Fifty Year Siege
From Codex Vocrotha
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Prelude to War
Though the Throntorian Empire was at its roots based upon the precepts of justice and peace, elements of that Empire and its leadership created natural divisions between its peoples. The Emperor, Eredil Lantradi, was a refugee of the last days of the Adaric Archipelagos, and though he had led his refugees successfully against the Warlord, Paldor Daln, he was a controversial figure from the start of his ascendency. By birth a Tenebriel, and thus by nature mistrusted by many of his allies for his aptitudes at Sorcery and the betrayal of his people during the battles against the Wraith Queen of Melikoth.
Perhaps because of these expectations, and because of his desire to prove his detractors wrong, the Emperor's drive to bring the Lords of Night to their knees reached a fevered pitch during his rule. His policy of zero tolerance towards any of the Lords of Night, even the more moderate ones such as Rigos and Vran, however, won him numerous enemies amongst his people. Sects of otherwise moderate worshipers were driven underground, and the need for secrecy, mainly due to the fatal price of discovery, slowly turned men to plot against the man responsible for those policies.
Sadly, that same policy won him few friends amongst adherents of the Lords of Light. Many of his most vocal detractors were suspicious of his crusades against the Night, believing that his outward zeal likely housed inner secrets. Too, many adherents of Light who believed in his honesty were concerned by his course: as used as they had become to open debate with their Night counterparts, the Emperor's hunting down and execution of Night cultists gave reason to cover zeal with a circumspect apathy, but created private worry as to who next might find themselves on the wrong side of the Emperor's sword.
So, despite two hundred years of outward prosperity and peace, just beneath the surface a violent current slowly charged, polarizing the people of Dalkiar until the the moment when someone should make the right contact.
Dalkiar Falls
Starting in the early 2800s DR, the unrest of the Empire finally began to blossom into outright rebellion. In 2832, in response to a series of tax disputes, the Grand Duke of Thurgar, Vandriel Turmaris, expelled the Imperial Assessor and declared the lands north of Forgent and east of Wellthane a sovereign state, free of the Empire. Disgraced by his own countrymen's rejection of his rule, Eredil immediately sent troops to take back the Frozen Throne from Vandriel, only to find the keep of Vishrâk held strongly against him. Unable to bypass the keep, the Emperor reluctantly laid siege to the fortress.
The initial success of this rebellion incited other attempts at sovereignty, with varying results. The Gochin of Elsmere followed the example of the Tenebriel immediately, but their proximity to Malthar, then a military stronghold, doomed them to failure. Henge and its satellite fortress islands made noise about seceding but never followed through, apparently gaining from the throne whatever concessions they required, and while the Grand Duchess of Areg, Tura Nyd, pledged her loyalty to the Emperor, the open secret of her court was her simultaneous dealings with both Thurgar and Throntor.
Given the dissent alone, and without outside intervention, the Empire may have ultimately held together; near the turn of the century, several communications had passed between the Lord's Spire and the Frozen Throne that indicated relations were on the mend and a possible means by which for Thurgar to rejoin the Empire had been devised. But the long period of unrest had accomplished several things, not least of which were mistrust among allies and a thinly spread deployment of military might. A watchful foe of the Empire would see that the Empire was ripe for conquest now as it never had been before, and would shape the chaos to his need.
It was just the opportunity the Warlord had waited for. In 2890 DR he appeared, suddenly and without warning, with a massive force of Ur Berserkers from Areg, a fast and powerful naval presence from Henge, Gochin Trackers from Elsmere and the largest Tenebriel host the world had seen, including sorcerers and irregular elements that a traditional army had few means to counter. Knowing how thinly his enemy was spread, Paldor launched simultaneous attacks on opposite ends of Dalkiar, taking both Rilgaran and Anlador almost bloodlessly. Within days of the initial attack, Elsmere, Areg and Thurgar had all declared their alliance with the Warlord, and the rest of the north -- minus Wellthane, naturally -- was all but taken in that single master stroke.
While the bulk of the Hengian Navy held Anlador against the Solindriel of Highbranch, the joined armies of Paldor and the North marched quickly south, sweeping around the Gan Peninsula to unite the rest of Dalkiar against the Emperor. The Hengian marines bravely held Anlador for five days until reinforcements finally began to arrive, the first from Elsmere. With that, the Solindriel left the field, retreating to Highbranch and preparing for an extended fight with the Warlord.
This was not the Warlord's plan, however. With all but the southern tip of Dalkiar mastered, Paldor marched north and west, taking the Gan peninsula by storm. Malthar was all but abandoned by the time the Daloric Alliance turned their attention to the lonely fortress, and Ganar held only long enough for most of the Emperor's men to retreat west, across Erith Chasm and the Great Hanging Bridge. Ganar was looted, mainly for supplies, and the army pressed westward. The Emperor obviously expected a conflict at the Great Hanging Bridge, but Paldor disappointed him, taking instead both the northern and southern overland routes around the Chasm and cutting the Emperor's army in two with the surprise move.
With the Bridge taken and the Chasm circumvented, only Throntor herself and the slopes of Gan Mountain could stop the Warlord's progress now. And stop them is precisely what they did.
Throntor Besieged
For fifty years, the Daloric Alliance besieged the city of Throntor, crown jewel of the Empire. Her Kâlindur architects had wrought true: though the city shuddered, it would not shatter, and between the city's multiple defenses, the stockpiles in the Warrens of Throntor and the fertile lands sheltered by the peaks of Gan Mountain, the defenders were able to hold out indefinitely against the alliance. During the first two years of the siege, terrible battles were fought at Throntor's Great Gates, and once the Gatehouse was taken, but not held, but once it became clear that the Gates would not break, the two sides settled in for a lengthy siege -- though how lengthy none would have suspected.
Various feints and skirmishes between the Alliance and the loyalists at Highbranch occured over the years, but the loyalists had little in the way of military resources, and were forced to maintain most of their forces in defense of the city, in anticipation of an Alliance invasion that never came.
As the years drew on, the people of Dalkiar grew weary of the conflict that would not end, and this discontent began to show in the growing apathy of the soldiers. Two entire generations went to war with the Emperor in the West, only to retire, having spent twenty years on the front and never lifted a sword in combat. Unwilling to admit failure, the Alliance made several abortive attempts to establish a Kingdom, or at least a central governing body, while the Siege dragged on, but none of these attempts succeeded. Between the egoes of the leaders involved in the Alliance and the constant harassment by Highbranch loyalists, it seemed most prudent to maintain a military hierarchy until the Siege was broken and Highbranch brought to heel.
The psychology behind the walls of Throntor, however, was no more ruinous than the growing dissent outside. The city became the entire world for those who had pledged their honor to their Emperor, and the temptation to simply be done with it all was very strong. Eredil was forced to take highly unusual measures to keep the spirit of resistance alive with his men, allowing occupational shifts, creating grand balls and spectacles, and encouraging marriage and childbearing with rewards directly from Throntor's treasury. Even so, deserters became an increasingly difficult problem over the years, and towards the end of the Siege the defenders were less than half their original number. By 2941 DR, there were still enough to hold the Gates and the wall, but the growing trend was obvious to any with open eyes.
Apocalypse
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and no time was more desperate for Emperor Lantradi than the fall of 2941DR. The man once hailed as the liberator of Dalkiar and the Warlord's Bane had failed his people, had allowed the scourge of Night to spread despite his best efforts and, ultimately, was nearing a ruinous end at the hands of the very forces he'd once thought to destroy.
Unknown to all but the Emperor's closest advisors, the Kâlindurian architects of Throntor had made a royal gift to the man who had avenged their kind against the Warlord: a single Rune, Haegel, from the elder days of the Golden Reign when the Kâlindur had used great magics to create beautiful, impossible works. The destructive force of that Rune had never before been measured to its logical extreme: those who possessed the Runes were always the wisest, the most kingly, and those who understood best that to tap the full power of magic incarnate was to invite disaster on a scale never before imagined.
Eredil knew this, and yet his desperation grew daily. The siege never ended, his people lost faith and crept over the wall, the invaders had taken his Empire in all but name, and when he fell, the Night would cover the earth. And, ultimately, he could not allow this.
So, in the fall of 2941, the Great Gates of Throntor were thrown open one last time; the horns was sounded and the besiegers taken by surprise by a final, heroic charge. Heavy casualties were taken by the Alliance, unprepared as they were for a sudden, vicious assault, but as their troops rallied the Imperial forces began to fall back. At last, the Gatehouse was taken as the defenders fell deeper and deeper into the city, and the leaders of the siege followed their troops into the city, heading for the Lord's Spire where they knew the Emperor was waiting for them.
As fact, little more is known than the chain of events up to this point besides the obvious outcome. It is believed that the Emperor waited for his enemies to approach the Lord's Spire before unleashing the Rune, but the ensuing conflagration destroyed not only the city and all within it, but levelled the lands in a radius no less than fifty miles, turning the farther reaches into blackened, barren desert lands, and causing such incredible destruction closer in that the Crystal Sea was created from the blast. Gan Mountain itself was completely levelled; of Throntor and the Great Hanging Bridge, there are no remaining signs. Only Erith Chasm remained proof against the spoken Rune, and even so it is completely altered, untraversable by any means. To this day, the Sea is devoid of life, and the few expeditions into the Sea that have returned have reported nothing more than the endless expanse of glass and death where Throntor once stood.
