Part I:
The Empress of the Sunrise Mountains Fights On
Prelude to Part I:
Excerpt from Wise Man Tellorin’s
The Updated Histories of House Dorsa
Before we embark upon a journey to understand the War in the East, the conflict which defined the final years of Emperor Andreth III’s reign and arguably the entire reign of his daughter Natasia I, it is first useful to consider more generally how the East came to be the fourth and final established realm of the Empire of the House of Dorsa.
One hundred and fifty years before the time of Emperor Andreth III, the farthest reaches of the East were inhabited by a primarily pastoral people who called themselves the Quanca Carin, “the people of the clans.” Like the apa-apa herders of Terinto and the ancient horsemen of the Central Steppes, the Quanca Carin were a nomadic people organized in loosely affiliated tribes who shared a language, culture, and religion.
Although in more recent years the Empire has treated the Quanca Carin as a single entity, the modern reader would do better to imagine these tribes as interrelated city states who sometimes coexisted in peace and sometimes warred with one another – something like the Seven Cities of Northern Terinto before that region was subsumed into the Empire. Subsisting mainly on domesticated goats and sheep, the Quanca Carin traveled from pastureland to pastureland just west of the foothills of the Sunrise Mountains, each tribe generally staying within its own territorial boundaries.
But in the decades before the Empire encountered the herders of the Quanca Carin, the Capital Lands, the West, and the Central Steppes were rife with lesser nobles who, due to accident of birth, were far removed from the storied names of their lineages – and thus far removed from the wealth and power associated with those names. Over the course of centuries, the noble houses of the Empire increased in terms of number of descendants, but not necessarily in terms of landholdings and wealth. This created a situation in which all too many so-called “highborn” lived nearly as paupers. The salve for their affliction, as they saw it, was for the Empire to expand its boundaries, thus providing new parcels of land to be settled by, of course, them. Shrewdly, they masked their personal ambitions in a shroud of a nearly religious patriotism, claiming it was the sacred duty of the Empire to civilize the uncivilized, to bring order and peace to lands and peoples who deserved to experience the benefits of Imperial rule.
These nobles initially pushed Imperial colonization into what became the Northeast, founding the Houses Errit, Keltior, Clermont, and Farrimont. Witnessing the successes of these “new” noble lineages, other highborn families hungry to improve their status pushed for even further expansion eastward. At first, they set their eyes on Terinto, but the Terintans proved too difficult to conquer – and as today’s readers know, it took until the reign of Emperor Balus X, sire to the better-known Emperor Andreth III, before Terinto was fully incorporated into the Empire.
Undeterred by losses in Terinto, the pauper nobles simply set their sights further afield, beyond Terinto’s eastern border. Leave Terinto to pirates and nomads, they told themselves; the fertile plains beyond the Snake River were more desirable anyway.
Emperor Palmerane, having experienced colossal military losses in Terinto, was not as eager as the nobility to expand beyond the Snake River. Fortunately for those nobles, Palmerane was a weak emperor, easily influenced by his coterie of Wise Men. The pauper nobles therefore took their cause to the House of Wisdom, which agreed to an initial exploration of the lands east of the Snake “for the sake of furthering knowledge of the continent.” Yet the nobles and Wise Men who sponsored these expeditions made clear to those they sent forth that, regardless of what was discovered, they were to return with one unambiguous conclusion: The lands to the east of the Snake River were temperate, fertile, and, most importantly, uninhabited by anyone who would give credible armed resistance to colonization.
Thus it was that new Houses with names like Pellon, Tergos, Birsid, Fontan, and so on were founded. And meanwhile, the Quanca Carin were gradually pushed from the plains of the East, which they had inhabited without challenge for generations, and into the inhospitable Sunrise Mountains.
That first wave of Imperial colonization nearly destroyed the Quanca Carin – and from an Imperial perspective, it might have been better if they indeed were eliminated at that time. But the tribes scraped by in the mountains, slowly rebuilding their numbers.
For roughly five generations after colonization, the mountain tribes satisfied themselves with raids against the farms and villages of those who had stolen their homes. But as they grew stronger and more acquainted with Imperial military tactics, the disparate tribes finally united against the common enemy of the Empire and began the War in the East. The war dragged on for nearly a decade in painful stalemate, but about three years before the war ended, something dramatic changed: The Quanca Carin, who had never been as advanced or organized as the Imperial Army, suddenly possessed armor and weapons every bit as good as the Empire’s. Their raids became surgically precise rather than random, targeting important military positions. And then, of course, there was the routing of Fox Battalion, after which rumors began to spread amongst the common soldiers that some mountain men fought with the aid of supernatural forces.
Compared to those early years of the colonization of the East, who could ever have predicted that the mountain men and their allies would eventually nearly undo the Empire itself?