Personal System Calendar: Year 00015, Day 1-28, Month II: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6859, 1st to 28th day of the 2nd Month
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Somewhere in the Central Continent
The Forest of Kîamo sat somewhere in the northern stretch of the central-western continent inside the territorial scope of the Federation of El.
A battle had just broken out between a group of nomadic people and a newly settled hamlet.
Poisoned arrows came raining down first. Those working on the outer structures of the unfinished hamlet didn't hear it coming. A few went down before anyone knew what was happening. Then the screaming started and the rest of the settlers scrambled for whatever weapons they had nearby.
The nomads followed the arrows in. A hundred of their Asgub came with them, they are large forest dogs that move low and fast from multiple directions. By the time the settlers had gotten themselves together enough to push back the attackers the fighting was already inside the settlement perimeter.
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The Aít-ås
The nomads were called the Aít-ås; they are ancient humans that have no magical prowess whatsoever within their veins.
They were native to the land but never settled in any one place for long. They moved when winter came, heading to warmer regions and returning to the same spots when the seasons changed back. They had been doing this for generations. The spots they returned to were theirs in the only way that mattered to them. They had been there longer than anyone else.
They were dark to brown-skinned people, small in height, rarely over five feet eight inches at the tallest. They wore clothing made from animal hides and furs. Those with more experience in combat wore additional protection from beast bones and toughened hide, passed down from whoever had worn it before them. They had no access to metallurgy so their weapons were what they could make. Wooden spears with jagged stone tips or fire-sharpened tips. Bows with poison-tipped arrows from plants and beasts in the regions they traveled through. Wooden shields reinforced with animal hide or plant fiber. Wooden swords edged with serrated stone or sharpened bone.
None of it was metal true, but that also didn't make it any less dangerous.
The labor within the community was mostly split along the lines of males doing the hunting and heavier work while women handled most of the gathering, picking herbs and fruits. Though that wasn't universal. Some communities had more shared roles and women could also be seen working alongside the Asgub, using them the same way the predominantly male hunters did.
Each community was led by an elder. Larger communities had a Shaman Leader on top of that, someone who performed the rituals and offerings that the tribe believed kept them protected and guided, and who led the migration to warmer grounds when winter came. The Shaman Leaders carried a different kind of authority from the elders. One was practical, while the other was something older than practical.
But what the nomads lacked in materials they made up for in experience. Conflict between Aít-ås communities was not unusual. The ones who reached elder status had been in those fights and remembered what worked. Their combat knowledge was old and it had been taught carefully from one generation to the next.
The Asgub had been with them for so long that the line between wild and domesticated was barely meaningful anymore. They were loyal to the tribe, protective of it, and in a fight they were contributors to how most of it would go, they were fast and would crouch low to the ground and they were very hard to stop.
A full community of Aít-ås ran between three hundred and five hundred people. They spread across the forest regions of multiple kingdoms with little contact to any of them and no interest in changing that. They moved, they returned, they hunted, they gathered. That was how it had always been.
Now they had come back to one of their spots and found it already occupied.
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The Unwelcomed Settlers
The settlers had come from a kingdom called the Federation of El. There are fifty families, with four to six people each.
They had been pushed out of their previous home. Their lord had gotten their settlements into an inter-territorial war with a neighboring lord. These wars were legal in the Federation of El, a recognized way for lords to settle disputes that negotiation hadn't resolved. Lords had retinues and armies and sometimes hired mercenaries and they were permitted to use them against each other within limits.
What that meant for the people living under those lords was that the war had to be paid for somehow. Taxes went up and caused grumbling people. Then they took their food reserves and went to the campaign they never asked for. By the time things settled down there wasn't enough left to stay on. So these families left and went further into the forest of Kîamo because it meant they were further from the lords who had taken everything from them and left them for dead.
Entering the forest they sent scouts ahead and found a clearing with water nearby, trees they could fell for timber, and soil that looked like it could be worked for farming. So they claimed that area and started building around it.
Their palisade walls went up but weren't finished yet.
They were mostly farmers, not fighters. Some had militia experience from their previous lord's territory requirements. A few could use magic, around ten at an expert level and twenty-five more at common to advanced. Magic was the one thing they had that the Aít-ås didn't. Ancient humans without access to the world system had no magic and the Aít-ås were exactly that.
But magic in the hands of people who are scattered and were surprised with an ambush and not organized with any military training doesn't work as well as magic in the hands of people who are trained for a fight.
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First Blood
The Aít-ås had not hesitated with their attack. They came back to find their ancestral grounds cleared and occupied and loud with construction and for them that was enough reason to launch a surprise attack.
The attack came without warning and that was the point. The first arrows had struck the people who were busy at work before anyone in the settlement understood what the sound was. Three workers went down near the eastern edge of the clearing. The ones close enough to see it happen started shouting. The ones further in heard the shouting and grabbed whatever was nearest.
The Asgub came in alongside the warriors. A hundred of them spread wide, coming from the tree line at multiple points so there was no single direction to face. They were big animals and they were fast and they had done this sort of things before. Some of the settlers had never seen a beast that large moving that fast directly at them.
The settlers pushed back once they got themselves together. Those who had grabbed weapons fought with what they had, farm tools, spears, whatever was within reach. The magic users were spread out through the settlement with no time to coordinate so they used what they could from wherever they were standing. They used fire and wind magic and they managed to disrupt the Aít-ås advance in some places and gave the defenders time to fall back to the sturdier sections of the unfinished perimeter.
The Asgub was the harder problem to deal with. They were fast and they came from directions the defenders weren't watching. A few of the magic users turned their attention to them specifically but hitting a moving animal in close quarters with a spell that wasn't prepared was harder than it looked.
Meanwhile the melee in the middle of the settlement was fought with spears and wooden swords and farm tools and fists and anything else that came to hand. The Aít-ås fought with the efficiency of people who had done this many times in various forms. The settlers fought with the desperation of people who had no choice but to defend themselves to the bitter end. Both of those things produced roughly the same level of violence.
The Aít-ås had been in fights like this before. The settlers hadn't. The Aít-ås knew the terrain. The settlers had been here a few weeks and had spent most of that time building.
It ran until both sides had taken more losses than either had expected when it started. Then it stopped. Not by any agreement. Both sides were just spent. They pulled back to their own ground and the dead stayed where they had fallen between them.
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After the Fighting
Both sides saw what they had done and what losses they had incurred.
The injured were more than those who had fallen with varying degrees of fatality. The Asgub that had made it through paced the Aít-ås perimeter unsettled. The settlers also checked their wounded friends and families inside the walls. Neither side was in a position to start a fight again immediately and both knew it.
One of the Aít-ås elders knew some of the common tongue. Not fluently. The kind of working knowledge that came from decades of passing contact with traders and travelers who sometimes moved through forest regions. Enough to get a point across.
He walked within speaking distance and made it clear he wasn't coming to fight.
His argument was simple. The Aít-ås had been returning to this ancestral ground for more generations than any of them alive could count personally. It was theirs in the way that a place becomes yours when you keep coming back to it long enough. From their point of view the settlers had illegally come and built on it without knowing it was taken because you couldn't know a thing like that without knowing the Aít-ås even existed here.
The settlers gave their own answer. They had come from somewhere they couldn't stay anymore. They had found ground that looked like no one had claimed it. They had built their settlement here because they thought it was unoccupied and they had nowhere else to go. They hadn't come here to take from anyone.
The elder listened. What he translated back to the Aít-ås behind him changed the feeling in the air somewhat. But both sides still had their own dead friends and family members. Both sides still had their anger within them. None of that went away. But they had both heard why the other had done what they did and that was something they could at least work with.
They agreed to separate. The settlers would stay on the ground they had already cleared. The Aít-ås would find another seasonal spot somewhere else in the broader Kîamo forest. They both recovered their dead together in a shared spot at the edge of the clearing, a marker for both of them of what had been lost in a fight that didn't have to happen the way it did.
Then they went their separate ways.
The Aít-ås moved elsewhere into the forest with their Asgub. While the settlers went back to grieve and to finish their walls.
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The Federation of El
The Kîamo conflict was a small thing against what was happening in the Federation of El at the larger scale.
The Federation sat above Ogind in the northern stretch of the central-western continent. It was the 8th Region in the sphere of the free reigning kingdoms cenrtral-western continental framework. Ogind was the 11th and it shared a northern border with El, which put El in between the other free reigning kingdoms directly to its north; it had borders specifically with regions 5 and 6.
The Federation was composed of eight states that had come together under a shared agreement to form an alliance. Each of them had been their own kingdom before and had kept their own laws, traditions, and ruling structures when they joined. What they had built on top of that was a shared executive structure to make the 8 states into a cohesive nation of its own; they are led by a High Chancellor, elected from among the eight State Lords by vote of the other seven.
The High Chancellor has an indefinite term to serve the interest of the Federation until they can't anymore, which usually means from old age or an untimely death. They were typically already old when elected. The State Lords who voted tended to prefer someone with long demonstrated judgment over someone young enough to hold the position for a generation and build up too much centralized weight. It was a system that produced careful, consensus-based leadership.
Each State Lord was chosen by their region's Senator Lords when the previous ruler died. Senator Lords were senior advisors and administrators drawn from the nobility at the Marquis to Duke level; there are anywhere from ten to twenty per state depending on the region's size. From among the State Lords, the ones who had distinguished themselves as capable statesmen could rise to the position of High Chancellor vote. Below the Senator Lords were the settlement managers, the day-to-day layer that kept things running on the ground.
It worked well enough when the states broadly agreed. When they didn't, the Federation's framework had no strong mechanism to force anyone into line. The agreement holding the Federation together was exactly that, an agreement. Paper with signatures on it. When lords decided their problem was worth fighting over, the Federation could not stop them.
Inter-territorial wars between lords were a regular feature of El, not an exception. Most burned out quickly once the cost became clear. The current conflict between two manager families Baron Geislerr and Baron Himel was not new. They had already clashed before and they would have clashed again on their own.
What was different this time was how fast it was escalating and how much heat was behind it.
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The Next Arwenian Crisis
The Cabal had already identified the Federation of El before Arwen had even finished collapsing.
It was an obvious target. A multi-state alliance held together by voluntary agreement and consensus had the same fracture points that Arwen had, just spread across more parties. You didn't need to attack the Federation from outside. You just needed to push the tensions that already existed past the point the agreement could hold them together. The Cabal was good at finding those tensions and pushing them to their breaking points. They had just finished doing exactly that in Arwen over the course of several years.
El had always had inter-territorial wars. That was not new. What the Cabal had done was to directly identify which ones could be made worse and make them even more gruesome than what it is. And they found out their two breaking points, the houses of Geislerr and Himel. They would have clashed again on their own eventually. But the speed of the current escalation and the heat behind it was not entirely natural. Some of that had been helped along by the cabal, because why not if it was an inevitable outcome might as well speed up the process and bring the entire Federation into that mess.
Ogind was also on their list. But they had deemed it harder to work on because its governance was more unified and its leadership was already cautious about outside influence after watching what happened to Arwen next door. The Cabal had people inside Ogind but the operation there was going slower and quieter.
El was easier to manipulate and create the chaos they so wanted to occur. El was already moving into their destruction.
Meanwhile the Empire was not sitting still. The intelligence from the Arwenian collapse had given them enough surface understanding to recognize the shape of what was happening. Individual kingdoms acting on their own information would surely produce individual responses to individual problems in due time. But the Empire has deemed it that it was not enough. The problem that was occurring within these kingdoms aren't natural outcomes of their own folly but it was carefully constructed to make it seem that it was due to their own incompetent rules, which technically it was. Now they have seen enough of these patterns to know that their enemy the Cabal was operating across multiple kingdoms simultaneously and the response had to match that.
A meeting of all the free reigning kingdoms was the only thing that would give light to this scale of terroristic attacks. The Empire has deemed that this was happening across all the Free Reigning Kingdoms that they have no direct influence of. It was hard to assess how deep the enemies' infrastructure has penetrated to the various structures of each individual kingdom. It isn't also easy to call upon the leaders of each nation but it was necessary.
The invitations had been sent to the Free Reigning Kingdoms. El had already received one. But whether the High Chancellor would attend, whether the eight State Lords could agree on sending a single representative, whether the Geislerr and Himel conflict would be stable enough by then for the Federation to show up as a coherent party rather than a fractured one — those were left as open questions.
The Cabal's people in Arwen had already pulled out. The work there was done. The ritual was finished. Whatever they had needed from Arwen's collapse they had already achieved. And now they were already moving on to the next place.
The Empire had sent the invitations and waited to see what came of it.
And somewhere in the central continent a newly settled hamlet was only finishing its walls while the Aít-ås looked for another ground to call their own. Neither of these groups knew anything about what was coming for the Federation they both happened to live inside.