Chapter 1: A Different Kind of Winter
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 2-28, Month XI: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 2nd to 28th day of the 11th Month
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State of Affairs
The central subcontinent of Arkanus was beginning to fracture.
Not all of it, and not all at once. The Empire's reach was too vast and its presence was too overwhelming for any single crack to become a collapse while the Emperor's attention remained intact. But outside the Empire's sphere of influence, in the territories that had never bent the knee to the Cornwall-Elms-Arkanus throne and had built their own power structures across the centuries, the pressure that had been accumulating since the Beast Dominion Wars was finally finding its release points.
The Sovereignty of Arwen was the first to buckle on this pressure. It would not be the last.
The Beast Dominion Wars had left scars across every nation that had participated in the defense of their nations, and participation had not been an optional choice, for anyone with borders touching one of the Great Forest was subjected to the beast's onslaught. The kingdoms that managed to emerge from that conflict had done so diminished: their populations have dwindled, especially those of working age, their agricultural lands were destroyed and some were reportedly reduced to ash and crater in some regions, with the worse being entire major city districts abandoned because there were no longer enough people to inhabit them. This was the reality beneath the victory speeches and the monument dedications that each nation had done to celebrate their victory and honor their fallen. The war might have been survived, but it was not won, and the difference between those two words was a gulf that the common people understood far better than the kings who commissioned the monuments of grief.
Worse of all was that into that diminished landscape now walked tyrants, which was not unusual. Crises had always produced opportunists who understood that a weak, frightened, and exhausted people were easier to control than a prosperous one. What was unusual was the particular flavor of cruelty that had taken root in several of these kingdoms, a cruelty compounded by the specific betrayal of soldiers who had been sent to protect civilians and had instead plundered them (rape, pillage, and all kinds of evil deeds that didn't go unpunished). The people of several sovereign territories carried a bitter saying that had spread across the non-imperial territories in the years following the war, it was passed from settlement to settlement through the mouths of traders and the surviving refugees: that they would have been better off dying in the belly of the beast than surviving to see what their fellow men had done to them in the aftermath.
It was this exact accumulated wound, festering for three years, that had finally burst open in Arwen.
What the people of Arwen did not know, and what the people of Maya Village did not know, and what even most of the imperial intelligence apparatus had not yet assembled into a coherent picture, was that this was not entirely natural. It was a premeditated, deliberate and orchestrated event that rode on the seeds of destruction that the Beast Dominion Wars have brought.
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The Cabal of Demonic Worshipers
Somewhere in the continent stood a very great hall. The room had no windows to speak, nor did natural light manage to seep through, there was also no voice that could be heard outside of this room. This was a deliberate construction made possible because of the use of magic devices, talismans and runes that were written on its walls.
The chamber existed somewhere in the interstitial geography of power, it is one of those spaces where wealth and secrecy when combined was able to produce a location that didn't appear on any official or unofficial maps and it did not exist in any official record. The people who met here were not the kind of people who wanted themselves to be known to be a part of it. Instead they had servants to tell them what was going on outside.
These people wore symbolic masks.
The masks were the organization's symbol of hierarchy made visible. Those that covered only the eyes were identified as the lowest tier, they are called Neophyte Demons, fresh initiates still being tested and assessed, given access to the organization's outer operations but not its core deliberations. Those that covered the upper half of the face belonged to the Demonic Managers, the operational tier, the ones who translated the organization's intentions into actual events in the actual world. Then we have those who have full-face masks, the ones that left no identifiable marking of their skins, they are called as the Demonic Kings: there twelve of them, they were the apex of the membership beneath the one who sat at the chamber's highest point, whose face was uncovered because he had nothing left to hide from anyone in this room.
The organization called itself the Cabal of Demonic Worshipers, which was the kind of name that sounded theatrical until you understood what was actually being worshipped. They were not just performing stage plays in the darkness. Because they were its actual genuine servants. Their allegiance ran to the Great Evil, the force that had infected half the Eastern Sub-Continent and turned its people against each other, the same force that had rode the coattails of the Beast Dominion Wars from behind a veil of shadow and manipulation. The cult had predated the wars that had wrought the Arkanus continent since time immemorial and time and again they had outlasted them. They were also not afraid of shedding members who had grown too greedy or too visible when the Imperial Agents catches wind on one of their operations and the purges came after, doing this kept its core intact through the patience of people who understood that they were playing a longer game than any of their enemies had the patience to watch for.
Most of the organizations they had seeded across the non-imperial territories had been identified and destroyed. The syndicate networks, the corrupted noble houses, the merchant cartels operating as intelligence fronts. The Empire had been thorough in rooting them out, and the Cabal had fed those operations to the Empire's purges deliberately, offering up the expendable infrastructure to protect the essential core.
What remained was leaner and more deliberate than what had existed before.
The meeting was called to order by the man wearing the Demonic Boar Mask, a large man whose lavish lifestyle was evident even in the way he occupied space in a room. He spoke with the comfort of someone accustomed to having a welcoming audience.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, spreading his hands in a gesture of shared satisfaction, "I hope you are all doing well. What a glorious moment we find ourselves in. The kingdom of Arwen finally burns. The people have finally been pushed past what they could tolerate. The king's mistakes have been years in the making, and now they are delivering exactly the chaos we have been cultivating."
"Hail Zeerk," the room replied.
The man wearing the Demonic Fox Mask spoke next, his voice carrying the precise measured quality of someone who chose the exact words to speak because he had already thought about them first.
"It burns, yes. But I would counsel patience with the next steps we may take. Many of you remember what happened with the syndicate networks we had installed in the Empire and the other kingdoms. The Empire is a rabid hunting dog that does not move slowly when it has a clear target it can see. If we accelerate too visibly, then we might hand them a thread to follow. Our advantage is that they do not currently know which thread leads to us. I would prefer to maintain that advantage."
"Patience and boldness are not mutually exclusive," said the one wearing the Demonic Viper Queen mask, her voice carrying the particular sharpness of someone who considered caution and timidity to be the same thing when they came from someone else. "Sometimes the bolder move is the correct one. Especially when visibility is the point. Let them know that something is moving under their shadows without knowing what or where it actually comes from. Keeping their attention fractured into many places all at once."
"Hahaha," the Boar said. "That is the spirit."
The other kings and queens who had not yet spoken said nothing substantive. Their collective response was simple.
"We will follow the command of our emperor."
It was the correct answer. It has always been the correct answer in this room.
The man sitting at the top of the chamber was called the Shadow Demonic Emperor. This organization is one that mirrors the Empire but they ruled in the shadows instead. He had not spoken throughout all of these interactions; he only watched and listened as he remained seated like a vulture watching the carrion. He sat in his chair with the particular stillness of someone who was projecting his silence as a form of power, the stillness of a thing that does not need to move to remind everything around it of what it is.
His visible hair fell in deep crimson waves past his shoulders, it was the only color that stood out clearly in the chamber's dim light. His eyes (red), when they moved at all, were filled with the darkness of something that had not been human in a very long time. When he finally spoke the room went quiet and everything within it seems to tremble, it wasn't visible because it was only sound
"Continue with the current progress, let us see how it plays out for now…."
Unfortunately the man with the Horned Bull Demon mask made the mistake of speaking before the emperor indicated he was finished.
"If I may interrupt, there is the matter of the village in the forest that I must discuss with you…"
The aura that was unleashed from the emperor was not heat and it was not cold in any natural sense either. It was the bone chilling cold of something that had decided it did not like what was happening in its presence and had communicated that decision through the air itself. Several of the people in the room began to bleed from every orifice of their body just from the pressure of it. Others went rigidly still, pouring every mana they had into simply remaining upright under the weight of it.
The woman with the Demonic Crane mask spoke through clenched teeth. "You dare interrupt the emperor's speech bull!"
The emperor's red eyes found the Horned Bull Demon and they remained glued in that direction.
"Continue speaking," he said, though his voice was deadly calm, but behind it, it wasn't, "until I am satisfied. Though I hope you (all) can bear the weight of your interruption."
The Horned Bull Demon did not look as though he was bearing it comfortably. But still he spoke his mind.
"The village in the northern forests, your majesty. Their growth has been drawing attention. Their expansion rate is unusual. And they operate under imperial protectorate status. I raised it only to ask whether we should direct any resources towards observing it closely."
The emperor regarded him for a moment that felt considerably longer than it was.
"Are they such important people that they require our attention, Bull?"
The Bull understood the question for what it was.
"No, your majesty. I spoke out of turn. I apologize for my transgression."
The aura was released from the hall. Though it did not dissipate gently. It simply stopped, leaving the room in the comparative warmth of normal air, and several of the occupants exhaled at volumes that communicated more than they probably intended.
The emperor rose from his seat of power, straightened his robes with the unhurried movement of someone who had nothing to prove to anyone in the room, and left without another word.
The chamber's foundations had shaken. Not from any dramatic gesture. Simply from the sustained weight of what he was. Had he held the aura ten seconds longer, the room's weakest occupants would have begun to die, not quickly, but in the slow uncomfortable way of things crushed under pressure that they were not built to withstand.
The cold air that he left behind was not winter. Winter was a natural thing, clean and neutral in its intentions. What he had expressed was something that corrupted the air it inhabited, beautiful in the way that deadly things could even be called beautiful, but carrying underneath it a quality that made even breathing feel like an act that was needed to be earned.
The remaining members sat with it for a moment.
Then they began discussing logistics.
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The King of Arwen
Elsewhere, considerably further south, a different kind of man was having a different kind of crisis.
King Justavous Arwen the Fiftieth had not been trained to handle the weight of what was currently happening all around him, which was to say he had not been trained for any difficulty in any form. This was not entirely his fault. The generals and nobles of his court had spent years engineering his current comfortable lifestyle, ensuring that the king remained behind the lines, that his appetites were kept satisfied, and that the machinery of governance appeared to function smoothly even when it was falling apart. They had done this with sincere dedication, because they understood something about the Arwenian bloodline that the king himself had never been allowed to fully grasp.
The power that had been carried through every Arwenian Royal Line for generations was not the kind of power such as the elemental magic that governed most combat capability across the continent. It was older than that, and stranger. It was called the Bloodline Domination, it was a power that was inherited from every previous holder of the throne, each new king or queen receiving access to the accumulated skill set of every monarch who had come before them. It was not a metaphorical inheritance either. It was as literal as every sense of the word. The skills, the power, the combat instincts of a dozen or more warrior kings and queens, is stored in the current monarch's genetics and it is accessible only to those who were proclaimed as kings or queens.
The condition that made it terrifying was also what made the generals terrified of it. But there is a major flaw in this power: for the Bloodline Domination to become more powerful it must be fed with a worthy blood, specifically blood spilled by the bearer's own hand in genuine combat against genuine peer ranked opponents or stronger. Without that, the inherited power sat inert, a sleeping thing that accumulated without being exercised or expanded. With it, the power grew at a rate that made everyone who understood it deeply uncomfortable, because a fully active Arwenian king was not a king who required an army to function as a weapon. He was the weapon on the battlefield itself and if he didn't need an army then the current corrupt generals and noblemen would no longer be able to plunder the coffers of the kingdom.
The generals had made their calculations and decided that a fat, debauched, politically controllable king was a safer outcome than a powerful, self-sufficient one. They were not wrong by the terms of their own reasoning. The alternative, was a king who had been allowed to exercise his full bloodline power through regular front-line combat from an early age, was a king who would have accumulated the skills of a dozen predecessor monarchs and developed the combat instincts to use them. That king would not have needed his generals as political managers. He would not have tolerated their corruption or their maneuvering. He would have been the most dangerous individual in the kingdom by a significant margin, and dangerous individuals who also held absolute authority were not comfortable people to serve under.
So they had chosen the controllable version. They had arranged his entertainments, curated his indulgences, kept the real business of the kingdom out of his direct sight, and told themselves that this was a form of public service. Stability was valuable. A predictable king was better for everyone than an unpredictable one, even if predictability in this case meant corruption could operate with near total freedom.
They had enjoyed considerable latitude in managing the kingdom's actual affairs for over a few decades.
What they had miscalculated was the point at which their current management would produce its own catastrophe they couldn't handle.
The revolution that had broken out across Arwen was the product of their decisions as much as the king's indulgences. The years of unchecked corruption within the court, the generals' own exploitation of the power vacuum they had deliberately created, the noble houses that had used the king's inattention to extract as much from the common population as they could manage without triggering immediate violence. The king's cruelty, when it had finally expressed itself in the execution of several subordinates, had been the visible edge of a problem that ran far deeper than what the Sovereignty presents to the world.
Now, sitting in his war chamber with the evidence of at least one general's head who interrupted him in the morning was evident in the chamber and was thrown somewhere on the floor behind him, Justavous Arwen the Fiftieth was ordering a full mobilization of the kingdom's military forces.
His generals received the order with the faces of men who understood that the full mobilization of an army against the kingdom's own civilian population was not a military problem but a political one, and that pointing this out to the man giving the order was not something that the current mood in the war chamber made survivable.
They bowed. They agreed. They departed to begin the process of turning soldiers who had signed up to defend their country into instruments for crushing the very people those soldiers had sworn to protect and they are also the people who they live with, mother, father, brothers, sisters, relatives and friends.
It was going to be a bloody winter for them. For Arwen, for the families caught between the crown's reach and the rebel generals' ambitions, and for the flood of people who had already begun their exodus to the north or south whichever was nearest towards whatever they could find that would be able to shelter them for the time being.
But if they had chosen to go north though, what waited for them at the crossroad of that northern path was a village in the forest that had not yet decided what it was willing to offer them.
Winter had only just begun, and it was going to be a bloody one..