Chronicles of Nentsun
CHAPTER TWO: WARCHILD
by Giulio CarolettiThe situation of Nentsun around 130 AC was not very different from that of the last two centuries. Some cities had fallen, some new had risen, kings had died, and skirmishes had been fought. But in the northern lands of the Inner Circle, the Kingdom of Vixen was prosperous and rich.
The aristocratic families of the Inner Circle held the positions of Masters of the Divine School of the Bear, but with the passing of time, they had become less and less involved with the religious duties, that involved actively the worship of Nentsun and Simurgh, and had begun to ignore the meditations and practices needed to control the engines.
After some time, the radiation problem that had revealed itself in the previous millennium, manifested itself again. However, one of the Masters, who was, contrary to the traditions of the school also a cleric of Simurgh, received a visit from the Immortal. The Roc God told him that he had already seen two cycles of life destroyed in Nentsun (Great Rain of Fire, Rakshasa invasion): due to the Masters' incompetence, another cataclysm was imminent. To avoid this, Simurgh gave the only true Master, known as Kashang, one of his claws. This is the origin of the artifact known as "Claw of the Invincible Simurgh".
The Claw helped the Master in controlling alone the radiations.
Disgusted by the incompetence of the aristocrats, Kashang, Baron of Wolven, raised an army of Outer Circle mercenaries, and conquered the Kingdom of Vixen. Paying his mercenaries with lands and titles, Kashang reunified several kingdoms, and re-organized the engine control, creating another school of fighting, the Sacred School of Nentsun, to help the efforts of the Divine School of the Bear. He decided how to find the new members of the schools, and separated the link between aristocracy and heads of the schools. He told the population that the reasons for the prosperity of the land were the dangerous engines, that he called "Unholy Devices of Blekmur, things who caused the first destruction of an Empire in Nentsun" (this has caused the wrong belief, among the Nentsunians, that the Nentsun culture is directly descending from "Blekmur") (135 AC).
For a long time, it seemed that life would go on as it always had. The Kingdom of Wolven was a new reality that guaranteed stability in the region. The Wolven family didn't accept changes to the status quo, intervening any time a local skirmish threatened the peace in the region. However, these interventions became, with the passing of time, more and more oppressive, and the smaller nations begun to fear for their independence. The last straw was the intervention of King Rikyudy Wolven in the rakastan city of Zeshuita, where a Wolvenian diplomat had died, apparently for heart attack. Rikyudy, who hoped to intervene in the region, where a silver mine had recently been discovered, told the city to surrender to him, pretending that the diplomat had been killed.
Surprisingly, the city refused: the king of Wolven, enraged, put the city under siege. After three months of siege, he conquered it and had all the men and male children killed, and the women and females were sent to work in the silver mines. The city was burnt to ashes. Many other states, enraged by the brutal conclusion of the siege, declared war to Wolven (374 AC).
Death, war, famine, destruction, all were spread through the land. The Masters hid, to remain able to control the engines, and assured the survival of the country, but petty kings, warlords and brigand leaders fought each other through forty long years, until a man, who called himself Warchild (apparently he was born in 374, in Vixen, the day the war was declared) was able to stabilise the situation and re-organized (again!) the situation. This time, kingdoms of the Outer Circle were involved. Hoping to solve the problem with the creation of bigger states, he created a sort of theocratic Confederation, forming 12 states over the entire Nentsun region, and putting an end to the recognition of two Circles in Nentsun (411 AC).
To lead each kingdom he put the heads of the clerical orders who worshipped the 12 Immortals of the Nentsunian Pantheon. He proclaimed himself united war leader of the country, but divided the army in twelve groups, not directly linked to the territories: a general had control over divisions spread in more than one kingdom, so when he was dead, no general could take his position to try to gain the crown. The Silver Crown, symbol of the royal power of the Wolven kings, who had been the leaders of the land in the last centuries, was melted by the clerics of the Order of Fire (followers of Fire, an aspect of Rathanos). The Masters of the fighting schools had definitely lost any political power in this period, and in 453 AC the clerical leaders created a law that forbid any land owning noble family to have any of their member in the schools.