History of the Dargon-Men

[b]The Kingdom and Fall of Kraelov[/b]

 

[u]1E (0-94) – The Epoch of Worldrage’s Sons[/u]

 

The origins of Drekynkind are lost to the tribes and their neighboring races, and in its place a rather confused and bureaucratic cosmology has taken hold, a thing of a dozen-hundred animist gods dying and rising again in a convoluted war. The details are unnecessary, as all that need be known is that the war left only one standing, the Firstdrek that named itself Worldrage (pronounced whirl-drah-gay, for the uncultured among you) for its heated passions and raging angers that allowed it to destroy its brothers and sisters in spirithood. Left alone in the vast and frothing Syngolii Swamps of the northwest, Worldrage was suddenly taken by a great futility; what was it to conquer if that kingdom could not be made to last? And so Worldrage took from the storm of his sorrow a rainbow and drew forth the best of its colors to adorn his sons, and pulled forth mud and bark and shaped the first Drekyn. The Hideshades still hold a central part in Drekyn spiritualism and art, with reds, blues, greens, whites, and blacks all expressing various aspects of their all-father and assuring his protection from the spirits and demons of Dharta. This also explains their great loathing of Greyhides, those scrawny colorless twin-pairs known for their horrifying magical ability; the lack of color which betrays their unblessed nature and allows the devils of other faiths to have their way in their souls, granting them elemental power in exchange for their minds and clan-loyalties.

 

Historically, little is known about the 1st Epoch other than that the Drekyn filled the Syngolii swamps with what may have been barge-homes or treehouses over the course of a century and took to spear-fishing and trapping the ripper-fish and alligators of the area in lieu of formal agriculture. Granted, clan gardens and deforestation efforts were made by the Drekyn, but they were insufficient to call them a properly settled people until the 2nd Epoch. Being the only form of sapient life in the swamps and marshes left them free to expand to the edges of the swamp, and the fierce wildlife of the area put them on a head-start to a martial lifestyle, forcing young Drekyn male and female to learn the ways of combat or die ingloriously at the claws and fangs of some creature of the darkness. Donning hide armor, sturdy swamp-bark shields, and spears in hand, the Drekyn were astoundingly successful in purging the Syngolli of apex predators by the end of the Epoch, leaving them free to hunt in peace and temporarily removing the people’s main conflict with Mother Nature.

 

The 1st Epoch finally ended, and the dawn of Drekyn history began, with the rise to power of Clanhouse Kraen. The swampfolk had until now lived under the rule of a council of clan leaders and shamanic authorities, with ‘law’ being the interest of the people and its enforcement the use of clan militias to rectify any wrongdoing. Alongside the Clanhouses Vroak, Marden, Lengallak, and Quinal, and a dozen of Worldrage’s (self-)appointed scion-shamans, Clanhouse Kraen and Clanfather Ondorod led the Drekyn to the fringes of the Syngolli and helped oversee and direct the purgation of the more dangerous fauna from the area. When all was said and done, though, it happened that Kraen was sitting on the largest standing militia in comparison to the other houses, and along with some well-placed promises of lasting power in the new regime, Kraen rallied the shamans to gain their blessing and assure hegemony over the others. With Kraen’s forces combined with the moral authority of the religious [i]cultus[/i], the other houses could do nothing but go along with the power grab. In actuality, the move was more ceremonial than anything else, as all decisions were still made by republican consensus between the clans, it gave the Drekyn a figurehead for future foreign affairs and began a dynasty of Kraen kings that would go unbroken until the end of the Kraen Wars.

 

[u]2E (94-198)  - The Epoch of Exodi[/u]

 

With the scepter in his taloned hand, Clan-King Ondorod Ar-Kraen decided it was high time to make a proper nation-state of the Drekyn. Until the dawn of the 2nd century, they had remained a confederation of small town-states held together by familial bonds and religious unity, but in light of the tales of foreign witch-queens, taurian mountain-shouters, and of up to a dozen other thinking, speaking peoples across the land, the Kraen family figured it would be best to make their way out of the swamps and begin settling the lands beyond the Syngolli with speed to make up for a hundred lost years. With the recent development of cuneiform and willow-paper to allow the religious elect to preserve Worldrage’s doctrines and combat heresy, the groundwork was laid for their civilization to make the leap to a proper nation. That is, once there was a proper nation to be leapt to; the great clan-houses of the Drekyn gathered together and put into writing the governmental tenets and procedures of what would later come to be known as ‘Rite of Commission for The League of Ashi’dirr’. Authored by the shamans in sole conjunction with the Kraen (further cementing their right to rule), this [i]magna carta[/i] of the formal alliance of the five clans and their hundreds of tribes into a sovereignty was signed into gospel law in 107 AW (as indicated on the original Rite of Commission), and Ondorod used the spirit of the people to full effect, fueling the fires of exploratory curiosity and species-national pride at the formation of a proper state for themselves that surely must spread to and grow to greatness and wealth.

 

Appointing expeditionary leaders from the nobilities of all five clans and attaching them to religious overseers, Ondorod sent out a great multitude of cartographic expeditions both to hand-map as much of the continent as possible and to obtain maps and charts from foreign powers to ensure that the Ashi’dirri could choose the best sites for their colonies. By 120 AW, the dealings and treks were done, and the Ashi’dirri Kal-Kalexus ([i]Book of The Planet[/i]) became one of Dharta’s foremost atlases and cartographic collections, rightfully garnering the rapt attention of such powers as the Amiran Empire and the Saetulanite [i]polises[/i]. With the monks of Worldrage hand-producing Kal-Kalexi and with Clanhouse Kraen distributing them to the most successful of the explorers, the word was put out to the Drekyn that the time for greatness was at hand and that volunteers were needed to colonize the frontier, being the forests and plains to the south and the taiga to the north-east. The quotas were filled far quicker than expected, the [i]zeitgeist[/i] of the Drekyn longing for this day for quite some time, and soon the colonists went underway.

 

The colonial parties, easily standing at 60 strong by the end of the Epoch, made their way from the Syngolli Swamps and set up trading stations, settlements, watchtowers, roads, and rest-stations for relay messengers throughout the region. Specializing each town to ensure that it was the most capable at mastering the local terrain, the seeds of future balkanization were sewn as the fur-wearing hunts-Drekyn of the taiga grew further apart from, say, the rangers of the southern forests or the Homedrekyn of the marshes. Nonetheless, colonial leaders answered to Kraen with little difficulty, paying a tithe of food and wealth back home which would be distributed back to the colonies as seen fit by the League of Ashi’dirr. Granary systems and constant communication with the border allowed the League to respond quickly and effectively to any agricultural or martial crisis that presented itself, proving exceptionally useful during the ‘Siege of Shand’, a 9-year series of protracted long-range raids in the taiga by the Kalstalten kitsune aided by Bellalupan mercenaries. Outlasting the raiders and giving them only their arrow-filled black-furred bodies to bury, the Ashi’dirri for the moment was capable of managing its burgeoning empire of palisaded towns and fully walled cities.

 

[u]3E (199-322) – The Epoch of Adaption[/u]

 

Change is inevitable, and despite its survival for over a century and a half, the League of Ashi’dirr eventually came upon hard times. The Clanhouses bickered with the Kraen via growing bureaucracy and miscommunication in the government, clan and League militias occasionally broke off into warbands to engage in private spats and conflicts with one another, and the recent acceptance of the Zhinohuman kingdom of Aarvania as an ally was proving more trouble than seemed worth it, with poor soil forcing Drekyn settlements to feed the Zhinohumans season after season. The League proper was grateful for the friendship, gaining access to cheap metals and finally finding itself capable of properly armoring its military on a budget it could handle, but the individual city-states of Ashi’dirr were growing tired of nursing a sickly child of a kingdom. The situation was made worse by the passing of Clanfather Ondoron and the passing of the scepter to his son, Emrak, leaving a bad situation in the hands of a first-time despot.

 

At last, the Drekyn of Eshela had enough, and in 220, the end of the League began to unfold. The town of Eshela, a large, well-walled city in the safety of the taiga that did plentiful ‘business’ with the Aarvanians found itself on slightly hard times of its own, refused to deliver their annual tithe of food and wealth to the League for redistribution throughout the Drekyn nation. Citing the existence of no real benefits when the town could hold its own without the League, making a fuss about the Aarvanian ‘nursing’ that left its own people hungry, and sending this little news-flash back to Syngolli in the form of a taxdrake’s severed head, Clanhouse Kraen found itself confronted with its first serious domestic crisis.

Skirmishes with all manner of foreign brigands, the occasional territory spat with the kitsune of the north and various other localized conflicts had prepared Ashi’dirr for war, but the repercussions of both action and inaction were dreadfully unpleasant. Declaring war on Eshela would go against the Rite of Commission’s missive to guard Drekynkind from itself, and even if the war was made, putting the town to the torch was just as much a non-option as bringing them into the fold and acting as if nothing had happened.

 

While the League debated with itself and scoured their laws and religion for an answer, Eshela prepared with haste, hiring up Sectan and Amiran mercenaries using the sort of ‘moral high-ground’ rhetoric to be expected of a scorned micro-nation. When the League finally sent a few warbands of raptor-lancers and levy militiamen to debate the matter at spear-point, the Ashi’dirri forces found themselves outmanned, out-armed, and totally unwelcome. Peace talks were ‘initiated’ by the League, if sending a diplomat to the no-mans-land only to have him stuck down by mercenary arrows counts as true initiation. The ensuing ‘First Battle of Eshela’ was short and grisly; a solid formation of men-at-arms was bogged down by Eshalan infantry in turn, and what raptor-lancers the Ashi’dirri had brought were dragged off of formation by Zhinohuman Cantabrians to be circled and ground away into nothingness. Once the cavalry was gone from their sides, the Ashi’dirri were helpless to resist as the humans stowed their bows and took up spears to crash against the League’s formation and squeeze their ranks to the crushing point and beyond. With their cruel annihilation on the field, the League proved that it could no longer hold sway over its frontier with nationalism alone.

 

On that unhappy note, Emrak decided to get creative. After conferring with his shamans and gathering their support for this risky venture, he rallied his personal guard and attaché and made his way for Eshela. Arriving outside the walls to the sight of dried corpses spiked onto poles above the gate, archers fully ready to fire on his men, Emrak called for Eshalan leadership with the offer of making them the capitol of a new kingdom. Intrigued, the local governor met in the fields outside of the city and entered into heated truce-talks for well over a week. At last, though, peace terms were settled. The messengers returned to the Syngolli Swamp and asked the other leading Clanhouses to gather their families and belongings and make their way for Eshala, to help set up the new capitol. Shocked and confused, the Clanfathers set out and arrived at Eshala to find it already undergoing development, expanding the walls and beginning work on a new governor’s palace to house the League’s council. Emrak explained that the swamps were no place to run an empire, and since Eshala was both in the heart of Drekyn territory and well-connected to the other settlements via roads and trade routes, it would only be best to move central command here. Seeing the logic, the Clanfathers went along and moved the center of the nation into the heart of the windy cold-prairies.

 

Shortly afterwards, the shamanic leadership stepped forth and announced on behalf of Clanhouse Kraen that some very worth-while and important changes were to take place; namely, the change of Eshala’s name to Kraelov and the dissolution of the League of Ashi’dirr to be replaced by the Kingdom of Kraelov. Only after a number of shamans were killed by Clanhouses Marden and Lengallak did the priests get to properly explain the changes. With a secretly written copy of the ‘New Rite of Commission’ in hand, they showed that the changes were nominal at best, still leaving the ruling council and all its powers exactly where they had been. Of course, this shameless ego-stroking on Emrak’s part was totally uncalled for, and it came as little surprise that at least two assassination attempts were made against him in the coming months. After a short-lived political purge that had Kraen’s personal guard stealing away the youngest sons and daughters of the rival houses and offering them as burnt sacrifices to Worldrage, the infighting simmered and cooled as the Clanhouses learned their place in the new order. Kraen would have functional military autonomy from here on out, able to coerce or demand troops and resources from other families and tribes seemingly at will, managing taxes and redistributions exclusively, and leaving the Clanfathers in a purely advisory role to King Emrak.

 

Now a proper kingdom, Kraelov once again drew the attention of its neighbors. While the Saetulanites hoped for some sort of buddy-buddy trade deals and the Aarvanians waved their little pennants in happy support of their protectors every move, the Amiran Empire remained cold, even outright unfriendly to the Drekyn. Trade moved slowly, mercantile wars of exclusion and proxy-battles fought via mercenary companies raged on the frontiers to the south-west, and diplomatic relations were commonly considered a bad joke by both parties. Peace treaties were written up to save face domestically, but if something happened to tip matters over the edge, nobody would have been surprised or objected to a good call for war. When word of slave revolts in the Aecharsi provinces of dread Amira arrived at Kraelov, Emrak and his freshly matured son Alrekd-Shan finally saw a chance to begin solving the problem of the neighbors. Sending word to the Aarvanians that the humans could finally make up for the famines of yesteryear, the Clanhouses and the humans began sending men, arms, rations, and qualified commanders to lead the slaves and form them up into a force capable of keeping the Amiran army busy while the Drekyn clans and Aarvanian generals gathered their warbands and began snipping off bits and pieces of territory for themselves almost at will, with skirmishes of increasing frequency proving little trouble in paving the way for further Drekyn settlement.

 

[u]4E (322-417) – The Epoch of Purgation[/u]

 

The death of the Amiran empress at the hands of Emrak’s heavy-armored personal guard during an otherwise uneventful land-grab raid marked the beginning of the 4th Epoch, known more commonly as the ‘Kraen Wars’. As the years of fighting slogged on, the Drekyn began adopting and formalizing their old fighting styles into a cohesive set of tactics and stratagems to draw on the best of all Drekyn micro-cultures. Using Aarvanian metal to outfit heavy drakes-at-arms and domestic experience to provide javelin-throwing, bow-toting skirmishers, the common combat formation was that of ‘Worldrage’s Maw’, a slow-moving, momentous [i]svinfylking[/i] that proved effective against all manner of infantry and most cavalry formations. Spear-toting heavy infantry formed a wedge, with ranged skirmishers holding a back line just behind the triangle and backed by two more lines of infantry on either side, forming a long pentagon (which could close up into a diamond shape to protect against rear-flanking). With the skirmishers providing suppressive fire or short-range support for the advancing wall of infantry, and the rear-guard providing protection against infantry flanking, the Maw could cut through a line or annihilate lancers and hussars with relative ease.

 

As the war continued, the Maw proved as effective as hoped. Granted, not every battle went to the Kingdom, but those losses are generally considered matters of being swamped in bodies rather than a failure of the formation or the commanders leading them. Mercenaries both Kraen and Amiran fought on the frontier for both parties, with the relative futility of the war making it a welcome prospect for sell-swords and soldiers of fortune. Young lads and lasses were sent to the front-line knowing full well they were doing nothing meaningful, only happy by virtue of their instinctual love of warfare and bloodshed. Even that did little to make up for the long tours, brutal fighting, and fears of capture by Amiran slavers in the field.

 

When a sturdy cohort of Amirans swept up and set up camp around the Aarvanian city-state, these fears were whipped and reshaped into [i]causi belli[/i] by Emrak and Clanhouse Kraen, rallying his warbands to fight for the good of the Kingdom and their Zhinohuman compatriots to fend off the legions and send them home in corpse-carts. Simply wrapping his armies around the city with a few well-placed Maws and several companies of Aarvanian Cantabrians and mage-knights, putting the cavalry to use herding Amirans into the path of the flying wedges and crushing them against the walls of the city, the battle was a decisive victory and the feasting and celebration that followed a cultural memory for centuries to come. The entire war had ended up going rather splendidly, with the Kingdom gaining a handful of new strongholds and quite a many taxable holdings to fill the coffers of the aging Emrak and his hero of a son Alrekd-Shan, who had proved himself in battle as a capable commander and a brutal warrior wielding his personal poleaxe [i]Forestfeller[/i]; he’d earned the moniker of ‘Worldrage’s Fang’ well enough for it to leave the tongues of Amiran troops with a touch of fear and awe at the mention.

 

Both Emrak and Alrekd-Shan took great pride in their accomplishments when the Amirans sued for peace. The talks went swiftly, with the Empire having been cowed by its recent defeats, and the Drekyn walked away with territory, vast wealth, and the goodwill of the slaves whose cause had started the 1st Kraen War. It seemed as good a note as any for the aging, scarred Emrak to formally give his throne over to Alrekd-Shan and retire to manage the domestics of the Kingdom, leaving his son to continue in the sport of warfare and nation-building. Alrekd-Shan took up the scepter and began training his own son, Zendik, in the ways of war, grooming him to conquer Amira and put its people in chains for the glory of Worldrage’s sons. While Zendik remained with Emrak and was instructed in strategy, swordplay, riding, and leadership, Alrekd-Shan continued his war of attrition against the Amirans, deploying mercenary bands and joining them in hit-and-run raids on border-towns and outlying farms in a campaign of terror.

 

After 15 years of looting, killing, and assorted mischief on the borders, Alrekd-Shan returned home and found his son as capable a killer as himself, with Zendik taking up shield and lance, making his personal guard a unit of heavy-barded cavalry chargers. While his father didn’t quite care for horsemanship, he had to appreciate the help it’d be in the upcoming war, and after gaining the blessings of the shamans and priests of Kraelov, father and son rode out against Amira, leading their men-at-arms alongside the dreaded Aarvanian riders of old. Striking swiftly and without any semblance of mercy, the Kingdom’s forces crashed against the Amiran west like a typhoon and swept away what little resistance was presented. Drunk with blood and imperialist imaginings, Alrekd-Shan drove his men on relentlessly, his followers all too eager to quick-step to the next killing field to loot whatever they could get their claws on, be it art, precious gems and metals, or any of the multitudes of women to be taken captive and slaved.

 

Arriving at the city of Tofalna, the Kraen advanced as always and took the place as their own, narrowly missing a chance to destroy their enemy’s empress as they had before. As the Amirans fell back, Alrekd-Shan turned the city into a great muster-field to organize various warbands and companies to work their way towards the town of Zerponon and prepare for the final assail on Amira herself. Zendik himself accompanied several of these companies and was present at the final taking of Zerponon. He pushed his forces on shortly afterwards, with his father shifting the rallies forward into the city as the heart of the army marched on Amira. Three long years passed, three long years of crushing relief forces, driving back a handful of sally attempts, and letting the city’s great walls work for them by starving the locals into submission with no hope of escape. When they failed to surrender at the three-year mark, Zendik gathered his men, sundered the gates, and put the city under his clawed boot. The city was stripped of any and all valuables, and the same were shipped back to the city of Kraelov to adorn the capitol. Art, weapons, commodities, and enough slaves to give every Clanhouse a proper royal harem were seized and sent back in long military caravans, leaving Alrekd-Shan and his son as the most successful leaders in Kraen history.

 

King Alrekd-Shan appointed his son as governor of Amira, putting him near the front lines of any future wars but taking away the legions at his doorstep as men and women returned to their homes rich with loot and tales of conquest. It didn’t sit well with him, leaving him feel tactically naked, but he knew his father’s time was coming to a close. Indeed, it did, with Alrekd-Shan dying young of venereal illnesses in conjunction with a plague that swept through parts of the Kingdom. Amira was unaffected by the blight and Zendik was free to return to Kraelov, appointing a governor from Clanhouse Quinal to watch over what was left of Amira. Once home, Zendik finally sired his son Kozin and daughter Rhilla, and kept his empire ready for war while the two grew up in the same martial tradition as all other Kraen before them. During this time, many calls to start war early before the enemy could recollect themselves were made by various clan leaders and generals, but were ill-heeded by the Kraen who were too busy enjoying their newfound luxury and hedonism to care for war. While ‘Amira Must Be Destroyed' became a common rally cry in the military, it was never acted upon in time. By the time they came of age, the two keeping things simple and taking up plate and spear to lead their own Maw formations, they were ready to confront the threat posed by the next generation of Amiran fighters in the dawning days of the 3rd Kraen War.

 

Rumors came quickly from the frontier that Atoran troops were mobilizing in force, but when settlement captains returned news of no troop formations or war camps, the rumors were dismissed for the most part. Rhilla, being a bright girl and a bit of a paranoid regarding military matters, took some troops for herself and moved her forces and governorship to the seaboard, fully aware of the fact that the river-raiders that plagued the borders could be indicative of a changing martial ethos in the Amiran Remnant. While she was totally right, her paranoia did her little favor, and so her requests for reinforcements and additional officer-groups went mostly unheeded as she was helpless to watch that suspicious tramp flotilla float on by past her dominion. Once it floated past, Rhilla spent many a restless night wondering what to make of it. At last, her fears were realized as she was stirred from her cot by the sounds of a displaced river spawning guerilla troops and tearing apart the guard. Taking up arms did little to stop the attack, outmanned and ill-prepared for night fighting, and so it was that the war-maiden was slain and rent asunder in martial combat with Meymeddi herself if the skalds and bards who tell the tales are to be believed. While she died falling to pieces, crushed into her armor and broken to pieces after being swamped by the Atoran and her guard, her men were not nearly as lucky, slaughtered en-masse save those who had deserted at the first minute of the attack, who could only report that they hadn’t been hunted down and executed for their ‘good sense’.

 

Knowing now that the Atorans had stepped up their efforts and were fighting for the survival of their people, the Clanhouses did the reasonable thing and set about blaming one-another for the loss of the princess and the Karum Delta in general. While the Clanfathers argued and shouted and challenged one-another to trials by combat, their princes and generals took ‘initiative’ and began rallying their forces into unaccountable warbands of army scale, resembling overblown mercenary operations rather than formal war-making units. Approximately 30 of these warbands had been formed and were moving about wherever each individual general thought the Remnentals would hit next before nine of them who’d guessed correctly met the Amirans along the Karum River and fought for glory and honor beyond measure. The religious rhetoric from above and the reality of life-or-death struggle from below failed to form the quasi-brigands into an effective fighting force, however, with their commanders concerned mostly with keeping themselves alive first and foremost, and the fresh discipline from the Amiran Army held fast against the Maw formations meaningfully for the first time in the tactic’s history; pole-arm phalanxes trapped the wedges in drawn-out melees while shield-walls of halberds closed in and pressed the spearmen into useless fighting ranges where they simply could not get the kills needed to hold a position. Thus, the Maws found themselves shoved and shunted into one-another and eventually pulled into the river and variously hacked to bits or drowned in their armor, with the battle killing all nine warbands and their commanders strung up on the piikaga trees at the end of the Karum Massacre, known to the Drekyn as the ‘Sunder of Vroak’. Clanhouse Vroak had been gutted of men as a result of the Karum Massacre, giving it its scornful moniker and forcing the women of Vroak to marry into other clans and thus dissolving the family and ending the bloodline proper.

 

The remaining 21 armies, known as the ‘Force of Four Fives’ for the five armies each Clanhouse mustered (excluding Prince Kozin’s personal guard and legion), rallied at Amira, expecting the newly reborn Remnant army to launch an assail on their cultural homeland and claim another victory for their ilk. Without a cohesive military intelligence system in the form of Kraen royal command, the Force of Four Fives failed to learn of the pillaging army’s advances in time to move to stop them, forcing the armies to set about the local countryside requisitioning resources from the local farmers and merchants by force. While Kraen forces would deny it, they knew full well they were losing what right to rule they had at this point, violating the Rite of Commission behind a façade of military necessity. However, they had enough time to send another 8 legions forth to aid at Aarvan and save the Aarvanian nation-state from impending annihilation. Alas, in the crop-levelled fields outside the city where the armies met, the old precedent of pushing back the Amiran horde and leveling them on the run failed to hold as Meymeddi’s prowess in the field inspired her troops to hold and work on wearing away the Kraen armies and dragging their leaders out for honor duels against the Johshaber’s personal guard which they were obliged to accept. If the first challenge failed to fell the brute, the next attempt was made instantly in the form of another guard’s assail, and so the ruling blood of the Kingdom was spilt leader by leader in such a way that Drekyn skalds can still salvage some dignity and honor from their ancestors in the current age.

 

Dead drakes’ honor does not win battles on its own, though, and so it was that cavalry strikes against Aarvanian bow-riders and mage-riders took away what little advantage the alliance’s army had left. Wall fighting against Amiran wall-scalers was short and greatly flawed, with garrison commanders disbelieving such an attack was underway from across the city even as the gates were dragged open and the Amiran Remnant began to flood in past position-locked Maw-groups of Drekyn. The rest of the afternoon and through to the morning, the city was put to torch and blade, with the warbands fleeing with what few dozen men the eight could claim survived and the Zhinohumans annihilated and driven functionally extinct. The piikaga trees lined the walls, roads, and highways in and around the sundered city, and even to this day, the area is believed by most to remain haunted by the spirits of the dead race.

 

Their hand forced and their bloodlines running drier and drier, the Kingdom’s Clanhouses sued for peace in 374 AW, and played out more as a study assignment than a peace treaty; the Clanfathers read over the terms, found themselves incapable of asking for any real cessations from the Amiran Remnant, and thus had to go along with the loss of territory and the acceptance of human refugee populations the Kingdom simply could not support. Meymeddi had proven the superior commander when presented with the Kraen lack of command, but even so, she was a worthy adversary in her own right; combining her presence with the Rite of Commission’s and the Kraelov Kingdom’s daily decay, the end seemed to be a possibility for the Clanfathers. Over the next 36 years, the 13 remaining noble armies struck out on various independent raids, marches, campaigns, and variably successful assaults and sieges on Amira’s protectorates. The resources needed to fuel these armies was drawn from the homestead, which left the human refugee population starved and desperate; assassination attempts, domestic rioting, attempted secession by at least two human settlements, and an uncontrolled explosion of crime and banditry in Kraelov was borne as a result.

 

In the end, Prince Kozin rallied the nobility and set out to regain national momentum in the endless conflict. The Fourth Kraen War sparked in 410 AW, with Kozin emulating his father’s achievement in taking Tofanla and staging assails from the city. Finding the defenses curiously low, he charged on ahead with his forces and caved the city’s walls with little fuss to be had with a proper siege, rushing in and destroying any and all martial resources, be they weapons, food, or trained citizenry. While the sack was underway, the armies outside began to reform and continue onwards to repeat the campaign of pillaging, burning, and indiscriminate murder that had taken place in the region during the 2nd Kraen War. However, during the final stages of preparation, ‘Meymeddi’s Impossible Legion’  poured from over the mountains and dug its fangs into the exposed rump of the army, with generals and their cohorts facing imsurmountable numbers as their proper armies marched head, deaf to the carnage behind them by virtue of the speed of attack. By the time the armies began doubling back, their chieftains had been cut down and bled into the earth, forcing them to hole up in Tofanla and play out an ironic reversal of the 2nd War’s assail, complete with the destruction of the defense but lacking the rout afterwards, for lack of survivors who remained uncaptured. Kozin himself fled and barely escaped with his life, his cowardice replaced with references to ‘destiny’ and ‘wisdom’ in later retellings.

 

The next 5 years were marked by a lack of any notable battles, mostly in part because the surviving command-structure holed up in Kraelov as the Clanhouses continued spitting at each-other from their deathbeds. As settlements fell and the Drekyn were slaved and slain on a town-by-town basis, the news of forced fighting for the Amirans set the remaining holds to retreating their holdings to Kraelov, where making a central defense would allow the least chance for fighting against distant family. With scores of captives forced to take the lead of the attacks, forced to slay their own and making the final destruction of the Rite of Commission a crime of the Amirans, the stage was set for the end of the Kingdom. There was little to be done but hope for an honorable end, and in 415 AW, the chance presented itself when the Amiran Empire marched on Kraelov and beset the city in siege. Over the course of two hungry, languid years, Kraelov and the Kraen were helpless but to watch, and in 417, had little energy left to repel the final attack.

 

Lo, and the four concentric walls of Kraelov were sundered within the same week as sapping broke foundations and siege towers lay the defenses to waste ring by ring. The militias were broken in spirit and tried to surrender along with the few remaining nobles, apart from Kozin who broke from reality and went mad as his city began to burn. As the longhouses were leveled and the last city of the Kingdom laid low with fire and sword, the process of a long week’s chattel inspection outside the city as the walls were already being dismantled and the bracing within scattered to the wind. The slave population of Kraen was mostly put to the sword, with Amiran and Täkvash captives and harem slaves released as their masters were thrown upon piikaga. Both Amiran and Drekyn historians agree that the nocimation of the city would have long-lasting effects on the bloodlines of the Clanhouses and their affiliate tribes.

 

That is to say,  the one in ten Drekyn that survived the purgation of the city; those who failed religious inspection were handed over to the conquering armies to be killed in any number of ways, with drawing-and-quartering and maulings by war-hounds resonating in the verbal history of the survivors. Piikaga was also used as never before, with the roads outside the city lined with trees, victims nursed by their enemies simply to draw their deaths out to twice what they would otherwise be. The soul of the Clanhouses also came away sullied, especially with the death of King Zendik, as those who managed to meet the standards of the Amiran religious were often those who put up no resistance to the invaders or would willingly trade away Clan and nation for a few hour’s life. As the Drekyn were led from the city, lamenting their condition, it is supposed by most skalds that Prince-King Kozin himself was forced to push over the last heap of bricks and end his nation with his own hand before being thrown upon a last piikaga and left to gaze over the ruins of his empire as his followers were led away before his eyes. Thus, Drekyn history proper came to an end.

 

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[b]TO BE CONTINUED: Drekyn Integration, The Dread Magus Gh'osht, and the Nobility of Tails...[/b]