lands, the eternal war between the Satar and their neighbors has finally ended, or at least one of volumes had – the Ardavai Exatai has fallen from a thousand wounds. The horror of Kargan has come and gone, the Red City obliterated by a lengthy siege. The newly remade Karapeshai Exatai promises to continue the fight, but war on one front and uneasy peace on the other makes for a nervous empire at best. The end of the Khivani Roshate seems close at hand, while renewed war in the north threatens to boil over and engulf all of that region.
Even now, the dust has not settled. Conflicts that seemed straightforward but a decade ago are complicated by further madness, and even men in regions far from strife rest uneasily.
And still the steel circle of war widens...
* * * * * * * * *
Let me tell you of the sunset – of the far off western lands. Astride a peninsula on the horizon of the known world, these peoples have seen little of the brutality that dominates the cradle. Wars have been waged here, of course – numerous wars – but few recently, and none with such mindless slaughter as in the east.
But all that has begun to change.
Alarmed by the upstart nation of Dehr and its steady expansion into the divided peninsular regions, the King of Trahana called his nobility to court, and declared that he would not stand idly while this new rival rose in the north. Vowing first and foremost to save the city of Rakuts from its besiegers, and to stave off the destruction of the other independent city-states, he raised a tremendous army and marched north to confront these new foes, not so far from the placid waters of Lake Normegha. One part of this force was to distract the enemy around Rakuts and pin their main force; the other part was to swing around them and march on the capital of the rising empire itself.
Such a plan required a great deal of luck, however, and unfortunately for the Trahana, King Caille of Dehr had already planned an assault on Edris. Consequently, he already had a second army in reserve – right in the path of the Trahana armies. This force quickly headed off the Trahana attack on their heartlands before it had even begun. At the same time, the campaign so far form the traditional Trahana heartland had put a serious strain on the southerners' supply lines; they instead withdrew southward and prepared to relieve the siege of Rakuts – genuinely, this time.
Caille had no desire to get caught between the walls of the city and the advancing Trahana force – he wisely withdrew and prepared to hold onto his previous gains; meanwhile a secondary Dehr force captured Edris. The Trahana king, not satisfied with these meager gains, pressed onwards and engaged Caille north of Rakuts. After a three day clash, both of the armies withdrew, each bloodied and neither making much headway against the other.
Of course, neither king contented himself with the results of such a fight. Each prepared new designs, and soon the Dehr had sent a flying column down the east side of Lake Normegha, threatening the rear of the southern army; the Trahana seized Edris from an unwary garrison and launched a renewed attack against Caille's army at Moiran. Both efforts stalled in the face of unexpectedly stalwart opposition, and the Peninsular War continued unabated.
And still, conflict spread.
The Dulama Empire, long decaying and seemingly on the brink of decline, had finally been woken from its stupor. Much-needed reforms had staved off long-looming problems, for a little while at least, and under the direction of an increasingly confident emperor, the Dulama looked to reassert their regional dominance.
Obeisances had been received from the Haina, and several other peripheral nations had acknowledged the power of the Empire. But from one people, apologies were deemed insufficient – the Sechm. The strange hill kingdom from which Machaianism had originated untold centuries ago had done ill unto the empire – it had seized outlying Dulama territories in the south during a moment of weakness. This affront had happened so long ago that the idea of it had been preserved much more by historians than by the populace on the border.
But it made for an excellent pretext.
Taking a crack group of Dulama soldiers, the Emperor launched a massive campaign to subjugate Sechm and reclaim the old Dulama territories. The forces committed bordered on overkill; they easily crushed the outmatched Sechm armies in a lakeside battle, pressed on south, and secured the head of the king on a pike, installing a petty noble who swore fealty to the Emperor in his place. In short, the military campaign went almost absurdly well.
But even such a simple campaign exposed serious problems that had heretofore been mostly covered up. The Imperial reforms had been in full swing for some time, but they were hardly without their discontents. Unified and rewritten legal codes made for unhappy nobility, especially on the periphery, and the Emperor's more or less obvious abandonment of the traditional Dulama religion for the more trendy Machai faith – and his abandonment of Dula itself – infuriated the traditional elite. Soon, a veritable storm of religious, economic, and social problems flared up.
The Imperial army, even with such a minor exertion as crushing the Sechm, had still been stretched perhaps further than might have been wise in a period of reform. Rebellion, which had been only the shadow of a rumor ten years before, suddenly became a very viable possibility. In short order, the old homeland of the Empire revolted, supported by the religious and aristocratic elite – and indeed, even some of the military. Though the rebels had not yet made much headway beyond the old capital itself, the Emperor feared their potential for mischief. Simultaneously, border raids by the Hai Vithana reached a new level, making serious incursions into the hinterland of the Empire.
The wars and rebellions unfortunately buried many positive developments – an academy at Aeda, the merchants of the Haina meeting a new people far to the southeast – all were lost in the midst of these new threats to the greatest empire in the western world.
And even far beyond the frontiers of the Empire, war flared. The King of the Narannue launched an attack against their neighbors in Limach, putting the ancient city under siege in only a few weeks. Even the Vischa were on the move – fresh from their raids in the east, their warriors launched a series of expeditions westwards, meeting another great tribal confederation on the steppe – the Adanai. It took very little time indeed for the two to begin fighting – though thus far the conflict had not escalated into full-blown war.
At the same time, surprisingly xenophobic policies by the Vischa khagan and the eruption of further conflict to the east disrupted trade across the eastern half of the confederation; though seemingly a minor distraction to the warriors of the Vischa, even this group took notice when the luxuries they had grown accustomed to trading for with their more settled neighbors vanished, and especially as their Hai Vithana neighbors had none of these difficulties. To say the least, the Vischa tribes were not happy.
Of course, the Hai Vithana had problems of their own...
* * * * * * * * *
The palace at Amhatr had lost some of its luster since the khagan had been a boy. Ten years ago – 502 by the Seshweay Calendar – ten years ago, his world had been shattered. The memory was not pleasant. He frowned slightly, and spurred his horse on. The golden palace, weathered, lay ahead.
His father was a just man, by every account. The khagan barely remembered him; a man only sees the shadows of faces that a boy once knew. But that shadow was still an imposing one – one that had taught him to rule fairly, to take the measure of a man before passing judgment. Half-faded conversations still lurked in the recesses of his mind. Yet the one memory of his father that remained vivid was that of his death.
Ten years ago. Much had changed since. The Lakatar Gate opened to greet his arrival; he brought his horse trotting beneath the old carvings of wind spirits, his escort by his sides. The gatehouse looked far different than it had all that time ago – the carvings splattered with blood and bodies of his father's comitatus lying about the palace, eviscerated.
Assassins had struck that day, killing his father in his sleep. The many tribes had torn each other to pieces. Amhatr itself became a bloodbath, with Iralliamites, Aitahists, and Ardavani at each others' throats; soon rival claimants to the throne had emerged. The khagan, caught by one of these rivals, had been rescued by his grandfather and uncle from the fighting – he still remembered galloping out the Lakatar Gate at full tilt in his uncle's saddle, looking back as his grandfather dismounted, calmly strung a recurve bow.
His grandfather had been but one more of the bodies that day.
Slowing to a halt, the khagan dismounted. The courtyard looked much as it had back then, minus the stains, though now he felt far more secure in his person, and far more retainers waited upon him. He had fled all the way to Karamha, in the southeast corner of the Hai Vithana state, and there he had gathered his support. The new khagan raised in Amhatr had been by all accounts an unlikeable man, fond of cruelty and unwise in his rule; men of all classes suffered throughout his reign.
It should have been easy to reclaim the mantle of his father. Repression and murder should never sit well with a people. Yet somehow it does.
He sighed once more. What was done was done. As much of his life had been spent now in fighting for his crown as had ever been spent in rule. Somehow, he had weathered the storm; the Golden Palace was his once more. The Hai Vithana were his once more. And the southernmost of the three great tribes of the steppe could rise once more. Already, raids had begun on the frontier with the Dulama – a risky move, but one bound to unite his people. No matter.
He entered the throne room by the southward gate.
* * * * * * * * *
A city rose in the wilderness. Thraeldirnë, they called it, and it was a brave enterprise, carving away at the forests of the Settōn to create some sort of northern parallel to the old cities of the Evyni heartlands. Broad avenues, covered in slow-melting snow, courtesy of a late spring. Red-columned temples in the eastern style – dedicated to a new god. Construction had now all but stopped, the workers long since removed southward to fight a new war. The tale of that war was already a long one by the spring of 511 – and a tangled one as well.
Two decades after the beginning of the War of the Three Gods, the Evyni and the Karapeshai Exatai had concluded peace on unsurprising terms: the resumption of trade and borders as they stood at the end of the conflict. But the treaty had no sooner been made than it had already started to show cracks – albeit subtle ones. Both sides drew down their armies, but before too long, emissaries from either nation ended up at the court of the Xieni king.
The Xieni, for their part, had already achieved everything they could have wanted from the war – only the city of Naiji remained intact to threaten their realm. With their Satar allies gone, they asked for peace with the Evyni, asking for fairly sensible terms – the unrestricted opening of Evyni border cities to their merchants and a royal marriage to seal the pact and ensure the Evyni did not immediately betray them. Both of these seemed to be sticking points for the Evyni, but especially the latter, as it would dilute a long-pure bloodline.
The Satar approached the Xieni more covertly, offering the king a tempting deal – to be named one of the princes of the Karapeshai in return for aid in their war against the Evyni Empire. Risky, no doubt, but certainly worth it if they won out in the end. The Xieni stalled for time. The king did not want to rebuff the Satar, in case the Evyni proved intractable, but he was far more wary of the closer and larger Evyni Empire than he was of his southern neighbor.
For one reason or another, the Evyni finally caved to both of the terms. The Xieni princess Chongorzol, or Ashar, as she would later become known, began the long trek from her homeland to the capital at Anyais.
Ashar arrived in Naiji as the first snows of the winter were falling, and decided to winter there, both for safety and to learn the ways of her new homeland before she finally arrived in Anyais. In the midst of all this activity, she heard the preachings of a man by the name of Essril, the founder of a new faith – Enguntith. This, a sort of evolution of Ytauzi (and borrowing elements from other faiths of the north), declared the existence of a mystical, powerful god Yleth. Despite the difficulties that such a radical new faith might present, Ashar converted that winter, and resolved to bring the holy man with her to court.
They did not quite reach it.
* * * * * * * * *
The world lay in northern spring. Meltwater streams ran down dark mountainsides, their slopes shaded by pines with fresh-sprouted cones. Everything had that wet glint of ground just uncovered by snow. The road fell in a winding switchback, unpaved and muddy in places, the earth eroding around upturned rocks like little buttes that threatened to twist incautious ankles or horses' hooves.
The column churned onwards, crimson banners hanging limply in the still, damp air. Behind them lay peaks coated in snow and ice, but before them... before them lay a different kingdom.
The Evyni Empire.
Thickly-wooded valleys and rills extended before them to the very horizon, forests climbing dangerous slopes with narrow paths and deadly clefts. The Satar had some trouble here, as they had for the entire march, but they were nothing if not persistent. All, thus far, had gone to plan, and that if nothing else raised the suspicion of Elikas. His outriders had spotted nothing, but then they had not happened upon the nearest of the Evyni outposts yet. They, surely, would mount some sort of response.
And indeed, though they had emerged from the most dangerous part of the march unscathed, before the Satar host could fall upon Croalle, the Evyni emerged from the valley to give battle.
Even before the first skirmishes, it became clear that it was a battle that favored neither side's strengths. The terrain about the city was a patchwork of verdant hills and new-sown fields; rains the week before had made the entire landscape slick with mud and the rotting leaves fallen last autumn. As they converged on one another, the footing grew worse still; soon it became difficult for either side to maneuver at all.
The loss of his cavalry's mobility troubled Elikas, but their opponent's ordered formations faced difficulty on broken ground. Disordered and ragged, they seemed easy prey for the larger Satar force, which, largely dismounted, showered them with arrows from afar before the battle had even been joined. The Evyni sent forward their own archers, and thus battle was joined.
Even as the archery duel continued, each commander looked to probe the other. The Satar searched for gaps in the enemy's lines, hoping to disrupt them or turn them, while the Evyni looked for more general weaknesses in the horselord's front. Neither was terribly successful at the start, and either side drove back the subtle prodding of the other with much bloodshed, the cries of the dead and wounded sounding through the blackened woods, forest animals and farmers alike awaking from their hibernation to a cruel spectacle.
If the battle had continued thus, the superior discipline of the Evyni might have won the day. But Elikas sensed this, and he also waited for the next day, when the ground was somewhat less slippery, and far more inviting to his strengths.
The Satar cataphracts rode out with their lightest armor, avoiding being bogged down as best they could; the angles of attack over the open fields or level groves, avoiding the rills and creeks that might break their attacks before they started. The cataphracts smashed the lines of the Evyni army, who, to their credit, withdrew in good order. Elikas tried his best to cut off their retreat, but in such narrow spaces this proved impossible. In any case, the Evyni fell back towards the rest of their forces in the Rhon Valley; Elikas swooped down on Croalle and captured his first base on the northern side of the Rhoms.
But time could not be wasted. Even though, as we shall see, others tied up much of the enemy forces in the east, initiative was key to minimizing losses. Leaving a significant garrison, the Satar continued onward into the valley of the Rhon.
Here, the land was much more built up. Cellena fell reasonably quickly, but the greater cities in the way, Asyvedr and Alusille, seemed much tougher targets. Once again, the Evyni came forth with further reinforcements; now they met the Satar head on in the greening fields of the lowlands.
The Battle by the Rhon only matched the second largest armies of the Satar and Evyni alike, but each side fought fiercely despite that. From the start, the Satar attempted a rather unimaginative double-envelopment maneuver that had been the staple of their tactics; the Evyni met each of the flanking attempts with reserve forces and repelled them without too much loss. The false retreat and the harassment, too, were familiar to the Evyni, fresh off of their war with the Xieni.
Abandoning traditional tactics, Elikas now tried a different maneuver. By means of several probing strikes, he drew one wing of the Evyni army forward, onto more exposed ground; then a crack corps of Satar infantry emerged from a riverside grove and attacked the enemy flank, driving them back. Thus encouraged, the Satar pressed forward and were able to turn the Evyni positions; their opponents drew back, and it looked like it would be yet another fairly indecisive battle.
But in this more open terrain, the massive Satar advantage in horse began to finally tell; they rode down the retreating Evyni, and even though the iron discipline of the latter prevented a full-scale rout, they were able to drive them a considerable distance further. Soon, they seized Asyvedr and put Alusille, one of the greatest cities of the northern empire, under siege.
Even as the Satar pressed forward, they began to send feelers out to the various Ming city-states, proposing to establish one of their aristocrats as a new prince of the Karapeshai and join in the war against the Evyni. Yet this song did little to sway the Ming people, who had not been all that badly mistreated under recent years of Evyni rule. Moreover, the sheer risk of joining an endeavor such as this – with the Evyni still not even close to defeated – was not attractive.
The Satar invasion of the Rhon valley stopped Ashar in her tracks; she had planned to continue to Anyais after the first spring melt, but a rather large enemy force lay in her way. With Essril in tow, she decided instead to travel to Beixang, far upriver, and circle around the northeast to reach Anyais. Her native Xieni people, converting to their faraway princess' new faith, stayed surprisingly true to their alliance with the Evyni – they attacked the Satar's northwestern frontier. Seizing Harasai on the southernmost tributary of the Einan, they began to launch large-scale raids across the steppe to distract their opponent from the other parts of the war; though, in the end, this was to little effect...
* * * * * * * * *
For even as Elikas' fell upon the River Rhon and stunned the Evyni defenders, the Redeemer Jahan led two more armies into the east of the Empire. Jahan's defeat at Karhat had not resulted in his ruin, as such losses had for so many other Satar Redeemers. Instead, Jahan led what forces he could into the Kotir and gathered up the other remnant Satar that trickled out of the Sesh part by part. Some grumbled that a leader so humbled should not lead the Exatai, but these whispers were quickly quelled by Jahan's steadfast hand. To divert their attention from what they had lost, he promised them new gains – a renewed campaign to the north.
Jahan's last foray into the region had ended with mixed results – Acca had been recovered, but the Evyni had not been defeated. This campaign had entirely different aims: to strike north of the Rhoms and create a new Exatai in the northern reaches of the world.
The first move was to catch the Evyni off-guard. To this end, Jahan ordered the construction of a large war fleet, crewing them with the various merchants or privateers that could be scraped up on the Accan coast, and using a significant force of marines to gain the upper hand in combat. Coincidentally helped by chaos on the other side of the Kern Sea, a surprising number of volunteers could be gathered; they were headed by a grizzled former merchant captain – Arto Rutarri.
The size of Rutarri's fleet would have caught the Evyni off-guard even had the attack been expected – as it was, the combination of the two meant Rutarri had by far the easiest road of any of the three Satar commanders. Hopping from island to island on the old Ritti lands, Rutarri seized the ancient city itself with little resistance, and soon turned his attention to aiding the overland campaign of Jahan's.
For the Redeemer led the largest army of all – 55,000, all told, directed through Rutto and towards Anyais itself. The Evyni armies had not fully demobilized, and though the Lawgiver's forces proved unable to stop the fall of Ceralle, they gathered themselves in defense of the ancient capital of the Empire, and faced the Satar before the walls of the great city.
The Battle of Anyais was not quite so large as Karhat, nor as decisive, but the forces involved were surprisingly similar given the differences in climate and peoples. The Satar, fully ahorse, attempted yet another double envelopment of a primarily infantry army, driving off the Evyni cavalry before encircling the large and disciplined center of infantry.
The Evyni had superior numbers in the field this time, and though their cavalry proved of a decidedly inferior quality compared to the Satar, they held long enough to allow the reserves of the army to catch up. The Satar certainly pummeled the Evyni from three sides, but the Lawgiver had stopped them short of encircling his army outright. On the other hand, with his forces fully engaged, he could make no adjustments or decisive maneuvers; for the moment, the initiative belonged to Jahan.
Losing no time, the Redeemer led his personal guard of cavalry into the center of the battlefield, and then carefully drew out the Lawgiver's center; the enemy line advanced to follow the retreating Satar center. Thus exposed and disordered, Jahan led a series of attacks from several sides that shattered the Evyni center and allowed the Satar to make a major breakthrough; the overcommitment of the Evyni forces proving too much to overcome.
The Lawgiver made a good account of himself in the denouement of Anyais, extricating the majority of his forces to fight another day, but he could not allow his army to be trapped in the city itself. Its relatively weaker fortifications were no match for the Satar siege equipment, designed far in the south; the Satar engineers managed to effect multiple breaches in the wall and drive the Evyni from the city wholesale. Anyais fell.
What followed could only be described as retribution for what the Satar had always viewed as a stab in the back – the attack that had broken the Satar in the War of the Three Gods. The Satar absolutely ravaged the city, wrecking its buildings and plundering its wealth; the people themselves became slaves to the various soldiers that had participated. In that maddened week, the most ancient home of the Evyni was destroyed.
Jahan quickly styled himself a Lawgiver and prepared to renew the campaign, to strike further into the north and subdue the remainder of the Evyni Empire, but the northern armies were far from broken. The Satar had inflicted two very serious defeats, to be sure, but the losses suffered did not cripple the Evyni war effort, while much of the productive centers of the Empire remained far from the front.
All the same, the Empire has been thrust into a harrowing situation. Even as the Karapeshai forces occupy much of the heartland, word out of the eastern extremes of the empire runs that someone is fomenting a Maninist rebellion. Though the Lawgiver himself has converted to the more syncretic faith of Enguntith, the difficulty of holding onto the farthest extremes of the Empire cannot be underestimated. But then, perhaps more allies could be sought...