Seventh Day, Third Month, 872 AD.
Alekos Virgilos, King.
Kingdom of Polaeros.
Polaeriopolis.
The Seeker's Palace.
My Dearest Alek,
It was so very good to hear from you again. I must confess to being glad that you covered Triarios yourself in your last letter, for whilst I am more than aware of how their kingdom runs its affairs my distaste for their methods would doubtless seep through in my words as it did with my contribution to your text about Licotemos.
Yes, I am doing well. As well as one can at the moment, anyway. Seeing you here would doubtless raise my spirits, but we all need to do our duty to weather the coming storm. That has been the mantra of my life, or at least it feels that way at times.
Ah, enough of my woolgathering. I will confess that I have few solid plans for my own writings as of yet, merely that it is intended to be a treatise on effective rulership. I have little intention on writing such a subject to completion for quite some time yet, as the coming years will no doubt prove a font of knowledge on this subject through experience, but still I have been compiling notes on examples of leadership throughout history that prove how not to rule.
Most recent amongst my readings is that of the Bastard's Wars, a subject in history I tried my best to ignore throughout a goodly portion of my childhood due to the stigmas around bastardry as a result of the wars, as you no doubt recall from our years spent in tutelage together. I wish now I had looked into it in more detail and not just viewed the bare minimum to please our tutors, for the subject has fascinated me immensely. The wars are about as well documented as they can be for being so long ago, but still the names of every bastard who fought in them are lost save only those who fought in the Great Rebellion, or the Eighth Bastard's War. The rest are referred to plenty of times, but only ever as 'the bastard', 'the nth pretender', etcetera. Therefore I believe this to have been a deliberate choice by the monarchs of the past, a way of trying to convince people that bastards never prosper.
Pricks.
Before the reign of the Barracks-Kings and the Manic King before them, there was the Interregnum, a six year long period of chaos and anarchy in Klironomea. Before the Interregnum, there were the kings of house Stagmore.
House Stagmore boasted the longest unbroken line of kings in the history of the Kingdom of Klironomea. It isn't that hard to imagine the amount of children, legitimate or otherwise, that such a feat required. Of course a large house means security for the future, however if one of those children were to grow too ambitious, too bitter, or too popular, then outside powers had a tendency to take notice.
Eight times did a bastard scion of the Stagmore dynasty rise up and attempt to overthrow their kin, and seven times were they vanquished. Some rebellions were born of outside influence and greed, others an attempt to combat injustice and help out the downtrodden. Whatever their purpose, it mattered not. They all ended the same way.
As an aside, the Bastard's Wars should not be confused with the 'Interregnum' that followed shortly after, wherein the many bastard children of King August VII fought like rabid hounds over his kingdom after the good king died with every wife he ever took providing only stillborns or dying in childbirth. Yes, that war involved a great many bastards of the Stagmore dynasty. No, I don't understand why it isn't classified as the Ninth Bastard's War. Even so, I thought that clarification worth mentioning.
The first of the Bastard's Wars began in the second century Before Desolation during the reign of King Arwald II. One of his bastard sons, influenced by a great deal of Terranean money and mercenaries, rose up in what nowadays are the border regions between Triarios and Owkrestos. He waged a four-year long campaign against his father and trueborn siblings, but was eventually cast down at the walls of Kingstonopolis, where he was the first man over the walls and the first man to die.
The Second Bastard's War began relatively soon afterwards. A few years after the defeat of his bastard son, King Arwald II passed away. The throne passed to his eldest trueborn son, King August IV, the man who had defeated his older bastard brother in the first Bastard's War. This time it was no son who rose up, but a nephew. Following a botched assassination attempt just after the coronation of his uncle the young bastard rose up in rebellion with all the opportunists and gamblers who would follow him. Once more did Terranea provide gold for the hiring of sellswords to the young bastard, but they seemed to understand that this time there was little chance of the bastard winning. In the first war there was a very real possibility that the throne would fall to the first bastard, but this one had no hope. Terranea just wanted to probe Klironomea's defences, to weaken them somewhat. What they found certainly pleased them, though they knew they'd likely have to wait a little before trying anything else.
The Terraneans were always good at waiting.
The Second Bastard's War lasted less than two years, the head of the rebellion being unceremoniously slain in battle somewhere outside Corthraxiopolis. Accounts differ on the manner of his death, but all agree that it was rather more ignoble than that of his predecessor.
The third to strike at the banners of the trueborn kings of Klironomea was, if the histories can be believed, a son of the first bastard to rise in rebellion. According to what we know he was hidden away by his father before he embarked on his rebellion, with the promise that the throne would be his once his father had won it.
Of course his father did not win, and as a result the boy was hunted across Klironomea by the 'honourable' knights of King August IV, who had struck down the forces of his father originally. When King August IV died he did so without issue, and after a brief period of courtly gridlock the throne passed to the weakest candidate there. Why the weakest? Well, because the nobles who's choice it was had a vested interest in ensuring their king was the sort of man who could be pushed around by them.
King August V came to the throne in one-hundred and sixty-eight BD, and no sooner had he sat the throne than the son of the first pretender rose up to depose him. Once again the pretender had Terranean support, but this time it was far more extensive than before. Armies marched from Tilda, Dathan, and Ibaenea in support of the rebel, their forces scoring a series of victories though not advancing deep into Klironomean territory for fear of becoming overstretched and losing what gains they had made. As a result the pretenders found themselves cast down once more by the trueborn members of house Stagmore.
This war played out concurrently with the First Kliro-Terranean War, and though the bastard pretender who was a staunch ally of the Terraneans was killed outside Haestinghen the Terraneans cared not. They had secured the transfer of a series of border territories and ports along Klironomea's southern coasts for their own, not to mention a litany of valuable trading rights, and so they counted the fall of their 'ally' a success. Opportunistic hellspawn.
Still, one cannot help but be impressed by their pragmatism. Impressed, and repulsed.
The next decade and a half was filled with peace in Klironomea. August V passed away peacefully, and his son took the throne this time with no bickering or quarrelling from his siblings or nobles. No-one wanted another war like the First Kliro-Terranean War, and that had only been possible thanks to the Third Bastard's War. He reigned for twelve uneventful years, which must have felt like a divine-sent gift to the war-torn lands of the Klironomoi. If only his son could have boasted the same achievements.
The reign of King Lykourgos I was a litany of disasters. The eleven years he sat the throne were filled with rampant corruption, constant internal wars between the nobility, and a religious war incited by the Church of the First Saint as they looked to uproot the last remnants of the old pagan faiths. The Dragon's Waltz certainly didn't help things either; a great many reptilian monsters descended from the mountains and rose from the earth, vying for power and for ownership of towns and cities across Klironomea, seeing the people and items held within as their 'hoards'.
Amidst this chaos rose the next four rebellions.
The first of these three was the greatest and most well-intentioned. The Forth Bastard's War was the only one to be ignited by a woman rather than a man, and with an army of men and women loyal to her she fought tooth and nail against the militant sects of the church. She wanted to stop the bloodshed, to unite the people against the very real threat that the drakes and ampitheres represented. For a time she was successful, her armies protecting those who would otherwise have been burned either at the stake or at dragonmouth. Her own father, despite knowing that she was protecting his subjects, condemned her for taking up arms without his permission. She was labelled a traitor to the crown, and her army were now seen as rebels.
Three years after her crusade of protection began she was dead. No-one knows what killed her, but as callous as it sounds at that point it hardly even mattered. With her dead the army of righteousness she had led fell apart. Their cause seemed lost, but one of her brothers who had fought alongside her refused to let her efforts be in vain. The Forth Bastard's War may have ended, but the Fifth was only beginning.
This new pretender, the brother of the fallen woman who had defended her people, rallied as many men and women as he could. Primarily these soldiers were either veterans of the Forth Bastard's War or refugees from towns subjugated and starving under the auspices of the scaled ones, and rose up once more. Her body was not yet cold when her brother took up her mantle and continued her work, though he did not busy himself with breaking the militant sects of the church as she had. His focus lay squarely on the dragons, and despite knowing that he would be condemned by his feckless and hedonistic father just as his sister had been for taking up arms without permission he set out across the land to purge the dragons and drive them back to their mountains.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
To the amazement of all he was largely successful. More than a hundred of the great monsters were put to the sword by his forces, and though the cost in lives was steep his great purge marked the beginning of the end for such terrible creatures. Hundreds died to kill just one of the monsters, and in the cases of some of the greater beasts thousands, but that mattered not. He always found his numbers replenished by fresh volunteers from those towns he liberated, and soon enough every dragon from Anaria to the western hills feared his name. His last great battle was a stunning success for humanity with dozens of the fire-breathing monsters slain in the western hills, but the battle was so apocalyptic that to this day the hills are simply known as the 'Wastelands of Drakefyre'. He finally met his end in the seventh year of his campaign where, after having slain so many dragons, he was finally killed by a knife in the gut.
He had grown popular, you see. Too popular. People looked to him as a beacon of stability in a time when so much was wrong with the world, a time when old certainties were being washed away as sure as sand on the tides. The poor loved him, for though he was hardly a reformer by any stretch of the imagination at least he was not lording over them like dragons did. The nobles of the lands he cleansed loved him, for many had lost family, lands, and settlements to the rampages of the fire-breathers.
The only places he was not loved were in the churches and in court; the church remembered the campaigns of his compassionate sister, and had no intention of allowing him to turn on them. As for court, his own father feared his popularity. He feared that this phoney war, this farce that was really little more than a man leading an army against dragons, really would become a true Bastard's War like those before had been. Still, it was not to be. With his assassination the Fifth Bastard's War was at an end.
The reign of King Lykourgos I is a tapestry of disasters, as I have said, so is it any surprise that there are still two more Bastard's Wars to come during his reign?
The Sixth Bastard's War ran in direct opposition to the Forth and Fifth. Where they had sought to curb the powers of the church and the dragons respectively, the Sixth Bastard's War aimed to made the Drakotheous Agiathos, the Cult of the Ampithere-Worship, the sole legal church in the empire. Headed by a raving zealot of a man the forces of the Sixth war butchered and burned all in their path, shattering armies both royal and rebellious in nature. Eventually they arrived at the walls of Anaria himself, and it is said that when King Lykourgos I saw the size of the host now arrayed before him he retreated back into his palace and told his advisors to meet with the zealot who was in charge of their forces, one of his own bastard sons, and let the boy know that he was willing to convert so long as he could keep his throne.
His son agreed, and the Sixth Bastard's War came to an end. Though technically inconclusive, I feel confident that most would call this a victory for the forces of the sixth pretender. For nearly a hundred years the Cult of the Ampithere-Worship would reign supreme over both the Old-Church and New-Church, a fact which both sects remember all too well.
A year later the last crisis of King Lykourgos I's reign would begin. A forth bastard, one apparently fostered with a Scelopyrene tribe, led a vast host of barbaroi south into Klironomea. Once more the walls of Anaria were besieged, only this time the howling zealots of the drake-church were fighting on the side of the king, not against him. The battle was fierce, the fighting bloody and without even the pretence of civility, and the people cowered knowing that whoever won would turn on them next. On one side was a mass of howling barbarians, on the other valiant and skilled warriors, but the thing is that no-one can agree on which side was the one and which was the other.
It didn't matter anyway. Both the bastard who had led the Sixth Bastard's War and the one who had led the Seventh were killed in the fighting, in personal combat no less. That is if you believe the histories and legends anyway. King Lykourgos the First lost his life in the battle as well, though I fear few would call such a thing a tragedy.
What was a tragedy was what came next. The last of the Bastard's Wars, the Eighth Bastard's War, in some circles even today it is known as the Great Rebellion. It is the exception to the rule of these wars, for it was so monumental in Klironomean culture and politics that it is the single most documented series of events pre-Barracks-Kings. We know the players in this game, have read the stories and heard the tales.
This is the story of Prince Loukas and his sister, the Princess Violeta.
King August VII was not a bad king; he ruled for over forty years, much of that time a period of stability and peace save only an embarrassing defeat in the Second Kliro-Terranean war. Despite the relative peace of his reign, things would soon begin to spiral out of anyone's control.
The Eighth Bastard's War was a conflict that began when the bastard prince Loukas Stagmore rose in rebellion to supplant his father's rule, for the poor and the lowborn had been pushed to the brink and extorted for all they had. Injustice was commonplace and double-taxes being paid, as both the royal tax collectors and the petty-nobilities own taxmen demanded the common folk pay their taxes in full to them, decrying the other as illegitimate but coexisting nonetheless. This was the result of a particularly nasty spat between the king's royal council and his nobles, though neither was willing to ratchet up tensions any further. On top of this the Old-Church was being increasingly looked down upon by the authorities, and many of its adherents feared a crackdown against their beliefs. Prince Loukas was his father's heir, since the elderly king's every wife had only ever given him stillborns with the exception of a single daughter, and by all accounts the two genuinely counselled their father to stop listening to the holier-than-thou lickspittles in his court, but they found themselves rebuffed at nearly every turn.
The common folk rose in revolt due to this 'double-tax' alongside a good portion of the Old-Church and around one-in-ten men of the professional Klironomean soldiery. All told there were six factions that made up the revolt: three peasant leaders, two Legionary officers, and a priest had secured positions of prominence. Each knew they must work together to overthrow the king, but none could choose which of them would lead the revolt. As a result the leader of the religious faction of the rebels, a younger bastard of house Stagmore, put forwards a solution that all found agreeable; he would contact his brother, who had always done his best to look after the poor folk of the kingdom, and offer him leadership of their united forces. The leader of the most extreme of the peasant factions grumbled and grit his teeth a lot, for he was another bastard of house Stagmore by the king's uncle, but relented. He was Argil Stagmore, and he was dangerous if not for his own prowess then for the ideas that he preached. He argued for a true republic, like the old states of Tilda and Dathan before the Terranean Conquests, but eventually relented with the hopes of convincing his half-brother to compromise with him when he helped him take the crown.
Opposing the rebel forces stood the royalists, led by Ser Ilias Gagros. Ser Ilias gathered up a great army of knights and lesser lords, almost entirely heavy cavalry, with the aim of smashing the rebels to the side. When the Forth Legion marched to join him, he decried the idea of relying on lowborn soldiers in support and instead rode away with his many thousands of men, leaving the Forth in the dust. When riding through Haestinghen along the Woodsroad towards the great forests his forces were joined by a similar, though smaller, contingent of knights and petty-nobles under the command of another royal bastard. Prince Arwald Stagmore, widely noted as being borderline psychotic with an insatiable appetite for women and men both, led an army of around two-thousand knights and nobles alongside Ser Ilias. Ser Ilias viewed the Prince of sixteen as little more than a blunt object, but the so-called 'Nobles Militia' he had rounded up contained exactly the sort of soldiers the old knight wanted in his service, so onwards they went.
It should be noted that the royalists were as fragmented and factional as the rebels; there were half a dozen different cliques and groups hoping to assert their dominance over their erstwhile comrades, united only by their wish to see the lowborns and rebels ground into the dirt. There were men fighting for the status quo, men fighting for an absolute monarchy, there were those who wished for a return to true feudalism and those who wished to limit the power of the king but saw the rebels as going too far. On both sides there were three bastards and a trueborn of house Stagmore. Of all eight, only one would survive until the end of the war.
I wish I had time to go into more detail on the events of the Eighth Bastard's War, but this letter has grown long enough as it is. A following letter will elucidate on the Great Rebellion at a later date, but for now I think I have laid the groundwork for a section on the Bastard's Wars for use in an eventual book on rulership.
The Great Rebellion is a topic so rich with history that I am certain an entire section of my writings will be devoted to its happenings, causes, and effects. It deserves far greater detail than the rest in my opinion, though I am not against retelling the stories of some of the more interesting stories, the fifth and sixth especially. Still, the Eighth Bastard's War is something that I will certainly write to you about in greater detail in a future letter. I hope you are not against this, though you always have enjoyed listening to me ramble on about whatever it is that is catching my interest at that moment, so I think I'll be okay on that front.
The Bastard's Wars have done more than anything else in history to highlight to lords and ladies the dangers of trusting their 'baseborn' children, shunning them in favour of their trueborn brothers and sisters. I have always found this deeply unfair, not least because I have been subject to such prejudices in the past. Many other bastards fought against the pretenders, and yet they have been buried by history! How is it that the bastards who rose against their 'betters', if such a term can even be used in half of the rebellions, are remembered, and yet those who fought to protect their trueborn siblings are lumped into the same category as them? How can that possibly be fair? Many of them were great heroes who rallied the forces of their trueborn family members, who dealt blows to the enemy that no-one else possibly could have, and yet they're shunned for their sibling's treachery despite their heroics! I can think of no greater injustice for these forgotten heroes, and if possible I would do almost anything to see their names and deeds restored in the pages of history. They deserve no less.
Things are growing yet tenser at home. Every time a messenger calls to see me, every time a missive comes in from the capital, I feel as though my gut is churning with dread, my mind swimming in a black pool of anxiety. I feel so terribly nervous, for I know war is to break out any day now. My father has not been seen in public in a great many weeks, months if my brother is to be believed, and I can almost smell the oily smoke of war drifting in on the winds. The time I warned you of is coming, Alek. A succession crisis in Teleytaios may not seem like much, but I guarantee that the coming years will see the status quo upended across the entire continent. I know not what birthed this feeling, nor do I understand why I feel so strongly about it, but I know it to be true nonetheless.
A storm comes to Kliskorios, my dear, and you must promise me you shall live to see the sun once more.
It will be good to see you again in the flesh. I have yet to see you since we... what I mean to say is that we have conducted our correspondence through letters for so long that the mutual decision we both made in regards to our happiness was done without our meeting face to face. It will be so very good to see you again now that so much between us has changed. I will not write any more on that subject in this letter, but I know you know to what I refer.
I hope you keep yourself well in these trying days as you take the reigns of power. I would trust you with anything you turned your mind to, and rulership is certainly not an exception to that statement.
Your friend, now and always,
Prince Lykourgos Sperakos.