Fiction:Valian Empire/History

The Origin
The Valian people are native to a world that now lives on only in legend; whose remaining history and records are extremely limited and guarded: a planet somewhere in Rohse's core regions called the Mother Moon of Nol Aris; Valian for old home. What is left of it (at least in public circles), points to it having been a harsh but verdant homeworld, and that it spawned the Valian species and its ancient glyphs and culture. Valian civilization then, now dubbed the Ancient Empire, was advanced enough to have ventured into space, but it had no colonies. It appears to have been a great monarchy with absolute authority, its subjects never deviating from their rulers' spoken law. Volanti in Nol Aris were a proud and devout people, but apart from the fact that they may have worshipped the stars not much else is known of them in those days.

What is strongly documented is the world’s abrupt destruction, an event it seems they had forseen, but calculated to be far in the future. An aging star, flickering to death quite near, seemed to be on the verge of collapsing. But Valian observers simply nodded and set a date, and assumed that if all went right their entire race could flee in time before the event, assuming the star kept to schedule.

The dying giant did not behave. As it started to go out in white-hot flare storms and explosions, ages before any of them had predicted, the Mother Moon perished- much too soon. Its crust was torn and fractured and its continents were sunk, and the whole of its sphere was soon engulfed by the disaster. Only a fraction of the Volanti would escape, dispersing in primitive ships to wherever chance would take them. No other creature from their home was saved, but for a single flower that would become the symbol of their race's rebirth.

The Valian seed ships that escaped the flash fled in all directions, outfitted with archaic and brand-new technology. They were cut off from each other, without any hope of contact or the knowledge of where they'd land. The number and the fate of many was never to be known. The only thing we can be sure of is that some of them survived, finding a viable place to settle and the setting for a new start. This is how the Era of the Splintered States began.

The Splintered Reigns
The Era of the Splintered Reigns is a period of Volanti history that took place from approximately 8000 BF until 240 BF in the central regions of the Rohse Galaxy, as the many mini-empires that arose after the destruction of Nol Aris developed and eventually discovered each other. It concluded with the victory of the Kingdom of Tharys over the other large state, the Pillar of Veroe, in the Primal Wars, and was followed by the Two Kingdoms Period. The era has no clear beginning, as no clear records exist of the year Nol Aris perished and the period began, but most scholars agree it was about eight thousant years before the Founding.

The Pillar of Veroe
One of the ships that escaped the Ruin found its way to the newly-named Veroe- a deserted planet in the (also newly-named) star system of Rakiva; it was farthest from the launching region than any other found by survivors. Its Volanti settlers brought their technology and culture, along with a distant descendant of one of Nol Aris's old kings: one who would become the Prince Vesped. The new arrivals established a kingdom on the planet, and over hundreds of years grew to house a prestigious new order, an empire that, through the development of pulsar-based technology and the settlement of the othe rplanets in the system, was called the Pillar of Veroe. It was at this time that they encountered the first alien signs of life, fledging states all around the newly-settled system. And intent on regaining power and pride, the Veroese accordingly crushed them. It soon proved to be not so small an issue: the unnamed wars that followed as they attempted to claim the region cost Veroe almost everything; the world itself was almost ruined, laid waste to by the war. At its end, tired but victorious, its aging king Vesped claimed dominion over the star cluster, and renaming the capital of his last opponent Velasco. He did not live to see it flourish.

Left kingless and led by regents, the Pillar kept growing. Veroe itself was eventually all but abandoned, made a backwater world in imperial politics by the rise of new worlds and conquests. The king's son, remarkably young, ruled from Velasco over a prospering enclave, now with dozens of planets in tens of stars. His mother, the Widow-queen Rubian, could not interfere, leaving prince Reza to manage as best he could. He embraced the new wealth of Veroe and its gardenworlds with joy; much too inexperienced to control or care much for its government. The Veroese nobility grew larger; the Pillar, loose and scattered. But the Young King, unexplicably, left life as quick as he'd gained it. The hive was restless, and it was in for a surprise.

Rubian, the Widow-queen, put the tassel crown on her head herself. She named yet another new capital: Veruna, a placid orb to be remade in her own florious vision, and took the reins of the empire with a steel grip. She forced the nobles from their hiding-holes to her court at Velasco, where they could be watched with a careful eye from the developing capital. Not long after this the Empire’s remaining gentry, outspoken enough to irritate her from their outposts on the empire’s outskirts, were dethroned, relieved of the treasures and titles they'd gained during the curtailed reign of her son, and carried in chains to Veruna Sy’on. Unlike their paling, disbelieving counterparts, they were promptly called to the Imperial courts and denounced traitors in trial after trial chaired by Rubian herself. Then they were executed, swiftly, and silently- all for not keeping quiet. The Empress is notable for her use of terror in incapacitating the cabal of nobles that had made the Pillar of Veroe, at least according to her, so bumbling and inefficient- and replacing their quasi-democratic system with a new regime of her own. It was centralized; it was harsh; it was controlling. And it was to cement order in the region for the next five centuries.

At last, with her grasp on power solid as could be and every city in the empire under strict curfew, Rubian began to recreate the nation under freshly-made rules: her own. The massive Veroese Imperial Navy was deployed en masse from the capital and seized control of every vulnerable trade route, moon and settlement from Veruna to the borders of the Dark Regions, reaching as far as the planets of Arcel and Kanto in the east. She commenced some of the most ambitious expansion plans ever seen; unveiled titanic construction projects that would leave Veruna covered in marble courts and monuments; and ordered the blazing of wide and guarded routes spanning thousands of light-years between every world in her empire, connecting every planet to the seat of her power and dispatching hundreds of scouts to find new worlds amidst the darkness. She styled herself Empress of the Stars, and meant it. But her reign would not last for much longer, nor Veroe’s over the brilliant regions of the core- a lesson both were to learn soon, the hard way.

Kingdom of Tharys
By the time of Veruna’s golden age and the summit of Empress Rubian’s power, the thriving Volanti trade-world of Tharys, set barely parsecs away, had become a major power. Neither civilization, however, had discovered the other. Space travel was still to be perfected, and it still was, if not outright life-threatening, inexact and dangerous: stars, unless stumbled upon, could not be reached at all. But this didn’t stop either culture from seeking wealth and expansion, even if it had kept them separate. And the shock of their first meeting would not be a soft one.

Tharys’s rulers were, like Veroe’s, Volanti survivors, a spawn of the ancient colony ships that left the decaying Nol Aris. Culturally speaking, they could not have been more different. Rubian’s empire, in keeping with the strictest Valian traditions (and a taste of her own personal tastes), was a xenophobic and warlike culture. The Kingdom of Tharys, named after a solitary planet that had expanded to include about as half as many planets as Veroe had to the west, was not a creature of war but of scrolls and orum, a disciplined but veritable cultural collector with many more alien races in its ranks than the militaristic Pillar. Favorably surrounded by timid alien peoples, it had crushed some into tribute-givers and traded with the rest. It was by now surrounded with client states, and with around forty worlds and moons under its banners and its coffers fit to burst, it was a power to be reckoned with. Tharysian kings, careful not to extend their arms beyond their reach, lived in splendor, along with the rest of their race, the ruling class of Tharys’ holdings. Altogether, the kingdom looked like a prize fruit ripe for the picking.

And a prize is what Rubian saw when Veroese scouts, purely by accident, collided with a Tharysian fleet and relayed their discovery back to Veruna. It revealed that Tharys was not the only neighboring culture, nor was Veroe the lone surviving heir of Volaris’s ancients: in fact, it may have been only one of many. The discovery of these prosperous stars was an undeniable bait for Rubian, the end of her century-old search for a crowning conquest. And after tasting the spoils of wars with defeated minor neighbors, her attention turned to Tharys.

The Primal Wars
The name given to the giant brawl that followed as Tharys and Veruna dueled for control of the core was the Venu Cluster Conflicts. It is now known more widely as the Primal Wars, because they were to be the last conflict of the Splintered Reigns era, and lead to the birth of the first unified Volanti state. At the time, they were anything but glorious.

Empress Rubian, by now determined to claim not only Tharys but all of the galaxy's core region for her own, marched first. She mobilized the entire Pillar of Veroe, spreading to the northeast with a massive force behind her. She was rash but fast, easily toppling the Volanti mini-empires that had popped up throughout the region with surprise attacks and ambushes. Military victories at Kristos, Serrum and Kanto sustained her continuous crawl across the core, and by the time of her invasion and the Siege of Cobalt, barely parsecs from Tharys itself, her opponent set its foot down. Kingdom warships, leaving Sulat, smashed imperial flotillas at Nol Galle and the independent satrapy of Berru, encircling Rubian's forces as they attacked form the east as well, liberating planets in the small empire of Arcel. Bypassing her fleets entire, the Tharysian king Talathos instead delved deep into the core- and took Velasco by surprise. Without ships or troops left behind, Rubian got a very nasty surprise. Velasco and neighboring Gavon, even closer to her own capital, were caught defenseless and rotundly conquered. Veroe itself seemed to shiver.

The presence of Talathos' ships only light-miles from her homeworld made the Empress incapable of any tranquil thought. Her hold on the conquered worlds was tenuous, if thorough; she still possessed tremendous force, but her enemy had time on his side. Still she forged on. Relying on the maze of stars between Velasco and herself to prevent any further Tharysian progress, she ordered her forces to pummel the worlds surrounding the royal capital. The king pulled out all the stops to beat her onslaught, leaving Tharys lightly guarded to push out the bulk of its troops. The fighting was brutal. Copia, Igoro and Cyson were deadlocked in battle; Cobalt, still besieged, refused to yield. Epic feats of carnage and war followed the two factions' ships wherever they went; Rubian, despite her numbers, lost this particular stalemate. Her attempt to escape the fighting and advance to Vesyos, directly north of Tharys, went bad when Talathos forestalled her fleets in mid-travel, decimating a third of her forces. And Tharyisian reinforcements kept replacing the lost, arriving from the untouched planets of the inner kingdom.

After painstaking months of almost continous firing, the planets around Tharys gave way- a short-lived victory, because many of Rubian's early conquests were also starting to fall apart. Her army cut off from the core and the Tharysian kingdom seemingly still stalwart, she finally had no choice but to order a retreat. The Veroese, however, didn't leave without a last incursion. As what was left of their forces fled north to attempt to circle back to Veruna, they raided and bombarded the unprotected capital, ravaging its surface as they fled the region.

The Road to Veruna
From then on it was an outright rout as the Veroese fell back, chased from their former prizes; eventually, not a single Veroese ship remained outside the Pillar. Talathos' next move was to plan their own attack- into the Pillar itself. It proved to be a daunting task, it being so near the galactic core and its labyrinthine passageways, but one he deemed necessary: he would not rest until he had Veruna. The Empress of the Stars, with her attempt to conquer an 'unworthy toadie state' in ruins and her own domains under attack, panicked. Tharys's forces made quick work of any occupied planets, easily retaking Copia, Kanto, Kristos and Serrum and raising the sieges of Cobalt and Sygilos. Velasco and Gavon, original Veroese worlds and early casualties of the war, remained under occupation, and as their stationed troops joined the main Tharysian spearhead, they continued their advance toward the core. The fall of Unan was the last straw; the closest Tharysian gain to the capital yet, it forced the Empress herself into action. She resigned to leave her glorious Veruna behind, fleeing to the depths of the Empire with half the court in tow. Determined not to allow the fall of the Pillar, she hastily renamed planet Verdun the capital, a target well away from Tharys' current advances. To reach it, the invaders would have to cross half the empire, not to mention navigate the treacherous terrain of the inner core. That they did.

Sure enough, King Talathos and his legions arrived at Veruna within days. It capitulated without a single shot fired. The rest of the road would not be so easy: loyalists put up a brave fight at Vyros, the old capital's close neighbor, and managed to stave off the Tharysi at Serina and Vuloto. But still, one by one they fell- even Veroe itself was not impregnable. As the army, with the king himself in the lead, drew inexorably close to Verdun, the Empress fled yet again- this time headed to the small hideout of Lein, one of the closest to the galactic centre- and there awaited an invasion that never came. She transformed it into a fortress world, but her strengthening paranoia and erratic fears almost brought the world to ruin. Verdun fell shortly after, completely, and decisively. The Pillar would not rise again.

Two Kingdoms Period
The subjugation of the Star Empress' armies brought an end to Verunian glory. The planet would never again rule a state of its own (though that doesn;t mean it didn't try to). King Taitos of Tharys made Rubian hand him her crown, personally, and with her all of her people were humiliated. The king, however, did not simply make the ravaged Pillar a client state or a slave colony, instead opting for the more popular route. Both their inhabitants being the children of Nol Aris, the idea of mistreating his conquered foes was distasteful to put it mildly. Taitos instead came up with one of the single most important decisions in Volanti history: the union of their race into a single nation, then and forever. He proposed a diarchy, in which Veruna would rule alongside the Tharysian crown, soon to be relocated to a new capital; Volaris, replacing the war-ravaged Tharys. The defeated party somewhat bemusedly accepted. Taitos' goal was to create a stronger Volanti state, and unite its people under a single banner. It didn't, lamentably, work- at least not entirely. While the new government, amicably titled the Kingdom of the Twins, did not fall victim to conflict, the two crowned capitals started drifting apart. Upon Taitos' death six decades after the Primal Wars, the division was a universally aknowledged one; Tharys had always been an open-minded world of progress and trade, but Veruna, ever the suspicious (and still resentful) hotbed of intrigue, responded with icy distance. Rivalry between their rulers soon developed, and arms race for glory followed. Tharys pursued it by sending explorers in all directions rimward to search of colonies and treasure; it came to rule over an informal Verunian-free area called Thrace. Veruna, for its part, did the opposite, dedicating itself to colonizing and developing its worlds near the galaxy's core. The worlds of Vuloto, Vantaal, Nol Illia, Verdun, Quesay and Nol Homma, along with countless within the core itself, remained vapidly loyal to their capital.