Prologue – The Forgotten People
For centuries, the mountain clans endured, high among ridges and valleys where no empire could fully reach. They were unwritten, unruled, and unbroken. Though dynasties rose and fell in the lowlands, the clans carried their honour codes, their ancestral names, and their memories forward, bound more by lineage than by borders or crowns.
In the great wars of the twentieth century, outsiders discovered them. Foreign powers pulled them into struggles that were never truly theirs, arming and training them to fight in jungles and shadows. The clans fought, bled, and died for causes they did not command. And when the wars ended, those same powers abandoned them. The lowland regimes declared victory, sealed their borders, and called the mountains their own.
Scattered and exiled, the clans were driven further from themselves. Some languished in camps. Others crossed oceans and disappeared into faraway cities. The rest clung to hidden valleys, holding to fragments of their tongue, their customs, their songs. Their culture frayed, their children raised in exile, taught silence for survival. For a people without a nation, it seemed their story had ended.
But not all endings endure.
By the century's close, the lowlands themselves had begun to crack. Economies collapsed, armies starved, and the weight of corruption buckled states once thought eternal. Unrest swelled in the cities, and for the first time in generations, the mountains heard the plains falter.
The clans stirred again. Elders sent word across oceans, calling the scattered home. Veterans unearthed old weapons and passed them to the young. Diaspora families sent their wealth back into the highlands. Students, born in exile, split open the lines of the regimes with technology no border could contain. What had slumbered for decades awoke in months.
By the dawn of a new millennium, the rising began. Villages rose before dawn to seize barracks. Columns of exiles crossed borders. Hidden networks lit up like fire along the ridges. And in less than a season, the regimes fell.
From the ruins, the survivors declared something the world had never seen:
The Republic of Houses.
Founded not by kings nor parties, but by eighteen houses, bound by blood, bound by merit.
And so the victors gathered, in rain and judgment, to decide whether this newborn would be strangled in its cradle — or allowed to live.
The storm was waiting.