Under Sleeping Suns: Two Riders Were Approaching

You're almost through the closing verse of "All Along The Watchtower," I promise you. It won't be long, now.

As you've no doubt guessed by now, when the Eternal Kings took hold of the power left on the face of Loris after the demise of the Gods Of Light And Dark and gathered up the various people that would become the citizens of Harak-Ur, they didn't get all the people who lived in Kever and its outlying neighbors. A good number of people remained in other areas. As previously discussed, there were quite a number of cultures left over after Kever fell, nearly universally blasted back to their primitive roots when The Sunfall took place. As said: Kever was the most powerful civilization of its time. It was not, however, the only civilization.

After the Eternal Kings moved their followers and faithful up out of what remained of Kever, they trod north and slightly east, into an enormous, mountain ringed valley – what would become Harak-Ur. Along the way, they lost and gained in number as some chose to stop in what were (hopefully) safe, fertile lands, or as other hopeful supplicants took up the march out of the ruined lands that had once been Kever's Valley Of Life. Today I'm going to talk about some of those people (or rather, who they became), and one of the civilizations that survived The Sunfall in relative health. Well, for certain values of "relative health," that is.

I've mentioned the war between the four Allied Nations and the Kolanthan Empire in previous essays. As will be dealt with in more detail later, the war itself has been going on for over a century – war is a very tricky, long-running endeavor when you have magic and the ability to get the wounded back on the field with a few incantations. I do intend to go into the details on how such a long-running conflict impacts the world around it, especially in environmental, cultural, and economic terms. One of the more immediate impacts, though, is that of population displacement. This is best described by discussing the Doro "invasion" of the Cualish free States.

The Doro are descended from one (or more likely, several) of the groups of Kever refugees who decided to give up on the march to this promised "new land" and stay behind in a relatively fertile, presumably safe stretch of land between Kever and Harak-Ur. If the Vetrur are modeled on a spiritual and cultural amalgamation of the Iroquois and Norse archetypes, the Doro have evolved into a combination of the Apache and Mongol traditions and attitudes. These are a fierce, powerful people. Their strength and trade comes from constantly reinforced family/clan ties, and they are pretty much the undisputed masters of the equestrian arts across most of the known world. They inhabit the plains and steppes of the lands to the east of the Kever desert, and for a good long while were immune to the depredations of the war with the Kolanthan Empire.

(As a side note, those of you who are culture buffs like myself will realize that there are a good many differences between the overall umbrella of the Apache tribes and the Mongols. Unlike the spiritual mesh that became the Vetrur, I had a hard time reconciling some of these differences. In the end, I decided to keep the religious tolerance/openness of the Mongols above all - these are a people who are very practical and pretty much just want to live and do their thing, regardless of what their neighbors believe. I also ended up keeping the Matrilineal marriage/family customs of the Apache tribes, along with the spirit-focused, shamanistic aspects of both of their spiritual systems – like the Vetrur, these are a people who are very close to the spirits of the land. They've had to be, without the Eternal Kings to guide them, and like the Vetrur they were quick to hear The Nine when those Gods arrived on the scene.)

Because of their general disposition of keeping to their own affairs, the Doro were unfortunately slow to understand the true threat of the Kolanthan Empire and what it meant in terms of disrupting their way of life. At first, they were content to let the strangers from the Southwest come into and move through their homelands. There was plenty of room, and the strangers didn't seem very interested in the Doro, per se. The strangers kept to their trails, and they mostly stayed near the coast. There was little to concern the clan councils and elders.

Without warning – as that is always as these tales begin – contact with many of the west-most and south-most clans came to a halt. Then, as winter fell some years after the first sighting of the strangers, came the smell of smoke on the wind, and the children sent to run ahead of the armies of the strangers. Feet and hands cut and let to bleed, with no shoes on their feet or clothes to protect them against the cold winter ground, the children had been sent ahead as a warning: The strangers were coming, and those who would not turn away from The Nine would be put to the sword.

As The Nine say it is the righteous path for the strong to protect the weak, so the largest, strongest clans sent their riders out into the south. Half a million strong, the riders and their mounts thundered across the prairie, and shook the earth so mightily that they say that a new riverbed was pounded into the ground by their passing. Those who returned were like ghosts, the very life drained from them, their spirits broken. Phantoms and specters haunted the survivors, the spirits of the fallen sent by the Kolanthans to harry and ravage their once-beloved kin. The clan councils and elders acted quickly, and with great sadness: they commanded the Doro to leave their villages and clan holdings behind, take only what they could carry, and ride fast and swift to the North, toward what had once been Harak-Ur.

This is how the Doro came into conflict with the Cualish Free States. With relatively little warning, the Easternmost of the Free States suddenly found hundreds of thousands of Doro refugees flooding into their lands. The Doro had been traveling for weeks, months, even, seeking to escape the destruction of their homeland. The Kolanthans left little for the Doro: the largest herds of horses slaughtered or captured, the mighty Auroch herds nearly obliterated to feed the bellies of the Kolanthan armies, rivers fouled with the corpses of those who would not take up the Book Of Kolas as their only true word. The Doro were hungry and desperate. They had little energy or faith left in them to reach out to their new landlords and make humble requests. They saw good land, with clean rivers and ample game, and they did what anyone in dire straights would do: They took it.

Suddenly finding themselves facing a conflict on two fronts – The Kolanthans in the south and the Doro to the east – the various governors and councils of the Free States did the best they could for a time. They split their attention and their forces, trying to maintain the alliances and treaties they'd forged with their allies while also defending their natural resources, and for a time it worked. Eventually the pressure from the Free States whose land was being systematically annexed by an ever growing number of Doro immigrants grew too great, and the entirety of the naval and infantry commitment of the Free States was withdrawn from the war effort so that they might focus on their internal issues.

Angarn and Cymrik, both far and away stronger than Vetris in terms of naval power, both committed more forces to make up the loss of the Cualish contingent, but the leadership of these nations all knew that without the Cualish forces, their war efforts would eventually falter, and the Kolanthans would once again rule the seas between their lands. It took nearly a decade, but eventually diplomats from Angarn (Angarn does produce some very good diplomats, let me tell you!) managed to broker not only a truce, but a deal that would benefit both the displaced Doro and the Free States as a whole. Focusing on the fact that the Doro, like the rest of the Allied Nations, all worshiped The Nine, the diplomats from Angarn brought in priests and elders from both sides, and sat them down to formulate a plan to reclaim the Doro homelands.

With warships flying the flags of Angarn, Cymrik, and a dozen Free States, the Allies laid siege to four strategic seaside ports held by the Kolanthans. Bolstered by arms and munitions given to them by the Free States, and riding alongside two full legions of Angarnian cavalry, the Doro used their traditional knowledge of their homeland to move an immense army quickly and relatively unmolested down into the Kolanthan occupied land. Over the course of a year, the four Kolanthan holdings were razed, and the Doro regained a sizable portion of their homeland. With a firm Allied colony established at Fort Vallus, the Doro and the Allied Nations found themselves at peace and focused against a common goal: The end of the Great War, and the removal of the Kolanthan Empire from the face of Loris.

Unlike the Doro, the people of the nation of Vulasha and her sister nation, Celinia, would not be so fortunate as to recover from the Kolanthan invasion of their territories. Vulasha and Celinia, a pair of young cultures at the time of The Sunfall, managed to maintain a relatively strong identity and level of advancement following that catastrophe. Essentially two large cities facing one another across a wide, slow river, the Vulashans and Celinians enjoyed ample fishing, plentiful farmland, and resource rich hills on both sides of the bowl-shaped valley they resided in. The river that cut through the valley eventually led to the sea, and thus the people of the twin cities were able to trade with Kever by both land and water. They were well protected from the majority of the devastation of The Sunfall, although the fire that fell from the sky still scarred them greatly and destroyed the bulk of their farmland.

Recovering from The Sunfall took centuries, and required the people of both cities to expand out beyond their previously perfectly adequate valley. In the centuries that followed, as the land of Harak-Ur grew and thrived, Vulasha and Celinia scrabbled back up from their cultural devastation and re-established themselves as best they could. Over time, the river that divided the valley took on a near-legendary level of importance to the people of Vulasha and Celinia. Eventually, all the land to the west of the river became the Kingdom of Vulasha, while that land to the eastern side of the river's shore became the Kingdom of Celinia. The River Valley Cities became the River Valley Kingdoms: two nations united as one in spirit, but each independent and strong in its own right. As with the Doro and the other outlying civilizations, they had no Eternal Kings, no divine power to heal the sick and injured, no near-Deific power to guide them through difficult times. The people of the River Valley Kingdoms did have a particular advantage, however: They had magicians.

The Great Library of Doan in Kever held a copy of every tome of learning necessary for magicians to ply their trade. The River Valley Cities, between them, had a full set of copies of those tomes. With these, they were able to restore a large portion of the pre-Sunfall culture. Though it took them nearly three centuries, they were able to restore a large amount of their blighted land, and with it, their prosperity. Having worked so hard to restore their land, the people of the River Valley Kingdoms When the Kolanthans – rushing southward to their "promised land" as part of their self-inflicted exile in conjunction with the Night Of Burning Eyes – arrived on the continent of Saron, the River Valley Kingdoms were there to greet them.

The people of Vulasha and Celinia were not friendly to the Kolanthans. Kolas had slain Jengo, and the effects were felt all over the world, here included. The servants and supplicants of the Mad God Kolas were outright shunned, driven out into the lands beyond the River Valley Kingdoms and into what was believed to be nothing more than still-stricken land: blighted and barren of all but the most basic levels of subsistence. Unfortunately, Kolas' followers had been preparing for this exodus for some time, and had a goodly amount of materiel, supplies, and resources available to them. Within a few decades, the Kolanthan Empire was formally established and capable of defending its borders. Within a century of their arrival on Saron, the Kolanthans had attacked and conquered the (relatively) small country of Ikurn. A handful of years later, the Kolanthan Empire fell upon the River Valley Kingdoms and devoured them whole.

Those few refugees that escaped the destruction of the River Valley Kingdoms told tales of hundreds of legions of troops, each bearing the flag of a the Mad God, each led by a ruthless and powerful Sorcerer Priest: the Inquisitors Of Kolantha. They spoke of how the Inquisition marched as one, the echo of their boots roaring like thunder through the valleys of the twin Kingdoms. They wept to recount the grisly treatment that the Haran and Ulehu suffered at the hands of the Inquisition: No attempt to convert the Small Cousins was made. Only Humans were ever given the chance to be spared the point of a spear or blade of a sword. The Kolanthans brought the songs of their Mad God and the incantations of their magicians. They brought fire and steel and cannon and steed. They brought destruction on a scale not seen since The Sunfall.


Sadly, there would be no cultural reprieve for the people of the River Valley Kingdoms. The Great Alliance had not yet been formed, as Kolantha and the nations of the North would not enter into any sort of serious conflict for decades. With Angarn, Cymrik, Vetris, and the Free States separated by hundreds of miles of open sea, the goings on in these far away, barely understood lands was of no immediate concern to the countries that would eventually form the Great Alliance. It wouldn't be until almost fifty years after the successful destruction of Vulasha and Celinia that the Great War would break out. By that time, all traces of the once affluent, influential River Valley Kingdoms was eradicated, buried under the weight of the arrow-straight avenues and promenades of the ever-expanding Kolanthan Empire. Perhaps, somewhere out there, records exist to tell a curious soul about the now vanished people that lived there not so long ago.

Perhaps not.