Fiction:War for the Eye

The War for the Eye was a nineteen-year world war which affected most of Koldenwelt.

Background
According to legend, there was an ancient, magical artefact known as the "Eye". This artefact was said to be able to fell entire armies and lay waste to entire nations in an instant, and ultimately, whoever possessed the Eye could bend the Source to their will and reshape the world to their own design. The Legion of Shiarchon believed in these myths, and also wished to access the full power of the Source, so they made plans to claim the Eye for their own. However, nobody was sure exactly where the Eye was - many believed that it had been lost in an even earlier war - other than that it was south of the Northern Region around the arctic circle, and north of Korodis in the south. In 20 BNA, the Shiarchon mages began to scry for the location of the Eye, while their military forces mobilised in order to destroy any civilisation that stood between the Legion and their goal.

First Attacks (19 BNA)
In the autumn of 19 BNA, the Shiarchon began their search for the Eye. The Legion marched out of Korodis and towards the Eastern Plains, and before long they found the Magnus, a large tribe of giants spread out across the savannah. The Magnus did not take kindly to the sudden intrusion of hundreds of warriors onto their land, and the Shiarchon were ready to kill anybody whom they perceived to be a threat, and fighting quickly started. The Magnus were armed with swords and slings, and combined with their stature these were more than sufficient to deal with typical raiding parties. However, the Shiarchon were as tall as the Magnus, outnumbered them five to one, and travelled with crossbows and siege engines. The battle was a complete victory for the Shiarchon, but many Magnus still survived. Some Magnus fled to elsewhere, hoping to eventually exact revenge against their new enemies, and a few remote villages managed to escape the notice of the Legion.

While stationed in the tribal lands of the Magnus, Shiarchon mages determined three places where the Eye was likely to be located. One of the places was in the Ar-Klith Deeps, a volcanic mountain range on the other side of the Eastern Plains, and the second place was in a lake in the Western Forests. The third place was in the Archipelago, which was a long way away from where it was believed that the Eye would be found, but it was not out of the question that the artefact had been taken from its resting place and moved elsewhere. The Legion split into three seperate armies, and each one went in the direction of one of the three locations. During these travels, they came across few more tribes, but those that they did encounter were destroyed in minutes, leaving nothing more than smoking ruins and piles of bones as evidence of their former existance.

Siege of Ar-Klith


Only having to cross open plains, the Shiarchon that were headed for Ar-Klith were the first army to arrive at their chosen destination. There, they found that Ar-Klith was inhabited by the subterranean Klaxxa civilisation. In open battle, the mountain-dwelling Klaxxa would have had a terrain advantage over the Shiarchon, so the Legion instead lay siege to the Deeps. Living underground, the Klaxxa were reliant on trade from outside, so the Shiarchon's main tactic was to fire their siege engines at any of their vehicles that came out of the volcanoes and moved across the landscape. However, the Klaxxa vehicles were powered by steam engines, so they travelled at high speeds which meant that many of the attacks missed. Still, several vehicles were destroyed each day, and within five days the Klaxxa trade network had been severely disrupted. In addition, the Shiarchon had salvaged the materials and the technology that made up the destroyed vehicles, and made vast improvements on their siege engines, creating huge war machines that could move across the landscape and launch their projectiles under their own power. These machines were based on vehicles that, according to Shiarchon myths, had been inspired by the Eye when it was under the control of the Legion many millennia before.

The Klaxxa were a civilisation that was not used to warfare, but they were also very adaptable, and when they realised that the Shiarchon posed a major threat, they quickly began constructing a military force that would allow them to defend themselves. Initially, this force was composed of several wooden gliders, which were armed with several gunpowder-filled bombs and manned by a single pilot. The gliders were brought to a high speed by steam-powered vehicles and launched off the mountainside, then they passed over the Shiarchon armies, dropped their payloads and then returned. The gliders were much more difficult to hit than the freight vehicles, and they managed to destroy approximately one-tenth of the Shiarchon forces surrounding the Deeps. However, from the craters that were now dotted across the landscape, the Shiarchon managed to find some unexploded gunpowder, and their mages managed to determine that it was made from three different ingedients - 15 parts saltpetre, 3 parts charcoal, and 2 parts sulfur - which could all be found around the base of the volcanoes. Overnight, four of the Legion's siege engines were further converted into cannons, which not only fired explosive shells, but launched them using gunpowder too.

The next day, the Shiarchon bombarded the sites from where the gliders were being launched, destroying several of them before they left the ground, and they also fired on the rest of the mountainside to cause as much damage to the cities inside the Deeps as possible. By midday, the Legion had finally exhausted all of the available ammunition, but so had the Klaxxa. A few hours later, a small group of Klaxxa emerged from the mountains to negotiate with the Legion. The Shiarchon soldiers prepared to shoot their crossbows at the diplomats, but the mages realised that feining a willingness to cooperate could be beneficial for them, and the negotiations proceeded, with the mages claiming that their scrying had led them to conclude that there was a great evil within the Deeps due to traces of powerful magic with them. The Klaxxa then gave the mages a quick tour of the upper levels of one of their cities, and showed them some of the magical crystals that they had created and had been trading with other civilisations across the world. The Shiarchon mages confirmed that these crystals were what they must have scryed, and left, taking some of the crystals as a parting gift. The Klaxxa still did not trust the Shiarchon, and as the mages were simply planning to "reverse-engineer" the crystals and use them to further their own power, their beliefs were accurate. Meanwhile, the Shiarchon army marched westwards, planning to possibly join the part of the Legion that was searching for the Eye in the Western Forests.

Battle of the Archipelago
The second Shiarchon army had marched through the rainforest, leaving their seige engines behind along with a small regiment to defend them, they built several transport boats to carry them across the ocean to the Archipelago. The crossing took two days, significantly longer than expected, which the Legion's mages attributed to the Source's influence around the islands. Hiding within the ruins that were scattered across the Archipelago, several of the native Elvish inhabitants sensed hostile intent from the intruders. They leapt out of their cover and onto the ships. Many of the Elves were shot down by crossbow fire, but those that landed succeeded in causing chaos using their psychic powers, mind-melding some Shiarchon soldiers so that they attacked their own allies, and using telepathic suggestion to paralyse and wound others. Many even used the native insect life of the islands, sending swarms of stinging flies through the Legion's ranks.

Eventually, the Shiarchon soldiers and mages managed to defeat the Elves, and the ships landed on the central island of the Archipelago. The soldiers were sent to find any survivors and bring them to the mages, and to kill them if they tried to resist. After several minutes of searching, there was only one survivor to be found - Arbor Vitae, the tribe's leader. The mages questioned Arbor, who told them that the psychic disturbances around the Archipelago was the result of a Source nexus underground that had existed since the dawn of time. She refuted the mages' beliefs that the Eye was located within the nexus, and to prove this she was forced to lead them to the pyramid at the centre of the disturbance, which was made of solid rock. The Shiarchon were satified that the Eye was not located in the Archipelago, but instead wished to learn of a way to harness the powers of the Source nexus. Arbor did not want to help the people who had just killed all of her tribe, so she tricked the mages into taking her to Ar-Klith by telling them that the creations of the Klaxxa who lived there would help, showing the magical crystals embedded in her own clothing as evidence.

A Northern Intervention?


The peoples of the Northern Region, as always, kept out of matters and wars south of their homes. The Urindalë Elves were living an isolated life and didn't want to be involved in the events south of them. But a prince of Ondiliaë, son of King Sindrigal, known as Prince Forindolin, broke his land's and father's laws and left Ondiliaë, and travelled south as rumours reached Eruburgh of a war breaking out. When passing Eruburgh and reaching the edges of the Northern Region, the prince was attacked by a lone Shiarchon cannon which was scouting the southern edges of the Northern Region, en route to the Western Forests. Angered and on the defensive, he attacked the cannon, but his sword was useless against its metal plating and he was almost hit by the cannon when it fired.

Seeing no other option, he called upon his magic abilities, and with an ancient Urindalë phrase a burst of magic destroyed the cannon and killed the Shiarchon who commanded it. Surprised by their presence so high in the north, Prince Forindolin began searching for potential allies and wanted to fight with them in the war, as a representative of the North.

Skirmishes in the Western Forests
Meanwhile, the third Shiarchon army was making progress through the deciduous woodland parts of the Western Forests, albeit slowly, as scouts had to find paths through the jungles which could easily be cleared to allow the passage of the siege engines. These paths were cleared by cutting thick trees down - both with saws and with the mages' powers - and by rolling over thinner trees with the siege engines. However, the scouts often encountered problems.

The first of these was in early spring, when a group from the Cult of Pilgni ambushed a squad of Shiarchon scouts. Hiding in the surrounding trees, they threw blades at the scouts, succeeding in killing several of them, although the Shiarchon fired back with crossbows and shot several of the cultists in return. After a short fight, most of the scouting party were dead, but all but one of the cultists had been killed or had fled into the depths of the forest. The final one, who had been injured by a crossbow bolt, told the Shiarchon that they had recently been told to attack a certain group of intruders to the forest by their god, and the Shiarchon fit the intruders' description. Before the scouts could get any more information, the cultist died from the bolt's poison. The scouts returned to the main army, and told them to increase the size of the scouting parties in case of future, and possibly larger, attacks.

This decision was of great benefit to the Shiarchon, as their scouts came across a small city in a large clearing in the woodland three days later. A few of the scouts returned to call the siege engines to war, while the others remained and defeated the local defence forces. A few of the city's inhabitants escaped into the forest, while the rest were enslaved and forced to help dismantle the city in preparation for the siege engines. When the engines arrived the next day, they finished the job, and the army made a temporary base in the clearing while the Shiarchon soldiers killed the rest of the natives.

The Alliance
In the Eastern Plains, the Shiarchon from the Archipelago, along with Arbor Vitae, approached the Ar-Klith Deeps. The siege engines and their guards had also rejoined the army in case there were any Klaxxa left after the previous army's attack who wished to hinder the Legion's progress. They did not expect the Klaxxa to have built a relatively large air force in the last five months, composed of aircraft with rudimentary propeller-powered flight, allowing them to travel three times the distance as the gliders that had been used in the earlier siege. The army was scattered, and Arbor managed to escape and run towards the mountains. The Klaxxa pilots noticed the comparatively small Elf in the chaos and avoided dropping their bombs nearby, allowing her to reach the Deeps unharmed.

In one of the Klaxxa's subterranean cities, Arbor met with the Klaxxa Clanslord, along with members of several races from across the Eastern Plains whose civilisations had been almost completely destroyed by the Shiarchon, including the Magnus. After Arbor explained that the Shiarchon were searching for the Eye, there was a unanimous agreement that the races all had to work together to defeat the Legion. However, even with Klaxxa technology to give them an advantage in battle, none of them wished to fight in the front lines and risk the extinction of their race. These fears were quickly extinguished when the Klaxxa showed them their latest project, the Zeppelin, a large aircraft supported by an even larger lighter-than-air balloon. This vehicle was the first of its kind, as previous attempts at making such large balloons failed since they had previously relied on heated air to lift them, and this required such quantities of fuel as to make the vehicle too heavy to fly. The Zeppelin replaced hot air with hydrogen, naturally lighter than air, meaning that much less fuel was required to power the vehicle. The evacuees boarded the Zeppelin, along with the vehicle's pilots and a few Klaxxa soldiers, and the airship began its journey to the Western Forests.