In the wake of the fall of the Syndicate Union, a small number of revolutionaries fleeing a welkin theocracy’s expansion penned and disseminated the Democratic Critique, a document lambasting the faults of previous regimes, tracing a throughline of inadequacy through the old alliance, the severed states, and the Syndicate Union, and speculating on what a future, more effective democracy might look like.
The document caught the eye of one Thimithi Theion, the heir of a so-called decadent clan. Bearing a curse from the tragedy that befell the nymphs of the dream; expelled from the Third Dominon; and forever suffering attrition from the nature of their blood secret, the centuries had not been kind to clan Thimithi, and they were few in number by then, courting line extinction.
Only a nymph at the time, Theion had no capacity to act on any of the ideas present in the critique, but they no doubt settled in the back of her head, enabling her to dream of a peace beyond the endless war of the clan-states period. A dream she shared, in time, with Anthimati Eothi.
When the night of ashes destroyed the last remnant of the Third Dominion, those two ladies, years older and with remarkable prowess for their age, seized the chance. Thus began the Realignment. In its nascent moments, it seemed a clan war like any other; by its end, when Eothi spoke of the coming dawn at a massed rally in the autumn of 1627, their political bloc consisted of more than half the clans that had once formed the third dominion, now for once turned to noble purpose.
Commanding the aligned clans, Eothi and Theion carved out a territory encompassing much of the midwestern heartlands by 1629, when the syndics completed the final draft of the Articles of Alignment: at that point, one can finally speak of the Pantheca. And at that point, the wardens were created, and the might of the aligned clans turned from expansion to the consolidation and protection of this new nation.
The wardens would require a leader, a scourge above scourges: an overscourge. The aligned clans all cast their vote (a plurality for Eothi, whom even Theion supported) — and the syndics overruled it entirely, appointing Thimithi Theion as the first overscourge.
We can speculate as to their reasons. The optics are obvious; the Anthimati never escaped their patina of trerachery and malice, while the Thimithi were considered at turns either hopelessly or inspiringly idealistic and spiritual. It’s clear which looks better in a position of promenience.
The politics only underscore this: Eothi, famously, contended that the revolution would be eternal: that banes would never — should never — stop fighting for a brighter dawn. And a world of eternal fighting is a world of eternal employment for the wardens (the clans were so fond of their power). Theion, by contrast, believed in the gradual withering of the wardens: bit by bit peace would be established, and warriors could lay down their weapons and become healers or builders, until there would be only the Stewartry. The Syndics, who founded the Pantheca on the idea of the grim necessity of vesperbanes (something the Syndicate had never fully accepted), clearly found this so much more palatable.
The clans nearly rebelled upon hearing the Syndics’ decision. But not wanting the budding nation to be immediately torn apart, Eothi threw his support behind Theion.
So much context. But this brings us to the first overscourge: Thimithi Theion. Hatched in1605, Theion is the youngest of her clan to have attained the Ashen Ecdysis and manifested her blood secret, achieving it upon her fifth instar, her chitin darkening to a sooty blackness.
In the clanstates period, it unfortunately wasn’t unusual for a nymph to be considered battle-ready by then. It wasn’t even usually for a Thimithi to ignite so tragically young (hence their dwidling number). But Theion survived, and underwent Ashen Ecdysis four more times, attained the strongest endowment the clan had ever known. Theion was known to be able to reach into a active forge, handling molten iron with no protection and but minor discomfort; her blood was said to steam when it left her body. In one battle, a nervecaster hit her with an explosive melter ball of the sort that’d instantly kill most banes, blasting their prothorax wide open; by the time Theion had crossed the distance, closing to melee, the wound had closed entirely.
And Theion was considered inarguably a weaker bane than Eothi.
As overscourge, Theion’s days were often occupied with coordinating matters within the Pantheca, navigating political realities, while Eothi was sooner to be found on the frontlines, running missions to secure new territory or defend their existing holdings. For this reason, the most influential figure on Theion rule was not Eothi, but the overscourge’s brother, Thimithi Immolata.
For better or worse, Theion inspired her followers with her courage, her passion, and her strength — not necessarily her intelligence. If Theion was the greatest sword of the Pantheca, if Eothi was the tactician that guided all of aligned clans with perfect synergy (she had only lost two battles), Immolata is the reason there was a alliance of clans at all. He had a perfect memory for motivations, intentions, secrets, and the cunning to commit even the obstinate to his side.
It shouldn’t be assumed that keenness of his mind made him callous, or anything less than perfectly devoted to the Pantheca. Indeed, where Theion saw the clans electing Eothi and them threatening mutiny over it as something inspiriting, as a sign banes had really come to trust the last of a clan stained by treachery — Immolata saw it as a threat, a dire warning that the clans were not loyal to the Pantheca, but to a demagogue.
The talk that Eothi was the bane’s choice, that she was the rightful overscourge of the wardens, never went away. And Eothi was gracious and accommodating now — but with a bane that even Theion could not defeat, what recourse would they have if her hunger for power overcame her restraint?
Immolata advised Theion on her handling of Eothi, and drafted plan after plan to find a counter: perhaps they could relentlessly train a legion of exceptional vesperbanes with unwavering loyalty; perhaps they could experiment with blood secrets until they find a sufficiently powerful strain; perhaps they could create a vesperbat. Theion shot them all down. That’s not the Thimithi way, she said.
After one terrible mission, Eothi’s young sister, Chloris (the only other surviving Anthimati), died on a mission, body unrecognizable when eventually recovered. Eothi blamed Immolata for assigning the mission, for always plotting against the pair. Still, the last Anthimati remained unwavering in her duty, but Immolata considered it the closest thing to a warning siren they would get. He demanded Theion find a solution to the Eothi problem.
Still refusing any of Immolata’s utilitarian options, Theion meditated, consulting her clan’s anamnesis, contemplating their history and accumulated wisdom for some desperate answer.
She found something.
The vespers may not approve.
But it might work.
Theion disappeared with only a cryptic word for her brother. In her absence, Immolata took power. He’d made arrangement for regency to fall to him in the event of something like this. He cared for Theion, and made some attempts to find her: assigning teams of sensors, haruspex diviners, percipient umbracogs, to puzzling out the mystery, but no fruit hatched.
Some, the most diehard supports of Eothi especially, saw Immolata’s regency as a naked power grab, and demanded he had the office over to Eothi. Tensions never eased, and Immolata decided there was one way to prevent an insurgency. He drafted a mission brief and assigned Eothi and all of her most mutinous supporters on a new expansion campaign: their objective was to capture territory in the land of quiet frost beyond the swamps. They were to report back after no fewer than five years.
A few months after pushing past the boarder, a tenth of them had perished in the care of the inhospitable wastes. They decided this campaign was a suicide mission, and retreated from the land of quiet frost. They declared Immolata had no legitimacy. Theion was dead — assassinated by her traitorous brother, no doubt — and they called for the overscourge perch to be turned to Eothi where it belongs.
In response, Immolata condemned Eothi with a designation more grave than the punitive discharge-pending-trial criminal banes had been granted so far. She was now an enemy of the Pantheca itself, no different those they’d fought in the Realignment — and thus, she had become the first vesperbane defector. The sentence? Trial by campaign.
At Immolata’s call, the wardens, for the first time in almost a decade, geared up for war. But the Pantheca had ushered in peace unprecedent, it had promised an end to war — and thus, Immolata assured, this was but judgment and enforcement of the law, no more a war than a guard restraining a drunk or a syndic exercising executive authority. Call it… a grand trial.
To those on the frontlines, it felt quite a bit like another war — and not one they had the morale or the might to sustain, not when they watched their sisters defect to Eothi’s side, not when their belligerent was Eothi.
Immolata, it might be said, was a negotiator, not a strategist, not a tactician. The first grand trial was becoming a disaster, so he did what he did best: negotiated an armistice.
His bargaining chip?
After the Night of Ashes, the Anthimati clan was utterly destroyed, the vespers sparing only Eothi and Chloris in their inscrutable judgment. The bloodline itself was cursed, to every haurspex’s eye, and conception for either of them seemed impossible.
Immolata revealed the impossible had been done. It was Chloris’s secret: a new brood of Anthimati, still gurgling nymphs. He would give them to Eothi’s care, assuming a truce could be minted. Otherwise…
This one move, nearly any history book will acknowledge, saved the Pantheca, and it overshadows the entire proceeding campaign when Immolata’s legacy is recounted.
Because this armistice lasted just long enough for Theion to return.
After three years that’d felt an eternity, Theion revealed he had journeyed deep into the ambrosia woods seeking revelation from the weevils. He found it. What he brought back was a exultation of the Thimithi blood secret, an alien embellishment only a weevil could conceive.
She calls it the Ebonform. You see, mastery of trees, the manipulation of wood, the ability to go from seed to full growth in but a few days, these arts are exclusive to the weevils and those who accept their warping influence. That’s not what Ebonform is, but there’s a certain resemblance.
The Thimithi blood secret offers resistance to flames, and the secretion of highly flammable oil; its members are typically, but not always, of the ash affinity. The ash form consists of burning a fuel, consuming it to release heat. Ebonform is the opposite: given sufficient heat, it offers the capacity to create constructs made from pure carbon and enervate. Matter made from, to all appearances, nothing at all.
It means that ebony is better known as the fuel of flourishing flame: described as wood (it’s not wood) which grows when it is burnt.
Ebonerve is highly flexible medium for imbuement; it’s capable of molding, which would have made it an unparalleled medium for dwimmercrafty, if Theion had had a mind for it. What he learned from the weevils instead was a kind of advanced nouspell, projecting autonomy onto ebony constructs.
When banes speak of the first grand trial, they aren’t remembering Immolata’s disasterous first campaign. They’re remembering the reinvigorated rush after Theion returned, led by the flourishing scourge who breathed life, true life, into flame itself.
She was the one who walked away from the great battle of Traitor’s Waste.
Still, Theion despaired at how things had devolved; her brother’s terrible schemes, and the defection of the bane she loved like a sister. But Eothi would have torn apart the Pantheca. As overscourge, Theion could not allow that.
When the final verdict was given and things settled, the banes who fell in with Eothi were marked and punished, but allowed back into the wardens (Immolata protested the admittance of traitors, but even he knew that too, too many had followed Eothi; they needed the banepower).
But, as Theion tried to exercise her regained authority, she finds laws and arrangments undercutting her; in her absence, Immolata had slipped power away from the overscourge, such that even as her subordinate, Immolata retained much of her power. Theion became a figurehead, her power an illusion — but vision is the most informative sense, as any Thimithi flame-seer knows. The image of the flourishing scourge, rebuilding the Pantheca with fires that dance and march, was unifying in its inspiration.
Still, Theion was growing older, and with the duty of running the warden removed from her, her focus turned to her family. She built them a new compound, a fortress surrounded by a forest of ebonerve trees in a grand display of her technique. Theion sought to continue her line, rear a brood of her own. It was her final mistake.
It’s unclear what happened. Perhaps Ebonform manifested as a double blood secret, and her child underwent ashen ecydysis even more disasterously young than Theion. Or perhaps, when the vespers made to grant her child its entitled blood secret, they reflected on what Theion had done, and found it in violation of the Septagrammaton.
What is known is that the crepular process acted. The new Thimithi clan compound became the Ebony Forest Exclusion Zone, and Theion is theorized to be its crepuscule.
The syndics, after all the proceeding crises, had put some thought into what to do once Theion could no longer lead. It is perhaps unsurprising what happened next. Immolata is appointed as the second overscourge of the Pantheca.
Hatched in 1610, Thimithi Immolata was his sister’s shadow. He boasts none of her distinguishing feats; he had his ashen ecdysis at his eighth instar and only twice more after. That he was combat trained at all speaks to the desperation of the Thimithi clan during the late clan-states period; tiercels aren’t fit for war, yet they needed every body.
Theion fueled massive, battlefield-shaping techniques with equally massive reserves of umbra and ichor. Even with years of training, Immolata never came close. Indeed, if it weren’t for the soot-black chitin, some would wonder if Immolata was even a Thimithi; no one ever saw him cast a single fire technique.
Instead, he used his blood secret in more subtle ways. Despite the lack of flame, he did have the ash affinity, and ash is carbon. No living creature could survive having their carbon burst or ripped apart, and while all vesperbanes have a resistance to enervate forces, Immolata’s control was sufficient to quickly outmaneuver the defenses of lesser banes, and for those more accomplished, that resistance wanes with attrition — and Immolata had plenty of stamina. Though he never used the Thimithi oil for anything as crass as igniting something, he definitely burned it. Within himself, the oil burns slowly, more akin to digestion, a patient and scarcely exhaustible energy supply. A battle against Immolata was over either instantly, or at great length, and even in the latter case many find that they’ve scarcely managed to dirty the clothes of the lithe bane.
But perhaps the most distinguishing of Immolata’s endowments is his chitin. With their long tradition as haruspices, the Thimithi clan has a a far greater mastery over blood secrets than any other clan. Their restrictions bind looser; their boons apply eagerly.
For a Thimithi after the ashen ecdysis, their flesh insulates and resists heat damage, and quickly repairs it. But how different is heat damage from umbral damage? The temperatures are opposite, and yet in the breaking of bonds, the warping of tissue, there’s a similarity.
It shouldn’t be possible, not deliberately; blood secrets cannot be twisted and conformed like mundane techniques. And yet, Thimithi Immolata was utterly resistant the breadth of umbral techniques as simply as Theion could walk into a raging inferno.
Perhaps the vespers found him just as persuasive, his devotion just as inspiring.
Though so many defining instutions remain absent — no mavericks yet, no strongholds — the reign of Immolata can be taken as the beginning of the modern Pantheca.
Immolata, most of all, pushed for standardization and organization. He established the ranking and evaluation of vesperbanes, commanded the creation of technique libraries, and most controversial of all, created schools.
Theion was overscourge for at best, one generation. By the time Immolata ascended, the wardens were not just an organizing of existing vesperbanes, but growing, with nymphs who hatched after the Articles of Alignment old enough to undergo pharmakon. Until now, training, besides the training they all got on the battlefield, was something left to the clans to conduct. But this results in an obvious disparity, with wealthier clans affording better training, and what of banes with no clan?
In many ways, Immolata was an enemy of the clans. He blamed them for the treachery that lead to the first grand trial. What good was a clan, really, but as a distraction — a bane’s loyalty should be, first and above all, to their country.
Thus, Immolata created the inculcatorium, an academy for training nymphs to become pawns and pawns to become wretches — for the blank ignorance of a child to be overwritten with a soldier’s understanding of greatness of the Pantheca.
The clans’ condemnation of Immolata reached such a fevered pitch that, years into his rule, Immolata dissolved the council that had advised Theion. The clans, once the elite fighters of the wardens, were stripped of their rank, to be treated no better than common banes.
It will not surprise you to learn that Immolata’s unpopularity reached such a peak to make assassination attempts a matter of monthly occurrence. Immolata made a spectacle out of each assassin’s public execution, until it was decided that this only martyred them, raised their profile and give future attempts helpful tips.
With a political climate like this, Immolata created a new division of the wardens, to replace the clan’s former prominence as the elites. As the antithesis to the clans, he names it Unbrood. A clanless, faceless, nameless rank of loyal vesperbanes, with orders only to protect the overscourge and execute his will. The legislation that created Unbrood is truly a testament to the good will Immolata had among the syndics. Where wardens, in theory, can be questioned and tried by the syndics in the event of misbehavior, the Unbrood are accountable only to the overscourge. Immolata’s power was verging on the dictatorial — but why should the syndics worry, when he clearly prizes the prosperity of the Pantheca above all else?
The inculcatoria were a definite success. In years, they spread throughout the Pantheca and produced a new generation of vesperbanes. Such a success, in fact, that the supply of vesperbanes was beginning to exceed the supply of missions for them to do. (Missions for banes with warden-style combat training, of course. On the other hand, there never seemed to be enough pure Stewartry banes…)
The natural solution? War, of course. The Pantheca had established itself in the midwest. To the west, the veinlands and the land of quiet frost were unsuitable for colonization. To the south lay the ambrosia reserve where, after his return, Theion had mandated the most stringent prohibition on disturbing the weevil’s lands. This leaves the east, where a despotic welkin theocracy, Immolate observes, lays siege to its people. Why should they not know the peace of the Pantheca?
Between syndic trade sactions, and the intervention of the percipiency (themselves descended from a sect of welkin monks with objections to theocratic tyranny), the annexation of the east was, in potentia, a bloodless coup. On paper, the land was theirs. Immolata decided this wasn’t enough. Why countenance the continued devotion to the welkin? Such energies were better directed to the Pantheca. With this pretense, the warden were sent in. They had two essential jobs: to root out any resistance to the transfer of power, and more pointedly enforce the laws of the Pantheca where they differed from the previous regime, most notably the ending of roach subjugation and the abolition of the welkin’s caste system.
From a historical perspective, that there was a backlash goes without saying. The form it took was a touch novel, though.
You might expect some welkin fundamentalist movement, or some revolt of the peasantry. Instead, there was a coalescencing of the anxieties of both west Panthecans and east Panthecans catalyzed by bane of remarkable influence.
Synthia Shadowbane preached a doctrine of lineage purity. Clan vesperbanes were, by blood, superior to laybrood vesperbanes. Immolata’s inculcatoria, by which the ranks were flooded with a influx of wingless masses, was a direct threat to their blood, which would be diluted until there was nothing left. Why were clanbanes superior? It’s not due to their blood secrets; such endowments were a mere reflection of superiority, Synthia asserted.
No, Synthia proclaimed that every noble clan was descended from God-Empress Oosifea, the only exalted ancestor to return to life from the fires of welkin — Oosifea who was, in fact, the first vesperbane! Rather than stealing the vespers in animalistic consumption, as the myth of Aromethia suggests, Oosifea took in batsblood and pulsed with it until it recognized her as its master. Where the refuse produced by pharmakon are merely bugs pretending to be something more, Oosifea and her angels had the hearts of bats in a new form.
The clans were descended from these angels, their blood dirtied with that a common mantis but its purity still shining through — except for Synthia, who was the last descendent of Oosifea, her lineage unbroken and undiluted.
Synthia was a chimerical lightning rod, struck by the levins of seemingly contradictory ideologies. To the laity of the east, she was a defiant defender of the welkin faith against the modernism of the Pantheca. To the supposedly disenfranchised clans, she reasserted their superiority. To both the occupied populace of the east, and those banes taken far from their homes and commanded to serve by a distant overscourge, she offered them what they most desired: independence.
She was, in a word, a rejection of Immolata.
Her mythos and her devoted following only grown when, after several attempts to neutralize her by wardens and then by Unbrood, Immolata arrives in the eastern holdings to dispose of Synthia.
She kills him.
Synthia was a puppetmaster. A rare application of root-type rhizomorphs allows the creation of fungal threads that conduct precise enervate flux, which modulated other rhizomorphs, contracting threads to move, or molding enervate.
Famed for his stamina, it meant nothing against an opponent who didn’t tire when fighting you. Any other Thimithi might’ve had luck burning the threads — but Immolata did not use his oil for anything so crass as igniting things.
Cognizant of the political threat Synthia represents — what had fueled her rise more than Immolata’s treatment of the clans? — the syndics make an unprecedented concession in the selection of the third overscourge: they allow the clans to vote.
Their choice? An unproven yet promising bane, a young yet influential member of one of the oldest, biggest clans.
Brismati Deladora, hatched 1639, represents an intersection of the two factions vying for control of the gold-plated antennae-band. Though hatched of what might be call the clan, Deladora was teacher in an inculcatoria. She hatched in Immolata’s Pantheca, not knowing the clan-states period, one for whom even the first grand trial was history rather than experience.
Ironic, then, that her first task upon ascending the rank of overscourge, the act for which present and future would judge her, is ending the second grand trial.
Deladora was Yan-Brismati. She was not a powerhouse in the way the past two overscourges were. (Indeed, perhaps in that lay part of her appeal: other clans could imagine themselves overpowering if needed,her even as they voiced support.) But what she offered was perhaps more important, particularly against a foe whose power was as logistical as that of Synthia. The Yan-Brismati, put simply, are far-sighted.
The blood-secret of all the diverging Brismati clans is the Pierazeidos, the piercing eyes of ghostly light, famed for the seeing through all obstruction their surroundings. By and large, their range measured in the tens of meters. Tactically game-changing, of course, but undoubtedly limited. The Yan-Brismati, however, have telescopic eyes: with training, they can cast their gaze off for kilometers. That… that could be of a strategic utility.
Strategy, ultimately, is what defines her administration, why she was chosen over other candidates. Brismati Deladora, the far-sighted scholar. Under her guidance, the second grand trial was a methodical affair, stretching for years with only gradual progress. The war, to the extent this ‘mere matter of justice and enforcement of law’ could be analogized to a war, differed from others in that there were no real lines to advance: this was a counter-insurgency, not an invasion. Indeed, the effort would have been entirely hopeless if led by anyone but a Brismati.
Synthia’s followers were called the Shadow Court. (“Where our shadows rest, gathered beneath a greater shadow’s wings.”) There was no concrete objective for the Pantheca here, no known whereabouts where Synthia could be sieged and vanquished, only the fleeting appearances where she gave speeches or teased the occupiers. Too many times, the Pantheca’s forces advanced and cut down a swath of insurgents, only to find at their helm not Synthia, but a puppet facsimile.
But no bane could hide forever from the piercing gaze of ghostly light. The pierazeidos found the antiscourge’s headquarters, and Deladora’s approach, by then, was patient and inexorable.
Deladora watched the siege from afar, and as it began, realized with the dread of one who would be remembered in foolish infamy, that it was all a trap. Though they’d rooted out Synthia’s forces, exiled them across the expanse of the eastern heartlands, though their forces numbered in the hundreds, with myriad talents arrayed against a single puppetmasters, they were really no match.
Deladora had underestimated Synthia as gravely as Immolata before her. The siege became a deluge of blood, and the light of the Brismati’s forces was extinguished.
Except for three. You see, before she ascended as overscourge, Deladora was a teacher at an inculcatorium, and she’d personally mentored a trio of promising young wretches, and she’d interrupted, but not ceased, their instruction even as she took the gold plate. As Synthia obliterated the western Pantheca’s forces, three banes persisted longer than all others: Anna No-name, Edu of Three-lakes, and Uvema Asetari.
They didn’t win. Later embellishment of their legend would say that they fought Synthia to a standstill, or even that they had mercy, but what happened was Synthia decided she was impressed, and stopped fighting.
It was clear to her then, that the western Pantheca would not succeed here, and they could not attempt another campaign of this sort, not without leaving Synthia alone with time to consolidate her power. She had won, in a certain sense, but military victory was ultimately insufficient: she wouldn’t get what she wanted by destroying the Pantheca.
Call it my surrender, or yours, she said, but these are my terms. Her first bid is of little interest — subsequent negotiations sharpened and solidified the pact. First, she called for an end to the totalitarian control the overscourge exercised. She wanted the independence, for the banes of the eastern Pantheca to be able to govern themselves. And she wanted those three banes to be recognized as the Great Western Triumvirate, the only banes of theirs to survive the battle of Shadow Court.
Thus, in 1671, Deladora signs an act establishing the federation of the wardens, allowing the overscourge to legally recognize a stronghold as independent from their authority. Synthia is granted her own stronghold, Shadehold, a land of neverending wispfall, contingent on her never raising hostilities against the Pantheca or its wardens. The other banes of the east are allowed to join her, or elect to establish their own stronghold. Most choose the latter, perhaps because they indeed had plans to one day raise hostilities against the Pantheca, or because Synthia’s surrender had injured her optics as the insurmountable heir to Oosifea. Regardless, this is the origin of the second scourgehold: the Mountain’s Crown Stronghold, Crownhold.
This opened the floodgates, and the number of scourgeholds flew up and up. Frozen Swamp Stronghold, Bloodweb Stronghold, Cursed Taiga Stronghold, Ocean’s Depth Stronghold, and so forth. (One was even granted, to accusations of nepotism, to Deladora’s student and her clan: Duskroot Stronghold). Many of them failed or floundered, but there’s a certain incentive in their creation. For all that power seeks more power, splitting the wardens like this resulted in a shrinkage of administrative overhead without a commensurate shrinkage of gains. Every new scourgehold owed tax to what became known as Westhold, and Westhold retained certain exclusive executive rights as head of the federation of wardens.
It soon became apparent that too much independence was afforded to the scourgeholds: the it didn’t take long for the first inter-stronghold “trial”, between Bloodhold and Frosthold, and by then, it was too late to fix. A quirk of how scourgeholds were legally instantiated means that it’d be impossible to reel back their rights without individually convincing their overscourges to do it themselves, or dissolving the stronghold and recreating it (which is the same thing, as that independence means it’d take the overscourges consent). A scourgehold, in effect, has a copy of its parent’s legal system, and changing one doesn’t change the other.
For similar reasons, once the potential for atrocity latent in the Unbrood division became clear, little could be done; while this scourgehold or that could abolition their Unbrood, doing so left them vulnerable to the legally unaccountable ministration of neighboring scourgehold’s Unbrood.
Still, Deladora became the longest reigning overscourge, and her Westhold was the envy of every stronghold: the largest territory, the most numerous and well-trained wardens, the richest treasury. She grew old. She’d been given the gold for the purpose of dealing with the Synthia situation, but she had no successor. When offered, her students declined to take it; Uvema had her own scourgehold; Anna was busy studying under Thimithi haruspices, and Edu studied euvespid seals, and trained his own student: Alemar of Three Lakes.
In the end, Alemar didn’t have a mind for seals like their master, and though they applied insights in her own techniques, they eventually parted ways as he delved deeper into their study.
Deladora takes an interest in Alemar, and offers them a spot as her assistant. What happens next is a study in boiling the cricket: Deladora will ask for them to finish up this paperwork or that, leave them in the office while they step out for air, or because someone pulled them away, leaving them with instruction that, if this bane shows up, tell them this. This goes on for years; Deladora never asks them if they want the gold, but at some point, at least half the time Alemar might as well be the overscourge.
Not long after, Deladora retires. There has never been a smoother transition of power in the history of the heartlands.
Hatched in 1666, Alemar of Three Lakes was the first overscourge in the Westhold tradition not brood of a clan. They trained under Edu as they studied the mechanics of sealing scrolls, and that influence could be missed to the unenlightened observer of Alemar’s techniques, but it’s the principle by which they all function.
All of them were original creations, and the matter of molding an original technique is a feat of exceptional danger, easily lethal. And that’s for mundane tricks like modified melter balls, to say nothing of such esoteric effects. Alemar’s intelligence is an understated thing, but in this regard, it’s undeniable.
The first of his techniques took a form most conceptually descendent from seals: wards, the use of enervate to create a protective boundary between the users and their foe. He called it the Nerve-Stilling Ward. When active, incoming enervate technique would be stopped at the boundary, seeming independently of mass or momentum. They would remain there for a moment before fizzling out or being dispelled by Alemar themself. What’s happening here is that Alemar isn’t stopping the projectiles, they’re redirecting them. When they ‘stop’, they’re still moving, but now pointed along an orthogonal phase index, resulting in no effective spatial motion. It’s effective, because turning something is easier than stopping it.
This principle is taken further in a subsequent ward, the All-Banishing Ward works on not just enervate, but matter. Enervate can still be seen when displaced along a phase index, but matter cannot, and so upon touching this ward, projectiles seem to just disappear. At first, they would reappear, moments later, warped and aerated, but as Alemar developed the technique, they never reappeared at all. An observant Brismati could see that they were really only redirecting the projectiles unseen into the ground, but it’s an effective misdirection. There was the first overscourge, famous for her ability to create something from nothing, and now the fourth overscourge can turn something into nothing.
But a few clever wards does not an scourge make. There were destructive applications: most famously, the Vortex Maw, a chaotic dynamo of enervate like a saw or whirlwind, costly, yet capable of rending anything, leaving even thick armor look like wet paint swirled on a canvas. This was refined into Soul Sunder, a blade-like construct which could slash an internal artery or brainstem, unresisted by any armor, seeming to go under the normal defenses a bane has against internal nerve forces.
Theion was an idealist outside of her element; Immolata, for good or ill, was a tyrant; Deladora, by contrast, eased off the dictatorial control an overscourge exercises — but Alemar was downright progressive. They instated a cabinet of democratically elected advisers with veto power; they were the first overscourge to create a maverick program; they established a minimum age, before which inculcatoria recruitment was banned; and peeled back some of the benefits the clans had accrued under Deladora. Those highly tuned into stronghold politics might hold strong opinions on these matters, but admittedly they are fairly into the weeds of policy. Much more visible was a growing issue throughout the heartlands.
You see, Synthia had surrendered and ceased hostilities. Her followers had not. She’d stirred up a hate movement, bigots made anxious at the existence of the laybrood and the wingless. Whatever byzantine agenda animated her may have contented her to hole up inside the impenetrable darkness of the Shadow Court Stronghold, but those she’d used in the war were left baying for blood.
And thus, like a cancer metastacizing, the Kult of Kaos emerged.
Their crimes and doctrines need not be described in detail; the reader’s imagination suffices. Alemar openly condemned the Kult, which fed into the reactionary backlash their policies were creating. Tensions were mounting, and simultaneously, something curious was happening.
History had marched on; the era of the Great Westhold Triumvirate, who had led many successful, high-profile missions after their christening at battle of Shadow Court, seemed to quietly come to an end. Uvema, after some months of growing inexplicably ill, disappears from Duskroot. Days latter, with her entrails everted as if the vespers had been ripped right out, her corpse is returned by Anna, and prepared for the Asetari’s burial practices. Edu, alongside the wingless ex-percipient Autumnchild Rooka, is expelled from Westhold, and his file remains classified. Anna’s shattered harusign is discovered while she herself never is, looking to all appearances to have deserted for reasons inscrutable.
By the 1690s, the Pantheca, Westhold in particular, was sorely lacking for heroes to inspire. Alemar, perhaps, was shaping up to fill that role. Or perhaps his students could have: there were publications, commenting on the doings of vesperbanes like the plays and counter-plays of some sports game, which argued Hela Haze, Asetari Mewla, and Thimithi Theta had the makings of the second coming of the Triumvirate.
Things go wrong when Alemar catches a young scion of clan Ichneumon, recruited into the Kult and inspired to commit some heinous act of hate. Alemar walks away from the scene with droplets of hemolyph and chitin-chunks dripping from his overscourge robes, splashed from the Vortex Maw piercing their eyes.
Word gets out to the syndics, and with unusual haste, they launch in inquiry into the affair. With byzantine legal arguments, the syndics conclude the Alemar’s politically motivated extrajudicial execution of a warden in good standing is grounds for a vote of no confidence. More than they, they decide Alemar’s judgment is too compromised; a mad overscourge is a threat to everyone, and a motion for execution passes.
What was Alemar to do? The laws of the Pantheca had been adhered to to the letter. Were they to resist, they would be a defector at best, an antiscourge at worst. Unfortunate, disappointing — but perhaps they had been too hasty, perhaps their judgment was clouded.
Many inculcatoria Panthecan history courses, either due to time constraints or the age of their textbooks, tend to mostly cover the founding of the Pantheca and the first two grand trials, and perhaps the founding of some major scourgeholds. If you asked a bane off the street how many overscourges Westhold ever had, a number of them might say just four.
It may be a surprise, then, that the correct answer is five, with an asterisk.
In 1698, Hela Haze was recognized as Alemar’s successor and the fifth overscourge of the Midwestern Stronghold.
The relevant documents have been destroyed. It’s unknown if it was by Hela Haze, to cover up a lie, or by his opponents, to cast doubt. But it’s noteworthy that he ascended after the unprecedented execution of a perching overscourge — not, one would think, a time when procedures are likely to be loosely followed.
As if to send a message, one of the first things Hela Haze does as overscourge is try and execute several Kultists. Previous overscourges of Westhold have by and large, had some crusade that defined their term — Theion brought victory in the first grand trial; Immolata incorporated the eastern heartlands; Deladora concluded the second grand trial. Alemar, a consequence, perhaps, of Deladora’s strategically constructed peace, lacked that animus. Hela Haze, by contrast, looked to be an immediate correction.
The injustice of the Alemar affair defined his rule. Some, observing the contradictory swiftness yet tenuousness of the investigation and verdict, speculate that there may been some ulterior motivation behind the execution of Alemar. Hela didn’t suspect it: he asserted it. The syndics are all corrupt, he said. The Kult has infiltrated the councils; they need to be purged.
There’s some confusion on this next point. Confusion, and deliberate misinformation. Many are under the misapprehension that the Heaven Slayers were a terrorist insurgency of some stripe, renegade actors. It is true, after a fashion — certainly in the modern day, the heaven slayers are outlawed in most strongholds. But some extrapolate that backwards, map the third grand trial onto the much easier to parse second grand trial, and think the Heaven Slayers some militant uprising, only pro-wingless this time, rather than anti-.
Others, equally misinforned, assert the same by way of the opposite: that while falsely recognized as overscourge, Hela Haze created the Heaven Slayers as official branch of the Westhold Unbrood, and all of their activities were stronghold-sanctioned.
On the books, the Heaven Slayers were a maverick organization. It would be foolish for the overscourge to directly go after Kult after what happened to Alemar. Hela was brazen, but not to walk directly into that trap. (He walked indirectly into it, rather.)
The Heaven Slayers were, without a doubt, exceptionally powerful vesperbanes. At their helm were the so-called great knights. Every Heaven Slayer was masked for their protection, known only under pseudonyms, titles like the Melancholy Beast or the Boneknight. The Ash Prophet was an ashbane whose could absorb projectiles with one flame and have them emerge from another, seemingly without crossing the distance; some sources claim to have seen them step into one flame and step out of another (yet teleportation is known to be impossible). The Dualist, courtesy of modifications due to the Nouchiurgeon, was one body able to split bodily in half, each half able to fight and cast techniques independently. The Nouchiurgeon did the impossible; despite the umbracerebral reaction which prevents ichor metaplasia from acting on brains, the Nouchiurgeon was a hemotechnic able to perform brain surgery.
Leading them all was Phantom Chain, who wielded the titular weapons. Like teleportation, ethereality is intractable to the point of impossibility. And the Phantom Chain, make no mistake, was quite solid — despite this, his chains were able to be thrown through walls and solid obstacles; he could retract them at high speed, and by throwing up a momentary ward, could ride them to slip through walls. The walls were evidently damaged by his passing, and a thick and heavy enough obstacle stopped him, yet it was a perplexing mystery.
Less perplexing, of course, when his identity — and that of his teacher — was revealed.
The Heaven Slayers, ostensibly acting independently of the Westhold wardens, went to war with the Kult, cutting the members down in their hideouts. Nonmembers weren’t spared: syndics suspected of colluding with the Kult were assassinated, something all of the great knights’ skills lended themselves quite well to.
Hela Haze, early into his reign, enjoyed an upswell of popular support: there was utter outrage at the idea of a syndic overreaching into vesperbane matters, and his crusade against them had their backing.
But the reactionary undercurrent that fueled the rise of the Kult didn’t go anywhere. Worse, other scourgeholds smelled blood in the water. No one since Synthia has yet been bold enough to try outright war against the Midwestern Stronghold. Instead, the war is first conducted with propaganda. Comparisons are drawn between Hela’s crackdown on the Kult and Immolata’s anti-clan tyranny; suggestions are made that the Hela lied about Alemar’s appointment, and has no legitimacy. Soon duped banes of principle are resisting alongside the cult, crying oppression.
By the time it’s revealed that Phantom Chain is none other than Hela Haze himself, the situation boils over into an outright civil war. By then, the scourgeholds like Bloodweb or Mountain’s Crown backing the Kult become directly financial, and soon there’s boots on the ground, and this can properly be called the third grand trial.
Whether Hela is the hero or the villain of the trial, what’s unclear is who stands against him: the Kult is by nature decentralized, amorphous. Undercover operatives have concluded there’s definitely bugs higher up pulling the strings, but it’s unclear who.
A suggestion goes around, soon repeated with greater and greater insistence: a cry to the last of the Great Westhold Triumvirate to step in and decide this conflict. Edu had always been studiously apolitical; still, the Kult seems quite insistent that Edu would agree with them, and bring them victory.
It’s not clear they’d need it. No matter how powerful the great knights might be, Westhold is split down the middle, and enemies encroach from all sides. It’s a short grand trial, by comparison with the second. By late 1604, the Kult lays seige to the Three Lakes Stronghold, the adminstrative center of Westhold.
Out of desperation, it’s then that Hela Haze reaches out to Edu, promising to forgive whatever it was that Alemar expelled him for, if only he’d return now and defend Westhold in its hour need.
Miraculously, he listens. Edu arrives in the middle of the siege, taking a slow stroll along the road to the gate, forcing it out with a momentary activation of one seal, and approaching the citadel without quickening his pace. Neither the siegers nor the defenders are brave enough to stop him, or even ask whose side he’s arrived for.
Edu enters the citadel where the Heaven Slayers and remaining loyal wardens await.
There’s no consensus on why what happens next happens.
There’s a fight — a big one, between the great knights and Edu. The citadel is half-destroyed, and then the fighting stops.
Edu walks back out, another easy stroll.
He only says one thing to the siegers as he leaves.
“I haven’t fought like that since Shadow Court.”
And then he’s gone.
The siege ends, and the attackers flee.
The war is quiet for some time, then, as the Kult reconsiders their plans, and the Heaven Slayers catch their breath.
And then Hela surrenders.
Not to the Kult — that would be wholly out of character — but he steps down as overscourge, and there’s only one bane left who can validly take the position. He pleads for Deladora to come out of retirement.
The Brismati is weary of leadership (she retired for a reason), but she guessed it’d be unfortunate for her legacy if Westhold implodes.
Kult and Slayers alike are classified under a new designation as terrorist organizations. While many of the Heaven Slayers — those who can’t simply discard their mask and return to normality — scatter to the wind, escaping to other holds or disappearing outright, such an option is unavailable to Hela. He escapes execution at Deladora’s will, and instead is confined to a prison long ago designed by Edu, secured by seals. As they’re captured, other knights like the Nouchiurgeon (a.k.a. Autumnchild Rooka) and the Ash Prophet (a.k.a Thimithi Theta) are likewise imprisoned.
All of this, however, is handled by other strongholds. Because, once the fighting simmers down and this is no longer a crisis tearing at her graying hairs, Deladora makes her last act as overscourge — the last act of any Westhold overscourge, in fact.
The Midwestern Stronghold is dissolved, effectively immediately.
Deladora does what she did best: splitting things up. Westhold’s holdings were divided in two. The northern half became the Three Lakes stronghold, granted to the fraction of Hela Haze’s opposition that weren’t found as defectors, scourge to be appointed by syndics; the sourthern half became the Windborne Stronghold, led by moderates and less extreme Hela Haze supporters.
Both strongholds had inherited the expulsion of Edu, and neither stronghold moves to rescind it.
Deladora returns to retirement. Not long after, she’s found dead, signs of a struggle.
Quietly, Edu’s status is updated from the bespoke ‘expulsion’ condition, to ‘defector’. His file remains classified.
Snuggly Serials 