In the aftermath of the Second Ralka War, Palkas ir-Nilen’s Salvators capitalised on the deep popular discontent and ethnoreligious tensions within Kauln society. While the working class was wracked by widespread poverty and unemployment, the powerful military leadership became sharply divided into pro- and anti-monarchist groups. The ultranationalist anti-monarchists were highly receptive to Nilen’s promises of national renewal and purification. King Charos II’s indecisive leadership only worsened the kingdom’s divisions. Throughout the 1370s, the Salvators infiltrated local government and the military at all levels, effectively transforming themselves into a “shadow state” within the Kauln establishment.
In 1380, the Salvator movement swept the national elections in a landslide, formalising their already substantial control over the kingdom and elevating Nilen to the position of King’s Marshal. In his accession speech, Nilen declared King Charos apostate, and ordered a nationwide purge of “traitors and degenerates”. Fanatical Salvator militias, supported by a significant fraction of the conventional military, immediately began rounding up and executing loyalists, and Greater Kauln descended into civil war overnight.
King Charos was forced to flee the Crown City for the kingdom’s western provinces, where Salvator influence was far less prominent. The outnumbered and outgunned loyalist forces fought a series of courageous delaying actions, allowing the King and millions of civilians to escape to the far west in the so-called Great Retreat. However, eastern and central Kauln were soon fully under Salvator control, as were neighbouring states such as Okanios, Sathiarik and Caes Cantyn. Nilen, now the self-declared First Marshal of Holy Kauln, swore to bring the entire planet to heel. He ordered an enormous expansion of the already formidable Kauln war machine, while also decreeing the mass internment and enslavement of ethnic minorities.
The other powers of Aede gradually awakened to the existential threat they faced. Despite their long history of conflict with the Kauln monarchy, the Four Beacons and their smaller allied kingdoms agreed to ally with King Charos and his loyalists, as did Tletora, Mar-Ilhande and, later, Andireiu. Meanwhile, several of the smaller eastern Ralkovak Kingdoms, including Eyban-Ralka and Odail-Ralka, sided with Nilen and provided troops to swell his armies.
The first two years of the war were marked by devastating Salvator advances, as the western Kauln provinces fell one by one, forcing the loyalists back to Tletora and the Ralkovak Kingdoms. Mar-Ilhande and Comaghir became battlefields, relentlessly shelled and bombed as Salvator armies repeatedly attempted to overrun their defences. Meanwhile, the Salvator navy carried out maritime invasions of the outer Ralka archipelagos and struck loyalist shipping as far away as Tletora. In 1383, Nilen launched a large-scale invasion of neutral Esuloa, with the stated goal of exterminating the Esuloan people. As few as 10% of the Esuloan population escaped alive, fleeing west to join the loyalist alliance, in which they served with fierce and vengeful loyalty.
Unable to break the tenacious resistance of Mar-Ilhande and the Ralkovak Kingdoms, the Salvators turned their attention on Tletora, seeking to invade the vast western nation through its barren outer provinces. However, the great distances involved and the growing strength of the loyalist forces first blunted and then repelled this invasion, while Andireiu’s naval strength assisted the loyalist fleets in a series of key victories in the western ocean, ending Nilen’s hopes of storming Tletora by sea. By early 1384, a grand allied navy was advancing east across the Bay of Ralka, destroying some of the Salvators’ mightiest warships and recapturing numerous fortified islands.
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The war’s true turning point came later in 1384, when an enormous Salvator army was forced to surrender at the Third Battle of Comaghir. Having now lost most of their elite ground forces, and facing mounting defeats both at sea and in the air, the Salvators began to retreat eastward, abandoning their erstwhile allies on the Bay of Ralka to bloody loyalist reprisals.
The effort of reconquering Greater Kauln went on for four more years, as the Salvators offered fanatical resistance and resorted to increasingly desperate and inhuman measures, including scorched-earth mass destruction of civilian infrastructure. Nonetheless, the loyalists slowly advanced from multiple directions, now backed by the industrial might of almost the entire planet. Nilen’s growing paranoia led to large-scale purges within the Salvator military, to the point of almost causing a civil war, and internal resistance to the Salvator state grew rapidly despite brutal security crackdowns. By 1387, the Salvators only controlled a small number of eastern and central provinces, and Esuloa and Okanios were liberated later that year. The discovery of the Esuloan genocide, along with the Salvators’ mass killing of ethnic minorities on the continental mainland, resulted in numerous loyalist massacres of Salvator civilians and prisoners-of-war in revenge.
In early 1388, with Nilen’s starving conscript armies surrendering en masse, loyalist forces began closing in on the Crown City. In desperation, the Salvators detonated prototype atomic weapons at the cities of Indeleon and Drax-Taalo, causing massive destruction but failing to halt the loyalist advance. Open rebellion broke out against Salvator rule across the eastern provinces, and before long the Salvator empire was reduced to little more than the Crown City itself. Nilen’s most fanatical supporters defended the city to the death in a monumental siege that left hundreds of thousands dead. Finally, Nilen himself was summarily executed by mutineers within his inner circle, and the People’s Salvation effectively ceased to exist beyond a small number of isolated island holdouts in the eastern ocean. King Charos declared victory, and the formal reestablishment of the unified Kauln kingdom, in the ruins of the Dawn Palace. The final death toll of the war was later estimated to be as high as 95 million, or over 12% of Aede’s pre-war global population. Tens of millions more were left homeless by the devastation of many of Kauln’s largest cities.
Over the following months, the remaining Salvator holdouts were encircled and destroyed one-by-one, while military tribunals began the years-long task of identifying and punishing the numerous war criminals. During the conquest of the heavily-fortified island of Delan’s Rock, Kauln soldiers discovered a Salvator research facility containing highly anomalous technological artefacts, apparently left behind by ancient posthumans who had colonised Aede tens of millennia before. These technologies – referred to as the Heritance – changed the course of Aedean history overnight. The Kauln monarchy realised that Aede was merely a forgotten remnant of a vast star-spanning civilisation, and became determined to rejoin that civilisation by any means necessary.