The Rise of True Rectitude Revisited

[Ibn Khaldun 7729]

 

 

The Rise of True Rectitude

The Birth of the Teutonic Order

Ve Zantek i ve Hauchvojshka Teutonik [trans. New Marian]

The Genesis of Mankind's Military Prowess

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅗𝅥𝅘𝅥𝅯𝅘𝅥𝅮

 

 

Quote

"If you fell upon his armies on a moonless night, they seemed like silhouettes with a faint contrast of black and white. The black crosses stitched into their tabards would be the only visible signs of his army before close engagement. If you fell upon his armies during an illuminated night, his men appeared like specters marching in haunting waves. What would cause men, women, & children to recoil wasn't so much the sight, but the sound of them. The Sariants earned their infamy with the foreboding chants and prayers they would recite in unison as they marched."

- Ezekiel Tarus, of the Kingdom of Oren after the division of the Land of Men between Oren & Hanseti.

 

 

History in some ways can be considered cyclical, repetitive even, and in no way is this more apparent than in the manners by which peoples form themselves into cohesive polities, into distinct tribes and groups. No one form of government or of organization is truly unique and in some instance of the near or distant past; there were others who had same such forms of organizing themselves. Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs have all contended with banding together whether by some common goal or, at the very least, that they may preserve lineage and guard themselves and their homes.

 

One such form of banding together is that of the knightly order. This particular conception of organization usually requires a held set of values that all organizing themselves willingly concede are worthwhile in forming their worldview and giving them the lenses through which they viewed themselves and their neighbors. There have been many knightly orders throughout history dating as far back as Aegis. This particular work narrates the genesis of the first of the knightly orders; the birth of the Teutonic Order. The Hochmeister Gaius Marius is identified as the progenitor of this knightly order, but he is not alone in contributing to both the philosophy of the Order nor was his labor alone to credit for the awesome success of those most dreaded Black Crosses whose legend is now inscribed in the histories kept in wondrous libraries across the lands.

 

Herein will be narrations, descriptions, letters, and stories compiled from various Sariants ("knights" in Old Marian) that illuminate both the causes for the founding of the Teutonic Order and those major events that left indelible impressions on the early history of the Order.

 

 

Out-of-Character Note: This is an attempt to revisit and improve upon my first long-form story when I first joined the server here. I hope you will enjoy.

[TreeSmoothie 4903]

Hell yeah!!! I was just looking at that yesterday. DeNurems are still kicking (kind of) (i'm the only one that plays,,)

Mirtok made a doc of Old Marian, if you'd like it

[Ibn Khaldun 7729]

56 minutes ago, TreeSmoothie said:

Hell yeah!!! I was just looking at that yesterday. DeNurems are still kicking (kind of) (i'm the only one that plays,,)

Mirtok made a doc of Old Marian, if you'd like it

 

I'd greatly appreciate it if you could send me that document. My Discord is gaiusmarius8#0788. Much obliged and I'd love to incorporate it somehow in what I'll be writing in this thread!

[Ibn Khaldun 7729]

  

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅗𝅥𝅘𝅥𝅯𝅘𝅥𝅮

 

 

Quote

"The homesteads of the north and of the east were few and far-between compared to the central plains surrounding the Perea's capitol with little in the way of town and keep. Whereas the centre and the southeron lands past Al'Khazaar had more than enough people close enough to put up a defense against the Undead, the north and eastern hinterlands were mere scattered cornstalks that the necromancers could graze their thralls on once when living and again after the stalks were chewed."

- Sariant Glylith Erikrr, of the Kingdom of Oren after the division of the Land of Men between Oren & Hanseti.

 

 

Both men drew their breath and held it tightly in their chests. They craned their necks to look to each other with awestruck glances and pursed lips, trying with only the expressions they wore on their faces to reassure one another of the import of silence. They looked on from their quiet trench in the side of a snow-packed glen to find jittering forms whose jerky movement made sounds eerily resembling the clash of bone between feuding rams. The forms marched in a disarrayed line behind a robed figure. The figure looked this way and that, the opening of its hood made apparent by the face half gone with frostbite that became visible each time the figure turned to look in the general direction of the dug-in spies. Despite the flesh that was missing from bone and tendon, the figure's motion seemed more similar to that of an energetic youth than that of an infirm or what one might expect be affected by rigor mortis.

 

Bone scrapped against bone as the forms launched themselves like hounds sicced on prey towards the far end of the glen away from the scouts. The two men ached from the tension that shuddered through their whole bodies at the sudden motion. They watched as the forms closed against a small sortie emerging at the mouth of the small valley and found the figure ordering them in foreign tongues and orchestrating with outstretched fingers where lightning bolts would strike down from darkening clouds above. The ensuing thunderclaps accompanying the lightning provided the necessary noise for the scouts to shuffle from their hiding places and climb over the ridge away from the ensuing fight. They dashed away with eyes swollen with both surprise and stressful fear.

 

The two men turned for a brief moment as cries meant to distill courage among soldiers only instilled forlorn in the fleeing scouts. Send them far from our Snowy Fields!

[Ibn Khaldun 7729]

 

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅗𝅥𝅘𝅥𝅯𝅘𝅥𝅮

 

 

Quote

"The Order of the Sariants emerged, most unlikely, from a land ravaged by the Undead. The spirit of their defense and the ingenuity of their tactics were bred on the very ranches made by the thralls of the necromancers. The earliest members some of the most disgruntled with the Kingdom of Man whose head was Perea and who wore the crown of Al'Khazaar. The Kingdom gave little attention to this particular frontier and let many a minor lordling or jarl scaffold little keeps from which they competed for the dwindling population and the attentions of any daring soul who saw industrious potential in the ore-rich mountains and timbered hillsides."

- Samuel Bealcrest, ruling shortly as the Jarl of Sargoth in Aegis before eventually becoming Ordenmarschall and later the 2nd Hochmeister of the Teutonic Order.

 

 

 

Take mine own words to heart!

Every ravine and glen, every hillock and mount, will be scoured by the bone brush

This scouring will be done by a woman whose vacuous eyes looks for anything lush

Resembling life, thinking to herself to extinguish that lively glint in our eyes

She comes with a cohort of thralls that combs us apart like hairs with her lies

Every jarl and lordling in the land are bent over chessboards heedless of their cries

They knock over their enemy's pieces thinking highly of himself

Unwary, or dare I say uncaring, for that woman who takes souls

The passion in their hearts are little more than air-starved coals

They attend more to the matter of their diminishing wealth

Than to the lives that live cordoned off behind their wooden palisades

Little regard given to the woman ordering her thralls to commit raids

Set aside that oath that, though you may have given it in conviction

Has stirred little in the heart of the jarl for your safety and regard

We must leap the palisade walls and band together in order to guard

Our own lives and lineages lest the woman gives us a foul resurrection!

- Gaius Marius of the Snowy Fields

 

The above document authored by the eventual Hochmeister Gaius Marius, often referred to as The Lament of the Lands Far North, had been published and disseminated throughout the northern and eastern frontiers of the Realm of Man. The poem illustrated the twin frustrations of the young Marius who, at the time of dissemination, served as a hedge knight with the Knights of the Flame: his frustration with the Undead's successes in killing and resurrecting frontiersmen and women and his frustration with the small polities and petty kingdoms that constantly rose and waned during his youth. His initial writings did not reveal his own consternation with the very hedge knights he rode with. Little did Rytto, headmaster of the Knights of the Flame know, but Marius planned to mutiny with a great score of Rytto's forces.

 

The omissions of certain feelings and certain developments from his public writings underscored Marius' preference for secrecy. Early on, Marius befriended a Farfolk man by the name of Kai Len-ri who he would employ as a covert agent to venture into the heart of the Kingdom of Man and keep him informed on the going-ons in the capital Al'Khazaar. He urged Kai to be particularly observant of any civil unrest related to the circumstances of the frontier and whether the monarchy had any interests in sending military support to the north and east.

[Ibn Khaldun 7729]

  

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅗𝅥𝅘𝅥𝅯𝅘𝅥𝅮

 

 

Quote

"The first fortress of the Teutonic Order took its name from the hill we built it upon; the great hill of Nurem. Nurem had been defiled by a necromancer's holdfast called Hanar that Marius and his earliest partisans pulled apart stone by stone. It was there that Marius and his partisans mutinied against Rytto and it was there that the hedge knights sought something different, something more fulfilling than mere counting coins from petty courts for Undead heads dumped in their halls."

- Sariant Alizyn after the mutiny within the ranks of the Knights of the Flame.

 

Warriors dressed in chainmail laid in repose along a slope whose black surface seemed as smooth and seamless as the twilight following the dusk overhead; whose stone seemed to drink the shadows cast by both obelisks and timbers that ringed the surroundings of the holdfast which the men inspected. Gnarled roots seemed to grip the obsidian and blackstone of the construction as if trying to pull its piercing sharp form out from the earth it appeared to embed. The bulwark made an unsettling sight and elicited concern and curiosity for months now with some tales told of legions of thralls cobbling together extensions to its halls and defenses and ferrying prisoners to be sacrificed to some daemonic entity. A multitude of entryways seemed to stare back at the warriors, a lidless and dark gaze tunneled into the blackstone though nothing stirred from within any of the entrances in response to what stirred from without.

 

"Rytto, you mustn't cast us forth with no sense of what marches within or how many," one hedge knight pleaded.

 

"Let us merely lay in wait and get some number to return with as to an estimate of forces therein!" another urged.

 

Rytto, at the head of the group laying with a cloak drawn around him the color of moss green, looked on without a response. Marius slid himself until he brushed against Rytto's shoulder. Nothing save for empty darkness could be seen from any of the entrances that peppered the eldritch holdfast whose stone seemed oiled with tar and ready to be lit aflame. The warriors occupied a small ravine opposite the bulwark which sat on a great hill named Nurem. They came by word of wayfarer gossip. The great hill of Nurem stood surrounded by a forested mountain ridge northeast of the town of Galahar; the furthest town in the east in the Realm of Man.

 

The warriors belonged to a group of hedge knights calling themselves the Knights of the Flame. Though they took on the name knight, little resemblance did they have in dress nor did they carry themselves in any virtuous manner. The group struck out together with some guided by a sense of adventure, others with the hope of accruing wealth by dispatching Undead on behalf of the towns and villages littering the frontier, and yet some rode with the hedge knights after losing hearth and village to the Undead. Marius belonged to that latter-most group having lost his cabin in some nondescript woods to a fiery strike of lightning incidentally loosened when necromancers visited a village near his home.

 

Rytto stood up slowly and began to make his way up the slopes and steps onto the bulwark proper. Hesitation, stumbling, and nervous coughs followed as others slowly stood from hiding and made their way forward. Marius kept to Rytto's side, but craned his neck to check the many entryways that they slowly approached. The closer they got, the more the bulwark's stones seemed to drink away at what light they could use to determine what lied ahead. One knight cuffed Marius on the back of his neck and directed him to look upward. Clouds began to gather and swell, taking on a darker green hue that foreshadowed hail. The hedge knights picked up their speed and chose one entrance in particular to advance to.

 

The banter of meaty mandibles mocking the warriors echoed indiscriminately from the various entrances into the holdfast. The clatter of bones foretold thralls sallying out to meet the hedge knights. Rytto brought his longsword forward between himself and the nearest of the sallying forces with Marius close behind him bearing down with his zweihander. The sallying Undead, though numerous, lacked the vigor to push back the living warriors in a charge and many of the hedge knights behind Rytto and Marius formed a shield wall that they invited the two to fall back behind. The latter kept a hand on the shoulder of the former as they both retreated and pressed against the soldiers packing themselves into a close formation.

 

"We cannot fight like this on an open field for long, where there are thralls, surely the master is quick to follow!" Marius argued, looking to Rytto for his decision.

 

"I'll be the one to tell these men to break formation, mind your sword," Rytto rebuked.

 

The streams of Undead from the many entrances dwindled, the mass of thralls unwittingly throwing themselves against the shieldwall with little effect. Warrior after warrior took heart with each spear thrust and sword swipe that plied away bone from bone, flesh from flesh, and hollered with satisfaction as body after body fell back in inert stillness. Marius and Rytto took turns cleaving away from behind the shield wall, turning to their respective sides to assist against any flanking that the thralls managed by sheer numbers pouring around the edges of their formation.

 

The clouds overhead ballooned upwards into an anvil; lightning coursing from the heavens through the clouds and down against the earth beneath. Men cried out as electricity jolted through bodies and conducted through the metal of their armor. The formation broke as men fell down amidst clouds of smoke carrying the smell of charred flesh and the wisps billowed by convulsing arms and legs excited by the lightning. The melee devolved from an orderly affair to a conundrum where warriors picked duels with the remaining thralls like battles of old. Rytto broke from the mass of men and necromantic churls and rushed towards a lone necromancer who recoiled back into one of the pine copses adjacent to the holdfast.

 

Marius pursued Rytto and his quarry until they both came beneath the pine trees. The necromancer directed lightning towards them, but the trees overhead broke the bolt's trajectory and burst apart in a shower of burning wood and needles-turned-embers. The two danced to opposite sides of the necromancer and quickly cut him down; Marius taking a couple of steps forward to engage with his new opponent. Rytto stumbled back as the zweihander's heavy blade rebuffed his own longsword raised in defense. The two dueled beneath the burning canopy of pines while the other hedge knights recovered in a distance from their own melee with the Undead peons.

 

"Aid me you fools!" Rytto cried out as his blade's edge blunted against Marius' zweihander strokes. None of the soldiers came to his aid though many of them watched with bated breath and anticipation. The duel shortly came to a close after Marius brought his zweihander from a deflecting parry and bore the blade down like a spear into Rytto's hip. Marius wrestled against Rytto's dying spasms and wrestled him to the ground. The other hedge knights gathered closer with many of them letting out sighs of relief.

 

"We ought to gather the dead and pull apart this baneful bulwark, aye Gaius?"