Trying Something New: A Brief History of Sathyriel

I know, it's been a while. During that time, I've realized that putting my first drafts up here isn't really helping me to write more. The more time passes between sections, the more I feel like I have to get something up. And when I feel like that, I tend to write stuff that I'm not at all happy with, which is not encouraging. So I'm going to try continuing it without posting for a while. This also frees me up to write more out of order and not feel like I'm confusing anyone.

In the meantime, I thought I'd try using the blog for various tidbits; information that pertains to and informs what I'm writing, but won't necessarily show up in the final piece. As usual, it's subject to change, so don't be shocked if something I write here ends up being contradicted in the story itself.

What follows is the back story for Sathyriel (sath-EAR-ee-el), the kingdom where our story has taken place so far. (It's called that for now, at least.) This all takes place several decades before the events of our current story.

As always, comments welcome.



Long ago, the land that is now Sathyriel was a number of small territories held by various races. None of them were truly kingdoms, though monarchs of one region or another would sometimes rise up and shortly fall. For these lands were plagued with instability. Small armies fought for control of the local resources and land of value would change hands frequently. Prejudice and mistrust existed between certain races. At worst, they fought. At best, they had no dealings with each other, making trade nearly impossible. The more well established kingdoms bordering these territories did little to encourage true stability. They too coveted the natural resources: metals and gems, fertile land, towering forests, and waterways with passage to the ocean. But each believed that the best way to profit from these resources was to claim them in the name of their particular country. So the kingdoms merely added to the unrest.

Yet even as the wars over land persisted, small civilizations emerged. Dwarven towns sprung up near rich mineral deposits, dotting the landscape with farms and mines. The elves constructed great buildings and monuments of stone and wove cloth that was prized in every land. Tribes of beastmen hunted in the deep forests and even kept invaders at bay with their skill as warriors and their deep knowledge of their homeland. The centaurs, though too small and nomadic a population to attract much attention from the major kingdoms, lived off the land and developed an extremely through knowledge of its plants and creatures, kept alive through oral tradition. The humans seemed able to adapt to almost any landscape, but they gravitated to the trees for building shelter and water where the fishing was plentiful. Many human societies also devoted much energy to the study of magic. To say that humans were the only practitioners of magic is an oversimplification; other races were often familiar with some small number of spells. But humans were the first to consider magical study of major importance and to learn nearly all aspects of magic.

One human society of particular note originated along the northern mountain ranges. The dragon callers, as they were known, were characterized by their close relationship with the nearby dragon clans. Tall towers were built to call the dragons down from the mountains. The language of Rannak was created, allowing for communication between the species. In return for protection from their foes, the humans treated the dragons with great respect and care. This civilization grew and flourished for a time, but as the various territories made their first strides towards meaningful contact with one another, the close connection with the dragons was lost, until only a few villages situated particularly close to dragon weyrs still practiced dragon calling. The dragon callers may well have been only a historical footnote, if not for their crucial role in the ultimate destiny of these lands.

Though the land wars still persisted, these small areas of emerging culture were just beginning to have a measurable stabilizing effect on the area. Though they lacked any centralized leadership to encourage strong trade and diplomatic relations with the neighboring kingdoms, they proved a reliable enough source of goods to convince the larger kingdoms that small scale trade was a better option than trying to seize and hold the land themselves. So in these more developed cultural centers, the kingdoms began to cease military activity. Except for one.

Keltaria, a country on the southwestern border of this fractured region, had long been growing its strength as a military power. The Keltarian army was known and feared throughout the land, giving Keltaria a great deal of freedom in its actions. What no one outside of Keltaria knew was that the Keltarian leadership had made an alliance with the native dragons. This turned an already formidable army into a nearly unstoppable one. With the aid of the dragons, Keltaria was able to achieve a long held desire: to capture every piece of land between itself and the other major kingdoms. The battles were brutally one sided; with the dragons raining down flame from above and the forces of Keltaria charging in, the unprepared defenders could do nothing to save their lands from invasion. The small civilizations that traded with the larger kingdoms begged for help, but their pleas gained them little or no assistance. The other kingdoms feared Keltaria's might and, having no formal diplomatic ties with any part of the territories, did not want to risk war with an even more powerful Keltaria. One by one, every one of the small territories fell to Keltarian rule.

Under the terms of Keltaria's pact with the dragons, the newly acquired Keltarian territories were ruled by Talshak, leader of the Keltarian dragons. Talshak's main task was to keep order in the territories and ensure that the native population continued working for the benefit of the Keltarian empire. The surrounding kingdoms saw the stability that they had craved, but now Keltaria controlled all trade. Prices on goods from the territories grew astronomically and the nobles of Keltaria reaped the benefits. Talshak and his army kept the citizens of the territories at work, providing for Keltaria and any country willing to pay their prices. Rebellion, or even the perception of rebellion was not tolerated. A few small resistance movements sprung up, but they stood no chance against the well-organized and merciless armies of Talshak. In addition to quashing rebellion, Talshak devoted his forces to ridding the land of certain elements he felt too dangerous to go unchecked. Though they had always been a peaceful society, the centaurs suffered greatly under Talshak. Their ease at disappearing into the landscape and their lack of any permanent settlements marked them as too hard for the dragon to control. During Talshak's reign, centaurs were routinely killed on sight. The native dragons were also considered a threat, though Talshak was reluctant to deal with them as directly. Even with the vast forces he controlled, laying siege to the dragon weyrs would be a grueling task. And though it was never said in his presence, in was rumored that he feared some of the dragon clans. So Talshak contented himself with isolating the dragons. His troops were quick to attack any dragon foolish enough to venture too far from the weyr. Talshak further cut off the dragons from the rest of the world by systematically seeking out and destroying the remaining dragon callers. What had been a declining culture became a nonexistent one, as even those suspected of sympathizing with the dragon callers were in danger of being executed. Yet this dying way of life would give birth to the instrument of Talshak's downfall.

It was some decades after the beginning of Keltarian rule that Cyra first emerged. She appeared at first mostly near the northern mountains, though it was not long before her story had spread much farther. She was said to be the sole survivor of the destruction of the last dragon caller village, rescued by the nearby dragon clan and raised as one of their own. She spoke to them in the forgotten tongue of Rannak and treated them as her family. Safely hidden away in the dragon's weyr, she grew to maturity and slowly learned of her heritage, of the world outside and the people living under Talshak's tyrannical rule. So she left the weyr with a purpose: to free the land from Keltaria.

By itself it was a compelling story. But what really made people take notice and start to believe that just maybe this stranger and her dragons could actually drive Keltaria out, was the sword. Deslordian, the legendary blade of light. Few remembered the last time it had been seen and many called it a myth. But the story went, the dragons had retrieved it when the last champion fell, keeping it safe until the coming of the next champion. And at long last, the sword had chosen the very child the dragons had saved from the smoldering remains of the last dragon callers village.

Convincing people that the fight against Keltaria could be won was still a hard battle. There were those who pledged their loyalty the first time they saw Cyra with her sword and her entourage of dragons. Avery few even sought her out based solely on the tales they had heard of her. But even as the tiny band of warriors won a few skirmishes against Keltarian soldiers, most people remained skeptical. They were certain that Talshak would crush this uprising, as he had all the others.

Exactly why Talshak did not act immediately against Cyra's forces is still not known. Granted, it was not until several attacks by Cyra and the complete liberation of a major town that the dragon ruler was informed of her existence. Yet still, his response to the news was slow. It is possible that he simply did not believe that she was worthy of his personal attention and chose to leave the matter to more localized forces. Many military historians point out Talshak's continued reluctance to confront the dragon clans head on, which may have made him unwilling to risk fighting a force sad to include dragons. Complacency may have played a part as well. Talshak's rule had gone unopposed for many years and there was less and less need for the dramatic shows of force Talshak had employed shortly after the occupation began. Then there is the story, especially common in Keltaria, that Talshak was slowly going mad and could not see the threat Cyra posed through his clouded mind. Whatever the cause, Talshak did not see Cyra as a serious threat until it was too late.

As Cyra and her troops had more successes, they had more recruits as well. People were starting to believe that this resistance would not be immediately crushed and might even succeed in liberating a small chunk of territory, for a while at least. So old veterans and would-be soldiers sought out Cyra to join her. Most of these new fighters later said they had come because of the stories: of battles or dragons or Deslordian. But they stayed because of Cyra. Some said it was because of her presence, a sense of nobility and leadership that came from something other than her small frame and bloodline devoid of royals. Some were taken with her relationship with the dragons or her troops. She never treated anyone as lower than her, and the dragons were clearly her family. Others were taken with how she would fight in every battle she was present for, rather than sitting and strategizing from some safe location. But nearly all of them were won over by Cyra's vision for the land after the war. No resistance leader who had come before had ever mentioned a plan for after the Keltarians left. Cyra had a dream for shaping the land into a unified kingdom for everyone, a strong kingdom that would never again be fought over and exploited by its neighbors. And the way she talked about it, the soldiers with her believed in it, and it became their dream too.

But Cyra realized that winning over a few new fighters at a time would not be enough to create an army that could defeat Talshak. She needed to win the confidence of the leaders of the people. This was no easy task. Many of the local leaders had been killed in the early days of the Keltarian invasion to demoralize the population. There were some leaders who had sided with the Keltarians in exchange for favorable treatment. Those who remained, the ones who the people truly respected, were carefully guarded secrets. They were almost always treated like ordinary people by their followers, so that the Keltarians wouldn't discover them. For an outsider to get an audience with a community's leader was very hard. But Cyra persisted and her reputation eventually earned her audiences with the leaders. There was still a lot of mistrust at first. Cyra was a human and some of the races worried that she would favor humans before and after the war. Others feared being removed from power when Cyra formed a new government. But Cyra was fair handed and worked hard to assuage these fears. Her army welcomed anyone willing to fight and her generals were the greatest warriors and strategists from all the land's races. And as she laid out her plan for the new kingdom, she made it clear that local leadership would hold an important and respected place. As a result, more and more people became followers of the woman they would one day call their queen.

The centaur posed an altogether different challenge for Cyra. It was often difficult to find them at all since they had no permanent homes and their numbers were small due to Talshak's campaign to eradicate them. They lived in small groups with no leaders to appeal to for help. And they did not fight. Even as Talshak's forces slaughtered their kind, few were willing to break their culture's taboo against harming another creature. Most of those who had fought back had been killed. Many of Cyra's generals advised her to simply ignore the centaurs, but Cyra wanted them to be a part of her new kingdom and to have a stake in the outcome of the war. The eventual solution was to have the centaurs act as scouts. Their swiftness and knowledge of the land made them extremely adept at monitoring the movements of Keltarian troops and relaying the information back to Cyra, all without having to fight at all. Thanks to the centaurs' help, Cyra's army was frequently able to surprise Keltarian forces as they moved from town to town.

By the time Talshak began to pay real attention to Cyra, she had recruited a formidable army. To make matters worse for the dragon, the neighboring kingdoms had taken a surreptitious interest in the fighting. Though no one wanted to declare war on Keltaria outright, they were eager to see the territories become a free and stable kingdom with which fair trade would be possible. Many of them were secretly supplying Cyra's army with weapons and armor. So when Talshak began sending stronger forces to crush Cyra, they found a much better equipped force than they had expected. Cyra's army continued gaining ground and Talshak was losing troops. His attempts to further demoralize the population in areas he still controlled through executions and shows of force were only serving to incite the people. In desperation, Talshak appealed to the grand dukes of Keltaria for more troops.

As news of the rebellion and its growing success came back to Keltaria and the grand dukes, Talshak had begun to fall out of favor. Keltarian citizens were upset by the length of the war and the number of casualties. The fighting had caused major disruption of the trading that had been Keltaria's original reason for capturing the territories. The grand dukes felt that Talshak's inability to end Cyra's rebellion was making the kingdom seem weak and inept. Facing a lengthy and costly war, the dukes decided amongst themselves that Talshak should be cut off and the territories given up, for now.

It was around this same time that the rumors about Talshak began in Keltaria. There were many of them, all questioning Talshak's fitness to command, but two in particular seemed to catch on. One was that Talshak had gone mad and was simply not stable enough to keep the territories in line effectively. The other, which often traveled with the first, suggested that the reason Keltaria's great army was faring so poorly against a group of common, untrained rebels was that they were distracted elsewhere. Talshak, the rumor claimed, has designs on ruling not just the territories, but all the neighboring kingdoms and possibly even Keltaria. The army could not successfully quell the resistance because Talshak was staging secret attacks on the borders of the other countries which stole troops from the fight in the territories. Some people later wondered if the grand dukes had spread these rumors themselves as an excuse to withdraw the army and abandon Talshak. It is also possible that one or both of them were true. Either way, the grand dukes denied Talshak's request for more troops, effectively dooming the occupation.

With no reinforcements coming, it was only a matter of time before Talshak was overwhelmed. It was early fall of the occupation's final year when Cyra's army stormed Talshak's fortress. Talshak was killed by Cyra and the independence of the new kingdom of Sathyriel was declared. The remainder of Keltaria's forces retreated soon after. Any hopes Keltaria had harbored of regrouping and retaking Sathyriel were crushed when the neighboring kingdoms declared themselves allied with Sathyriel and sent support troops in to help defend its borders. Negotiations for a peace treaty began within weeks.

With the country's immediate future secured, Sathyriel began to take shape. Cyra was crowned queen. (Whether this was her desire from the beginning or the decision of the people has never been clear.) She began the process of finding suitable representatives from all parts of the kingdom to serve on the new Council of Knights. She and the Council crafted the laws of the kingdom, taking care to respect the original laws and customs of the different areas and races. The local leaders were charged with overseeing their regions and towns and representing the queen and the law. A system of education and codified training for knighthood were set up. Cyra moved the kingdoms capitol to her birthplace, near the mountain where the dragons had raised her. Over time, a suitable palace was build there and the once small grew into a bustling city. Trade was established with other countries. Roads were built to connect the various regions to each other and Sathyriel to its neighbors. As travel around the kingdom became easier, the major cities became more multicultural. The citizens now thought of themselves mostly as Sathyriens, justifiably proud of the kingdom they had helped to build and to free.