Nectorist

THE HISTORIA PERTINAXI: Volume IV;

Aurelius’s Final Crusade

Written by Justinian Nafis, Count of Susa

and

Adolphus Gloriana, Earl of Suffolk, Prince of Sutica

 

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Aurelius’s Final Crusade

"This war felt different. It wasn’t like the other wars, where it was for one lord’s inheritance or another’s plot of land. It was for something bigger, like what I’d hear about from my grandfather. ”  - A Curonian crossbowman in the service of Aurelius’ Legion during the Third Atlas Coalition War, c. 1693

 

In a letter written to his cousin, Margrave Mariusz of Styria, in 1685, Aurelius believed that he “[had] reached the peak of the mountain long ago. This descent is gradual, but the bottom is near.” 

 

The words were far from those of the authoritative, confident, armor-clad Emperor whose stone face could be found in every square across the realm. It was the embrace of inevitable death from an eighty-two year old man who had seen the lives of hundreds of friends and foes go by before him from beginning to end. His wife, his three sons, Leitseig Romstun, Arpad Ivanovich, Frederick Pius, Eimar var Burgundar, all of the Mardon Emperors, Sir Konrad Nzech, John Sarkozic, Adelard von Brandt, Jevan Ruric, King Sigmar of Haense, and many more who had played more or less prominent roles in his life were now dead. His first time in combat against the armies of Emperor Peter II seemed like ages ago, and it was, but so too did more recent wars: against Haense, against Curon, against Ostmark, and against Norland. With poor records to go back and refresh his memory from, all seemed to blend together in his mind.

 

In preparation for his death, Aurelius began to withdraw from his direct style of governance as he conferred more duties upon Prince Augustus. He was frequently absent from the capital, trading his power there for peace and serenity in his country palaces. He remained aware of all that was occurring in the realm by maintaining a strong flow of communication from Carolustadt, but in his advanced age he looked to spend the few remaining years he had left tending to his gardens and designing a small, constructed lake that he could fish salmon from. For a few years this remained the case, and as the Empire entered the lull of peace, the aged Pertinaxi could feel content with his accomplishments and be proud that he would leave a stable, calm realm for his grandson to inherit.

 

Unfortunately, one final challenge would come to test the old Emperor. While he may have believed that he had built a state impervious to challenge, inside or out, the truth was that it was him, not any institutions, not even the Imperial Legion, that had prevented significant challenges to the throne. It was benevolent in some regards: taxes were low and vassals could keep to their own affairs. In other regards, it was oppressive: soldiers of the Legion were allowed to take and plunder without consequence and any perceived dissent was met with intimidation, exile, or death. Aurelius was one of the few who could manage this tenuous balance, which was found out so disastrously in his later years.

 

For the men of Nordengrad, Earl Thoromir’s fealty to Aurelius was a great stain of honor that no method of rule by Renatus, benevolent nor oppressive, would be sufficient in earning anything but their contempt and rebellious spirit. In 1687, a disgruntled band of clansmen confronted the earl in their city’s square over his permittance of Imperial patrols to enter his lands. What occurred next is disputed- either the crowd slew Earl Thoromir by throwing rocks at him or one of their number challenged him to a duel, which he accepted, only to hit his head on a rock and perish during it- but no matter what truly happened, the result was that Torsten Ruric, one of Earl Thoromir’s more prominent critics, took control of Nordengrad with his clansmen.

 

Torsten Ruric made professions of loyalty to the court in Carolustadt, but he moved with the intent to rise against the Empire. He quietly arranged treaties with the dwarves of Kaz’Ulrah and the tribes of Krugmar, both of whom had grown tired of the Empire’s favoritism of the elves. He also made ties with other dissenting forces across the Empire, but none were so large or influential as the tribes of Arberrang, a desolate, primitive people in the south who, while nominally subjects of the King of Haense, as they lived only miles from the capital, were said to practice dark sorcery and conduct human sacrifice. No specific plans were made for a general revolt, but all expressed a mutual interest in resisting the power of the Pertinaxi.

 

It was in Arberrang where the war erupted on the 3rd of Harren’s Folly, 1689. During a visit for a feast, Torsten Ruric, accompanied by his house guard, ambushed a Haeseni patrol just outside of the feast hall of the chief of Arberrang. It was said that the patrol had been harassing the locals and, wanting to demonstrate his loyalty to his new allies, the Earl of Nordengrad slew this company almost to a man. The few survivors straggled back to Markev, where they warned King Robert of the attack. An alarm was raised, and word was sent to a nearby Imperial patrol.

 

Torsten Ruric, realizing his mistake, both in rashly attacking the Haeseni company and leaving survivors, attempted to rectify the situation by riding to Markev with his house guard and some warriors from Arberrang to assault the city. Despite a lack of siege weapons, and numbering no more than two thousand men, Torsten and his soldiers were able to take advantage of a ruined section of Markev’s walls to enter the city, where they began to slaughter denizens by the hundreds. Just as they were about to enter the royal palace, where King Robert was under guard with his soldiers, the Imperial patrol arrived. Led by Prince Cassius Horen, they met Torsten’s forces in the city streets and quickly put them to flight. Markev, House Barbanov, and possibly the whole of the southern Empire, had been saved.

 

As important as this inciting engagement was to Haense, it was just as important to Aurelius, who received word of it weeks later. In one of his spring palaces at the time, he immediately raced back to Carolustadt to raise a new army and summon his vassals and allies. He recalled Prince Cassius back to the capital to lead the Imperial Legion and began making war plans to put down the revolts in Arberrang and Nordengrad. Over the next few days, news of other, less successful, uprisings came from all corners of the Empire. A mutiny by the town watch in White Peak was put down by the governor there. A group of Reivers had tried to arm the peasants in Styria, but were driven off by Margrave Mariusz. Officials in Santegia had preemptively arrested several Norlanders in Presa de Madera who were attending “furtive gatherings”. The many chiefs and jarls of Norland proper, still in Imperial control, had gathered to discuss joining with Torsten Ruric, but chose to remain loyal to Aurelius because of Torsten’s poor lineage and marriage to the daughter of a fisherman.

 

Aurelius’s choice to name Prince Cassius as the Marshal of the Imperial Legion would be the start of the legend of the last hero of his reign. The eldest son of Prince Tiberius, it was said by those who knew him that the young prince carried the best traits of his late father and his late uncle Antonius. Young at the time of his ascension, having been born in 1671, Prince Cassius was mostly unproven, but he commanded an unwavering loyalty in the men he read, was one of the Empire’s finer swordsmen, and was well-read on strategy. When he arrived in the capital a few weeks after his victory at Markev, he did not carry himself as a meek, inexperienced boy of seventeen, but as a seasoned general. In a short time, ranging from one to two months, he had raised an army of eight thousand that was steadily being reinforced by soldiers from Adria, Santegia, Styria, Curon, Ostmark, Norland, and the many hundreds of other smaller vassals across the Empire. Haense sent a small contingent, but under orders from the Emperor, they devoted most of their forces to defending the south against the tribes of Arberrang, bolstered by mercenaries hired from the snow elves.

 

As the Emperor and his grandson hastily assembled their army in the Heartlands, Torsten Ruric and his house guards returned to Nordengrad. Understanding the gravity of what he had just done, and what was about to be brought upon him, the Earl of Nordengrad held a ramshackle coronation to have himself named King of Norland. He called upon the people of the city, and the petty clans outside of it, to join him in his defense of the north and drive back Aurelius. Kaz’Ulrah and Krugmar soon made good on their support and sent armies to reinforce Nordengrad while committing the bulk of their forces against the elves, whose realms they invaded from east and south. 

 

While Torsten concentrated his strength at the Krag, a fortress near Nordengrad that was named after the fearsome Axionite castle, though only a third as deadly, Aurelius and Prince Cassius raced their army north. With Haense and the elves pressed, but holding firm, defeating the rebellious Norlanders would remove the most immediate threat and allow the Legion to relieve its allies. The hastily-assembled army, numbering anywhere from fifteen to twenty thousand, arrived on the outskirts of Nordengrad on the 5th of Owyn’s Flame, 1689. Fortunately for the Imperials, the rebel Torsten, an inexperienced commander, had divided his host of twelve thousand between the Krag and Nordengrad with the aim of securing both. Prince Cassius drew up a light defense around Nordengrad to bottle the soldiers there in while he turned the rest of the army towards the Krag, where the self-proclaimed King of Norland was with his soldiers.

 

The siege continued for several weeks, most of it devoted to the construction of several great belfries that stood higher than the tallest buildings in Nordengrad. They were of Prince Cassius’s own design, and over the course of several assaults they proved quite effective. While the first three attacks against the walls were repulsed with some losses, the fourth, on the 19th of Tobias’s Bounty, gained a foothold. As the Marshal of the Legion held the line, thousands of Imperial and allied soldiers climbed the towers and made their way atop the ramparts of the Krag. The fighting there was fierce and brutal, but by nightfall the fortress was taken and Torsten Ruric was captured. Not wishing to lose more soldiers in a siege of Nordengrad, Aurelius had Torsten dragged before the gates of the capital in full gaze of his subjects, who promptly lost their will to fight and threw open the gates for the Legion. In less than a year, Torsten’s rebellion had been put down.

 

In conquering Nordengrad and the Krag quickly, Aurelius had parried the most dangerous threat to the realm, but Torsten Ruric’s allies did not surrender, though they did retreat. After a few weeks of rest, the Emperor and his grandson marched north to the orcish badlands, where they united with the elves and began the brutal conquest of the country. Several villages and forts were burned with little resistance, but the dry, inhospitable climate made occupation a slow process. Hundreds died, not of orcish steel, but of parched throats and scorpion stings, but Aurelius, determined to bring a quick end to the war, pressed his army on. Eventually they surrounded the central stronghold of the Rex, a cruel, misshapen hill fort called San’Kala. After a siege of four months, the orcs finally capitulated on the 30th of Owyn’s Flame, 1690, and their lands were given to the elves in exchange for their lives.

 

Having quickly defeated Nordengrad and the orcs without too serious a loss of life, the Emperor felt comfortable enough to divide his army. He took the bulk of his forces, ten thousand, to besiege the dwarven city of Kal’Tarak, which had been built into the side of a mountain, as is the fashion of those peoples, and would take significant investment to capture. Prince Cassius and five thousand soldiers went south to join the four thousand Haeseni in battle with the tribes of Arberrang and their snow elven mercenaries. Much like with campaign against the orcs, the Arberrang peoples rarely confronted the Imperials, instead taking to the bitter cold of the dark forest that they called home, which was filled with monsters, traps, and a frostbite that was more deadly than the two. 

 

A child’s soft birch bark carvings recovered from Arberrang. They are believed to depict some of the villagers there. These drawings were used back in Carolustadt to confirm rumors that the tribesmen were disfigured and had many extra limbs and appendages.

 

Curiously, a report sent to Prince Cassius’s staff from a patrol gives one of the only primary documents we have of the dark arts of the people of Arberrang. The patrol officer, Imperial Lieutenant Restoo Benkho, reported that his platoon was attacked by a single mage who formed creatures from the shadows of the dark woods of Arberrang and assailed the soldiers with them.

 

"No blades could pierce the black miasma of these animals that attacked us, so we dropped them all and ran for the safety of a nearby igloo that was known to bear a Cross of our Lord, having been put there a day earlier by a Haeseni priest that had accompanied us.” 

 

Whether true or exaggerated, this report is evidence of the widespread belief in the Imperial ranks that the people they fought were Ibleesian sorcerers.

 

By the winter of 1691, Prince Cassius and King Robert had pacified most of Arberrang, which is to say they virtually exterminated all but a handful of tribal villages. After extensive darkspawn testing, most were found innocent. They were allowed to live but, like the orcs, stripped of their lands and relocated elsewhere across Haense. The south had been pacified once again, leaving only the dwarves of Kaz’Ulrah still standing. As Prince Cassius and his army rejoined the Emperor in the spring of 1692, they found that much progress had been made.

 

Over the past two years, the Legion had systematically blasted into several rooms and hallways within Kal’Tarak. A dwarven city like any other, sprawling with more passages, fortified bunkers, and false paths than any fortress built by man, the slow, grinding process claimed many lives, more than were lost against the Horde or Arberrang, and the extensive use of magic and explosives drove up the costs. In what was the most deadly siege of the war, claiming well over a thousand lives, by the summer Aurelius and his staff concluded that if Kal’Tarak could not be taken quickly, they would have to agree to a diplomatic end to the war. It is said that while the many aged, wise generals murmured their agreements, it was the young, bold Prince Cassius who rose up angrily and volunteered to bring his grandfather victory within a week.

 

On the 6th of Horen’s Calling, 1692, Prince Cassius and fifty hand-picked Dragon Knights descended into a dark, cramped tunnel that had been found during an excavation of the northwestern part of the city. Old maps showed that the tunnel they were following, so narrow that two men could not stand beside each other, led to Kal’Tarak’s throne room, where the King of Kaz’Ulrah, Thoak Goldhand, was thought to be. An old dwarf, revered as a fierce opponent of humanity for centuries, the King of Kaz’Ulrah was an honored figure among the dwarves, and they would not risk his death were he captured quickly. If their guesses were correct, the Dragon Knights would win the war in a few hours. If not, they would all die with their prince.

 

After what Prince Cassius called “a walk that, while likely only an hour, felt like ten times that,” he and his small force finally saw light. As the prince, leading the pack, neared it, he saw himself overlooking the great throne room of Kal’Tarak, where King Thoak Goldhand and his immediate retainers were taking their supper. Not wasting the opportunity, the prince and his knights scaled down the wall and charged into the feasting group of dwarves. Most were killed immediately, but a few surrounded their king for long enough for guards outside, who heard the commotion, to swarm the throne room. As more dwarves poured in, surrounding the invaders, desperation set in for Prince Cassius. Proving himself all the swordsman that his reputation had made of him, he cut through five of King Thoak Goldhand’s retainers. When the dwarven king raised his own hammer in defense, the prince knocked it from his hands with a single blow. Facing the wrong end of a sword, the king fell to his knees immediately and roared for the fighting to cease, which it did a few moments later. Thirty seven Dragon Knights had been slain, and around them were the bodies of a hundred or more dwarves.

 

Prince Cassius and his few remaining knights were allowed safe passage through the rest of Kal’Tarak with King Thoak Goldhand in tow, his hands bound by the cape of one of the felled knights. By the time they reached the outside, the gates of the city had already been swung open, and the advance units of the Legion had begun to accept the surrender of weapons and high-value hostages. The prince and his men limped- all of them had sustained serious injuries of some sort- through the mass of soldiers until they reached Aurelius, who awaited on a palanquin with his great vassals and officers lined beside him. The Emperor descended from his palanquin to accept the surrender of King Thoak Goldhand and walked, with the aid of a cane, to a nearby tent that had been prepared for the ensuing diplomacy. From the moment that his grandson and his Dragon Knights had entered the tunnels of the city, Aurelius had made preparations for his victory.

 

The diplomacy between the Emperor and King Thoak Goldhand was a mere formality. Kaz’Ulrah in its entirety, even its crown, were surrendered to the Empire. For their willingness to surrender, the dwarves of Kal’Tarak were allowed to remain there, albeit under the occupation of a sizable Imperial garrison. The only exception was the king himself, who was to be made a captive alongside Torsten Ruric. When the treaty was finalized on the 7th of Horen’s Calling, the Third Atlas Coalition was finally brought to an end. The last challenge to Aurelius had been soundly defeated, and with these additional conquests, the Empire and its tributary states controlled all corners of the world except for the deep southern tundras, where the snow elven tribes resided. It had taken a lifetime, perhaps something even more than that, but Aurelius had done what only the early Johannians had: the world was now brought under his flag.

 

Feeling rejuvenated for the first time in years, Aurelius did not plan for a typical return to Carolustadt with his retinue upon the disbandment of his army. Instead, he granted himself a triumph, the likes of which had not been seen before. A festival book was prepared by Lester Drake, who also gave us historians the mercy of writing an account of the triumph itself. Using these two sources, we have a clear picture of what the Triumph of 1692 looked like to the people of Carolustadt.

 

After several weeks of securing his new conquests, issuing land grants, and appointing new governors, the Emperor began a slow march back to the capital. They finally arrived outside the gates of the city on the evening of the 30th of Owyn’s Flame, 1692, and encamped outside until the next morning. They arranged themselves in parade formation before the opened gates of Carolustadt. Entire streets were blockaded as spectators made their way to an outlined path that led to the city square. 

 

Then, as Lester Drake writes:

 

"For the first part, paintings depicting the sites of His Imperial Majesty’s victories: The Krag, Nordengrad, San’Kala, Arberrang, and Kal’Tarak were shown to the ignorant masses on canvases that were so large we feared they may not have fit through the gates if the carts that carried them hit even the smallest pebble. Thankfully, they were kept intact. As they were drawn forth, the people made their pleasure known by their applause, so thunderous that tiles fell from the roofs of the townhomes. After the paintings were more wagons, carrying the riches of our plunders: first were the weapons collected at Kal’Tarak, then came the gold from the same city, after were the totems of the Horde and the flamebrands of the Nordlings, and finally were the idols of the Arberrangian tribes. Lastly, more paintings, on smaller canvases, were drawn, depicting some minor battles and skirmishes that, although I did not know their names, it was under His Imperial Majesty’s instructions to have concluded. 

 

For the second part, the prisoners of war were brought. First were two dozen chiefs of the Horde and of Arberrang, all bound in simple chains and subjected to a maelstrom of rotten foods that had been left out in crates for months for this occasion. Next was the king of the dwarves, allowed to ride in on a horse, a dignity that His Imperial Majesty insisted be afforded for this old enemy of Man, but he too was subjected to the abuses of the people. Finally came six Norldling chiefs tied around a blackberry bush that was as large as the cart that carried it. Above them, held aloft above the bush by several poles that stabbed into his back, was their leader, whose screams dulled the mockery of the crowd at first, but was soon drowned with cries of “traitor” and “pagan.” 

 

For the third part, His Imperial Majesty was brought before the people alone on a chariot, which was painted in pure silver lined with gemstones of every variety. The Emperor wore purple robes from the neck down, and his face was painted a bright yellow. Atop his head was a wreath made from pea shoots. In his left hand he held his sword, in his right he held his scepter. His look was a pleasant one, and he even smiled at the crowd and waved twice as he was acclaimed as the triumphator by all of his subjects.

 

For the fourth and final part, the Legions, led by His Imperial Highness [Prince Cassius], marched at a slow pace. They sang songs of a subject so low that I dare not repeat their contents, but this rudeness seemed to be encouraged by the people and even their officers, for many joined in with their merriment, which within their first few steps in the capitol had eroded their well-famed discipline. Drinks, candies, and other goods were passed to the soldiers, who all in turn gave trinkets and baubles and coins and other bits of plunder from their campaigns. I thought I had even seen the Duke of Adria himself engaging in this base behavior, but I did not raise this aloud for I am uncertain and do not wish to tarnish his good character.

 

When the procession reached the square, which took four hours from its initial entry, the prisoners were arrayed before an audience of no fewer than eighty thousand. The orcs, whose necks were so large that they could not be strangled, were shot individually. Each time a crossbow bolt ended one, cries of ‘Tandem Triumphans’ filled the air from the spectators, though none partaking in the triumph would dare utter such a curse. The chiefs of Arberrang came next, and they were strangled in the typical triumphal fashion. Some cheers came from the audience, but it was fewer than with the orcs. Following them was the sole dwarf: their king. He was given the honor of a beheading at the hands of Sir Arthur Wayne, which he accepted with honor. This good conduct merited silence from the crowd along with a few prayers for his soul.

 

It was after the dwarf king’s beheading that a priest ran into the middle of the sight of the executions and demanded an end be put to it. The foulest of slanders came from his mouth, for he accused His Imperial Majesty of conducting human sacrifice to appease the pagan gods that he aligned himself with so that he may not bend to our true Lord. This untruth warranted the jeers it received from the crowd, who pulled the priest back but, at the insistence of Sir Pierre de Roth, did not see him harm and only escorted him back to the church.

 

 After the priest’s interruption, the Nordling prisoners were brought forth. Still tied to the large blackberry bush, with Thorsten [Torsten] Ruric above it, the traitorous earls were strangled, again to great acclaim and cheer by the audience. However, this dulled when two torches were thrown onto the bush, setting it alight and slowly burning Thorsten Ruric. Even this was thought to be either too cruel of an execution, or perhaps too sacrilegious of an execution, for the tastes of the crowd, so said some soldiers that were positioned near one vocal group. His Imperial Majesty was unswayed by this reception, if he even knew of it at all, and the Nordling chief was slowly consumed by the fire without any quicker death.”

 

The Triumph of 1692 was among the greatest that history has ever seen, and has subsequently spawned hundreds of pieces of art inspired by the spectacle.

 

If the Triumph of 1692 had shown the sheer power of Aurelius’s united Empire, it also revealed some of the fractures that the course of his brand of unification had created. Many of his subjects revered himself as something close to a living god, and while the Emperor had never openly entertained the notions in his early years, the past decade had only made the associations clearer. The colorful, imposing statues of the invincible Aurelius, standing with one foot atop a globe, was often a far more spectacular image than similar likenesses of local saints and even the Exalted themselves. When soldiers looked to military directives, rather than the Holy Scrolls, as instruction for virtue, the consequence was a mere reprimand. During a session of court in 1687, a minor nobleman from Santegia had even tried to proclaim Aurelius as the Fifth Exalted. While he was arrested and allowed to be put on ecclesiastical trial, the Emperor made it known that he would not allow this admirer to face anything beyond minor penance.

 

The Church had long-balked at these supposed pretensions of divinity that they accused Aurelius of promoting, but a succession of weak pontiffs had been unable to effectively rally the Canonist faithful against him. This, in turn, emboldened the Pertinaxi loyalists who themselves felt the Church was enslaved to the interests of their enemies. During the wars against Curon, Haense, and Ostmark, churches and monasteries were looted, priests were attacked, and several holy sites were desecrated. These attacks were almost exclusively the fault of independent, rogue units, who were often severely punished for their actions, but the Imperial government never truly took preventative steps against these attacks, only reactive ones.

 

The Emperor had done little to help his case. By far one of the most secular Emperors, his piety was little more than passing references found within state documents to his divine authority bestowed by God. He attended mass infrequently and confession less, was ill-learned on the Holy Scrolls and could not hold a conversation on theological matters for long, and openly admired pagan religions, such as the Red Faith, which he found better-suited to the organization of a militant society. He rarely tried to hide his personal indifference towards religion, and with state policy directed towards a propaganda campaign that bordered on deification, the most devout Canonist around the realm feared that soon Aurelius would adopt a new title: God-Emperor.

 

In late 1692, with the Empire victorious over all its enemies, a new conflict with the Church only became more likely. Two weeks after Aurelius’s triumph, the Imperial Senate, led by the old Sir Frederick Pius, resoundingly rejected Church-sponsored legislation that would increase the authority of ecclesiastical courts. Fiery rhetoric was directed against the Church during the debates, and even the godly Sir Frederick Pius denounced the incompetence of High Pontiff Siegmund and his Curia. This stirred some outrage, and many priests and their supporters published treatises against the Senate, in which they accused it of being an arm of the Emperor’s project to achieve self-acclaimed godhood. This incident may have come and gone without much issues, seeing as how the Emperor himself had not even commented on it, but just weeks later, far from the center of activity in Carolustadt, something worse happened.

 

After the triumph, Prince Cassius had been sent back north to oversee the integration of the conquered territories into the Empire. Part of this involved accepting the submission of many tribes that had never been more than nominally represented by their dwarven, orcish, or Nordling overlords. One of these tribes, known as the Rosenyr people, was particularly resistant to Imperial authority. They had allowed several Haeseni priests to visit and preach, so long as they gave tribute, but they had been far more hostile to Imperial officials. On the 21st of Godfrey’s Triumph, 1692, several Rosenyrites ambushed and killed a tax collector. Prince Cassius, who was at Castle Grolwic, only a day away, led a small party on the 22nd to exact justice.

 

The Massacre of Rosenyr saw the near-total elimination of this troublesome people, but more consequential was the slaying of two of the priests who had been living with the tribe. Prince Cassius first claimed that it was an accident, that they had been mistaken for tribal shamans by some of his newer recruits, but later he recanted and instead said that they had been fighting alongside the Rosenyrites. His testimony was generally supported by his soldiers, but across the Canonist world, clergy and the devout accused the prince of having conducted a premeditated murder. The clergymen at Rosenyr had a reputation for being more critical of Imperial policy, and Prince Cassius was known to align himself with many of the Empire’s most absolutist elements.

 

High Pontiff Siegmund, an ambitious, conniving man who chafed at his own authority being subsumed under the Pertinaxi strength, believed he had a prime opportunity. Two weeks following the Massacre of Rosenyr, he excommunicated Prince Cassius and demanded that he be surrendered to ecclesiastical courts. He also released several denouncements of the Emperor’s growing stranglehold over the matters of faith, and even came close to outright accusing him of aspiring to godhood. His words resonated with many of the clergy and common people outside of the Heartlands, and it was with this population that he hoped to leverage some change.

 

Back in Carolustadt, the old, tired Aurelius likely wanted to thunder with rage at the High Pontiff’s demands, but his voice could hardly carry by then. Many years of campaigning, especially the most recent ones, had worn him down. His strong-built, imposing figure had withered and left behind a husk of a man. A year earlier he had been able to walk with a cane, but now, aside from small strolls around his palace, he was forced to travel by litter. His public appearance at his triumph was a last display of public majesty, a show that affirmed his health and dominance, but ever since he had secluded himself from the common eye. He wanted nothing more than to retire again to his country estates, where he could live out his last months in peace and comfort, but even now, even after six decades of war, he was still facing challenges to his power that demanded his presence in the capital.

 

It was to be Aurelius’s final campaign, though it shed ink, not blood. He issued a pardon for his grandson and declined to have him sent to ecclesiastical court, much to the favor of the people of the Crownlands, who loved the prince above all others. Over the following weeks, he sent word to his vassals and governors, instructing them in the most direct of terms to stamp out any rebellious sentiments. All complied and ordered the arrest of the most vocal dissidents. With popular opposition stifled, Aurelius then moved to unseat the Pontiff. On the 8th of Sun’s Smile, 1693, he issued a Divine Imperial Command that removed Siegmund from the Pontificate. Drawing upon his divine authority bestowed by God, he claimed supremacy over the High Pontiff’s office and called for new elections. Affixed to the bottom of the scroll, which was posted in every town across the realm, was a new styling that so many had feared: His Divine Imperial Majesty.

 

For many, this was a step too far. Riots across the southern Empire broke out and were only barely contained by local authorities. Several cardinals and bishops affirmed their loyalty to Siegmund and called for an excommunication of the Emperor. Siegmund himself, in a response issued five days later from Belvitz, refused to excommunicate Aurelius. Instead, he called upon the Lord to bring an end to the man he now fully claimed aspired to make himself a god on the mortal plane. Two days later, the Legion garrison had him arrested and, under the Emperor’s orders, relocated to a monastery in Norland. Putting down this latest threat had caused an uproar, but aside from a few injured in Rivia, it had been mostly bloodless.

 

While many of the common people and the clergy had turned sharply against Aurelius, he had the support of the Legion and of the entirety of the nobility. To those who knew Siegmund, the High Pontiff was a man who could not be trusted and had a tendency to overestimate his position. His unpopularity did not extend to the masses who had never so much as met him, but that was more due to the symbol of his office rather than anything that he did. With neither the tact to keep his seat, nor the political ability to organize an effective resistance, the whole of the backlash that Siegmund could build amounted to a few riots that ceased by the end of Sun’s Smile. His Divine Imperial Majesty had enforced his total supremacy over the Church and the majority of his subjects did not so much as raise their voice in protest.

 

That is not to say that this decision was a popular one. Aside from most of the army, the Imperial family, and some of the more fanatic Pertinaxi loyalists, the realm overwhelmingly found Aurelius’s proclamation to be an unnecessary response, but the legacy of his victories burrowed deep within their collective spirit. Four or five coalitions had risen against Aurelius, not to mention countless other scattered attempts at opposition, and each time they had been defeated without much difficulty. As much as he may have tried to hide his condition, the Emperor’s demise was imminent; waiting him out, not confronting him, was a secure strategy.

 

It was a wise choice by the Imperial vassals. Whether he lacked the energy or the knowledge, Aurelius had no hope of manufacturing an Imperial cult of Emperor-worship. His measure had, like most regarding his image, been a pragmatic one. He was well-aware that his end was near, and his heir, Prince Augustus, was regarded as a far more moderate figure. So long as the old Emperor did not push the issue too much, he could have a more favorable Pontiff elected, withdraw from religious affairs, and allow a friendlier Canonist Church to resume its stewardship of the faith. When a Crownlander named Elwood was elected to the Pontificate, becoming Daniel V, he felt assured that he would face no serious resistance from the Church again. On the 8th of Sigismund’s End, 1693, he returned to his country estates and left Prince Augustus in charge of the capital once again.

 

At his palace of Donostia in the plains of Santegia, his favorite of his rural homes, the Emperor decided that it would be there, surrounded by vineyards, hot springs, and sweet-smelling gardens, that he would end his days. For all of his life, he had been in the center of the largest political events on the continent. His days in Doggersden felt like a history more ancient than that of the first Kings of Oren, but so too did his storming of Adelburg. For a man of such an advanced age, ninety, he remembered the past well enough to speak about them with some attendants he brought from the capital, who recorded much of what he said. During the last year of his life, Aurelius spoke quite candidly about his history, either as a confession of guilt or as a boast.

 

By the spring of 1694, it was clear that the Emperor would not survive for much longer. He was bedridden and infirm, though his mind stayed strong enough that he allowed the window of his room to be opened so he might feel the warm rays of the sun. It did little to help the chill he had contracted that winter, and come early Harren’s Folly he only awoke to take some bread and water. On the 14th, with his fever still unbroken, he was administered the last rites. He survived another three days, but he finally passed on the 17th of Harren’s Folly, 1694. Reported by a priest in attendance, Father Eugene Daumpart, his final words, spoken that morning, was a request to quench his thirst: “Could you dip that bread in the water for me?”

 

During the evacuation of Atlas, Aurelius’s body was transported overseas and brought to Helena, where it was buried once again. It disappeared after the Time of Troubles, and in the time since no fewer than twenty two theories have been put forward as to who took it.

 

As Aurelius’s body was taken to Carloustadt for burial, made slow by a long procession through the western Empire, Augustus held his coronation. The Imperial crown that was placed upon his head could not have felt any heavier than it did in that moment. As the funeral procession grew nearer to the capital, which could be seen with the many flags and fires that adorned the horizon in its wake, the period of mourning, to last a month in total, grew to a close. The day after his grandfather was to be laid to rest, Augustus would be unshielded from the punishing judgement of those who desired a man who could don the armor in the same way as the Emperor of Man.

 

History has treated Aurelius well, even those which are detractors of his time on the throne. In the most critical of examinations, the point was still surrendered that, despite his conquests, despite his ambition, and despite the destruction that followed him, Aurelius used methods that worked, regardless of the cost, and relentlessly pursued his vision with cruel efficiency. The ills of the Pertinaxi were directed towards Antonius alone, and his actions became synonymous with either the wanton slaughter of the age, or with the machinations of those who were jealous of the Pertinaxi and wished to smite them. With Augustus’s reign being quiet, the focus of any glorification of the age, or even a critical examination, fell upon Aurelius.

 

As time has passed, the model of Novellen liberalism and the scholars made in its wake came to stand in direct contrast to the Pertinaxi despotism that preceded it. Over in Haense, the rejection of Imperial centralization led historians there to apply a hostile lens to the suppression they had faced under the Pertinaxi in order to draw comparisons between them and their present situation. With the reign of Antonius all but exhausted of critical discussion, and the reign of Augustus still understudied, revaluation of Aurelius became the primary method to levy new attacks against the Empire of Man. Where intellectuals before could not help but admire the tenacity and success of Aurelius, even against the human, financial, and personal toll it took, the new age aimed to discredit even that.

 

The “new Aurelius” was a warlord like any of the era, not a high-thinking visionary who employed violence. He built no state save a horde totally dependent on tribute and coercion, and doomed it to collapse as soon as he died. Law was applied inconsistently, conquest was necessary to feed the state, and murder and intrigue defined all politics, as any perceived dissent was completely stamped out. Aurelius accomplished no more than Tobias Staunton: an impressive conqueror who knew nothing beyond warfare, damning his new Empire to its end the moment he died. Aurelius was never to be praised, he was not a ‘hard man making hard decisions’, for he was solely a bloodthirsty tyrant whose own ambitions preceded human unity in any real sense. Even his accomplishments were reduced as the achievements of his more-talented subordinates who succeeded in spite of their liege, not because of him.

 

At a glance, many of these critiques are reasonable. Aurelius was far more comfortable in military tents than he ever was at his desk, and his style of governance reflected that. It would fall to Augustus to build anything resembling a functioning bureaucracy, but even that was short-lived. The Emperor’s tactics did bring to his enemies a fear so great that few would ever dare to oppose him, but it in turn bred a hatred for him and his line that was so great that even the more moderate policies of Augustus would fail to earn the loyalty of his vassals. There is a certain truth to the argument that the Pertinaxi despotism, while nearly unstoppable during Aurelius’s time, faltered quickly after his end.

 

However, any arguments against Aurelius the man, rather than the system he implemented, fall somewhat short. Although he never was eminently capable in his own right- even when compared to his administrative failures, his personal battlefield record was mediocre- he was an expert manager. Having to deal with a number of personalities, each from different backgrounds, he was able to prevent a breakdown in cooperation or a fracturing of his personal network. At the same time, he maintained his hold on power absolutely and could dismantle any threat to him. When Margrave Eimar or Crown Prince Constantine, two influential men who had served him well before, conspired against him, the Emperor swiftly and decisively cut them out of the state. At times, this judgement would go awry, such as when he had a governor in Rivia executed for embezzling funds when he had done no such thing, but generally his tight fist on the state prevented challenges to his authority. 

 

The Pertinaxi system that he created, while imperfect and relatively short-lived, was perhaps the only form of government that could have emerged at the time. The Mardon Empire’s founding principles, a collaborative unity with subjects stronger than their master, had been discredited almost immediately after its inception. With the greater Imperial project at risk of complete collapse, only a militant state that could capably deflect any challenges to its ascent could restore it. Although Aurelius was no great thinker, he was more a visionary than he was a strongman, as much as he played the latter role earlier in his life. As short as it was, the Empire of Man would survive him, and with it the Pertinaxist ideology that has lingered in the background as a constant alternative, or perhaps threat, to the Petrine and post-Petrine liberalism that has come to shape our world today.

 

Vale, Aurelius ‘the Planet Emperor’

6th of Harren’s Folly, 1603-17th of Harren’s Folly, 1694

 

King of Renatus

(r. 17th of Sigismund’s End, 1637-17th of Harren’s Folly, 1694)

 

King of Marna

(r. 13th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1652-17th of Harren’s Folly, 1694)

 

Emperor of Man

(r. 4th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1678-17th of Harren’s Folly, 1694)

 

 

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O Ágioi Kristoff, Jude kai Pius. Dóste mas gnósi ópos sas ékane o Theós. Poté min afísoume na doúme to skotádi, allá as doúme móno to fos tis sofías kai tis alítheias. O Theós na se evlogeí.

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The transition to peace under Augustus shall be covered in our next volume of The Historia Pertinaxi.

At this point, trying to change certain aspects of the CRP system (how plate armor/ranged weapons work) really isn’t feasible because of how many other things they touch on, so eventually you just end up going through a major rework. While changes are needed, it’s basically impossible to isolate these two and fix them, so you’d need a bigger CRP rework that isn’t going to happen. 

2 hours ago, Gilded Quill said:

 

Yet, not all was serenity and splendor beneath the glittering masks. A scene of discord unfolded as Prince Paul of the Petra found himself embroiled in a heated exchange with his daughter, Lady Helene-Olympe. Witnesses recount a distressing moment as the Duke of Valfleur, in a display unbecoming of his station, was seen to raise his hand against his own flesh and blood. Such unsavory conduct casts a shadow upon the esteemed House of Valfleur, leaving us to ponder the depths of familial strife behind closed doors...

Adrian Tobias shakes a fist as he reads the slanderous accusations raised by the paper. He couldn’t do much where he was, but he could demand that his grandmother file a lawsuit. Perhaps she could even seek the execution of those behind the paper? The obese young nobleman’s fat fingers clap in glee as he imagines himself as the triumphant executioner standing above the disgraced editors who dared to speak ill of his house, and by extent himself. 

 

 

THE HISTORIA PERTINAXI: Volume III;

The Empire of Man

Written by Justinian Nafis, Count of Susa

and

Adolphus Gloriana, Earl of Suffolk, Prince of Sutica

 

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The Empire of Man

"As he gazed over the burning city, his look was iron. I could not tell if it was regret sewn into his rough features, or a determination to ensure that this bloodshed would not be in vain.” - An account of the aftermath of the Siege of White Peak from Menno Lehmann, a lieutenant in the Reiters

 

 

As history has shown, any hopes that the First Atlas Coalition War would bring an end to the compounding problems of Aurelius’s reign were sorely misplaced. The toppling of one power in Norland had only brought the rise of another in Ostmark. Margrave Eimar had been loyal, yes, but his ambition was rivaled by few. As the men and women of the Royal State Army returned to their homes and farms, greeted by the open arms of their friends and families, the soldiers of Ostmark departed theirs, destined for another apple of their liege’s eye.

 

This time, the feud was between Margrave Eimar and Mariusz Horen, Margrave of Styria. Margrave Mariusz, a distant cousin of Aurelius, had defended the southern border against Haense. With the lands of House var Burgundar now expanded to include Curon, the two fiefs bordered each other. The neighboring margraves were both proud, ambitious men, two traits that appeared to filter down to their soldiers. It is unknown who started the conflict (both sides accused the other), but most scholars are certain that a dispute arose over the possession of a mill that lay within the bounds of one Margrave of Styria’s estates; the mill’s owner was a Curonian who lived in the port town of Arbor, one of the properties of the Margrave of Ostmark.

 

Fighting broke out between the two lords in 1663. Initially it was centered around the disputed mill, but it soon grew to encompass a number of towns, ports, and farms along the Czena River. Margrave Eimar got the better of these early battles, but just as it seemed like he was going to take control of eastern Styria, Sir Konrad Nzech, one of Prince Antonius’s experienced subordinates, arrived with two hundred Royal State Army veterans to reinforce the Margrave Mariusz. Denied a quick victory, Margrave Eimar made thinly-veiled accusations that Prince Antonius had ordered Sir Konrad to aid his cousin.

 

Aurelius initially turned a blind eye to the small war developing in the south. It was his policy to allow disputes between his vassals to be handled between themselves in times of peace. The ideal Renatian man, an image that the realm’s king tried to cultivate of himself and his sons, was a warrior whose passions ran hot and whose pride allowed no offense to be suffered. These sorts of men, who had proven to be valuable in creating a well-functioning war machine, needed to release their bloodlust through violent, but acceptable, forms of combat resolution. It was a system that Aurelius had no wish to insert the Crown into, no doubt because of the memories of the Riga War, which had seen Emperor John II tip the scales of civil conflict and suffer greatly for it.

 

At first, this method seemed to play out well. Fighting had died down by the spring of 1664 and Margrave Eimar had withdrawn from a few of Margrave Mariusz’s estates. Their armies still heavily patrolled their own possessions, and at times postured against one another in chess-like battles of maneuvering, but there was little fighting to speak of.

 

Unbeknownst to all of Renatus-Marna, it was this brief period of peace that proved to be the most dangerous. The south of the realm, at the fringes of the Heartlands, was the most thinly-populated. An important duty of the two margraves was to see to the general security of the region from the threat of bandits, something that a war between the two, which required their units along the border at all times, was unconducive towards. Reiver mercenaries who had fled Norland after the First Atlas Coalition War saw opportunity in this region that was increasingly slipping from Renatian law. Throughout 1663 they had united many of the bandits and deserter bands in the area under their flag, and by the next year they had constructed a number of small keeps and fortified camps in the southern Heartlands. Most notorious of them all was Small Tower, a crude but well-placed tower along the Yodeling Crossroads that enabled them to rob traders and strike at a number of Curonian towns: Cyrilsburg, Ashwood, and Arbor all faced significant attacks during the year.

 

The depth of Aurelius’s mistake became clear when a delegation from Arbor arrived at the court of Senntisten and petitioned for him to personally intervene. Trade had plummeted in the region, even the largest cities were the subject of raids, and the two marcher lords tasked with local defense were busier with keeping the other in check. If there was no intervention from the central government, the south would fall out of Renatus-Marna’s grasp entirely.

 

Exasperated at the thought of returning to war so soon, but also growing paranoid as each day of continued Reiver presence of the south brought more tales of the absence of royal order- Aurelius’s personal physician, Jeshua Bright, noted that he had begun to grow his first grey hairs. He assembled an army of ten thousand and sent words to the southern margraves, ordering them to cease their hostilities and direct their efforts on eradicating the Reiver presence in their lands. After once again assigning Crown Prince Constantine to rule the capital in his stead, Aurelius marched south to restore order to the fringes of his realm.

 

The Bandit War, which lasted from 1664-1668, was yet another conflict that revolved around guerilla warfare. Prince Antonius and Prince Tiberius were each given a part of the army to assist the two southern margraves. Meanwhile, their father oversaw operations from Arbor and made sure to be an active presence, something that was rare for him, in order to emphasize the restoration of his royal authority in the region. 1664 initially started well, but Prince Antonius was wounded from a crossbow bolt while storming a camp in the Monger Forest, where Reiver presence was high, and camp fever at the end of the year struck Prince Tiberius and many of his officers. Both princes returned to Senntisten to recover, which meant that Aurelius had to join the army and lead it himself. 

 

It was in 1665, while his best generals and officers were recovering in the capital, that the war began to unravel. Most of the year had gone well, and the sixty-two year old monarch had shown a good degree of vigor and zest as he had cleared most of the Monger Forest of Reiver presence. Just as it looked that the bandits were about to be wiped out, the margraves Eimar and Mariusz reignited their feud over who would come to own a logging camp that they had jointly captured. When Aurelius ruled in favor of Margrave Mariusz, Margrave Eimer and his soldiers withdrew to Cyrilsburg in a rage, and they accused the king of favoring his family over his most proven subjects.

 

Seeing the internal division within the Renatian ranks, the Reivers regrouped around Small Tower. With an army of four thousand, they started constructing various siege weapons to appear as if they were preparing to besiege Arbor. Aurelius took the bait and marched his army, which was twice as large, to Small Tower and ordered Margrave Mariusz and Margrave Eimar to join him in what could be the killing blow to the Reivers. Margrave Mariusz attempted to join his cousin, but he was ambushed by another force of Reivers and had to retreat to Styria. Margrave Eimar simply ignored the orders and kept his army at Cyrilsburg. Angered but undaunted- he still possessed numerical superiority- the King of Renatus-Marna pressed the attack on Small Tower.

 

The Battle of Small Tower, fought on the 13th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1665, was one of the most disastrous defeats in Pertinaxi history and a black mark on Aurelius’s military career. Expecting reinforcements from Styria and Ostmark, the king waited the morning hours away, keeping his soldiers in formation while Reiver skirmishers pelted them with arrows from across the battlefield. Few perished from this, but the horses of the front line's knights became distressed by the storm of projectiles. For hours, Aurelius resisted the urging of his knights to order a charge against the smaller Reiver army, but as noon came and the additional forces he had been waiting for had not arrived, he made the order the charge as he believed that the opportunity at hand ought not to be wasted.

 

This was exactly what the Reivers had wanted. Having chosen the battlefield, just a few miles from Small Tower, they had plenty of time to litter the field with traps. While the area of the battle was mostly flat, there was a small incline leading up to the first line of Reiver archers, which was protected by spiked stakes. Leading up to this line, they had dug a long trench which they then covered. When the first few lines of Renatian cavalry were within meters of the archers, being pelted with arrows all the way, their horses were tripped by this trench and sent sprawling. According to Captain Markus Johannsson, one of the members of Aurelius’s staff, a jam was created by the halted first line, which dulled the charge. 

 

Reivers surged forth, causing panic within the confused mass of Renatian knights. As they helplessly tried to retreat, the backlog of riders prevented them from doing so, and many were cut down. Aurelius, a few leagues away, reluctantly sounded for a retreat, but a small force of Reiver cavalry, hidden behind their ranks until now, were sent forward to harass the Renatian foot. Retreat gave way to rout, and by the day’s end only half of the initial eight thousand that Aurelius led to Small Tower returned to the safety of Arbor. It was a crushing blow, by far the worst that he had suffered so far.

 

Aurelius’s humiliation at his defeat was matched only by his anger towards Margrave Eimar’s betrayal. In the day after the Battle of Small Tower, the king's closest advisors saw him lose his temper- a rare thing- and promise to execute Margrave Eimar for his crimes. Although they all advised him to allow his soldiers time to rest, or wait for reinforcements from Margrave Mariusz, the king refused and marched to Cyrilsburg with his Dragon Knights and a hundred knights who had not been wounded at Small Tower. Margrave Eimar planned to mount a resistance, but the city watch of Cyrilsburg had little love for him and the soldiers of White Peak. They let Aurelius and his soldiers inside, whereupon, after a brief fight in the streets, they surrounded and captured the margrave. The Margrave of Ostmark, one of the most ambitious men in Atlas, and a rising force in realm, was hanged in the center of Cyrilsburg on the 20th of Grand Harvest, 1665, just a week after he had left his liege to face defeat at Small Tower.

 

Because of the swiftness of his retribution, Aurelius had not planned for what would come after, nor had he drafted the official documentation. As a temporary order, he put Margrave Mariusz in charge of Curon and Ostmark while he and his army returned home to Senntisten to recuperate and rebuild their strength. Once again displaying the mercy that had served him well in the Heartlands and in Norland, the king must have hoped that any disruption brought by Margrave Eimar could be sufficiently combatted by a return to normalcy. Instead, he had inadvertently created the conditions for the most serious rebellion to his reign to date.

 

Aldyth of White Peak, widow of Margrave Eimar, was distraught at her husband’s death. As glory-seeking as her husband was, she had dreams of wearing a royal crown that had now been crushed by the King of Renatus-Marna. Two of her four sons had died in the brief war against Margrave Mariusz, and another from camp fever during the Siege of Ruriksgrad. With the survival of House var Burgundar threatened, and revenge on the mind of those from White Peak, Lady Aldyth sought to uplift the one man left in Atlas who could challenge Aurelius’s rule: Tobias Staunton.

 

The only surviving portrait that is believed to depict Aldyth of White Peak, c. 1678. In the years after her death, a small cult formed around her memory, but it was eventually disbanded by the Governor of White Peak on Aurelius’s orders.

 

In the years since the fall of the Kingdom of Courland 1615, House Staunton had remained active in the political scene, albeit in a quieter role. Left with only a few of their properties, and far diminished in their influence, they had quietly lived as the provincial nobility of a number of more powerful players. During the settlement of Atlas, the family had come into the good graces of the Duke Karl of Curon, himself a younger son of Tobias the Conqueror, who granted them several estates. While talk of the restoration of Courland was always tossed around the realm, and a strong pro-Staunton faction in court held sway, there was never any serious attempt to uplift the first descendants of the great conqueror of Axios.

 

Born in 1646, Tobias Staunton, great-grandson of his namesake, represented this newest hope of the Courlandic restorationists. Present in court, if never notable, he bore a strong resemblance to the Conqueror, and many believed him to be Tobias-born-again, drawing on a legend that had formed after Courland’s collapse that its beloved king would rise from the grave to save them again. Tobias of Cyrilsburg need not have been raised from the grave, but he was seen by many as the future of a new Courland.

 

Lady Aldyth was certainly privy to this talk around the enigmatic heir of House Staunton. In the waning days of 1665, she summoned Tobias Staunton to White Peak. The contents of their discussion are unknown, but afterwards she named him the heir of Curon and White Peak. Her death a few days later, from causes unknown but speculated to be anything from poison to a broken heart, made the young Tobias Staunton one of the most powerful men in the realm. Beloved by old Courlanders within Curon and with the inheritance of White Peak, his name alone commanded loyalty and adoration that even Margrave Eimar could only hope for. On the 17th of Sun’s Smile, 1666, he held a hasty coronation in White Peak where he revealed his possession of Tobias the Conqueror’s old crown, had a local priest put it atop his head, and named himself King Tobias II of Courland.

 

Invoking the name of Tobias may have brought the new King of Courland a surge of support, which he dearly needed in his early, quite sudden, rule, but leagues away, in the halls of Senntisten, the King of Renatus-Marna and his council deliberated on plans of war. House Staunton had proven to be one of the deadliest enemies of the Horens, and in his own coronation King Tobias had pledged to liberate the Courlanders from Pertinaxi rule. Thousands within Tobias II’s days-old realm had begun to enlist in military service, and many realms around White Peak had begun to declare their support for Courlandic independence. The Kingdom of Haense, the Council of Hammers, a collection of dwarven tribes, the Duchy of Neveria, the Duchy of Rivia, and the Reivers all pledged to join King Tobias in a unified war against Renatus-Marna.

 

Aurelius wasted little time assembling a response. He called upon his allies- Santegia, Krugmar, and the Dominion of Malin- to rally their forces. Prince Charles was recalled from Norland and ordered to aid Prince Antonius in training new regiments of the Royal State Army to replenish the ranks that had been lost at Small Tower. For the greater part of the year, Aurelius waited and allowed his strength to gather around Senntisten. He would not make the same mistake he had at Small Tower. If he was going to march against Courland, it would be with a well-prepared army.

 

Fortunately for Renatus-Marna, Tobias II had inherited only his name from the great conqueror of generations past. Untrained in matters of war or rulership, having only the most basic of an education as rural nobles had, the young king proved to be inept at handling his own military or diplomatic situation. Ostmark and Curon’s armies had yet to be merged into one unified force, and his many allies around the south effectively operated on their own. Throughout 1666, when he had an opportunity to march against Styria, which would be a decisive blow to Aurelius’s southern border, he simply waited. He relied mostly on his chancellor, Wilhelm von Manstein, to manage the affairs of government while he excused himself from council meetings to hunt.

 

Meanwhile, the far more experienced Aurelius had done the opposite. His armies were incessantly drilled and organized over the course of 1666, and he used his fresher forces to wreak havoc on his enemies. The Black Reiters burned fields and villages across Curon and Haense, their job made all the easier by the lack of resistance that they encountered. Many of Tobias’s men deserted his army to protect their homes, depriving him of bodies he desperately needed.

 

Their greatest catch came on the 1st of the Grand Harvest, 1666, when they were able to reach the poorly-defended Haeseni capital of Markev. It was there that the new King of Haense, Franz II, was being crowned. With the gates of the city wide open, and his only security detail armed with mostly ceremonial weapons, the Reiters stormed Markev and in a brief, bloody battle captured the King of Haense. He was brought back to Senntisten where Aurelius demanded he either withdraw from the war or submit to him- sources are divided as to which it was- but King Franz refused. Before the jeering court of Senntisten, Aurelius beheaded the newly-made king on the floors of his throne room. The people of Haense decried this as a wanton act of bloodlust and a great dishonor, but they were also now deprived of a capable leader to manage the war.

 

As much power as the name Tobias Staunton had carried, and as much as the banner of their eagle saw thousands flock to it, neither could alleviate the mismanagement of the war. In 1667, Prince Antonius marched south to the lands of the Reivers with an army of four thousand. After joining forces with Margrave Mariusz, the two of them soundly defeated the isolated bandits at the Battle of Hickory Hills on the 21st of Owyn’s Flame, for Tobias II had failed to reinforce his allies in time. Small Tower was burned and over the following months the last of the Reiver strongholds in the region were captured and destroyed.

 

With the Reiver threat diminished, Aurelius and the rest of his combined army marched to the border with Courland. It was then divided into three parts. The first, led by Prince Charles and Prince Tiberius, was to drive south to White Peak, King Tobias’s seat, and subdue it. The second, led by Prince Antonius, was to put Cyrilsburg to siege. The third, led by Aurelius, would descend upon Arbor and also fortify the southern border in the event that Haense attacked from there. In the autumn of 1667 this plan was put into motion and the rebellious Courland was invaded. Facing minimal resistance, all three armies reached their targets in weeks and began the process of besieging.

 

The Siege of White Peak, beginning on the 19th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1667, was the decisive engagement of the war, but it had truthfully been decided before it began. With twelve thousand soldiers of the Royal State Army and of the orcish tribes of Krugmar, Prince Charles and Prince Tiberius had little to fear from the seven thousand hastily-conscripted levies and city watchmen, bolstered by some contingents from Courland’s allies, that stood atop the walls. In what the Renatian soldiers mockingly called the "Siege of Red Peak", Prince Tiberius had a stunning array of trebuchets built, some accounts say as many as thirty, that slung rocks and boulders into the city from dawn until dusk. Nearly the entire city was leveled, killing thousands from the damages, fires, and starvation. While an outbreak of dysentery, and harassment from a Haeseni army sent to relieve the city, did cause some disruption in the besieging ranks, the loss was minimal and the morale of White Peak’s defenders plummeted.

 

None were so demoralized as Tobias II himself. Not raised in the mold of a warrior, he shunned the ramparts of his capital for fear of being struck by one of the flung projectiles. Hiding in the basements of his palace, he no doubt wondered what had gone wrong. Just two years ago he had invigorated the spirits of the Pertinaxi’s foes with his emergence, promising a return of a soldier equal to his great-grandfather. Now, he huddled within the safety of his wine cellars, the king of a realm that was in the process of being occupied with his soldiers and citizens dying around him. Knowing that his capture meant death, he resolved to escape, and on the night of the 5th of Godfrey’s Triumph, 1668, he snuck out of his city to flee west to Haense. He did not get very far, and the next morning he was found dead, impaled in a spiked pit trap that some of Prince Charles’s orcs had made to ward off their Haeseni harassers.

 

King Tobias’s body was paraded to the defenders of White Peak, whose spirits fell as they saw that their king had not only absconded, but had died in the process. They held out for some time longer, but they capitulated two weeks later, on the 17th of Godfrey’s Triumph. White Peak lay in ruins, with only its walls and some of its palace intact, but those too were torn down on the orders of Prince Charles, leaving only rubble where the powerful seat of the var Burgundars had once been. He and Prince Tiberius divided their army again, marching on the city of Ashwood and the keep of Jornburg, respectively, in the Duchy of Neveria.

 

The Siege of White Peak proved, definitively, that supporting the Stauntons had been a great error. The Council of Hammers withdrew from the war and returned to their mountains in the south of Atlas. The Duchy of Rivia, far on the icy southeastern shores of the continent, pledged to support Aurelius, though, much like with King Tobias, their support only went so far as unkept promises to provide soldiers. King Sigmar of Haense, who ascended to the throne after his uncle’s death, officially remained in the war but withdrew his armies to defend his realm. Only Neveria and the lands of Curon remained standing.

 

As Prince Charles and Prince Tiberius were turning White Peak red, the other two Renatian armies were facing far more comfortable battles to the north. Aurelius, leading eight thousand soldiers from mostly allied contingents (Santegia and the Dominion of Malin along with his Reiters and Dragon Knights), had put Arbor to siege at the end of 1667. Arbor, more friendly to Renatus-Marna than any other of the cities of Curon or Ostmark, negotiated their surrender early into 1668, on the 4th of Harren’s Folly. Few had perished in the siege and their punishment was light; ten years’ tribute and the surrender of some hostages was their toll. Aurelius then positioned his army to guard the south and directed many raids into Haeseni lands.

 

Prince Antonius and Margrave Mariusz, leading an army of twelve thousand made up of soldiers from Norland, Adria, and Styria, faced stiffer resistance at Cyrilsburg than Aurelius had at Arbor, but it was still not the bloodbath that had occurred at White Peak. The siege lasted well into 1669, as Cyrilsburg’s walls were strong, its defenders well-organized, and its granaries well-stocked. Prince Antonius led several failed assaults against the walls, but when news of White Peak’s fall and King Tobias’s death arrived, the end was in sight. The defenders of Cyrilsburg tried to keep their spirits up and fight in the memory of the extinguished Staunton name, but on the 15th of Sun’s Smile, 1669, they too surrendered. Punishment was relatively light here too, only some of the principal supporters of Tobias II were executed, and Sir Konrad Nzech was appointed as governor of the region.

 

Seeing his allies fall one by one, and knowing that resistance was futile, King Sigmar of Haense agreed to a peace with Renatus-Marna. The terms were mild, requiring only a few years of tribute payments and the destruction of several of Haense’s castles along their northern border. It was said by Tuvya Barrow, a scribe in service of the King of Haense, that his liege had “strived to make a good impression on the Lord of the Pertinaxi, knowing that it would only be a few years before the continent was his.” 

 

The war was rounded out in the month of Sigismund’s End, 1669, when both Jornburg and Ashwood fell. Sir Landry Cantel, one of Aurelius’s Dragon Knights, was made governor of the region and tasked with managing its integration into Renatus-Marna. While the Second Atlas Coalition War, also known as the Staunton Uprising, has mostly been described as a rebellion and a war to restore Pertinaxi authority over Curon and Ostmark, it did see the conquest of the petty lands of Neveria, which once again expanded the realm.

 

Initially a great danger to his rule, Tobias II’s rebellion proved to be a whimper of what his ancestor had managed. Within three years another coalition against Renatus-Marna had been smashed, Curon and Ostmark had been brought to heel, and Aurelius had reaffirmed his position as the most powerful man on the continent. In 1670, when a rebellion flared up in the Duchy of Rivia, he sent several Reiters and Dragon Knights to support the pro-Renatian rebels against the Duke of Rivia. While the war there would be long, owing to the treacherously cold, inhospitable climate, Rivia would be made another vassal of the Pertinaxi by 1685.

 

From the end of the Second Atlas Coalition War in 1669 to the beginning of the Third Atlas Coalition War in 1689, Aurelius saw the longest period of relative peace he had known in his life. There were skirmishes out west with the tribes of the snow elves and the occasional rural rebellion, but no threat as serious as the wars in Norland or Courland emerged. It was in these twenty years of peace that Aurelius, even in his old age (he was sixty six at the start of it), experienced great change in his life and style of rule. Aurelius had conquered most of the Heartlands, and even beyond, but now it was time for him to adjust from a warrior, one with victories to boast beside John III, John I, and even Tobias the Conqueror, to an administrator and diplomat.

 

While the violence on the field of battle had ended for a time, the challenges in Aurelius’s life had not ended. He was an authoritative presence while on campaign, a king who commanded the respect of his subjects and the fear of his enemies (and his subjects), but his household was constantly in disarray. He relied on his sons often, especially in times of war, but his relationship with them all, save Antonius, was strained. Of his many family members, councilors, and allies, only his wife, Queen Theodosia, had his full confidence.

 

Queen Theodosia, an enigma to history, was as much a shadow to the people of her husband’s realm as she is to modern historians. Not one for the spectacle of court, she rarely left her family’s palaces and estates. Some have taken this and assumed that her place in Pertinaxi history was minimal, as has been charged of many women of the age, but recent discoveries suggest this to not be the case. Far better-educated than her husband, comparisons of her handwriting and official missives and letters dictated by Aurelius suggest that she often functioned as his scribe. It is known that Aurelius enjoyed reading, but he was poor at it and his eyes were known to grow tired, so it was Theodosia who read to him on quiet evenings and rainy afternoons. Scholars have begun to investigate how much sway she had over Renatian policy, but a dearth of sources have left this field of inquiry difficult to pursue much.

 

Part of why Aurelius only felt that he could trust his wife is doubtless due to the conduct and scandal of his son, Crown Prince Constantine. Himself another mystery of the age, his lack of presence on the battlefield has made the man who was the heir of Aurelius a critically understudied figure. However, as these authors have shown, he played an important role as his father’s regent during the Czena Conflict, and the first two Atlas Coalition Wars. In this time he had amassed a critical alliance network in the court of Senntisten and shored up support among the provincial nobility and in places like Adria. He did not enjoy much love from the army, that was to be certain, but he was respected enough as an able diplomat and administrator who could, in the worst of cases, rely on his brothers for their military expertise.

 

Unknown to Aurelius at the time, Crown Prince Constantine chafed at his role as Archchancellor and was constantly paranoid that he would be replaced. Prince Antonius was adored across the realm as a handsome, skilled knight and a general who had brought victory after victory. Prince Tiberius, a far more reserved figure, still had a good reputation as a master of siege warfare. The Crown Prince, while respected within the bureaucracy and some of the nobility, never had the same love nor received the same honors as his brothers. Whether it was his father removing him as heir, or one of his brothers overthrowing him, he acted with a rash urge to save his position.

 

It is not precisely known when Crown Prince Constantine first started to undermine his father’s rule, but the first documented instance comes with the invasion of southern Norland in 1660. Wydren Volaren, by all accounts a decent, but never remarkable, general, had thoroughly outmaneuvered Prince Antonius and was only defeated when forced into battle at the Sleeping Swamps by King Godden Ruric. Uncovered letters from the attic of a dead Reiver in Ves, found in 1707, show correspondence between the Crown Prince and Wydren Volaren dating from 1659-1660. In one series of letters, the Crown Prince gave the Volaren general his father’s campaign plans in exchange for a promise of support from the Reivers in the event of a succession dispute.

 

The second instance was his elevation of both Duke John of Adria and Margrave Eimar of Ostmark during the war against Norland. While the former was believed to be a result of an overzealous response to the problems in Belvitz, and the latter had his father’s seal of approval, both clearly saw Crown Prince Constantine handpicking men who he believed would support him in a war of succession as a result of his patronage. While neither men were directly involved in any such plotting, it is accepted by historians that they had a more favorable disposition towards the Crown Prince than most other vassals.

 

The third instance was during the Second Atlas Coalition War. The reorganization of the Haeseni archives in 1789 revealed correspondence between Crown Prince Constantine and Matthew Colborn, the Palatine of Haense, dating to 1667. In it the Renatian Archchancellor had revealed the sizes of his father’s armies in the field and cautioned Haense against mobilizing strongly and pursuing a vigorous relief of the many sieges in Courland. Some have argued that this played a significant factor in King Sigmar’s decision to pursue a defensive policy during the war, but others believe that he had already made up his mind before then. While no overt agreement was made like in his letter to the Reivers, the implication was clear: he was fielding Haeseni support in the event of war.

 

The fourth and final known instance, ironically the least consequential, yet the one that revealed his disloyalty, came when he was found to be using funds from the state treasury to manage outstanding expenses coming from his estates in 1671. While this was no great crime in and of itself, his only fault had been not marking this information in the budget, the sheer scale of the payments far exceeded the usual estate expenses. An investigation led by Aran Talraen, the Seneschal of Senntisten and a sound mind with finances, traced these embezzled funds to hiring of various mercenary companies. When questioned, Crown Prince Constantine claimed that they were only for defense, but when he was summoned to the Royal Council again the next day for further questioning, he was found to have fled. 

 

Crown Prince Constantine sought refuge in the court of Haense, where he had curried some favor, and was reluctantly accepted by King Sigmar, but his connections back home had severed. His estates were confiscated, he was dispossessed of his inheritance by his father, and he was named a criminal of the realm to be apprehended if found. As he had no progeny able to inherit due to his morganatic marriage with a woman from Ghanya, he and his line were, as he had been vainly trying to avoid with his treason, swept aside for Prince Antonius. A few years later, in 1678, he would die in obscurity in a manor in rural Haense, the furthest he had ever been from the throne he coveted.

 

His heir’s betrayal was no great personal blow for Aurelius, like with much of his family, the two had never been close, but it did cause him to mistrust his other two sons. While all of the realm clamored for Prince Antonius to be named Archchancellor, it was Prince Charles, a far less charismatic man, though no less astute of a mind, with a less enforceable claim to the throne. Prince Antonius remained a valued counsel for his father, and he remained Grand Marshal of the army, but he would never be given a position so valuable as Archchancellor.

 

Constantine had been corrupt, and his treason is well-established in historical fact, but he had managed to cobble together something resembling a state bureaucracy from the warlike nobility and unenthusiastic clergy that inhabited Renatus-Marna. Prince Charles was a strong diplomat and could handle the nobility of the realm with a firm hand, but the tedious matters of administration bored him. With a lack of trained officials, or even the thought to educate young aristocrats in civil service, as military service was far prioritized as a means of ascending the social hierarchy, many posts were filled by officers’ wives and the inept third sons of rural gentry, neither of whom had the education or experience necessary. 

 

Archives were lost, mislabeled, or contained outright inaccuracies and forgeries. Tax collection was irregular, and it was only the plunder of foreign conquests and raids that sustained the Pertinaxi treasury, which in turn went to fuel continuing wars of expansion. Governance outside of the realm’s major cities was underfunded and corrupt as local lords and underpaid officials took bribes and extorted subjects. Banditry was quite common away from garrisons and centers of power, and at times it was alleged that frontier soldiers officially in the employ of the Royal State Army took part. There was very little oversight on vassals and governors during this period, and so long as they remained loyal and provided soldiers for campaigns, they were mostly left to their own devices, for better or worse.

 

Adrians, and specifically their Lodenlander population, were some of the only Imperial subjects that were well-studied in finances and mathematics. They were highly sought after as scribes, tax collectors, engineers, and other official posts throughout the realm.

 

Aurelius, like most of his councilors, was ill-suited to the monotony of daily governance, but he did make an effort. He rarely held council meetings, preferring instead to act indirectly through secretaries to dictate orders to various ministers. When the occasional meeting was held, he was direct and to the point. Meandering conversations and long-winded asides bothered him. While he invested heavily in an intelligence network and took time to hear rumors from around the realm, he himself never engaged in gossip with his ministers and other members of the court as most monarchs were wont to do. Once he gave his orders and outlined a broad objective for what he wanted to be achieved, he gave his officers the space needed and only expected reports after the fact, which he looked over with diligence.

 

While not thought of by history as a man taken to much leisure, the truth is that Aurelius’s style of rule allowed much of it. He never delayed or rested during a crisis, nor did he outright delegate extreme authority to Prince Charles or anyone else- he expected to have the final say on almost all government matters- but his loose handling of his government, especially in these years of peace, allowed him to visit his estates and palaces outside of the capital. He had never been one for court life, nor had Queen Theodosia for that matter, and he was perfectly content to allow his royal court to wither into virtual nonexistence in Senntisten, save for his occasional appearance before the assembled nobility of the realm to address matters of important, so that he could devote his time to hunting in his royal forests and fishing in his well-stocked lakes. These were simple, quiet activities that he often enjoyed in solace, though his wife frequently joined him and he sometimes brought along various ministers and family members to his countryside excursions if he felt that policy would have to be addressed there.

 

The one area where Aurelius was most active, besides the army, was in diplomacy. He never conducted diplomacy on his own, for he did not possess the eloquent, nuanced tongue needed for it, but, like in war, he had the mind for building a great strategy for others to execute. Unlike most others of the age, he saw war not as a good for its own end, but instead as a tool to achieve the true victory: a favorable settlement at the diplomatic table. It was a thinly-veiled secret, especially after he became King of Marna, that he desired to unite humanity and restore the Empire; one of the first statues he had built of him in Senntisten depicted him triumphantly standing atop a globe. It was a mix of victory on the battlefield and a firm, but not tyrannical, hand that had brought him Marna, Norland, Curon, Ostmark, and dozens more petty fiefdoms, but he did not allow himself to rest after these. Despite the urging of many to take the Imperial Crown, Aurelius believed that only in bringing Haense could he claim to have matched the feats of the previous Emperors.

 

The opportunity came in 1678. King Sigmar of Haense, who took the crown after Aurelius slew his uncle, Franz II, twelve years earlier, had been put to the impossible task of repairing a fractured, isolated realm. Lords fell outside of the crown’s control, bandits, some with connections back to Renatus-Marna, scourged his roads, and his weakening authority was challenged at every turn. In 1672 he had marched an army of eight thousand against one of his rebellious vassals, the Countess of Leeuwenhof, only to face a shattering defeat from a small company of mercenaries. A set of payment documents uncovered in 1779 showed that the man leading this band of ‘mercenaries’ was one of Aurelius’s Dragon Knights. This defeat showed the dire need for reform within Haense, but King Sigmar had neither the security nor the funding to set about doing so.

 

While Aurelius had covertly accelerated the process of undermining King Sigmar’s authority, he had also openly shown a friendlier face. In 1676 he and Kairn Ithelanen destroyed a Haeseni rebel group known as the Red Cloaks in a battle outside Belvitz, relieving King Sigmar of serious internal pressure at such a crucial time. He also increased the number of diplomats and functionaries in Markev and ensured that they had a constant presence at the king’s court there. After a series of defaults in the Haeseni treasury in 1673, 1674, and 1677, Aurelius sent Prince Charles with his offer. In exchange for taking on Haeseni debt, extending army patrols further south, and providing general security for the Barbanov Crown, Sigmar I would swear himself to Aurelius. With few other options, and not adverse to the Pertinaxi as his predecessors had been, the King of Haense agreed.

 

On the 1st of Sun’s Smile, 1678, in a great ceremony in Senntisten, Sigmar I knelt before Aurelius in the great palace hall and recited his oath of vassalage to great applause from the realm’s assembled nobility. Then, the crown of John V, taken during the Sack of Adelburg and kept in a vault, was brought before Aurelius by a company of priests. After a number of speeches, prayers, and sacraments, all of which have been lost to record, as the chronicler tasked with recording the event, the fifth son of a landholding knight, was functionally illiterate, the crown of John V was lifted atop Aurelius’s head and he was proclaimed Emperor of Man. Almost all of the human world had been brought under this new Empire, and what had not would soon come. The new Emperor had come a long way from his origins at Doggersden in 1603, but now, at the ripe old age of seventy four, he had finally unified what had been broken almost forty years before.

 

As the Empire exploded in size, bringing in humans from across the known world, Aurelius had plans made to rebuild Senntisten, which was straining behind its walls. Constructions started a few months after his reign, and by 1680 a fresh, modern capital had been constructed. He renamed the city to Carolustadt in honor of his father, and to mark the transition away from Renatus-Marna to the Empire of Man.

 

Uplifted by the winds of reforming Orenia, the Emperor of Man resolved to build a realm not only connected by his armies and the strength of his ability to enforce his will, but by shared institutions. Ambitious and innovative in scale, most of these reforms were only half-realized by the time of his death in 1694. With both the bureaucracy and intellectual sphere left complete underdeveloped by the constant need for soldiers, soldiers, and more soldiers, and the loose manner of governance that Aurelius preferred, there simply were not enough capable minds to put together many of the far-reaching reforms that Aurelius had hoped for.

 

The most egregious example was the Imperial Parliament formed in 1686. The experiment of the young, liberal-minded noblemen Prince Alexander Horen, son of the Archchancellor, Prince Charles, and Edward Morris, his scribe, this unicameral legislature was designed to give a voice to the people of the Empire in legislative affairs. In theory, it would allow them an appropriate outlet to air their grievances and feel as if they were a part of a great, pan-human political project. 

 

The first elections in 1687, which were open to every property-owning Imperial citizen, saw a strong turnout of sixty five thousand voters. The Common Civic Party, a liberal, constitutionalist faction based primarily out of Haense and Belvitz, won the majority of the nineteen seats, followed closely by the Priorist Party, an ultramonarchist, human supremacist faction based out of Carolustadt that sought to undermine the Imperial Parliament and return to the direct rule of the Emperor and his council. The people of the Empire had spoken, it seemed, and they had chosen a more liberal course of action and seemed relatively invested in this democratic project.

 

The 1687 elections would prove to be the high point of the Imperial Parliament. While Prince Alexander and Edward Morris, who was now the Speaker of the Parliament, had originally dreamed up a powerful body able to handle much of the legislative affairs that the Emperor and his council were reluctant to undertake, the final version of their drafts was a far cry from their original intent. The Imperial Parliament only had the power to propose legislation, not pass it, and review the actions of government ministers, but not impeach them. Aside from a handful of bills that outlined plans to build roads around the Empire, the vast majority of the legislation that was approved related to military funding in one way or another. The Priorist Party also complicated matters by being openly obstructionist during sessions of the parliament and attacking representatives who tried to hold hearings for ministers accused of corruption. Turnout dwindled as the Imperial Parliament increasingly came to be seen as a rubber stamp for the Emperor, and after 1693 it was little more than another advisory body.

 

More successful were the army reforms undertaken by Prince Antonius in 1679, which resulted in the creation of the Imperial Legion. Far more meritocratic than the Royal State Army, it was one of the few institutions that those of lower rank could see themselves ascend the social hierarchy. Men and women from across the Empire flocked to it, making it the most powerful fighting force in Atlas and one of the few Imperial institutions that could credibly claim to be a unifying body for all subjects of the Empire. Enlistment exploded, and by 1684 the Imperial Legion had grown twice as large as the Royal State Army at its height.

 

The (Renatian) Imperial Legion, one of the most vaunted armies in history, saw little in the way of defeat during its life. Although its formation came after most of Aurelius’s significant wars, it remained active in many smaller border conflicts against the tribes of Fenn, who remained a constant thorn in the Empire’s side, the City of Sutica, which was an object of conquest by one of the Emperor’s Dragon Knights, the Duchy of Rivia and its aforementioned rebellion, and the many wars between the elves and orcs far in the north, which saw, more often than not, soldiers aiding the Dominion.

 

The propaganda of the state was critical to maintaining Pertinaxi rule. Aurelius was fine with being thought of as a tyrant or a warmonger, for he firmly believed that, above all, it was the reputation of victory that kept his vassals in line. Monuments were built at the site of his victories. Statues of himself and other members of the Imperial family were required in every major city of the Empire. Paintings and murals depicting his triumphs adorned his courtroom, turning it from a dull, grey scene into one vivid with the sights of battle. Records of his defeat at Small Tower were scrubbed, and it was often proclaimed that the Renatians were undefeated in battle. A law was also passed that forbade all cities of the Empire to have a statue that was equal in size or larger than its statue of Aurelius, with exceptions being given to those of saints or of the Exalted.

 

While Aurelius never saw any significant resistance to his rule during his time, save for the Staunton Uprising, many scholars have tried to attribute this primarily to his propaganda, suggesting even that his Empire was far weaker than he let on, and the facade of his legions’ domination was one that would not have withstood the test of a true, pan-Imperial rebellion. This is a silly notion, these authors believe. During his time, Aurelius’s propaganda was often subject to ridicule, not admiration, for it was wholly needless. Most of his subjects were well-aware of the extent of his power, especially in the city centers where most of this propaganda was centered. Those who resided in the Imperial frontiers, in the many farms and villages that went overlooked by the government, were blissfully unaware of any source of authority beyond their liege lord.

 

A statue of Aurelius in the Norlandic town of Hofn. While the local jarl knew what the Emperor looked like, having been an ally of his in the First Atlas Coalition War, he had the statue designed in the style of a Norlandic paragon. It was common for statues of Aurelius to be fashioned in the style of the local culture, either as reverence or as mockery.

 

In a humorous episode, relayed to us by Soren Bracchus, a lion tamer in the service of a circus based out of Belvitz, Duke John of Adria, who liked to push the boundaries of the law for sport. In the center of Belvitz, Duke John built two statues, one of Aurelius and the other, of a slightly larger size, of a man who others swore looked quite familiar to the paintings of Duke Franz of Adria, Duke John’s ancestor, in the latter’s estates. When an Imperial patrol came by some weeks later, its commander questioned Duke John about the mysterious statue and why it was larger than that of his Emperor. 

 

"It is a statue of my ancestor, the Exalted Sigismund, you see. We Adrians have always thought that he looked a good deal like our Duke Franz,” said Duke John. The patrol commander accepted his explanation and it was never questioned again.

 

Even if his reforms were met with mixed results, they were inconsequential when taken in consideration with the Empire’s continued diplomatic victories. First, Aurelius’s faithful and capable cousin, King Leo of Santegia, died of a wasting disease in 1682. Overseeing a small realm that was, for all intents and purposes, a Renatian vassal, King Leo bequeathed his crown to his cousin. Santegia was a small region, but King Leo had a bright mind for finances and left behind a sizable treasury, which was desperately needed to fund the growing Imperial Legion, as many years of peace meant a lack of the plunder that had sustained the realm for so long.

 

The next victory was a year later. In 1674 a Norlandic nobleman named Thoromir Ruric had led a band of followers from Ashwood, dissatisfied with Imperial rule there, to the swamplands of northern Atlas. There they founded a town called Nordengrad. Although it was far away from the bustling trade of the south, it found allies in the nearby Horde of Krugmar and the dwarven Kingdom of Kaz’Ulrah, both of whom had been allies of Aurelius at some time in the past, but were generally the least willing of his partners. Thoromir Ruric loudly made it known that he wished to avoid the affairs of the south, but this did not entirely assure Aurelius. In 1683, the Emperor summoned Thoromir and the Nordengraders to Carolustadt, where he demanded their fealty. Thoromir, not wanting to provoke the giant, agreed, much to the chagrin of his vassals.

 

1683 saw Aurelius raise another vassal. Two years earlier Sir Konrad Nzech, who had been capable as Governor of Curon, had died. Those appointed to succeed him were corrupt and nearly sparked a rebellion after the mishandling of winter grain allocation. Enough time had passed since the Staunton Uprising, and the Emperor was confident that the region had been greatly pacified since then. A few weeks after he secured the submission of Nordengrad, he summoned Wilhelm Devereux, the son of the former Duke Alfred and Duchess Linette, and restored to him his family’s estates and titles. The new Duke of Curon proved to be an able leader and within months he was able to quiet the regional discontent.

 

These later years also saw significant change in Aurelius’s own life. In his early life, up until the flight to Atlas, he had relied greatly on the seasoned Leitseig Romstun and Arpad Ivanovich to give him the support he needed in times of war and to help keep the order of his fledgling realm. Through his intermediate years, as he slowly expanded his realm and consolidated it into the Empire of Man, he turned to his three sons, Constantine, Antonius, and Tiberius, and his cousin, Charles, to learn from him and shoulder the same burdens of war and peace. Throughout it all, Empress Theodosia had been a constant supporter, even if her role was unheralded. As the twilight of his career came, the ranks would change once again, bringing forth a new generation of men who would lead the Empire.

 

Crown Prince Constantine’s betrayal and exile had been the first blow many years ago, but it was a recoverable one. Prince Antonius was far better-liked by nearly all in the Empire, for he was a general second to none and could command a room in the same manner as his father. It came as a surprise to no one when he was made Crown Prince after his elder brother’s disinheritance. By the time of the Empire’s reformation, he was forty-two, in good health, and had many children. Contrary to the expectations of all, he would soon predecease his father. In the summer of 1679, Prince Antonius caught a fever while leading a campaign against the City of Sutica. When his condition worsened, he was evacuated back to the capital, but he did not recover. The next spring, he was dead.

 

The succession of the Empire fell to Prince Augustus, Prince Antonius’s eldest son. Closer to his uncle Constantine, in disposition, the new Crown Prince did not have his father’s charisma, prowess at arms, or natural affinity to glory, but he did have a bright, calculating mind for politics and was a careful observer of his grandfather’s government. He and Aurelius were not close, but he was soon involved in important affairs of the council and was, if by necessity more than intimate trust, given a high place by the Emperor’s side.

 

Prince Tiberius followed not long after his brother. Having taken control of the Imperial Legion after Antonius’s death, he worked tirelessly to keep his brother’s ongoing reformations alive. His diligence paid off, and by 1682 he had overseen the transformation of the Legion into a professional fighting force the likes of which had not been seen before, and had opened two officers’ colleges in the realm. Unfortunately, his body could not keep up with the energy he exerted to break from his brother’s shadow, and in 1683 his heart burst as he was inspecting the Empire’s northern defenses. The Legion had been thoroughly professionalized by that point, and disciplined soldiers and capable officers kept it from falling into disarray, but without a clear leader it was forced to scale back some of its more aggressive operations.

 

Prince Charles, unlike his cousins, managed to outlive Aurelius; but his career would not. The Archchancellor’s skill at the diplomatic table had allowed him to build (and more importantly, to keep) a strong coalition around the ever-expanding Pertinaxi realm. Through several wars he had kept this alliance together, but by the 1680s he had lost sight of his role in international affairs. While many within the Imperial sphere of influence had their grievances, it was Aurelius’s policy to never intervene, only to mediate. This had worked well enough during the many Dominion-Krugmar conflicts that entered a period of ceasefire each time their respective obligations towards the Empire forced them to join in a new war, but over the years Prince Charles had found himself increasingly-favoring Kairn Ithelanen and his elves. He sent soldiers and supplies to the Dominion from 1676-onwards to aid them in their fight against the orcs over the Loftywoods, a densely-thicketed borderlands between the two countries. By the 1680s this was more than enough for the orcs, who broke their alliance with Renatus and drifted towards alignment with the dwarves of Kaz’Ulrah. At the direction of Aurelius, Prince Charles resigned from his position and retired to his country estates, where he would quietly live out the rest of his days.

 

Empress Theodosia was the last to leave Aurelius’s life. She had been there since the beginning, before he even wore a crown, and had gracefully, faithfully aided him throughout it all. None could claim to match her as a confidant or even as a friend, for few could understand what it meant to be a man of Aurelius’s historical stature. Not even she could understand it, but she could talk frankly about policy in the late hours of the night, or be trusted with transcribing important orders when the Emperor did not wish to write them by hand. It was a work as restless as her husband’s own. 

 

Despite being seventeen years younger than Aurelius, Theodosia was in far poorer health, and by 1684 her body began to wither and deteriorate. As it was not expected that she would survive a year longer, she retired to one of their estates in eastern Norland to enjoy the fairer weather there. With matters of state keeping the Emperor at Carolustadt, he was rarely able to visit her, but he always strove to make the time when he could. She eventually died on the 11th of Owyn’s Flame, 1685, just a week after a visit from her husband. As had first been afforded for Antonius, then for Tiberius, she was given a great procession throughout the capital and laid to rest in the crypts beneath. Thousands came to the streets to mourn her, even if she had been little-known in life.

 

Public mourning had been declared on nearly every occasion of the death of one of the members of the Imperial family, but aside from wearing his customary black garb, Aurelius displayed little in the way of this sentiment. Never an emotional man to begin with, his sorrow manifested in further seclusion. It was here that critics of the time referred to him as “the Emperor in the shadows.” At his old age, death seemed near, but yet again he would be called to the battlefield to deal with new threats that had arisen in the wake of his Imperial expansion.

 

The lessons that Aurelius had learned from the Sixth Empire were evident as he built his own. Cooperative unity may have allowed the Mardons to quickly take the throne, but it also limited their control on force within the realm. The weakened Crown had fallen victim to the machination of the many powers within Oren at the time, and it finally was succumbed by them all. While Aurelius’s own aggression left a wake of resentment, death, and destruction that the creation of the Mardon Empire never had, it also had secured the state to a far greater capacity than any previous Empire.

 

Security for the state at the cost of his morality became a central theme to Aurelius’s life that some historians and authors would explore, but it has often painted him as a completely cruel, ruthless tyrant who was forced to become so by the conditions of his time. This picture is not an altogether incorrect one, though it often overlooks the very personal cost of this mission. Nearly all who he had any confidence in would at some point fail him, betray him, or predecease him. There is not much said on the mental toll that it dealt on him, but brief glimpses at personal correspondence suggest that it was quite serious, such as when he wrote to Kairn Ithelanen, an elf so aged as to have experienced greater than what even he had, for advice:

 

"... What have you endured to see your people where they are now? I pray that it is contentment, satisfaction, and not the despair that I believe must come with that position. A dream cannot be fulfilled if the heart does not splinter, nor can the heart be whole if the dream is not abandoned. Our histories do not have a single example of the satisfaction of both, and it seems that I may not be that exception. I am curious to know whether the elves have a figure who succeeded…”

 

This letter, written in 1686, is noteworthy in that it is one of seven surviving letters that was written by Aurelius’s own hand.

 

---

O Ágioi Kristoff, Jude kai Pius. Dóste mas gnósi ópos sas ékane o Theós. Poté min afísoume na doúme to skotádi, allá as doúme móno to fos tis sofías kai tis alítheias. O Theós na se evlogeí.

---

The end of Aurelius’s life shall be covered in our next volume of The Historia Pertinaxi.

"Let no one say that we didn't body some people," says Aldred 

THE HISTORIA PERTINAXI: Volume II;

The Conquests of Aurelius

Written by Justinian Nafis, Count of Susa

 

and

Adolphus Gloriana, Earl of Suffolk, Prince of Sutica

---

The Conquests of Aurelius

"Now is our only chance to stop this Aurelius Horen. Each year his power grows. I fear that if he is allowed to retain his throne, he shall become unstoppable.” - Adalwulf Horen’s advice to King Javier of Norland during the Third Crusade

 

It was almost midnight on the 12th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1638, and The King of Renatus had almost no time to savor his victory over the now-usurped Mardonic Emperors. It is written by Jimothy Trent, a palace serving boy who survived the massacre at Adelburg and eventually became a scribe for House Kastrovat, that the battle-worn, weary King Canonius sat atop his new throne for mere minutes. It would only have been enough time for those in the room to kneel. Adelburg was in flames, a Norlandic army could arrive at any moment, and news of the young John VI’s demise and the deposition of the Mardons would doubtless reach the other corners of the Empire within days.

 

Although Canonius, during his time as Aurelius, would come to be charged by later historians with lethargy and over-delegation, these accusations hold little water when compared to the accounts of the man during his earliest days as a true ruler. In these dire times, where the existence of his fledgling Renatian state was under constant threat, there are few accounts of the king’s rest and retirement, which he had no doubt earned. 

 

Leitsieg Romstun was ordered to bring the rampaging army to heel. Although the handpicked Romstuns that stormed the palace had since stopped their slaughter, the rest of Canonius’s army still ran the streets red with blood. The Mardonic force had long-broken, and what was a desperate battle had become a massacre. The endeavor would take Leitsieg hours (although some accuse him of wasting away precious time plundering and pillaging himself), and by the end thousands lay dead, among them women, children, and clergy.

 

Arpad Ivanovich was tasked with putting out the fires that engulfed the city. Alongside the wounded, of which there were a few hundred, an ad-hoc fire brigade was formed, and where the Mardons had given up their fight, the blaze refused to back down. Unable to fully contain it, Arpad and his men were forced to allow many neighborhoods of Adelburg to burn. Buildings around armories, food depots, guard posts, and hospitals were razed to prevent crucial infrastructure from being destroyed ahead of what was to be a Norlandic assault on the city. By the morning of the 13th, the fires had died down, leaving nearly seventy percent of the city in ashes.

 

Thankfully, Canonius quickly restored order, and issued commands to stop any looting and killing. While terrible slaughter had occurred during the Coup of Adelburg, the King of Renatus was able to stop its worst excesses. He did not wish to enrage the people of the city, especially not with a Norlandic army just miles from the city. Mere hours after his men were brought in line, he ordered Arpad and Leitsieg to organize defenses for an attack from King Javier and his army, which would surely outnumber the Renatians and their few allies. The banners of the invading vanguard could be spotted early the next morning, and soon after Santegian knights had reached the outskirts of the city. With half-erected barricades and poorly-patched walls, Canonius and his officers prepared for a second fight.

 

In what was deemed “the miracle of Adelburg” by contemporaries, what appeared to be an imminent storming of the city by King Javier and his far larger, better-rested army did not occur. While some Santegian knights rode around the city’s outskirts, certainly to scout the defenses, they did not so much as taunt or skirmish any of the beleaguered defenders. Within an hour they rode back to King Javier’s camp, certainly to report what they had seen, and mere hours after that the great Norlandic host turned back south.

 

Hardly anyone understood King Javier’s decision, least of all Canonius himself, who in 1680 admitted to one of his generals that the city was at that point indefensible with the manpower he had.

 

"Few had died, many had been injured, and others were assigned to guard the prisoners. Those from the Crownlands feudatories were unreliable. They would have fled or turned coat at the first advance, so we had them positioned far in reserve. No more than two thousand men were at my command, far inadequate to defend a city as large as Adelburg. Had King Javier attacked then, the seat of Oren would have been his by nightfall.”

 

Most explanations around King Javier’s unexpected retreat center around the Santegian knights. Some scholars believe that they provided him poor information and misjudged the strength of Adelburg’s defenses, assessing them to be far more well-prepared than they were. Others have proposed that a concurrent rebellion in Santegia was proving far too difficult for King Leo to contain, and the knights that had accompanied King Javier intentionally exaggerated Adelburg’s defensive capabilities in order to convince him to direct the army to Santegia and deal with the uprising there (which he did, securing the region by early 1640). Following this scholarship, newer research has posited that these knights were secretly Canonists in rebellion against the pagan-friendly King Leo, and they deceived King Javier into thinking that Adelburg was impregnable so that the Canonist Crownlands would not be conquered by Fatherists.

 

King Javier’s withdrawal on the 13th of the Grand Harvest, 1639, gave some time for Canonius to secure his base of power and navigate these turbulent political waters. While he was accepted, if not loved, by many of the lords of the Crownlands, the other Canonist princes were not so eager to follow. King Otto II of Haense removed himself from the chaos of the Heartlands and withdrew his armies to his realm. Lorraine and Mardon, both lacking a recognized leader, descended into civil war as factional rivalries split the respective realms apart. Prince Frederick Victor of Marna, the Archchancellor of the Empire, had rallied much of the Imperial bureaucracy and high nobility around the Westerlands and threatened to claim the Imperial Crown for himself. Only the High Pontiff Everard IV entertained any dialogue from Canonius, but, favoring both Prince Frederick and the King of Haense, he did not coronate Canonius, depriving his usurpation of the legitimacy it needed.

 

While he had clearly desired the Imperial title, Canonius was now forced to temper his ambitions. He simply did not have the army, resources, or support to enforce his claim abroad. He issued several proclamations announcing that the Empire was in a state of interregnum, and that he would only use the title of King of Renatus until affirmed otherwise by the Pontiff. In the same stroke, he denounced Prince Frederick’s actions as endangering the stability of Canondom in the face of a pagan invasion. He demanded that the prince cease all plans to claim the Empire for himself and called for those that had fled to the Westerlands to surrender themselves and swear fealty to him.

 

The demands were rejected, but Canonius had prevented Prince Frederick from making his claim to the Empire without looking even more power-hungry than the usurper of his former liege. The Westerlands would have to be brought to heel, but for now he could prevent any direct challenge to his authority in the Crownlands. In a series of courts hosted during the last weeks of 1639, Canonius accepted oaths of fealty and distributed land to some of his most prominent supporters. He also established a rudimentary administration in preparation for his coming campaign against the Westerlands, which began during the spring of 1640. Leitsieg Romstun and Arpad Ivanovich led Canonius’s armies west and are said to have won several small battles there.

 

The destruction of Bastion in 1642 destroyed much of the Westerlandic-Marnan archives there, leaving us without many sources as to the brief war between Prince Frederick and King Canonius. Information from Church archives, mainly surrounding the peace agreements in 1640, gives us some insight as to what may have occurred. In mid-1640, peace was made between the warring factions in a meeting held at the behest of High Pontiff Everard IV. Everard IV, a pragmatic and capable man, knew that the threat to Canondom posed by Norland and its allies was still great, and further infighting over the remains of the Empire served only to prevent a united defense of the faith. At his demand, Canonius ceased his campaign against the Westerlands and agreed to join with them and Haense in a crusade against Norland and Santegia.

 

At these negotiations, representing the Westerlands, was Prince Frederick Pius, son of Prince Frederick Victor. As a part of the agreements made, he was named King of Marna and coronated in a ceremony by the High Pontiff at Alban, where he was residing at that time. The fact that Frederick Pius, and not his father, was the one being crowned as King of Marna, and thus assuming leadership of many of the Orenian exiles, is proof to many scholars that Frederick Victor was slain during the brief war. Frederick Pius’s willingness to abandon any claims to the Empire might suggest that Canonius forced him into such a position, but it could just as easily be the case that the King of Marna had no wish to make his claim in such an environment.

 

Concurrently, Canonius was formally recognized and crowned by the High Pontiff in a similar ceremony not long after Frederick Pius. Given the regnal name Aurelius, which history knows him as far better now, the once-upstart general had now been fully brought into the fold of Canondom. Doing his part as a Canonist, he agreed to support the crusade with whatever manpower he had available. Let it also be noted that from here on forward, these authors will be referring to him as Aurelius.

 

Within months, Aurelius, Frederick Pius, and Otto II had assembled a combined host of eight thousand. While nominally allies in a crusade against Santegia and Norland, none of them trusted the other two, and so the majority of their forces were kept in defense. Fortunately for them, the winds had changed since the Battle of the Bloody Road. In the winter of 1939, riots from Canonists in San Adrian, the capital of Santegia, had forced King Leo to recall his army there to suppress them, a task that he found increasingly difficult. The next year, the King of Santegia returned to the Canonist faith and joined the crusade against Norland.

 

With his coalition weakening and his enemies growing stronger, King Javier gambled on another offensive against Adelburg, where the crusade was rallying, in the hopes of dealing them an early defeat before they had gathered their full might. Encouraged by Adalwulf Horen, the mercenary commander that had turned coat after the Battle of the Bloody Road, he led a quick march from Vjorhelm back to the Crownlands. Unfortunately for him, the success he found two years earlier could never have been replicated. In 1638 he faced a poorly-supplied, demoralized Imperial Legion with a far larger host bolstered by his allies. The crusader army he marched against was in high spirits, outnumbered his own host, and was far better led.

 

King Javier made camp at the small forest town of Rochdale, less than twenty miles from Adelburg. Confident that his lightning march had gone undetected, he failed to properly scout the area. Had he done so, they would have encountered the crusader army camped only a few miles away. Having learned from the mistakes of his predecessors, Aurelius had established an extensive intelligence network that informed him of the Norlandic army’s location, disposition, and size. With this information in hand he proposed an immediate attack on the King of Norland’s army, believing a decisive victory on Canonist soil to be the best chance at bringing a decisive end to the war.

 

On the 10th of the Grand Harvest, 1640, the encamped Norlandic army awoke to the sounds of war horns and taunts from the trees surrounding Rochdale. They had only minutes to assemble a clumsy shield wall before crusaders bearing the sigils of Renatus, Marna, and Haense came bearing down from the woods. Led by Frederick Pius, by far the most gifted commander of the crusaders, the combined army dealt a shattering blow to the six thousand Norlanders. Assailed from all sides, the shield wall was quickly overwhelmed and broken, and King Javier ordered a retreat. Over half of his army was killed or captured in the brief melee and ensuing retreat, and the force that limped back to Vjorhelm was only a shadow of what had brought an end to the Empire two years earlier.

 

For a Crownlands that had experienced nothing but war, famine, and humiliation for the past two decades, this avenging of the defeat brought utter jubilation. Days later, when news of the King of Santegia’s surrender to the Pontiff reached Adelburg, two days of feasting were held to celebrate the two great victories of the crusaders. Plans were made to march on Vjorhelm after the winter, and the kings of Haense and Marna agreed to remain in the south until the next year’s offensive.

 

Even at the time, Adelburg’s celebrations for Aurelius’s victory at Rochdale were derided as plain and inexpensive, but even the brief, one-hour parade that was held had taxed the city of nearly all its remaining wealth. After hearing of the cost of the small festival, Aurelius forbade any of its kind that were not financed by spoils from the war.

 

For Aurelius, the victory at Rochdale was critical in affirming the loyalty of the Crownlands nobility and of Adelburg. The brutal Coup of Adelburg, and the brief war against the well-liked Prince Frederick, had stoked fears in the populace that Aurelius was no more than a bloodthirsty warmonger. Avenging the humiliation at the Bloody Road was an important first step for Aurelius to build his reputation as a man who could defend the Crownlands from foreign invasion. 

 

During the winter, Aurelius spent what available time he had away from the war councils reestablishing a regular court and bureaucracy, both of which had been virtually absent from his realm for the past year. Despite not being a learned man himself, the King of Renatus was not so proud as to avoid seeking good advice when it was offered. Renatus had few intellectuals of its own, but with the Marnan and Haeseni armies wintering in Adelburg, he came into contact with many officials and nobles that had extensive experience in governing. It was from these men that he began to grasp many of the fundamental principles of statecraft. He would not refine his political talents for many years, but by the start of the spring campaign he had a simple, crude state and court apparatus to draw support from.

 

While Aurelius’s strength and popularity had grown over the winter, King Javier’s had waned. Defeated in battle and abandoned by its allies, Norland was wholly unprepared to face the coming offensive. King Javier, seeing the inevitable, claimed that an old wound ailed him so greatly that he could not effectively lead his people in a time of war. He abdicated the throne to his son Jevan and promptly left the realm. A capable commander, though far from his father’s equal, King Jevan prepared Vjorhelm for a siege.

 

Marching out in the spring of 1640, the crusader armies reached Vjorhelm by the month of Harren’s Folly and surrounded it. Numbering nine thousand to the Norlander’s two thousand, the crusaders were content to sit and wait for months while they starved the island fortress by cutting off its supply lines. Aurelius, inexperienced in siege warfare, once again deferred to the more experienced Frederick Pius, but he made sure to keep an active presence around the many artillery batteries and siege lines surrounding the city. By the month of Tobias’s Bounty, nearly half of the Norlandic garrison had succumbed to starvation and illness. Two assaults against the city on the 7th and the 10th were repulsed with heavy losses, but on the 12th the city was eventually stormed and conquered. Within a year, Norland, which had once threatened the Canonist world, had fallen.

 

As the crusaders dispersed to attack the many pagan chieftains and petty kings in the region, the four crusader kings (King Leo of Santegia had joined in the campaign against Vjohelm) met in the ruins of the conquered city. They agreed to extend the alliance, though it played little purpose, for another five years so that peace could be kept among the realms of man and each could recover from the Empire’s collapse. The question of what to do with the lands of the Norlanders. Haense, being so far away, had no desire to occupy and govern the region. Santegia, a weak state and only recently having joined the crusade, could not have enforced their will if they tried. Mardon, nearest to the faith, disdained the followers of the Red Faith and would have sooner massacred the lands.

 

Aurelius, not so religious as to have any scruples against having Red Faith subjects, not so far away as to be unable to govern the territory, and not so weak as to lack the forces needed to keep order, was the least worst of four poor candidates to govern the Norlanders. On the 18th of Tobias’s Bounty, Leitseig Romstun, still one of Aurelius’s senior commanders, met with Jory Ruric, the younger brother of King Jevan. Far more inclined to peace, Jory agreed to serve as King of Norland, subordinate to Renatus, in return for being allowed to keep to the Red Faith. His lands were reduced to Vjorhelm and a few towns outside of it, with the rest of the realm being given to a number of crusaders from across Canondom, yet another move that strengthened Aurelius’s support base. Sir Peter Reeves, a younger son of a minor noble in the Crownlands, was made governor of the region and given a small garrison to hold Vjorhelm as the rest of the Renatian army returned home.

 

Over the course of 1641-1642 Aurelius used the peace wisely. His third and final son, Tiberius, was born on the 2nd of Harren’s Folly, 1641, and a feast was held in his honor. According to William McGonius, a chronicler in Aurelius’s court:

 

"It was whispered by some near to the king’s circles that this feast had a dual-meaning. The celebrations for the birth of Prince Tiberius were well-held and expensive for the crown, but of greater note was the king’s insistence that every subject of noble stock in the realm attend. Throughout the day he met with each family, even during the festivities, and only once took a few minutes from this task so that he could enjoy two courses of spiced lamb, which was known to be his favorite dish. He asked them numerous questions about the state of their household, the number of soldiers they could field, their finances, and other such things, for which he had a scribe to record their answers. Though his son’s birth day celebrations were always at the forefront, King Aurelius would have felt it wasted if he did not accomplish anything during it.”

 

As is known to history, a great calamity struck the lands of Axios in 1642, requiring all of its inhabitants to flee to a new land called Atlas. Unsettled in the way Axios was not, hundreds of petty dukes and hillbarons sprang up across the continent. Aurelius and his subjects found themselves in the gentle hills of the eastern part of Atlas, and it was there that they built a number of villages and castles, though the names of most have been lost to time.

 

In fact, much of the history from 1642-1650 is poorly-known. The scant records from this time suggest that Aurelius could not exercise much control nor build a sophisticated state. Many of his vassals from the Crownlands most likely slipped away from his grasp at this time as they, like so many others on Atlas, ruled tiny, independent fiefs encompassing no more than a few hundred souls situated around a castle and its surrounding lands. Most disastrously, King Jory Ruric, who had sworn fealty to Aurelius after the Third Crusade, was able to build a great capital at Ruriksgrad in the swamps of the East Atlas Islands from which he reunited the tribes and clans of the Norlanders around his banner.

 

The affairs of the Kingdom of Marna are better-attested at this time. In the central Heartlands of Atlas, Frederick Pius built his capital of Senntisten, one of the greater cities of the continent’s early days. From here he fought frequently with the nearby Santegians and Norlanders for control of the region. To complicate matters, a group of old Courlanders found leadership in Charles Staunton, the Duke of Curon and a younger son of Tobias ‘the Conqueror’, and they too bitterly established themselves in the region. In this backdrop of feuding and territorial fights, mercenary bands also often threw themselves in the fray so they could have a piece of the abundant land. One of these, the Black Reiters, who had fought with Aurelius long ago, joined with the old Reginald d’Amaury, a distant cousin of the Archdukes of Lorraine, and formed the Republic of Vrakrai centered around the town of Belvitz, posing one of the more serious challenges to Marnan control.

 

While Frederick Pius, an able commander and administrator of higher degree than his peers, was able to maintain Marnan dominance over the region, by 1650 his position was untenable. He began a correspondence with Aurelius in the spring of that year, probing the King of Renatus’s interest in joining their resources together. With Marna’s infrastructure and administrators, mixed with Renatus’s military prowess, they could easily establish an impregnable power base at Senntisten and move outwards. These early letters are similarly lost, but it is generally believed by historians that Frederick Pius’s offer to the Pertinaxi was for an arrangement on these lines, with the finer details to be sorted out later.

 

Aurelius did not budge. His position was far from enviable, yes, but he did not face the same external pressures to his rule that Frederick Pius did. Not deprived of his faculties as he had been of his nobility, the King of Renatus kept the Marnan on a thread: always appearing open to offers of unification but never agreeing to any specific course of action. Aurelius was a proud man. He had not forgotten that it was the King of Marna’s father who had stolen the garrison of the Westerlands and much of the old Imperial bureaucracy from him over a decade ago. Never so spiteful as to avoid good policy, he would certainly unify with Marna and put aside these grudges, but it would be on his own terms.

 

In 1652 the waiting game paid off. Unable to replenish his ranks from constant raids and counter-raids, Frederick Pius finally acquiesced. Never the most ambitious man (it was a popular rumor that he never wanted the Crown of Marna), he willingly embraced what appeared to be quite lopsided terms in order to see through the unification of Renatus and Marna. In exchange for being made one of Aurelius’s first knights and an advisor at his table, and in allowing all Marnan subjects to retain their titles, posts, and properties, Frederick Pius gave all of his estates and titles, including Marna, to Aurelius. All terms were held to, and Aurelius and his court traveled to Senntisten to take the seat of their new capital.

 

On the 13th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1652, an official Act of Union joined together the two realms, and in an extensive ceremony Aurelius declared himself King of Renatus-Marna. To rapturous applause throughout the streets of Senntisten, Aurelius had completed his victory over all of his foes from the early Coup of Adelburg. However, he was not prepared to let this be his last. Within a week he had created a number of individual councils, tasked with Renatians and Marnans alike, though that distinction was quickly fading into irrelevance, with addressing the problems that faced the floundering realm. By the year’s end, the King of Renatus-Marna had reformed the army, streamlined the bureaucracy, regularized tax codes, reorganized several land grants and issued several more, and cut expenses from the royal court.

 

One of the more famous, or infamous, creations of this brief period was the Order of the Red Dragon, the highest knightly order in the realm that was to directly serve the king. Made up of a small and select, but elite, group of the realm’s foremost soldiers, the ‘Dragon Knights’, as they came to be known, served as both military officers and specialized agents. Credited for a number of battlefield victories, prevented assassination attempts, and anti-banditry campaigns (also accused of several coups, assassinations, and massacres), a Dragon Knight was an exemplar the quiet, lethal effectiveness that Aurelius sought to project of the Pertinaxi regime. Never more than fifty at a time, they would prove their worth almost immediately.

 

There is almost no doubt that Aurelius would have liked more time to follow through with his reforms, but international affairs did not allow it. The unification of Renatus and Marna was frightening to those in and around the Heartlands. Separate they were powerful, yes, but not overbearingly so. Together they had the potential to unite the Heartlands. On the 13th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1653, precisely a year after the formal unification of Renatus and Marna, the Czena Confederation was formed between the Kingdom of Haense, the Kingdom of Santegia, and the Duchy of Curon, all states with power and influence in the Heartlands that could be lost.

 

This was a challenge to Renatus-Marna, and it was met with fury. Details are sparse, but in the early spring months of 1654 a raiding party from Renatus scoured across much of northern Haense, even at one point sacking the outskirts of the capital Markev before turning back. It was a powerful opening salvo that set the course of this brief, indecisive conflict. Otto III of Haense, more a scholar than a warrior, did not wish to escalate the war, and instead focused on courting allies throughout humanity. Aiming to lock Aurelius out of the diplomatic circles, isolating him for when true war was needed, Otto III was willing to accept defeats in minor raids and skirmishes so long as Haense’s diplomatic position remained strong.

 

With a strong assumption of his foe’s plan, Aurelius similarly did not test his strength in a large offensive. While his Dragon Knights scoured small towns and farms across Curon and Santegia, he set about establishing a robust diplomatic corps. If he was to be treated with mistrust and hostility across humanity, he would find allies elsewhere. 

 

Kairn Ithelanen and Belestram Sylvaeri, the two leaders of the Dominion of Malin, were among the first to agree to an alliance. The orcs of  Krugmar, in exchange for yearly shipments of silk, soon followed. The dwarves of Kaz’Ulrah, never friends of Haense, rounded out a successful diplomatic mission by 1654. Otto III’s death the next year, which left the throne to his young son, only made Aurelius more assured of his position.

 

The Czena Confederation, fragile, as coalitions built around a sole interest often are, finally broke in 1656. Duke Alfred of Curon feared that the boy-king of Haense, Karl II, and his corrupt government would not have the ability to manage a war, so he formed an alliance with Renatus-Marna. King Leo of Santegia, seeing his realm crumbling from the heavy costs incurred by this conflict, followed suit. He joined Aurelius’s expanding alliance and began extensive negotiations to sell the rights of the Santegian inheritance (some, like Casimiro of Santegia, believe this was done under duress from Aurelius). The Pertinaxi government was able to raise seventy thousand mina to purchase King Leo’s inheritance in the name of Achilius Horen, a second cousin of Aurelius who had shown promise in the court of Renatus-Marna. Upon King Leo’s death in 1657, Achilius ascended to the Santegian throne and would prove a reliable ally of the Pertinaxi for decades. 

 

Despite being short-lived and having failed in its aims, the Czena Confederation became a model for future coalitions to challenge the Pertinaxi. No fewer than six emerged from 1637-1714, and scholars have alleged the existence of possibly three more, though the evidence for these is less certain. 

 

With the Czena Confederation in tatters and his influence in the Heartlands unchallenged, Aurelius moved to expand his realm. To Renatus-Marna’s immediate north, the Republic of Vrakai was having difficulties defending its holdings. While Belvitz was a wealthy merchant’s city, well-situated along a central trade route, the Black Reiters were too few in number to defend it and the many farming communities that it supported. The old Reginald d’Amaury’s death in 1564 deprived the republic of a capable leader, so many of its leading bankers and merchants traveled to Senntisten to ask the King of Renatus-Marna to take control. Obliging, on the 17th of Horen’s Calling, 1656, Aurelius ordered Adelard von Brandt, the Duke of Blackmarsh, to bring order to Vrakrai and occupy it in the name of Renatus-Marna.

 

Much like the unification of Renatus and Marna, occupying Vrakai and putting his cousin on the Santegian throne did much to improve Aurelius’s own fortunes, bringing him two of the more lucrative regions of Atlas at minimal expense, but it caused alarm with much of the rest of the world. The new King of Norland, Godden Ruric, a man far less friendly to Renatus than his father Jory had been, feared that his kingdom would be next. He began hiring mercenaries and joined into an alliance with Haense, which wished to avenge its diplomatic humiliation in the Czena Conflict, and Haelun’or, which opposed Aurelius’s alliance with the Dominion of Malin. In 1657 their alliance began to raid eastern Vrakai from the swamp forts of Norland.

 

The First Atlas Coalition War, the first of three major coalition wars that Aurelius faced, saw a new generation of leaders arise from under him, mostly from within his own family. Leitsieg Romstun and Arpad Ivanovich, who had served him well in his early rise, were now old men who had retired to their countryside estates. Aurelius’s three sons, Constantine, Antonius, and Tiberius had risen to take their places. 

 

Crown Prince Constantine was no warrior but had a strong mind for politics: he was the architect behind much of Renatus-Marna’s diplomatic successes in the Czena Conflict and served his father as Archchancellor. While never meeting the same heights of fame as his two brothers- quite the opposite, as his life would soon be ridden with scandal- his legacy lived on in the good government that he brought to the realm, as he was often trusted by his father to manage many of the day-to-day affairs of state and govern the country in his absence.

 

Prince Antonius, handsome, dashing, and brave, was the model prince. Adored by most of the realm, he was a famed swordsman and had military talent to share. He had first shown promise in the Czena Conflict, where his performance in a few skirmishes showed his aptitude for leadership at a young age, and by the time of the First Atlas Coalition War he had been given control of the whole army. Grand Marshal of Renatus-Marna at just twenty one, expectations for Prince Antonius could not have been greater going into 1657.

 

Prince Tiberius, like Antonius, had also taken to military life, though his passion lay with artillery and siegecraft. A brilliant mathematician and engineer, he designed several different siege weapons for his father’s army and was given complete authority over all siege operations during the war.

 

On the 7th of Harren’s Folly, 1657, war was declared by Aurelius, who had received commitments from his allies. Santegia, Curon, the orcish horde, the dwarves, and the Dominion of Malin would all fight beside their ally. Raiding parties from various members of this alliance scoured Haelun’or, Norland, and Haense, setting many villages ablaze. Within a month of the war’s beginning, a force of Black Reiters under the command of Louys de Bruyne had driven out all invaders from eastern Vrakai.

 

The war had begun well for Aurelius, but his allies often bickered amongst each other over strategy. The wood elves and the orcs did not wish to see the other rise in strength, for each wished to take lands from the high elves. The Curonians, believing that Haense was the greater threat, advocated a campaign against them, but the Santegians felt that Norland should be dealt with first, as they were still officially a vassal of King Aurelius and were theoretically in open revolt. For three years it looked like the war was to go the course of the Czena Conflict, with small raids and skirmishes only serving as a backdrop for the real battles at the diplomatic table, but unlike in the previous war, this delay was intentional for Aurelius.

 

While never a great warrior, nor anything more than a mediocre battlefield commander, Aurelius grasped higher strategy at a level unparalleled across history. Knowing that intelligence and logistics were paramount to winning any war, he prioritized making his armies among the best-trained, best-equipped, and best-informed on the whole of Atlas. Lester Crunk, the brother of a friend of a cousin of a junior officer on the King of Renatus-Marna’s staff writes this of the level of strategic detail that went into planning the operations throughout 1657-1660.

 

"[Aurelius] had over a dozen maps of southern Norland, each more detailed than the last. The one that caught many eyes was a map detailing the various resources that each village produced. Intercrossing red lines marked where various goods were exchanged between villages and other centers of trade before making their way back to the capital. When planning each raid his army would undertake, [Aurelius] consulted this map more than any other, as he believed that such attacks were only worthwhile if the material lost was less than the material that our enemy would be deprived from.”

 

Prolonging the war worked in the favor of Renatus-Marna and her allies, who already could field larger armies and draw on greater resources. As the strength of their enemies dwindled, the leaders of this alliance met in Senntisten during the Sun’s Smile, 1660 to plan their offensive into Norland. The armies of Norland, Haense, and Haelun’or, led by the mercenary leader Wydren Volaren, had gathered in the swamplands of the south of the country. It was inhospitable, sparsely-populated terrain that made the movement of large armies difficult. Undaunted, Prince Antonius, now comfortable in his position as Grand Marshal, divided the army in two for the coming campaign. The right wing, under his command, would follow along the eastern coast of Norland until it reached Ruriksgrad. The left wing, under the command of Prince Charles Horen, a son of Peter II who had recently found service under Aurelius as a capable diplomat and general in the Czena Conflict, was to similarly bypass the southern swamps and lure the main coalition army into a field battle by attacking the many towns and castles of western Norland. Aurelius, in nominal command of the army, joined Prince Charles’s force with his Dragon Knights.

 

Beginning in the summer of 1660, a late campaign by all metrics, the invasion of Norland began disastrously. Unbeknownst to the Renatians and their allies, the plans of their upcoming invasion had been given to Wydren Volaren, who immediately moved his army further north to new defensive positions, preventing them from being outflanked. He then divided his army into multiple pieces and scattered them across the Norlandic swamplands and its outskirts. If one was attacked, the rest of the army would group and converge on that point. With the Renatian army divided, he would either be able to bring his whole host to bear on one half of their army, or they would suffer crippling logistical issues uniting their two hosts.

 

Prince Antonius pressed forward with the campaign, but instead of a blitz towards the Ruriksgrad, he instead concentrated his efforts on attacking many of the chiefs and petty kings of southern Norland. Meanwhile, Prince Charles, keeping his army closer than originally planned, besieged the fortified town of Norvik. Drawing from his father’s insistence on patience in the face of pressure, Prince Antonius played cautiously as he relied on his army’s superior size, supplies, and the impetus that his attacks on King Godden’s subjects was creating for Norland and her allies. The gamble worked and by that autumn, King Godden ordered Wydren Volaren to consolidate the army and make a push through the swamplands to relieve Norvik.

 

This played right into Prince Antonius’s hands. He and Prince Charles broke off their respective engagements and drove their wings of the army towards the swamplands at a breakneck pace. The two commanders met on the 19th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1660, almost at the end of the campaign season, and combined their hosts in preparation for the coming battle. Mere leagues away, dispersed across the swamp, was their enemy. Renatus-Marna and her allies had brought just under thirty thousand footmen, while Norland and her allies had half that at most. Wydren Volaren’s plan to defeat isolated wings of the Renatian alliance’s army had failed, and now he would be forced to fight their joined hosts.

 

The Battle of the Sleeping Swamps, fought on the 20th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1660, began, much like the wider campaign, poorly. Although Prince Charles and Prince Antonius had both made it to the battlefield, their forces were still a few hours apart by the time that the fighting commenced. Prince Antonius, making a rare mistake, failed to communicate precisely when he was going to start the battle, and so it was that at 06:00, the right wing of the army was marching towards the enemy positions while the left wing was still having breakfast. Thankfully, the right wing was comprised of most of the Royal State Army of Renatus-Marna, the finest soldiers on the battlefield, and they still outnumbered their enemy some.

 

As Prince Antonius advanced, he and his soldiers encountered many isolated pockets of Norlandic and Haeseni soldiers. Some had prepared for battle, but were few in number and easily surrounded. Others were still sleeping as they were set upon. Most, prepared or not, simply fled as the Royal State Army cleared much of the swamp. By 10:00, Prince Antonius had captured five hills and two villages deemed of strategic importance, and all without encountering any significant organized resistance. An hour later he sent word to Prince Charles of what had occurred so far and ordered him to also move north if he had not already. 

 

In a day defined by communication problems, the forces opposing Renatus had fared no better. King Godden, proud as they came but inexperienced in matters of war, had tried to wrestle command of the army from Wydren Volaren. The Haeseni and Haelunorian contingents, lacking any strong leadership themselves, were mere spectators to the arguing and infighting that ensued at the war tents between the King of Norland and his chiefs and the mercenary captains. Come the morning, the scattered elements of the army had yet to be recalled and there was very little battleplan to work with. Without orders from the central command, everything was organized between brigades, which led to the general disaster from the battle’s outset.

 

At 12:00, Prince Antonius resumed his army’s march. By this point, many of the Norland and Haeseni officers had received word of the attack and were beginning to coalesce around a point called Mole’s Hill, a high hill that provided a good look over the foggy landscape and plenty of protection from direct assault. By the time that the first waves of Pertinaxi forces had met them, around five thousand soldiers had fortified the hill. Prince Antonius split his army in half again, giving one part to his lieutenant, Sir Conrad Nzech, while he took the other to lead repeated assaults against Mole’s Hill, all of which were repulsed with heavy losses.

 

By 15:00, Prince Charles and his part of the army arrived on the battlefield and fell upon many of the Haelunorian units. They found much of the same success that the right wing had, and once they heard word of the action around the Mole’s Hill they began a quick march to this last point of enemy resistance. Aurelius, uncharacteristically wishing to get involved in the fighting, perhaps seeing that victory was well-secured and wishing to earn some glory, took his Dragon Knights and marched to the enemy camps, quickly dispatching the defenders who had not retreated and plundering the coffers there. The King of Norland, Wydren Volaren, and their chief officers were nowhere to be found: they had fled the battlefield hours before.

 

At 17:00, the Mole’s Hill was completely surrounded and contained the final units of the Norlandic army, though a few Haeseni also numbered in their ranks. Prince Antonius and his soldiers charged seven times against the mass of shields and spears, but each time they were fiercely driven back. Not wishing to waste any more of his men’s lives, the prince ordered all available archers to be brought forth. For hours they covered the hill with arrows, drastically thinning the ranks of the poorly-armored Norlanders. With hundreds laying dead, an eighth charge from the Renatians proved to be the final one. Cut down to nearly a man, the defender’s at Mole’s Hill were the end of what was a shattering victory for Renatus-Marna and its allies. They suffered just over a thousand casualties, most of them Royal State Army soldiers at Mole’s Hill, compared to ten thousand killed, wounded, and missing Norlanders, Haseni, and high elves: two-thirds of their entire army.

 

The Battle of the Sleeping Swamps was one of the most complete victories of Aurelius’s career. In one day, Prince Antonius, Prince Charles, and the Royal State Army had achieved a near-mythological status for battle prowess and brutal efficiency. The victory was celebrated across the realm as news trickled back from Norland. Nobles and towns that may have wavered in their support, or questioned the war council’s strategy in the war’s first three years, cast aside their doubts and affirmed their loyalties. If Aurelius still had lingering questions of loyalty among many of his subjects, any serious discussion of it ended after the battle.

 

Compared to their enemies, the camps of the Royal State Army were well-guarded, healthy, and clean. Disease still claimed the lives of most on campaign, but proportionately it was far smaller than those from Norland, whose camps were filthy, disorganized, and isolated by clan, which played a role in their disaster at the Sleeping Swamps.

 

Over the next few weeks, Aurelius personally traveled around southern Norland as he obtained the surrender and fealty of dozens of chieftains and towns. He showed mercy to most, allowing them to keep their lands, titles, and privileges so long as they supplied his armies with soldiers and supplies and sent regular tribute back to Senntisten. Even their faith was untouched, though priests were allowed to proselytize under state protection. A few clans and keeps resisted, but they were all put to siege and conquered by the spring of 1661, which brought Renatus-Marna full control of southern Norland.

 

Although the Battle of the Sleeping Swamps may have cemented most of his subjects’ personal loyalty to him, Aurelius was still faced with domestic problems while on campaign. Back in Vrakai, riots had broken out in Belvitz against Duke Adelard of Blackmarsh’s governance. His obedience to the Pertinaxi could never be doubted, but to his people, a liberal sort used to loose governance under Vrakai, he was an iron-fisted tyrant. As Aurelius’s armies thrashed their foes in the Sleeping Swamps, a delegation from Belvitz went to the court of the capital to make their appeal.

 

Crown Prince Constantine, managing domestic affairs from Senntisten, was the first to receive this audience. Despite serving in a similar capacity as a regent, the prince was not given the same ultimate authority, though 18th-century Pertinaxi historian Gebhard Reyes claims that “the instructions that Aurelius gave his son were vague, partially owing to the fact that he had written them in his own hand. Defend the country. Oversee the state. Deliver to the army what it needs. Constantine saw the first and extrapolated from it the power to act when he perceived any possible rebellion.”

 

Eager to prove himself to his father, especially in light of his brother’s triumphs in the field, and wanting to avert a possible rebellion in Belvitz, Crown Prince Constantine decided to intervene directly into the dispute. Far more deft of a politician than either of his brothers, his lack of time in the army was made up for by his constant presence in the court. With a strong wit and a propensity for charming, the prince had especially endeared himself to a group of Adrians led by John Sarkozic, who had run many successful shops and taverns throughout Senntisten. Similarly inclined towards liberal pursuits, and with a sizable following of Adrians, John Sarkozic seemed the ideal man to rule Vrakai. John Sarkozic agreed, but on the condition that he be allowed to adopt the title ‘Duke of Adria’, his family’s ancestral title from before the days of the Johannian Empire. The Crown Prince, eager to have a loyal ally in charge of Renatus-Marna’s greatest trading hub, agreed.

 

On the 13th of Harren’s Folly, 1661, the Adrian Proclamation was issued from Senntisten. While formally drafted by the Adrians, it came with the official backing of Crown Prince Constantine. It dispossessed Duke Adelard of Blackmarsh of his lands in favor of Duke John of Adria, who was to be given all of the lands of Vrakai. Within a day of the proclamation, the Duke of Adria was leading a small army down to Belvitz to conquer it and the surrounding lands. The Duke of Blackmarsh tried to organize a defense, but few came to his support and he was forced to flee his lands. He went east to join Aurelius, where he ably served as an infantry officer and ceaselessly pleaded with the king to be allowed to lead an army back to retake his lands. 

 

Displeased at his son’s overreach of authority, but not wishing to spark a war in a region crucial for his army’s supply lines, Aurelius made some vague promises but ultimately never gave permission. Duke Adelard would eventually die in the Siege of Ruriksgrad a year later, removing the need for such a decision. He had been a loyal governor for the King of Renatus-Marna, but loyalty was not enough. Competence was just as, if not more, important.

 

Part of why Aurelius did not care to overrule his heir in the Belvitz matter was because of a coming offensive. The king wished to bring a quick end to the war and had duly planned a quick march through the Forkwoods, a heavily forested region in northern Norland, that stood between Ruriksgrad and the conquered south. With the enemy army heavily bruised after its defeat at the Sleeping Swamps, Aurelius believed that they posed virtually no threat to his own in a direct confrontation. That summer they marched north again, hoping to reach Ruriksgrad within a matter of weeks.

 

Unfortunately for Renatus-Marna and her allies, the Norlandic-Haeseni-Haelunorian army had recovered some over the previous months. While Prince Antonius and Prince Charles had gone about subduing various tribes and towns, Wydren Volaren had won the power struggle in the high command and now had total control of the army. With only nine thousand soldiers compared to the twenty five thousand under Aurelius, he had come to a similar conclusion as those marching north: his army stood no chance of winning an open battle. The Reiver captain, not wanting to repeat the same mistake that King Godden Ruric had at the Sleeping Swamps, divided his units again, but this time ordered them to operate with relative independence and harass the enemy army.

 

What was supposed to be a quick march to Ruriksgrad soon became a grueling trudge for the large, hulking army of Aurelius and her allies. While the elven contingent from the Dominion of Malin, led by Kairn Ithelanen, was used to this style of warfare, the regular soldiers of Renatus-Marna, Curon, and Santegia did not fare well against the quick, nighttime attacks that peppered their waltz north. Prince Antonius and Prince Charles, frustrated with the army’s slow progress and the harassing of their supply lines, turned their attention towards rooting out these roving guerilla bands.

 

The Battle of the Forkwoods is, unlike the Battle of the Sleeping Swamps, which has a wealth of information, one of the most poorly-recorded fights of Aurelius’s rule. This can be explained by the fact that it is better-described as a long-scale campaign marked by quick attacks, skirmishes, and raids on numerous villages in the Forkwoods believed to be housing Norlandic soldiers. By the 15th of Godfrey’s Triumph, 1661, Aurelius’s army emerged from the Forkwoods and had an unopposed path to Ruriksgrad, but they had suffered close to two thousand dead, primarily among the human ranks, and they had spent months in a region that should have been cleared in weeks.

 

No matter their losses, the Renatians had not fared nearly as poorly as their enemy. Five thousand of Wydren Volaren’s already-thin forces had been killed, wounded, or captured during the Battle of the Forkwoods, and there were no more reinforcements to draw. A stiff defense of the southern border of Renatus-Marna had prevented a second Haeseni army from making their way north, and the reserves of Haelun’or and Norland had been exhausted. Seeing the hopelessness of the war, many of the mercenaries that had originally been hired by King Godden Ruric began to desert in droves. The limping army that returned to Ruriksgrad had successfully delayed the coalition that opposed them, but only two and a half thousand remained to take solace in that.

 

On the 1st of the Grand Harvest, 1661, Aurelius’s army surrounded the city, and the king ordered his son, Prince Tiberius, to draw up siege plans. Ruriksgrad was still a defensible city that boasted high, sturdy walls and a maze of trenches and barricades both inside and outside that had begun to be manned by conscripts drawn from the local population. Now taking charge, Prince Tiberius vigorously set about organizing siege camps and directing the construction of several trebuchets and siege towers. He predicted that, with no other delays, they would have the city by that spring.

 

Unfortunately, there was no end of headaches for the King of Renatus-Marna, though now they came from within his own camps.

 

In 1658, Duke Alfred of Curon, one of Aurelius’s more steadfast allies, had died during a skirmish outside of Arbor, the largest city in his realm. His heir, Wilhelm, was too young to rule, which left his wife, Duchess Linette Grifford, as regent. House Grifford, a petty family with shipping interests in Haense, came to inhabit the court of Curon, where they took a far less cooperative posture towards their alliance with Renatus-Marna. Where Duke Alfred had more or less committed the bulk of his army towards the war, Duchess Linette drew back all but a handful of knights and generally acted to bring as little risk to Curon as possible. This earned her the ire of her allies, but it was not worth it to pursue the issue.

 

With the anti-Renatian faction in the Curonian court only growing over the course of the war, the Battle of the Forkwoods was the incident they needed to argue for their realm’s withdrawal from the war. Duchess Linette obliged and recalled the two hundred Curonians from the siege camps around Ruriksgrad in the first days of 1662. This was no great blow to the army there as a whole, but Aurelius was no less irate. To him, this act was a betrayal of their alliance, and it could be an example for others who were wavering, such as the orcs of Krugmar or the dwarves of Kaz’Ulrah. He dictated a brief letter for Crown Prince Constantine that ordered him to occupy Curon.

 

 Now with a far more legitimate directive than he had had when he ousted the Duke of Blackmarsh, the Crown Prince brought far more resources to bear against Curon. To handle the occupation he tapped Eimar var Burgandar, Count of Gotha, who was perhaps the one man in the realm who despised the Curonians more than Aurelius at that time.

 

Eimar var Burgandar was one of the soldiers of fortune (though his enemies argued that ‘bandit’ was a more appropriate label) who had settled the tundras of southern Atlas during the colonization of the continent. Beginning with a small keep, he fought a number of dwarven and orcish tribes, as well as fellow settlers, to establish a sizable realm. In 1650 he founded the town of White Peak, which soon grew into a place of moderate wealth. With Haense to his west and Curon to his north, Eimar swore fealty to Aurelius in 1656, being granted the title Count of Gotha in exchange, and with the cover of Renatus-Marna’s protection he continued the expansion of his realm.

 

With a reputation as one of Atlas’s finest commanders, second only to Prince Antonius, Count Eimar wished to join in the offensive against Norland, but being so far from the Heartlands, and strategically positioned near Haense, he was ordered instead to pressure the latter’s border and force them to divert soldiers away from defending Norland to protect their east. He did this for most of the war, and he was victorious in a number of small, indecisive battles there. He was also responsible for defending Curon, which frequently came under attack during the war from Haeseni raiders. Angered that he had to devote resources and manpower to defending a far larger, but inept realm, Count Eimar frequently mocked and taunted the Curonians and Duchess Linette, accusing their inability to defend themselves as a ploy to weaken his own army. As one of Atlas’s most ambitious players, he was only barely content with his current position, but Curon’s withdrawal from the war in 1662 gave him the opportunity he needed.

 

At Crown Prince Constantine’s command, he marched his army, two thousand and four hundred strong, north to Cyrilsburg, the capital of Curon. The forces under Duchess Linette were far fewer, and while sources are scant most scholars have agreed that she had no fewer than five hundred in the Cyrilsburg militia. He arrived outside the city on the 4th of Horen’s Calling, 1662, and spent the next week constructing a battering ram and several ladders. With his men rested and well-prepared, he led a direct assault against the walls of the poorly-defended city on the 11th of Horen’s Calling. Within an hour the ramparts had been taken, and when the retreating Curonian militia forgot to close the gates of the central keep, Count Eimar and a handful of men were able to storm inside and capture Duchess Linette. Only twenty of his men had died during battle, and with this victory he was able to occupy Curon, aided by a small force sent by the Crown Prince.

 

It was not long before Aurelius received word of the quick conquest of Curon. Not wishing for a repeat of the Blackmarsh fiasco, he sent more detailed instructions to Crown Prince Constantine. For his efforts, Count Eimar was to receive all of the lands of Curon, with House Devereux’s holdings reduced to Cyrilsburg, and House var Burgandar would be raised as the Margraves of Ostmark, owing to their new status as the invaluable defenders of Renatus-Marna’s southern border. With his conquest of Curon, Margrave Eimar had now become one of the most powerful men on Atlas, and he set about harassing Haense with an even greater zeal. By the war’s end he had assembled a small fleet with which he used to cut off trade along the Czena River.

 

With the uncertainty in the south now made certain, Aurelius resumed the siege against Ruriksgrad. Over the summer months, Prince Tiberius and Prince Charles led a slow assault against the many trenches outside the city, and by the autumn the defenders had been forced behind the walls. Concurrently, Prince Antonius constructed a fleet and smashed the Norlandic navy in a battle under the walls or Ruriksgrad, allowing him to strangle any resupply of the city by sea. As winter approached, his food supplies dwindled, and his allies prevented from reinforcing him, King Godden Ruric eventually chose to surrender. On the 8th of Tobias’s Bounty, 1662, Aurelius led a procession of soldiers to the ash tree in the town’s center, where he formally accepted the surrender of the King of Norland.

 

Pragmatically merciful in peace as he had always been, Aurelius allowed Godden Ruric to remain as Jarl of Ruriksgrad, but that was as far as his influence was to extend. The King of Renatus-Marna added Norland to his growing list of titles, something that, according to the monk Richard ‘Lemon’, Aurelius’s personal advisor on spiritual matters, was one of the king’s regrets from the Third Crusade, as in allowing the Rurics to keep the title he had made his own authority over them vague enough to shrug off. Prince Charles, who had made himself one of Aurelius’s most prized lieutenants with his conduct of the war, was made governor of Norland and trusted with pacifying the region and enforcing the law of the Pertinaxi.

 

If Aurelius’s enemies had accomplished one thing, they had made the war a costly endeavor. The conquest of Norland had been long and bloody, and the Battle of the Forkwoods had drained more resources than expected. The conquest of Curon, though quick, had stretched the realm’s reserves to their limit. Haelun’or was weak but of little value. Haense was valuable but strong enough to put up an exhausting fight. Both seemed inclined towards peace, and by the year’s end peace had been signed.

 

The First Atlas Coalition War, as expensive as it was, had removed any questions about Renatus-Marna’s status as the leading power on the continent. Norland and Curon had been brought into the realm, expanding the kingdom’s borders and tax base greatly. The alliance that Aurelius had built, though tested at times, had remained mostly intact. Any challenges to Renatian domination seemed to have been dismantled by the war’s end, as only Haense remained to pose any minor threat. By the time he returned to Senntisten in 1683, Aurelius’s advisors promised him that he could turn his attention to the governance of the realm, his attention undivided by external threat.

 

While the following years would show how misguided a belief this was, later Pertinaxi historians would justify it. Despite his conquests, Aurelius had rarely been one to strike the first blow. This logic is not unsound, even if it is dubious, but it fails to understand just how different he was from his contemporaries. From the emergence of the Sixth Empire until its collapse, most of the wars that were fought were minor rebellions or territorial disputes. As great as the death toll could be at times, it was all a part of a regular, well-understood pattern of warfare that had been practiced throughout most of history. Aurelius’s ambition, therefore, was less evident in his warmaking than his peacemaking.

 

Less content with border feuds than his peers, the Pertinaxi king desired to upend the global order and play the largest role in remaking the post-Imperial landscape, which ironically made him a closer figure to Tobias Staunton than any of the Orenian Emperors he compared himself to. Local power structures were typically kept in place during the wake of his conquests, but his realm retained the trappings of a unified state. Few overtures were made to his subjects for unity behind a shared vision, or anything resembling a shared ‘Renatian’ identity, but fear of the Legion and of the Pertinaxi’s strength could, for a time, replace these.

 

It was in designing this peace that Aurelius could ensure that so long as he remained alive, the power he wielded was firmly his, and any challenges to it would be surmountable. It cultivated a hatred that even the historical loath towards the name ‘Empire’ could not muster, but half or more of this hatred came from the realization that little could be done against the Pertinaxi. Many challengers would still try, but these authors have not taken up this practice in the hopes of writing a suspenseful novel: there was almost never an occasion during which Aurelius was under any serious threat of losing his realm or his throne. So long as Aurelius had his army, and people believed that his army was invincible, he would win time and time again.

 

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O Ágioi Kristoff, Jude kai Pius. Dóste mas gnósi ópos sas ékane o Theós. Poté min afísoume na doúme to skotádi, allá as doúme móno to fos tis sofías kai tis alítheias. O Theós na se evlogeí.

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Aurelius’s creation of the Empire of Man shall be covered in our next volume of The Historia Pertinaxi.

1 hour ago, cadazio said:

Adrian Tobias, 

 

No. you may strictly NOT physically or psychologically abuse your servants, houseworkers, underlings, goons, or any sort of human being that lives and breathes under (equal to, or even over) your command. Should you have any further concerns, please contact the Heartlandic Council instead of the reigning monarchs, as issues of law are national and apply to both the Provinces of Aaun and the Petra. 

 

As for now, the judicial law shall be expanded and reformed by the Garmont Assembly and future edicts as time passes.

 

Askatasuna Jainkoaren Bitartez,

Frantzisko, Lord Chancellor

"To the Lord Chancellor,

 

There are three people who I permit to order me. They are as follows:

 

I) My father

II) My cousin, The Queen of Petra

III) Now, the King of Aaun

 

Actually, there is also a fourth, whom I forgot:

 

IV) God

 

You have impugned upon my honor by daring to speak to me when I, son of the great Duke of Valfleur and Prince of the Petra, have written seeking their council. Know that if you tread foot upon the lands of Valfluer, I will see you hanged. I am also going to ask my father to personally challenge you to a duel. He is a powerful, honorable man and will dispatch you with ease.

 

Because you do not know my face, I will send my portrait. Whenever you see my fine-trimmed, pale cheeks, the sign of us superiors of the Heartlands, tremble in fear and flee.

 

Adrian Tobias, Lord of Valfleur"

 

A Letter to the Reigning Monarchs

☩ ☩ ☩

 

To Their Royal Majesties, the Queen of Petra and the King of Aaun,

 

By the hand of my servant and whipping boy, Thomas, I, under humble and conscious guidance by our God, request a clarification of the Law of our New Realm. Know that I, your humble and obedient cousin, acts only at the direction of your Law and of the good Instinct of Servitude that reigns over my deeds thirdly, surmounted in Authority by, secondly, Your Royal Majesties, firstly, God.

 

The servants of the Valfleur Estate are in need of that harsh Medicine and Salvation of the inability of work; that is, corporal punishment. Specifically, the kitchen staff, of which I have asked my Father to fire fifteen, which he obliged as a gift to Me, for they have proven their Inadequacies. The portions of food that they have provided for Me are far too little for what I require. For instance: I slew the peacocks on our hunting grounds, but when I requested that all three be served to me, I was given only two and a half. Forced to endure that night through gripping hunger, it was revealed to me that the cook preparing the meal allowed two assistants to thieve and gluttonously gorge from what was rightfully mine. I had Thomas whip all three for their crimes and transgressions. I am twelve years of age; to deprive me of the food that I require to sustain myself and my strength is paramount to efforts to weaken me through poison.

 

Other cases of similar vulgar criminality have occurred, but the weakness of the character of those who reside closest to our Estate reveals itself. We must now hire staff from Aaun. I take no issue with this and have been in prayerful thought, begging our Good Lord to guide them to be superior servants and understand their place as my lessers, and thus obey every order I give to them. I only wish to know if they, as subjects of the King of Aaun, are allowed to be punished by my order as well if they cut short the meals which I need to survive, or if I must seek recourse through the Courts of Justice there, or is there a new law that encompasses my rights that I must submit my actions to?

 

Your Devoted Subject and Family,

Adrian Tobias, Lord of Valfleur

 

@Zaerie@Ramon

“I take a good deal when I see it. This looks like a good deal. Hope those others think the same!” Comments one of Malphas’s underlings on the recent missive.

don’t have a dog in the fight, but redlining romance RP is notoriously hard to enforce. I think promoting good rp, of which sensible/lore-abiding romance may or may not be a part of it, is a bit of a better model. people don’t react well when their avenues of rp are closed off, but social reinforcement can often work 

 

and if it’s a case where it’s a circle of EVERYONE doing it, neglecting their CA/MA’s core purpose in the process, then that actually does become a staff issue along the lines of de facto inactivity 

Results of the Petran Elections, 1969

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As elections across the country have been brought to a close, and a final tally of all the votes is being conducted, The Office of the Orateur feels that the present slate of counted votes is sufficient to name the electors for the Fifth Garmont Assembly and the winner of the Mayoral Election. Note that candidates running for the same district will be assigned a seat that corresponds with their share of the vote, giving seniority rights in the Assembly to those who sit on the higher seats.

 

The Garmont Assembly will seat the following Electors:

 

THE SEATS OF VAL DE LAGNE

I) The First People’s Seat of Val de Lagne - Theodore Elwood @JudgeTrudy

II) The Second People’s seat of Val de Lagne - Konrad von Augusten @mineghost23

III) The Third People’s seat of Val de Lagne - Marcus Antonius @Andustar

IV) The Seat of the Bishop of Casica

V) The Seat of Stormont

 

THE SEATS OF NORTREBANC

I) The First People’s Seat of Nortrebanc - Sarah Artenin @Lord_of_losers

II) The Second People’s Seat of Nortrebanc - Arakawa @StingyParrot

III) The Third People’s Seat of Nortrebanc - Marinus Calvissiador @Forgefire

 

THE SEATS OF LADYR

I) The First People’s Seat of Ladyr - Charles Edward Temesch-Stafyr @Chorale__

II) The Seat of Martiel

III) The Seat of Hrenthorne

IV) The Seat of Fir’steinn

 

THE SEATS OF SOLLAND

I) The First People’s Seat of Solland - Renilde of the Petra @tilly

II) The Seat of Azor

 

THE SEATS OF THE MARDONLANDS

I) The First People’s Seat of the Mardonlands - Peter-Nicholas Montalt @MRCHENN

II) The Seat of Marignan

 

 

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MAYOR OF VALLAGNE

 

Rigoberto de la Cruz @Publius

 

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Signed,

Father Davide, Orateur of the Garmont Assembly

- Petran Elections, 1969  -

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With the process of nomination brought to a close, the office of the Orateur has opened elections for both the Fifth Garmont Assembly and the Office of the Mayor of Vallagne. Candidates for both elections will be included on the same ballot and will be available to voters across the realm. 

 

In order to encourage voting, the Office of the Oratuer will enter all eligible ballots into a raffle, with a grand prize of four hundred minae.

 

 

In order for a vote to be counted, it must be cast by;

 A citizen of the Commonwealth of the Petra,

Who is above the age of 18,

And who is currently in good standing with the law of Petra.

 

The Citizens will have 40 Saints Hours to send in their vote.

(Closes 5pm EST on Sunday the 24th)

Vote Here

 

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Signed,

Father Davide, Orateur of the Assembly of Garmont

 

Nominations to the Mayoralty of Vallagne, 1968 

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The moment has arrived for the city to choose a representative from among its populace to assume the esteemed Office of Mayor. The Mayor is entrusted with managing the city government and seeing to the general welfare of the populace of Vallagne in coordination with the national government and any private entities. 

 

 Requirements for self-nomination:

 I) Nominees must be at least 16 years of Age.

 II) Nominees must be in good standing with the law.

 III) Nominees must be a resident of the Commonwealth.

 

 

---

Signed,

Father Davide, Orateur of the Garmont Assembly

 

 

Nominations to the Garmont Assembly, 1968

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AS BY VOTE OF THE GARMONT ASSEMBLY, ballots must be cast to decide a new round of electors to represent the citizenry of the Commonwealth within the legislation. Made up of three bodies now, the Peers of the Realm, the Knights of the Petrine Laurel, and the Electors, the Garmont Assembly may present and vote on legislation, and bring suggestions to the crown with the backing of votes from the Garmont. From there, the bills shall be presented to the Queen and her River Council to give final assent to.

 

The Garmont Assembly will seat the following Electors:

 

THE SEATS OF VAL DE LAGNE

I) The First People’s Seat of Val de Lagne (Eligible for nomination)

II) The Second People’s seat of Val de Lagne (Eligible for nomination)

III) The Third People’s seat of Val de Lagne (Eligible for nomination)

IV) The Seat of the Bishop of Casica

V) The Seat of Stormont

 

THE SEATS OF NORTREBANC

I) The First People’s Seat of Nortrebanc (Eligible for nomination)

II) The Second People’s Seat of Nortrebanc (Eligible for nomination)

III) The Third People’s Seat of Nortrebanc (Eligible for nomination)

 

THE SEATS OF LADYR

I) The First People’s Seat of Ladyr (Eligible for nomination)

II) The Seat of Martiel

III) The Seat of Hrenthorne

IV) The Seat of Fir’steinn

 

THE SEATS OF SOLLAND

I) The First People’s Seat of Solland (Eligible for nomination)

II) The Seat of Azor

 

THE SEATS OF THE MARDONLANDS

I) The First People’s Seat of the Mardonlands (Eligible for nomination)

II) The Seat of Marignan

 

Note that candidates are not required to live in the region of the seat they are running for, but they must express interest in that region's development.

 

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As well, Citizens are reminded that the following prerequisites have been established in order to both vote and stand for these offices:

 

I) Be at least 18 years of age.

II) Be a citizen of the Commonwealth

III) Be mentally capable for the office.

IV) Be in good standing with the laws of the Commonwealth. 

 

---

Signed,

Father Davide, Orateur of the Garmont Assembly

 

 

 

"One of the greatest mysteries of the late Eighth Empire is the existence of the enigmatic will of Philip III and Anastasia, or solely the will of Anastasia. Both rumors have circulated, first from from propaganda issued during the reign of their son, Frederick, who deposed his brother, Peter, and had him slain. 

 

From the beginning, Frederick cited this supposed will, one that called for his brother's deposition and the dissolution of the Empire, as his legal groups for usurpation and the formation of the Kingdom of Oren. What is notable is that, despite this will being frequently-referenced at the time and immediately afterwards, a full, unadulterated copy has not been found. References of it remain, but it is difficult to piece together a complete will, edict, or other similar legal document that would have provisioned the disinheritance of Peter and the end of the Empire. Later accounts, from just before the Battle of Providence, that the soldiers of Frederick's army were visited in their dreams by Philip III, seem to be another effort to retroactively enforce Frederick's place as his parent's chosen successor.

 

It may altogether be true that Philip and Anastasia desired to disinherit Peter in favor of Frederick, but as it presently stands, there is hard evidence that they enacted this into policy, and it is just as likely that this was a fabrication by Frederick to justify his uprising and seizure of Providence. Because of this, there is no legal reason why Peter IV would not have been the legitimate Emperor of Oren, even if for only a few months and without being coronated."

 

Adolphus Gloriana, Earl of Suffolk

Orders of Garmont Restructuring

Passed in the Assembly of Garmont in the year 1967

Issued and averred by

Her Majesty

Atstana de

Regne Petrère

1967

 

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Purpose and Restructuring

Since our nation’s founding, Petra has been a champion of liberty. A champion of institutions that allows it to be run by and for the people, under the guidance of the Crown of St. Emma. Our fair assembly, the Garmont, brings together nobility, gentry, and commoners alike, so that all perspectives of our Commonwealth contributed to its direction.

 

This has been our strength, these Dumacratic principles we have held since the days of Paul-Salvian. Reinforcing these principles, truly pushing for the idea of a nation that moves with its people, will only make us stronger.

 

While the Garmont is already a representative body without comparison across the nations of humanity, we endeavor to make it radically moreso. We seek to have no restrictions on what issues may be raised and discussed therein, and who may present them. We seek to have those assembled come from all parts of our realm, be they in the newly acquired territories of the Midlands, or the age-old holdings in Solland. 

 

It is in the following reforms, that these goals will become fully realized.

 

 

Functions of the Garmont Assembly

With the reformation of the Garmont assembly, we aim to open up this body of legislation to the common people, and let it become their tool in shaping the future of the Petra. Rather than a body mostly made of noble peerage, and a limited number of publicly elected seats, the Garmont will now be made of a mix of peers and citizens represented by the nation’s various regions, with a majority for the public. Each geographical region will hold a certain number of seats, determined by their population, as well as the number of noble peers landed in that region. This will create an equal amount of representation between the peerage, gentry, and commonfolk.

 

For those not yet acquainted with the Garmont, those seated on the Garmont assembly- Whether by election or right of vassalage- will convene every two years to vote on any petitions or bills presented during the session. Previously, bills and petitions could only be presented by those seated. Now, the Garmont shall be opened up for any to present their ideas or changes, and to petition for the support of the elected officials.

 

A petition can be many things- A proposal for a new building, a request for funding to fix a bridge or a road, a suggestion for a change to the lawbook, the creation of a committee, or the proposal of a new law or regulation entirely. Anything that YOU, as a member of the Petra, would like to create or change within our community. Even if you are not seated upon the assembly, you can present your ideas before your fellows to be voted on. If your petition is approved, it will be passed onto the relevant member of the River Council, or a relevant committee, that will work with you to see your idea completed.

 

THE NEW SEATS OF THE GARMONT ASSEMBLY ARE DECLARED AS SUCH:

 

THE SEATS OF VAL DE LAGNE

I) The First People’s Seat of Val de Lagne

II) The Second People’s seat of Val de Lagne

III) The Third People’s seat of Val de Lagne

IV) The Seat of the Bishop of Casica

V) The Seat of Stormont

 

THE SEATS OF NORTREBANC

I) The First People’s Seat of Nortrebanc

II) The Second People’s Seat of Nortrebanc

III) The Third People’s Seat of Nortrebanc

 

THE SEATS OF LADYR

I) The First People’s Seat of Ladyr

II) The Seat of Martiel

III) The Seat of Hrenthorne

IV) The Seat of Fir’steinn

 

THE SEATS OF SOLLAND

I) The First People’s Seat of Solland

II) The Seat of Azor

 

THE SEATS OF THE MARDONLANDS

I) The First People’s Seat of the Mardonlands

II) The Seat of Marignan

 

The newly-created regional public seats will open up at the start of the next election cycle, upon which anyone who is a citizen of the Petra, 18 years of age, and in good standing with the law may choose to run for an elected seat. Living on the land of the regional seat is not a requirement, but one must express an interest in the development of that region. All candidates will participate in a large electoral debate to express their views and goals to the people of the Commonwealth. Any seat with more than one candidate vying for it will be voted upon, however- If you are the only candidate running for a seat, you will receive it by default, unless the Garmont votes in the majority for a veto of your election.

 

These reforms will go into full effect in two years [OOC DATE: MARCH 24TH] with the coming of the next election cycle.

 

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 Introduced to the Round Table by Sir Atticus Abraham Reinhold, Rigoberto de la Cruz, Adrian Godfrey Temesch, and Sir Wilford Anton Reinhold in the Year 1967

Resolution I of the Assembly of Garmont

Relating to the Retirement of Adrian Temesch from the Office of the Grand Speaker

Sponsored by Father Davide in the Year 1967

 

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WHEREAS, Mister Adrian Temesch has served faithfully and in good standing as the Grand Speaker of the Assembly of Garmont for many years;

 

WHEREAS, Mister Adrian Temesch was a key instrument in the officiating and managing of both elections and the regular process of the legislature, fulfilling both in an exemplary capacity;

 

WHEREAS, Mister Adrian Temesch has provided admirable leadership and conduct, to be a model of all future Grand Speakers;

 

RESOLVED, That in view of his dedication to our legislative and electoral institutions, We, the Assembly of Garmont, wish Mister Adrian Temesch a fine retirement and extend our congratulations and appreciations for the legacy that he has built while he has inhabited the office.

---

 

@Kaii

National Symbols Act

Passed in the Assembly of Garmont in the year 1967

Issued and averred by

Her Majesty

Atstana de

Regne Petrère

1967

 

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PREAMBLE

In maintaining a nation and cultural identity, symbols drawing upon our history are absolutely necessary to codify and promote. Given the propensity of our people to need to move continents every few generations, the physical history of our past homes are often lost, leaving us only with the written record, collective memory, and scant physical artifacts of the past. In establishing national symbols, we may point to a time and age that may be forgotten by the Petrans of the future, but lives eternally in our art and culture.

 

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Section I:

On the national symbols of the Commonwealth of the Petra

 

I) The national symbols of the Commonwealth of the Petra are as following;

a) Motto - “Petra, Flowing Water! Ave! Ave!”

b) Song - Petra, Flowing Water by Arnaud Halcourt

c) Seal - Seal of the Commonwealth of the Petra

d) Bird - Swan; as the most common inhabitant of the old River Petra

e) Mammal - Mule; as the trusty steed of the original knights of the Round Circle as they traversed the Upper Petra

f) Flower - Cornflowers; as the flower that bloomed most beautifully and elegantly during the first spring after the Petran Civil War, planted by Archduchess Renilde’s own hand

g) Tree - Willow; as the tree which hunches by the banks of the river, providing shade for all those who traverse along it

h) Hero - Dame Catherine Novellen of Furnestock; as one of the Republic’s founders and the guarantor of its security, stability, and prosperity through several decades

i) Fish - Trout; in accordance with the Trout Vote

 

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Her Royal Majesty, Catherine I, By the Grace of GOD, Queen of the Commonwealth of the Petra, Marquise de Val d’Estenou, Countess of Temesch and Moere, Baroness of Garmont, Valfleur, Vallagne-en-Petra, Eagles Peak, Brasca, and of the Phoenixspire, Protector of the Meadows, Defender of Liberty

Public Piety Act

Passed in the Assembly of Garmont in the year 1967

Issued and averred by

Her Majesty

Atstana de

Regne Petrère

1967

 

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PREAMBLE

Of the pillars of state, none is so important to the health and vitality of the Republic as the faith which guides our every action and intent. The Church has traditionally been a benefactor of learning within the Republic, a beacon of hope in dark times, and stalwart defender against corruptions both innate and unnatural. While Petra’s devotion to the Church and its adherence to God has never wavered, nor could be justly questioned, it is the sign of a healthy society to include aspects of the faith in all public spheres so that all may be reminded of what is of the highest importance in civic life.

 

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Section I:

On public ceremonies

 

I) All public ceremonies shall open and close with a prayer led by the highest-ranking clergyman present.

a) The following are recognized public ceremonies:

i) Sessions of court

ii) Sessions of the Assembly of Garmont

iii) Debates held during election seasons

iv) The appointment of state officials, if announced separately from court

b) If no clergyman is present, then the highest-ranking secular official may lead the prayers.

 

II) If an officer of the state uses the Lord’s name in vain during a public ceremony, they will be fined five minae, to be given as tithe to the Church.

 

III) All state buildings must contain at least one of the following:

a) A cross

b) A statue or shrine dedicated to a saint

c) An icon of a saint or episode from the Holy Scrolls or another important event in Canonist history

 

Section II:

On properties outside of the City of Vallagne

 

I) All palaces, estates, manors, and other properties outside of the City of Vallagne must contain a shrine dedicated to a saint of that property owner’s choosing.

a) Any property that does not have a saint’s shrine within four Saint’s Weeks of this bill’s issuance will be taxed an additional 15 minae per annum.

b) All saint’s shrines must be cleaned and maintained at the expense of the property owner. 

 

II) All forked roads must have a saint’s shrine at the intersection, built at the expense of the state.

 

III) If one desecrates a saint’s shrine, they will be fined twenty minae.

 

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Her Royal Majesty, Catherine I, By the Grace of GOD, Queen of the Commonwealth of the Petra, Marquise de Val d’Estenou, Countess of Temesch and Moere, Baroness of Garmont, Valfleur, Vallagne-en-Petra, Eagles Peak, Brasca, and of the Phoenixspire, Protector of the Meadows, Defender of Liberty

The Reinhold Edict

Issued and averred by

Her Majesty

Atstana de

Regne Petrère

1967

 

---

With the Synod’s conclusion, and the declaration from His Holiness, Caius I, to allow for civil unions between same-gender couples, the Commonwealth will accommodate and follow the decision of the Canonist Church. I began this discussion with the help of Queen Sybille I, Tar-Caraneth, and Viceroy Cesar I, because I saw the love between two of my own knights, one now my Chancellor.

 

Wilford and Atticus Reinhold, in my eyes, uphold every value of the Commonwealth. They act with love on their sleeves, chivalry in their hearts, and dreams in their eyes. You are both true Petrans, and though my actions may not have harvested the results that I yearned they would, they have reaped at least one consolidation. I can declare you together in civil union, and so I shall.

 

From this decision, I hereby unveil The Reinhold Law; Civil Unions.

 

ARTICLE VII, 

THE REINHOLD LAW; CIVIL UNION

I. Definition of Civil Union

A relationship between a couple that is legally recognized by the governmental authority of the Commonwealth of the Petra, and holds all the rights and responsibilities within the Catherinian Code that marriage otherwise would.

 

II. Rights and Restrictions of Civil Union

a. Civil Unions will be beholden to laws regarding Cross-Breeding, Consanguinity, Age, and Adultery.

b. Civil Unions in relation to Noble Titles shall act the same as a married couple, allowing for the joined couple to be Peer and Consort, or Peer and Peer should they declare to share the title.

c. Those joined under Civil Union will be considered Partners under the law, and not ‘Husband and Husband’ or ‘Wife and Wife’, though there shall be no restriction on the terms being used casually.

 

III. Inheritance

a. Should there be no legally adopted children, the Partner shall be entitled to the assets of the deceased.

b. Partners can not inherit titles from the deceased unless granted by the Crown.

 

IV. Ceremony

a. The Civil Union Ceremony must be performed and officiated by a government official.

b. The Ceremony must take place in a government, crown, or private property, and can not happen on Church land.

c. The Ceremony may not use Canonist Rites, vows to God, or include prayers about the Union.

d. Queen Catherine I requires that the officiant wear a funny hat.

 

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Her Royal Majesty, Catherine I, By the Grace of GOD, Queen of the Commonwealth of the Petra, Marquise de Val d’Estenou, Countess of Temesch and Moere, Baroness of Garmont, Valfleur, Vallagne-en-Petra, Eagles Peak, Brasca, and of the Phoenixspire, Protector of the Meadows, Defender of Liberty

Father Davide purses his lips as he reads his friend’s missive, but he eventually chooses to meet with him at a later date to discuss its contents. 

Father Davide, from his office in Hyspia, pens a letter to his good friend Rigoberto. @Publius

 

"My vocation, demanding the soundest of minds and purest of hearts, has forced me to turn away from the girl I have loved since I was a boy. If in the pursuit of duty my heart cannot be wholly repaired, the pain can at least be assuaged to see a common kinship forming again among the Canonist realms. War and the hatred it brought has scarred the Midlands, yet from the ashes there seems to be a consensus forming that a humanity that loves is better than one that does not. I pray to God that I may have some small part to play, so that my choice to deny myself of that greatest good of life was not a choice I made in vain."