The so-called People’s Salvation began life as an obscure religious movement in the rural provinces north of the Crown City. Founded by a charismatic preacher and demagogue, Palkas ir-Nilen, it quickly gained massive support among the impoverished, disenfranchised Kauln lower classes in a time of economic disruption and unpopular foreign wars. The Salvators, as they called themselves, advocated a return to the most orthodox and conservative form of the Sacramental Faith, while also railing against ethnic minorities and other supposedly degenerate influences in Kauln society. As its popularity grew, the movement became more extreme, openly calling first for segregation, and then outright expulsion of non-Kauln ethnicities. The Salvators moved decisively into the political arena, winning landslide elections in many of the most populous eastern provinces, and covertly installing their agents and sympathisers at every level of civil society. As the kingdom became increasingly restless and polarised, and the paranoid royal military oversaw a major rearmament programme, Nilen was elected to the position of King’s Marshal – Greater Kauln’s highest elected office.

Shortly after his election, Nilen enacted his master-plan, abruptly declaring the king apostate and ordering a purge of the royal government. He leveraged his massive support within the armed forces, regional authorities and the wider population to crush his opposition, swiftly seizing control of the Crown City and other major urban centres. However, loyalist elements resisted the purges, and within days the kingdom was in a state of outright civil war. Badly outgunned, the king and his supporters were forced to flee to the west of the continent amid the brutal battles of the Great Retreat, leaving the kingdom’s industrial heartland under Salvator control.

Building upon generations of deep-seated ethnic and religious tensions, Nilen transformed the Kauln state into a genocidal theocratic regime. His followers enslaved and exterminated minority populations across the eastern continent, and mobilised for a war of total annihilation against the Kauln loyalists. Initially, Nilen’s forces seemed all but unstoppable as they unleashed mechanised warfare on a previously unimaginable scale, with the explicit intention of conquering and dominating all of Aede. Immense strategic bombing offensives, combined with widespread use of chemical weapons and the indiscriminate killing of civilian populations, caused millions of deaths in the cities of central Kauln, Mar-Ilhande and the Ralkovak Kingdoms. Ethnic groups such as the Foresters, Hannevara and Inandica were pushed to the brink of annihilation. Emboldened by his early victories, Nilen also launched a genocidal invasion of Esuloa, often regarded as the darkest chapter of the war, and indeed of Aedean history.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The Kauln monarchy ultimately found shelter in Tletora, gathering allies from across the civilised world and rebuilding their shattered forces while the Salvator advance was slowed by the vast distances of the world-continent and the fierce resistance of Comaghir and Mar-Ilhande. Nilen’s repeated attempts to invade Tletora and conquer the Bay of Ralka were defeated, at an immense cost in human lives, while the Kauln-led coalition gradually assembled a vast combined navy to wrest control of the seas from the Salvator warfleets. After suffering a crushing defeat in Comaghir in the fourth year of the war, the Salvators were left on the defensive, never to regain the initiative.

The reconquest of the continent dragged on for a further four years, facing fanatical resistance from the Salvators, while Nilen grew ever more unhinged, repeatedly purging his own inner circle and staging mass executions of supposedly disloyal soldiers and civilians across his dwindling empire. Meanwhile, his overstretched conscript armies found themselves overwhelmed by the increasingly numerous and well-equipped loyalists. Even the Salvators’ infamous use of atomic weapons at the fortress cities of Indeleon and Drax-Taalo failed to prevent their defeat. Many of the eastern provinces joined the advancing loyalists, openly rebelling against the collapsing Salvator regime.

The war reached its endgame eight years after Nilen’s ascent to power. The Crown City was defended by his most dedicated supporters, who fought futilely to the death against a massive loyalist force. Nilen, by now completely delusional, was summarily executed by his own mutinous bodyguards in the grounds of the besieged Dawn Palace. Though sporadic fighting continued for months, as the loyalists encircled remote Salvator holdouts such as Delan’s Rock, the liberation of the Crown City marked the decisive end of the war on the mainland. Almost a hundred million lives had been extinguished, and much of the continent reduced to rubble, in the greatest conflict Aede had ever seen. Ironically, the decades of reconstruction and consolidation that followed saw the restored Kauln monarchy achieve what Nilen could not – the unification of almost the entire world under a single authoritarian government.

Officially, the People’s Salvation no longer exists; openly swearing fealty to it is a capital crime, and its very name is reviled by billions. However, many Salvator officials and military officers are believed to have escaped the postwar purges, and neo-Nilenist radicals and terror cells continue to pose a security threat across Greater Kauln. Even decades after Nilen’s death, his shadow hangs over the world he sought to rule.