A Note from the High Historian
It is not without hesitation that I publish this document with redactions in it, and whilst I do not do this as a form of censure I am sure there will be those that take that from this, especially given notions enacted by those entrusted to speak for the wider Concord.
And I do not remiss Herr Prospero Van Garzoni of the Civil Service for their impassioned writings and adamant personalisation of the recounted histories. It is hard to distance oneself from the direct impacts these very writings speak of when the scars borne from their might and their Empire still have yet to settle into blurred reminders.
And who better to speak on the beginnings and might of an Empire than those that have spit blood its feet whilst as they break the shackles it tried to keep them ensnared with.
However,
The Faded Star would remind us not to become ruinous to ourselves over a belief, and the The Tome Bearer demands we stand against attempts to distort knowledge.
So know these redactions are not secretive. Are not some hidden piece of dangerous information, but that they are ensuring the works stay true to fact where they can rather than be decayed and defiled. To not incite furore in those that would take umbrage in our perceived malediction.
I will not condemn the speaking of personal belief. But I will strike with the knowledge I am armed with. Whether that be with ink or iron, and not allow perception and falsehoods to become fact or truth.
- High Historian Houndspriest Wenche Vanatoure, Spring 225
No Law in Empire - The History of Artebazzan
By Prospero Van Garzoni, Civil Service Researcher
The Law of Empire
By Court Laureate Marcellinus of Pataviam
From blooded hills and storm-bitten shore,
Rose Arcadius, blade in hand, and heart unshaken.
The sky split, and Invicta shook
For he cast down the Hollow Kings,
And in their ruin, named the world anew:
Artebazzan. One Will. One Empire. One Flame.
He built not with mortar, but mandate,
Not with bricks, but breath and law.
The Senate he summoned, not as leash,
But as ladder: the higher it climbs,
he further the world beholds our light.
And in his shadow, all tyrants pale.
Pataviam sang with ships and silver,
Its harbours full of every tongue,
And every tongue learned Artebazzan.
For trade is but tribute in finer silk,
And knowledge is dominion without blade.
Let others dig, we chart the stars.
From the floodlands of wild Invicta,
To the jungled wrath of our enemies,
The legions march, not for spoil,
But for the Pact of Order made flesh.
To teach, to till, to tame
We carry fire where darkness lingers.
Some say empires rot, that power wanes,
But stone need not move to endure.
For every child born beneath the Laurel,
Knows in their marrow the truth of Arcadius:
Empires do not fall.
They choose when to sleep.
So let the wild lands whisper,
Let rebels scratch at distant gates.
We do not fear the flinch of history
For history speaks our name in marble.
And when the Spheres burn low and cold,
Only Artebazzan shall remember fire
It is hard to write of Artebazzan
It is hard because of what they have done to peoples across the world, with their blades and their brands.
It is hard because of what they have done to my own people, made them into servants to coin in pursuit of serving and ambition that was never to be theirs.
It is hard because I want to scream from the rooftops that the history of Artebazzan does not matter because I wish for them never to have a future.
But as a scholar and a civil service worker, I will say that is hard to write about Artebazzan because the Empire has gone to such extensive efforts to turn their history into myth and legend. To wrought this past into something that is sung and chanted, rather than known and understood.
To the left of these words is an example of Artebazzani historic works amount to, the hagiography of a polity penned by a devout propagandist and of little academic worth. It is poems like this that litter the homes and school chambers of students across the empire. It is stanzas about one empire that they are taught, not anything of functional use.
Now I cannot pretend that The Concord, and even my beloved Lerona Mere is much different, but it is the extent that is so much more confronting. It is actively difficult to learn the truth about Artebazzan, but alas, this is the task set for me.
As a final salute to Artebazzan and its failed scholars, I will use master Marcellinius’ poem here as the spine for my work, long may he moulder and seethe.
Gloria Rebellionis, Mors Imperatori
- Prospero Van Garzoni, Civil Service Researcher, July 225AE, Lerona Mere.
Hope and the Holimalktoa
~
From blooded hills and storm-bitten shore,
Rose Arcadius, blade in hand, and heart unshaken.
The sky split, and Invicta shook
For he cast down the Hollow Kings,
And in their ruin, named the world anew:
Artebazzan. One Will. One Empire. One Flame.
~
In the year 630BE, Invictia Minor was a wildland home to one empire that was soon to die, and another that was being born. In the foothills and valleys of the Victrix Mons there were many peoples in a loose coalition, they kept here between the lands of ‘The Brass King in the Mountain’ to the north and the Holimalkota in the Southern lowlands. This Brass King, named as Nythos Miltius in some earlier writing, was a human warlord who ruled some secluded mountain valleys deep within the Victrix Mons and was the last in a long line of martial kings who used the isolation of their petty kingdom to rule bloodily.
The Holimalkota are another matter entirely, being not human, and not kings.
Descriptions vary from text to text. For example Marcellinius labels them as ‘Hollow Kings’, while Patricus calls them ‘Bloodsworn Giants of an evil breed’. What can be known is that the Holimalkota were human appearing creatures of considerable height, ranging from two meters all the way to more than four. They were always presented as being slim, with strong connotations of starvation and hunger. While they appeared to maintain a complex social structure (there are always references to their kingdom, empire, or cities) they are individually presented as savage and evil. Holimalkota warriors fall upon their foes with their bare hands or crude clubs. They fight individually and either capture their foes as prisoners or consume their corpses. It is entirely possible that what the pre-Artebazzani would go on to fight was a disparate group of barely-sentient tallfolk who were cast as cannibal kings after the fact, but I do believe that there is some amount of truth to the ‘society’ of the Holimalkota, given the equal regularity of reference and the fact that the war against the pre-Artebazzani was such a drawn out affair.
It is between the Holimalkota and The Brass King that Primus Arcadius was born and raised. In reality its very unlikely that his name was Primus Arcadius. We know this because Niccolo Van Demuer was such a principled man that he would not have named one of the Divine Spheres after an Emperor for the sake of clout or acceptance. As such it is likely that the legend of the first Emperor was renamed some time after the acceptance of the faith of the Divine Spheres and the revelation of Niccolo some time around ~80BE. Such is the damage of the Artebazzani Empire’s propaganda that we do not know the true name of the first Emperor. This section has been removed by the High Historian. From this point on, the name of the first Emperor has been amended to 'He' by the High Historian.
It is probably that He was some local chieftain or warrior-leader as this stretch of highlands are known to be quite barren (not being of much use to the Empire for some time), and being of enough influence to do what he would go on to do would only have come from the end of a sword.
Pressed between these two Empires, He longed for more and raised a small army. This army took war to the Brass King and his valley Kingdom. We know this because the final coalition against the Holimalkota included King Nythos as an advisor to He and that the would-be-emperor had gained glory in ‘Wars in the mountainous north’. While we don’t know that occurred in this war, it can’t have been so bloody that the two people (His coalition of tribes and Nythos’ Kingdom) were forever opposed. We will likely never know the specifics, but what we do know is that some time in the early period of 610BE, a coalition of the Brass Kingdom and His hillfolk returned from the north and began to make their way south-east on to the lowlands of Invicta Minor, to directly oppose the Holimalkota.
A lot of words are spent on what happens next; He unites not only the Brass Kingdom into his coalition, but also ‘The Chashar’, a forest people who were held by the Holimalkota as slaves. There are a great many battles, including such epics as ‘The Slaying at Gluacan’, ‘The Freedom of Adivos’, and the final ‘The Defeat of the City of Charred Bones’. When all is said and done, He is left standing alone, the Chashar leadership, King Nythos, and any of their lieutenants are dead. What remains of both polities (let alone the vast wilderness lands of the Holimalkota) are his to rule alone. He named the world Artebazzan and a new age began.
This section has been removed by the High Historian.
What is far more likely is that a local warlord rose to power in the hills of Victrix Mons, he quarreled with other local warlords in the region before convincing them that they could actually gain a lot more by fighting the feral cannibal giants to the south together. This warlord then went on to use his allies, freed slaves, and other such patsies as fodder for his war, and ensured through murder or malady that when all was done he was the only one left standing. This section has been removed by the High Historian.
Now I also don’t think that He drove the Holimalkota into the sea or below ground as we are told. Or at least, not all of them. Shortly after the end of the war the ‘Artebazzani’ as they had begun to call themselves, began building their new seat of power within the City of Charred Bones, which had once been the capital of the Holimalkota. ‘City of Charred Bones’ does not sound appealing to be a place to reside, so why do that? Also, the Artebazzani Empire makes swift leaps and bounds, building a metropolis unseen from the people of the region and time, quite out of sorts, where did they learn to do such a thing? Finally, from this time until now it is seen as a piece of good luck and ‘imperial capability’ to be particularly tall within Artebazzani society. This section has been removed by the High Historian.
This section has been removed by the High Historian.
I believe that some of the Holimalkota remained in the new-Artebazzani culture, likely as prisoners, who advised the new emperor towards the mysteries of the Holimalkota which advantaged the new polity over rivals in the region. The bloodline of He likely interbred with these near humans, resulting in the obsession with height that we see in Artebazzan to this day.
But this was the Empire at 600AE, taking surprisingly confident steps into a region that was a complete power vacuum, with an aging Emperor at its head, and with mysteries already hidden beneath myth and legend.
Importantly, Artebazzan translates roughly to ‘All-that-is’ in the oldest tongues. The Artebazzani Empire is, by its own name, an Empire of the entire Mortal Sphere. Rather than being a cosmopolitan declaration of acceptance, this is in fact a pending intent towards conquest.
Building an Empire with Monsters in the Foundations
~
He built not with mortar, but mandate,
Not with bricks, but breath and law.
The Senate he summoned, not as leash,
But as ladder: the higher it climbs,
he further the world beholds our light.
And in his shadow, all tyrants pale.
~
This section has been removed by the High Historian.
We know that He was at least in middle age when the battles against the Holimalkota occurred. So if we’re charitable and say that he was thirty-five in 600BE, perhaps he lives another fifty years (unlikely given he lived the life of a war-mongering tribal warlord), before eventually dying at eighty-five in 550BE. We know that the Senate was founded in 497BE. We also know that the emperor that came after Hime was Emperor Graccus, who was son to Him . So we can assume that Hie died some time before 550BE, with his son succeeding him.
No where in the history of living humanity has a leader given up power willingly. So rather than Him raising up the senate as an additional regional power structure to delegate powers to do so he can focus on investigating Holimalkotan biology, what is far more likely is that following the death of a strong-man dictator, his son struggled to maintain the same power as his father. Rather than losing the entire empire he created a pressure release in a regional government which allowed his foes to fight each other, instead of him.
What follows between the founding of the Empire around ~600BE and 430BE is the consolidation within the ruins of the Holimalkotan kingdom. The Artebazzani people grew rapidly, and while I am sure that the transition from barely-surviving mountain folk to new imperial power likely had something to do with it, it is likely that the growing Empire absorbed a dozen or so local societies that had been subjects of the Holimalkota like the Chashan. We suspect this because the Artebazzani never lose their militaristic focus or tradition despite a lack of a firm or known enemy for hundreds of years during this period. To maintain a military of this strength and history during a time of peace would have been a waste of resources. So we can imagine a hundred and seventy year period where the Artebazzani grow within the region until they contact another nation, then continue to grow until it is an impasse for either nation, then they crush them with greater numbers. The remaining civilians join the Empire, and they repeat as is necessary. In truth, this is a very pragmatic and cosmopolitan method of growth (calling back to their history as a coalition of hill tribes), but is hardly the ladder that raises all peoples as defined by Marcellinius. Such is the defeat of these peoples that we do not know their names, but I hope that they did not suffer overmuch.
By the time of 430BE (when we see the first attempts of Artebazzan towards expansion over the seas), the Empire had roughly consolidated the core of Invicta Minor from the Victrix Mons in the west and north to the Great Trade Sea in the east and the Mountains of Hesh in the south. It was a wide and secure empire of likely ten million souls or perhaps as many as thirty million. It is important to note that the Senate and its ability to include conquered people as a form of consolation is essential for this rapid expansion, as it allowed the armies of Artebazzan to pursue campaigns of destruction and demoralisation rather than total defeat. Simply break the enemies will to fight, likely through decisive field battles and terror, then offer them appealing terms if they hand over their Kings.
Imperial Reach will not be Limited
~
Pataviam sang with ships and silver,
Its harbours full of every tongue,
And every tongue learned Artebazzan.
For trade is but tribute in finer silk,
And knowledge is dominion without blade.
Let others dig, we chart the stars.
~
With Invicta Minor secured, we see the first ‘Imperial Expedition’ depart Pataviam in the year 430BE. This expedition, which was bound for Invicta Major on the far side of the Eastern Victrix Mons, began a centuries long battle between the Emperors and the Senate which we have still not seen the end of.
You see, until now, expansion was a coordinated dance between The Senate and The Emperor. The Emperor, as commander of the armies of the Empire, chose targets and handled military affairs, while the Senate handled diplomacy and the governance of such affairs. The Emperor and his armies would bring the enemy to a breaking point, at which point the senate would step in as the ‘reasonable adult’, offer peace terms and get the Emperor to hold off complete and total destruction. These new senators would then already have positive ties to the established senators and the whole system would continue along.
In theory this system shared the power of conquest between both the Imperial Throne and The Senate, but in practice it produced a massive cohort of government leaders who had grudges against the Emperor and were insulated within the Senate. A lopsided distribution of power that no Emperor could have accepted.
This is where the Imperial Expeditions begin. Privately funded by the Emperor's own purse, sixteen heavy galleys depart Pataviam and head north. On the lowlands of Invicta Major they found Magnontium, beginning an occupation on the continent that will continue until this day.
Importantly, Magnontium and all territories attached to it were personal property of the Emperor. As far as he was concerned these were simply extensions of the palace grounds that happen to be hundreds of leagues distant. The thousands of inhabitants were tenants who owed personal loyalty to the Emperor, and as such needed no representation in the Senate. The balance of power had shifted and this could not be ignored.
It took them eighty years to organise, but the Senate responded with a ‘Civic Expedition’. A peaceful colonial expedition of seventeen ships travelling west around the Cape of Tabbadar to try and settle ‘The Beastlands’ far to the West. This expedition failed, sailing past the cape never to be heard from again, and this only increased the pressure and discord between the two forces.
And so followed nearly four hundred years of expansion. There is enough in each of these journeys to fill a historians report of its own, but I will summarise them here:
| Imperial Expeditions | Civic Expeditions |
| 1st Imperial - 430BE - Invicta Major - Founded Magnontium - Survived
2nd Imperial - 346BE - Invicta Major - Founded Port Aquilea - Survived 3rd Imperial - 283BE - Northern Esterra - Founded Vercellae - Destroyed 4th Imperial - 200BE - Northern Esterra - Recaptured Vercellae - Destroyed 5th Imperial - 120BE - Invicta Major East - Subjugated Alba Regius - Survived 6th Imperial - 1AE - Invicta Minor South (Tabbadar) - Subjugated Tabbadar |
1st Civic - 350BE - The Beastlands - Lost around the Cape of Tabbadar
2nd Civic - 301BE - Invicta Major - Founded Caralis - Survived 3rd Civic - 260BE - The Beastlands - Founded Nicopolis - Lost Contact 4th Civic - 220BE - Hildeblanc - Founded Crotoae - Destroyed by Drummondite forces 5th Civic - 142BE - Invicta Major East - Founded Alba Regius - Rebelled 6th Civic - 80BE - Southern Esterra - Founded Posta Lerona - Rebelled 7th Civic - 172AE - The Beastlands - Unknown |
There were some minor changes to business over this time, notably the Emperor found it easier to subjugate territories and leave them in a state of perpetual rebellion rather than colonise whole new nations. This way the war was never truly finished and if the war was never truly finished, then there was no need to elect senators.
So did Artebazzan chart the stars and teach every wayward savage the Artebazzani tongue to draw them into a brotherhood that spans the world? No, they pulled half the Sphere into a personal pissing contest between the Emperor and a rotating cast of his political enemies, a pissing contest that has probably killed millions and subjugated even more.
The Coming of Nicolo and the End of Gods
~
From the floodlands of wild Invicta,
To the jungled wrath of our enemies,
The legions march, not for spoil,
But for the Pact of Order made flesh.
To teach, to till, to tame
We carry fire where darkness lingers.
~
I think it is the greatest insult of Artebazzan that in obscuring so much of their history, they take the history of Niccolo Van Demuer from us, the man who is responsible for the righteous path that all humanity should pursue. But because it is wound up in Artebazzani failure and apprehension we can’t know much of him. So I will detail what we know here.
Prior to the arrival of Niccolo, the Artebazzani worshipped a Pantheon of gods known as the ‘Maximus Deus’. They saw that these gods were the ones who had competed with the other heretic gods of the world and rose to the top of the celestial hierarchy. As such there were a handful of slowly shifting gods who ruled over vast portfolios, while there was a smaller cast of minor gods who arrived from other cultures or from thin air. It is likely that this system was another necessity for the inclusion of other cultures in the fledgling Empire. When your nation is conquered and joins the empire you can keep your gods, they just get folded into the rotating war of the Gods like you had joined with a new sporting team. In truth the highest of the Maximus Deus rarely changed, and had existed since the defeat of the Holimalkota.
There were known to be priests with divine powers during this time, so it is likely that they were either powerful mages or were accessing parts of the Divine Spheres through ignorance, as reported by Spheric priests across the world in the process known as ‘Heretic Divinity’.
But heretic divinity is clumsy and expensive. When the recognised and respected arcanist Niccolo Van Demuer began to work miracles at a rate and cost far lower than any who had come before, all could not help but take notice.
Niccolo was a respected mage and researcher well into his life when his revelation occurred. At first his writings spread among other learned individuals and it was taken as another curiosity, but the miracles picked up pace. He wrought beings from storms, he witnessed the death of souls, he reported all of this in stunning detail, and also taught others how to do so, allowing these acts of divine provenance to be repeated. In the ultimate truth he used his considerable wealth obtained in the later years of his life to build the Window of Niccolo. The man, the prophet, would die at the base of the Window. Kindly speaking his truth to a cohort of children, if legend is to be believed.
A cohort was definitely there, but it was not children.
The issue with the Spheres was their power and their veracity. The Senate needed everyone’s gods to be on a (mostly) level playing field to keep all the disparate ethnicities and cultures of the Empire content. If a new, all powerful and all consuming deity enters the understanding it undercuts the contentedness for peoples to remain. At first the hope was that Niccolo’s ramblings would remain distant through the obfuscation of academia, but it transpires that the man was as charismatic as he was brilliant. A life spent teaching within the arcane academies of Pataviam had wrought a skilled orator capable of distilling his teachings for the commonfolk of the Empire. Which just would not do.
The Window was the final straw, this miracle would show the common folk that their gods were invalid and threaten to destabilise the Empire. And so a Civic Cohort (the Senates solution to the Imperial Legionnaires) marched on the Window, intent on tearing it down and arresting Niccolo.
But wherever the Senate wants to accomplish something, you will find the Emperor there prepared to spoil it for them.
Five hundred of the red-garbed Proceran Guard, two thousand ragged believers, and the golden-armoured Emperor Corsicus Cervitex himself stood on the hillside that held the Window and defied the Civic Cohort, a full three thousand armoured veterans of the fighting in Invicta Major. Legend had it that Emperor Corsicus stood at the head of this ramshackle army and said;
“Quis custodiet Imperium, si non ego?”
“Who guards the Empire if not I?”
The Battle of Salvatoris that would follow was a bloody one. But when all was said and done, the forces of the Senate were defeated and Niccolo Van Demuer would die in Emperor Corsicus’ arms and proclaim him the new Primarch of the Church.
Is it likely that, seeing the battle going well, Emperor Corsicus stabbed the old prophet and let him die at his feet? Probably. But I doubt we will ever know. Considering the close ties between the name Cervitex and the Sphere of Imperial Wisdom, this is likely in my mind.
The Church of Niccolo and his Divine Spheres became inevitable on the grounds of that hill. The Senate withdrew from its opposition almost immediately, less they faced an Emperor in ascendance, who was now the head of a church and had easy access to miracles. But it still took one hundred and twenty two years for the Senate and bureaucracy of the Church to deploy appropriate measures to ensure that this new faith would not cause widespread rebellion in the Empire. But eventually this was achieved and the common calendar was reset at 0AE by Emperor Corsicus’ inheritor’s inheritor, Emperor Oralkus Lumos.
The First End
~
Some say empires rot, that power wanes,
But stone need not move to endure.
For every child born beneath the Laurel,
Knows in their marrow the truth of Arcadius:
Empires do not fall.
They choose when to sleep.
~
The First End of Artebazzan, the first moment when things really began to question came on cloven hooves.
Since the Holimalktoa, the Artebazzani’s greatest enemies had been themselves and a lack of sufficiently powerful foes to keep the Empire lurching forward in one direction. The Empire had stumbled and spent most of its history fighting itself, but it had never truly been at threat until 91AE.
The Xan and their great Khan came across the northern wastes of Invicta Major, that impossibly wide expanse of land that was grass until it was nothing at all. A land so large that the insatiable greed of the Emperor and clawing hunger of the Senate were both cowed by its immense mass. The Xan crossed it and brought their war to the Empire.
And what a war it is.
The Xan are ‘Horsemasters’, which is to say they ride a breed of long-limbed powerful deers without antlers that they call ‘Ors’, commonly called ‘Horse’ in the trade tongue. Horses are skittish beasts, but when well trained they are faster than any man, many times his weight, twice his height, and capable of carrying riders into battle or over long distances. The Xan armour their mounts and ride them like they are the personification of the end of times. Previously the Legions of the Emperor and the Cohorts of the Senate had used professionalism and manoeuvre to win their wars against smaller nations, but here was a foe that was organised and could ride even the swiftest legion into the dirt. Over the course of 91AE to ~200AE the colonies of Invicta Major, which previously held tens of thousands of leagues of land in thrall, were reduced to isolated fortified holdouts and then to smouldering ruins.
The Senate and the Emperor were at each other's throats and where there should have been co-ordination between the two to hold the line, there was needling and opportunistic betrayal. So ingrained was the competition between both groups that the procedures and understanding of coordination simply didn’t exist and even if agreements could be reached in the Imperial Palace, there was no way to enforce and organise that out on the field. The Empire suffered defeat after defeat and even now their holdings in Invicta Major are a third of what they once were. The colonies in the East share no land border with the west and must be resupplied by sea.
This was the first ending, the first time the Empire threatened to buckle and break. While this was not what would transpire it showed the cracks in the foundations, the monsters that lurk below. For those of us in the world who would see the City of Charred Bones consume the Emperor, his Senate, and all his corrupted priests, it was a divine time. But it was not to last.
Gods of War, Gods of Change
~
So let the wild lands whisper,
Let rebels scratch at distant gates.
We do not fear the flinch of history
For history speaks our name in marble.
And when the Spheres burn low and cold,
Only Artebazzan shall remember fire.
~
This brings us to the modern age and the end of my work. As much as I would have liked it, it appears that the defeats that the Empire suffered at the hands of the Xan during the last hundred years have not shaken the foundations so rigorously that the cracks have spread. Instead it appears that we have had back-to-back ascendant Emperors who are leading from the front and a Senate that is weak enough to not overly oppose them. The last twenty or so years have seen great successes for the Empire in their wars against the Xan and while territory has not been recaptured, it at least not being lost any more.
But rebellions are growing elsewhere. The great revolution of Posta Lerona that brought Lerona Mere into the Concord and threw off the barely conscious rule of the colony by the distant Senate has weakened the empire, as much as they would rather not admit it. The fermenting rebellion in Tabbadar is another wound that the Emperor can ill afford. As much at the heights of the Empire are strong, the foundations continue to crack.
As much as I would like to never write of these fools again, there is plenty to learn here with subsequent research. Subjects such as the life of Niccolo Van Demuer, the growth of The Church, and the lost colonies of Artebazzan are interesting, if difficult to fully explore.
Thankyou for bearing with my ramblings, my energy, and my fervour, I hope we have all learnt something in this.
Gloria Rebellionis, Mors Imperatori
- Prospero Van Garzoni, Civil Service Researcher, July 225AE, Lerona Mere.