Fiction:Valian Empire/History

This is a comprehensive account of the history of all modern and previous Volanti civilizations, starting with their mysterious origins some eighty thousand years ago and ending with the modern Valian Empire. For a more specific look at the key points and events of Volanti history, see the Valian Timeline.

The Origin
The Valian people are native to a world that now lives on only in legend; a planet somewhere in Rohse's inner regions called the Mothermoon of Nol Aris; Valian for old home. Few records remain of the dark age that followed the collapse of its ruling empire; they only ascertain that it was a harsh but verdant homeworld, and that it spawned the Volanti 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 theocratic monarchy with absolute authority, its subjects never deviating from their rulers' spoken law. The Volanti of Nol Aris were a proud and devout people, but apart from the fact that they worshipped the stars not much else is known of their ancient ways.

What is strongly documented is their world’s abrupt destruction, an event it seems they had forseen, but calculated to be far in the future. An aging nearby star, flickering to death, seemed to be on the verge of death. 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.

It did not. 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 to rubble and its lands sunk into the boiling waters, and the whole of its sphere was soon engulfed by the disaster. Only a fraction of the Volanti were able to 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 technology. They were cut off from each other, without any hope of contact or of knowing 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 a handful of them survived, finding a viable place to settle and get ready for a fresh start. And thus the Era of the Splintered States began.

The Splintered Reigns
The Splintered reigns Era is a period of Volanti history that took place from approximately 57,000 BF until 31,800 BF in the central regions of the Rohse Galaxy, as the many mini-empires that arose from the destruction of Nol Aris sprouted, developed and eventually discovered each other. It concluded with the victory of the Kingdom of Tharys over the other major 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 actual records exist of the year Nol Aris perished and the new age began, but most scholars concur on it being nearly sixty thousand years before the Founding.

The Pillar of Veroe
One of the ships that escaped the Ruin of the Mothermoon found its way to a deserted planet in the star system of Rakiva; its first settlers christened it Veroe, from the Volanti word for daughter. These same pioneers brought their technology and culture with them, along with a distant descendant of one of Nol Aris's old kings: one who would become Vesped the First. They established a small tribe-kingdom on the planet, and over hundreds of years grew to house a prestigious new order, an empire that, through the development of archaic pulsar-based technology and the settlement of the other planets in the system, was called the Pillar of Veroe. It was at this time that they encountered the first signs of alien life, fledgling states neighboring the newly-settled system. On a crusade to regain their 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, the aging Vesped claimed dominion over the whole of Rukiva's star cluster, renaming the capital of his last opponent Velasco. Dying of old age in 52,100 BF, he did not live long enough to see it flourish.

Left kingless and led by regents, the Pillar kept growing. Veroe itself was eventually all but abandoned, its dusty temples and deserts made a backwater world in Veroese politics by the rise of new worlds and conquests. The king's son, Reza, remarkably young, ruled from Velasco over a prospering enclave, now with tens of dozens of planets under his banner. His mother, the Widow-queen Rubian, was prohibited form interfering according (as custom dictated), leaving him to manage as best he could. He embraced the new wealth of Veroe and its gardenworlds with joy, being much too inexperienced to control or care for its government. The Veroese nobility grew larger and larger; the Pillar, loose and scattered. But the Young King, unexplicably, left life as quick as he'd gained it- under rumouredly suspicious circumstances.

In 49,803 BF, the dowager queen Rubian placed the Tassel-Crown on her head herself. Discarding Velasco as the nobility's plaything, she named yet another new capital,: Veruna, a then-deserted, placid orb to be remade in her own glorious vision as she took the reins of the empire with a steel grip. She forced the nobles from their hidey-holes to 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 protest 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 of Vero. Unlike their disbelieving higher-placed counterparts, they were promptly called to the Imperial courts and denounced traitors in trial after trial, chaired by Empress 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 harsh; it was centralized; it was heavy-handed. And it was to cement order in the region for the next five millenia.

At last, with her grasp on power consolidated and every city in the empire under a strict new curfew, Rubian began to recreate the state under freshly-made rules. The massive Veroese 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 Unexplored Stars, reaching almost 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 colonnades and monuments; and ordered the blazing of wide and well-guarded routes spanning thousands of light-years between every world in her empire, connecting her vassals 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, though strong, would not last long, nor would Veroe’s over the brilliant regions of the core- alesson both learned the hard way.

Kingdom of Tharys
By the time of Veruna’s golden age at the crest 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.

Minor Empires and Satrapies
Aside from the Pillar and the Tharysian state, there were a handful of Volanti mini-empires that were borne during the age of the Splintered Reigns; the largest among them, however, were only mere fractions of Vero and Tharys' holdings. Most of these ancient states disappeared shortly, without trace, or were absorbed by others as the Primal Wars raged in Rohse's interior. However, three of these powers are worthy of note, if only as minor characters in the play of the time period. These are:


 * The Arcelican Empire: a small constellation of worlds on the western edge of the Tharysian Kingdom, with Arcel, another landing site of Volanti seed-ships, at its helm. The Arcelicans were a small but sturdy state, cordial but distant from their neighbor. They were nevertheless beaten, at least temporarily, by Veroese ships, who established a tenuous occupation host on Arcel itself that was broken later on in the war.


 * The Serrum Consortium: the Consortium consisted of an alliance of five planets, two of them survivor settlements, that united to pool their resources as they explored the regions around their own. Rich with intrigue and loosely linked, they were the first independent satrapy to be conquered during the primal wars, and the only one that was never entirely freed. Quite close to the Pillar's borders, they were easily overrun by Rubian's troops early in the war and remained a Veroese possession until the time of the Two Kingdoms.


 * The Berru Authority: the smallest of the Volanti mini-empires, the state of Berru constisted only of the Volanti settlement on the world of Berru, its six moons, and the Berrusi-owned planet of Tes. The Authority was growing rapidly in the pre-war years, but was blockaded by Veroese flotillas during their initial attack on Tharys' territories. Thanks in part to their good relationships with the latter, it was later liberated by the Tharysians as they marched west to Veruna. It changed hands again shortly, however, annexed by the Pillar until it in turn was defeated by Tharys' prevailing forces.

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 deep 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 Tharysians at Serina and Vuloto for months. But still, one by one they fell- even Veroe itself could not resist. 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 world of Lein, one of the closest to the galactic centre- and there awaited an invasion that never came. She transformed it into a fortress, but her deepening 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 Two Kingdoms period, also known as the Era of the Twin Crowns, was the period of Volanti history immediately following the Era of the Splintered States and concluding with the Stygian Schism. Starting officially in 31,800 BF, nearly 6 thousand years after the chaos of the Primal Wars, the period follows the creation of a long-lived Volanti dyarchy, with Veruna and Volaris as its throneworlds, and its eventual near-defeat in the Great Atrisian War near the turn of the era. The period ends with the fusing of the two kingdoms into a centralized Empire, in the year 1 AF.

The Twin Crowns
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 it wouldn't be for lack of trying). 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.

The Troubles
Small uprising by Volantenes; prelude to war. Riots against immigrants, alien neighbors spread; war with the Sayin Empire, natives from Atrisia (now renamed).

Great War of Atrisia
Alien invasions, over-expansion brings trouble to the Empire.

The Founding
Victory over the Sayins brought unprecedented power to the Verunasi kingdom's blue-bloods, who didn't hesitate to use it on their stymied rival kingdom. Baron Arugos Byleth of Arcel, long in the shadow of Volaris's royals, soon married Laigan Serinth, Countess of the house of Verunian founder-world Serina: their child, the first ever with blood from both realms, would carry undeniable sway.

Verono pf Serinth-Byleth he was called; a name that in itself exuded power, derived from the Volanti viero: "regal". He would not remain so for long. Upon his coronation, he declared the permanent union of the Two Kingdoms: a move no-one at the time expected, and one which no-one could refuse. To rule this new order, he said, there must be unity, there must be strength. There must be reform. And according to his vision, reform wasn't optional, for any faction. Crowning himself Emperor Verono of the newly-founded House Rigura, ruler of the Volanti, inheritor of the stars, he brought about abrupt change to a system that had endured for over 30 thousand years- beginning with its foundations. Verono fused the two royal crowns of Veruna and Volaris to turn them into a single, universal domain only briefly known as the One Empire. The birth of this state was one of the most decisive moments in galactic history: it is year 1 in the Valian Calendar, as the first-ever moment that the Volanti people were united in name and country. It was not to be, alas, a happy union.

Despite Verono's initial popularity, vigor and celebrations, his alterations to teh system brought him troubles from the older houses. His closest Verunian family members, previously of House Serinth, were elevated to the status of imperial household as tribute to his lineage. But their court, as demanded his highness' unyielding compromise, would be at Volaris- and so would Veruna's overlord, which ired the Verunian Paizos. Arcel's position in the empire, hardly improved at all, also turned the Byleths sullen. As part of his edicts to reorganize the crown and the Volanti peoples, the Emperor established a new system of divisions intended to make the handling of his star systems easier. The new colonies in the West absorbed Verono's attention, which he encouraged to grow and settlers to migrate. Most worlds in the empire grouped into new sectors; these were to be managed, sometimes in groups of many dozens, by especially-designated planets called Hol Worlds. Naturally, these soon became power brokers, their say worth many times more what ordinary planets' did- which in turn became a wellspring of discord.

The Riguran Emperors
For centuries upon centuries, the empire continued under the first of what were to be called the Riguran Emperors. Veruna, still steaming from the loss of its autonomy despite the empire having a Verunian imperial family, became ever more reclusive and strictly anti-emperor; and Volaris's former royals, furious at being overstepped by a Verunian upstart in their own home, were hostile. Emperor Verono, turning more stubborn as he aged and aging but never dying, remained staunchly in support of the union, which didn't help relations with the upper political classes. Upon his death nearly 6 thousand years after the Founding, one of the oldest-lived Volanti ever,, he was succeeded by his youngest son Cnaelos. A great military mind, he pursued the continued expansion of the Petal Rim colonies with enormous success. Treasure and tribute found their way to the capital, and suddenly the center of the Rose seemed bathed in riches. The crown's fortunes, however, would be its own undoing.

Emperor Cnaelos Rigura became a Volanti hero, in the early years of his reign appearing to be the antidote to his father's aged austereness and obstinacy- nonetheless loved because of the success of his venture sin the West. However, the age of the second Ruguran emperor was also the beginning of the empire's infamous era of decadence. The good fortunes of the Volanti seemed never-ending, the gold and silver overflowing. And keeping in tune with the public nonchalance of the time, Cnaelon was as free with his body as he was with his gifts. Lavish banquets and celebrations were the stuff of daily routine in the empire, and parades and costly fleets freed from cost or limits. The nobility and the imperial family took in as many wives and trinkets as they wanted, sometimes with the same regard. The monarch himself was a known dallier, building harem-palaces on the moons of Serina to accomodate his strings of lovers.

Cnaelos died after a relatively short reign, ruling for a scarce 9 hundred years against his father's 5910. He was succeeded by his youngest male descendant, his son Cloelun, the wife of his father's own sister. Incest had been a cardinal vice in Volanti culture in all of living memory- and would be the new norm during the Empire's existence.

Cloelun was one of the youngest emperors ever, and continued his father's ways with singular alacrity. His reign saw the beginning of one of the largest building sprees in Volanti history, with intricate moonsteel, orum and marble palaces, monuments and temples blanketing every Volanti possession from Veruna to the new outpost of Vondace. These massive, ornate constructs would become a staple of the Old Empire era- and a testament to its exorbitant indulgence. Building and entertaining, Emperor Cloelun was nether a great statesman nor a military leader. His blunt and unpredictable (some say unstable) behavior alienated the noble classes and made the public ridicule as well as avoid him. He took not one but all of his five sisters as consorts, and to general horror, was rumoured to kill any but the female children. His perversions, the stuff of dark mutterings and whispered conversations, were enough to gain the imperial family hoardes of enemies. Cloelun died one in night in, in one of the villas he'd built in the middle of the planet's oceans to watch the meteor showers. The cause of his death was not rumoured to be natural.

Cloelun's only son, Decimon, was the offspring of his father's eighth wife and oldest sister, Taimare. History suggests he lived with his father during most of his life and was present for the acts of depravity that characterized his reign.

Verono (First) -> Cnaelon (son) -> Cloelun (son) -> Decimon (son) -> Neiru (end)

Stygian Schism
Als known as the Volanti Civil War

Worlds in the core revolt because of failure of the Verunian line of descent; Veruna, long a rival of Volaris, is implicated among the traitors and brutally put down by the capital. The Empire is reformed, and a new dynasty of the Volari-native House Arabasti is put in place; Veruna, Mov Worlds stripped of their power.