Arcana: The Alfar Empire
The Warring Kings of Alba
Before recorded history there was Alba. A wide land beautiful and bountiful in its surplus; it was such a place that the ancestors of what later peoples would call the "Alfar" awoke. They were a strong, tall, and vibrant people beloved of the gods. They were separate and had no concept of cities until they gradually learned from the ancient ruins they found at some places in Alba, or beyond. Peering into the ruins of the past they glimpsed greatness even as they were seizing their own.
These were perhaps the happiest years of the Alfar, the years before they discovered the killing power of bone, rock and bronze. Villages became towns. Towns became cities. Elders became Kings and Kings levied armies. With organization came the Lords. And with the Lords came ambition; and with ambition came greed and from that came the hatred of neighbours.
And so the Kings went to war with each other and reeked great slaughter upon themselves, as for the long lived Alfar war was waged for decades. In the wars that seemed to have no end the forms of the most ancient and secret arts of the elves begin to be codified.
For a time the balance between the Kingdoms was maintained. War was not always the overt clashing of armies. Skirmishing, raiding was the most common form as a strict balance of power eventually tempered the first destructive conflicts into a more pragmatic cycle of battle. Systems of alliances ensured that no one ruler could aspire to conquer more than one of his neighbours; anyone that threatened to start building a great kingdom was faced with a large coalition of his neighbours that soon broke apart with his humbling or destruction.
The Yellow Emperor was one such man who managed to conquer roughly half the Kingdoms being succumbing to rebellion and tenacious resistence of the Kings. Around this time, when this form of more limited conflict settled in to the point that many of the Kingdoms became stagnant or resigned to it the first embers of human civilization begun.
Midgar and Elves
Awaking in at time when the Alfar did not yet rule supreme thanks to do their division, the first Midgar knew nothing of the great powers that were at work amongst them. When the Lords of Dar-Gorath discovered these short sighted, short lived creatures in the hills of Lemuria herding goats and sheep they were idly amused.
They knew of other races, for they were wise and learned. But unlike the others of the Kingdoms they saw potential beyond simple exploitation. They begun to trade and through trade they found that the Midgar were numerous, far more then they had ever suspected. The shortness of their lives and the bounty of their original homelands had seen to the rapid population growth of Man. When the homelands had filled up they expanded to find new lands; and found the Alfar.
At first the Alfar carried away humans in great numbers as slaves. They used them as curiosities and cheap, although short term, labour. Galandrius Telgorath, the Lord of Dar-Gorath, instead brought Midgar into his realm and settled them ever as he expanded into their lands and brought them under his crown. 'What does it matter?' Said his peers, 'Let him waste his time with the monkeymen and the barbarous lands,' They jeered.
The Lord of Dar-Gorath enslaved greater numbers of humans than any other King did and marched away from Alba into the outerlands and in doing so expanded his power greatly. His army was tempered in battle with barbarians, monstrous races that the Alfar had never seen the like of, Greenskin brutes that defied explanation and feral hybrids of man and beast. Yet, they did not even touch the closet limits of what they could dominate. Where they did not conquer or force into vassalage they traded with and slowly and surely owned them.
The Emperor of All Alfar
The Alfar who would be ruler of all under heaven turned his attention back to the ancient homeland of his people. Making alliances and breaking them with impunity he turned his seasoned and numerous armies against the stagnant Kings who thought themselves his peers; they carried his closet neighbors away in but a few seasons of campaigns and brought their Kings to his feet to exclaim unto him cries of fealty and praise.
With hordes of disciplined soldiers in gleaming maile and plate he was the greatest King in the world; none could deny this even as they fought him. The Army of Dar-Gorath was not simply an elven host like its enemies. In its ranks rode thousands of Human cavalry, fighting with both lance and bow. Uruks, who had gained the respect of the Gorathian legions, marched with their axes and overwhelming ferocity. Devgar mercenaries hefted great hammers and brought down the walls of cities. Halfling slingers and scouts worked tirelessly even as the elves of Dar-Gorath perfected the Arts that was the heritage of their race.
Instead of occupying only cities his engineers built great fortresses, walls, and towers across landscapes that broke up the advances of the forming coalition against him by forcing them siege dozens of places even as the Emperor's troops ravaged their countries.
His servants raised ever larger legions of professional troops that campaigned year round under the Emperor himself. His agents pilfered all ruins and hoards. His ministers taxed all his subjects heavily and broke any landholder or grandee that dared to claimed exemption until he whole country groaned under the weight of the Empire.
At the end All Under Heaven was his in Alba. Some he destroyed, others he allowed to join him as the new great Lords of the Empire, others he exterminated and ground their cities back into the earth, and the most unlucky he uprooted and sent to colonize the lands beyond Alba. In the first year of his complete victory the Emperor decreed that time and history itself he would command; it was to be the First Year of the Alfar. At the end of his life, for he was old even when he had conquered Alba, the First Emperor sent his legions, as his regular blocks of foot and horse were being called, out into the furthest reaches of his influence to search for the fabled exilar of immortality and when they failed he himself searched for it.
He lead his final campaign a full hundred years after his great victory over the Alfar. Deep into the Underdark in search of a relic said to be held by some monstrous people there. There he fell in a disastrous battle which sent his armies out of the underdark for a generation. Galandrius Telmel had left as he came.
The Empire of the Alfar
At his death the whole Empire revolted. The Second Emperor crushed it and pacified the Empire completing the work of his father. The "First Dynasty" of Dar-Gorath eventually gave way to a second dynasty, of which its complete eradication of the Kyrenian League for the danger its Sorcerer-Kings posed was but one of its many triumphs, and then came the reign of the Five Good Emperors.
The Five Good Emperors, lasting from about 1000 to 3000, perhaps represented the golden age of the Empire. This was the era when the Emperor Faegon ruled most of the known world and knew no rival. In this era all slavery was abolished; every creature was free under the absolute and unquestionable rule of the Emperor.
Peoples prospered, the land was green and bountiful, the cities made great and fat through trade and happiness was said to be the common condition of all within the empire. All those that existed outside of it to snowy mountain tribes to lurking monstrous beats in the wastes and the foul creatures of the underdark, elves included, were nothing more than gnats huddling in terror of the one force that could not be challenged in all creation.
But all things come to an End.
The Decline
By the 4000's the Empire was in a long period of decline. Stagnation set in for there were no challenges and no threats. Mediocre Emperors reigned one after another since the murder of the Tyrant, whose named has been wiped from all history, who succeeded the last of the Five Good Emperors.
As the most noble families choose to pursue politics rather than war less and less elves of quality entered the legions leaving the humans to raise higher in their ranks, for they were ever the favorite of the sons of Dar-Gorath. The decline of martial and legionary values as a focus of society was but one of the rots that gnawed at the Empire.
The center became preoccupied with itself and shifted much of their focus away from managing the outer provinces in favour to increasing their own power, which was to be found in the center. And for an age it didn't matter. There were no external threats and the Empire seemed strong enough to take care of itself. And so the Great Lords of the Empire started to believe less that it was their duty to sustain the state with every cost born cheerfully and more that it was their right to lead it.
When Alfar governors stopped receiving enough recruits for their legions, as the men were needed by the grandees and Generals in the home provinces to contend for the throne, they recruited more humans and locals into their ranks to fill up the gaps then ever before.
And when they became corrupt, feeble, and stagnant they started to gave way to greatest of their servants who were more vibrant and ambitious then they. For what did the tyrant in the capital care about a province that could not provide tribute? What did the great noble whose son could be Emperor, if he only kept the money he was to send to the provinces, care what happened to places that could never truly leave the Empire?
The frontier seemingly slipped away under the eyes of the uncaring Lords in the heartlands who cared for nothing other than their personal power. The only Emperor who grasped the danger was murdered by his own soldiers at the thought of campaigning beyond the still almost-idyllic heartlands. And so humans like Conrad Scheyern took whole provinces away and begun their own Empires while the Asgar-led Orthodoxy swept like a wildfire across Lemuria, converting milions to the new Faith.
The Age of the Empire has passed for want of the will to prevent it.
Warring States and the Great War
The death of the last Emperor at the hands of his soldiers plunged the Empire into a succession crisis. Established precedent existed for patrilinear, matrilinear, meritocritous and electoral succession to the Diamant Crown and no single candidate had been groomed for the throne. Dozens then hundreds of potential successors lined up, from sons to daughters to cousins to famous generals, wise senators and powerful lods. Each had their own claim to the crown and each soon gained a following. Conspiracy, manipulation and betrayal was rife and by the last century of the 5th millenium, the Empire was no longer a rock of ages but a treacherous quicksand, ready to swallow the foolish or unwary. Open squabbling between lords was common, and many Midgar, Devgar and Uruk found employment as hireswords.
Then, in 5149 Imperial Calender, the sorcerors who would be known as the Necromancer-Lords made themselves known. A cabal of willworkers of shocking puisance, their ranks included not just highborn races like Alfar and Asgar, but baseborn mages and even, it is rumored, a godling cast out of the celestial bureaucracy. They had seen the failure of the highborn and had pooled their wisdom to usher in a new age.
This was not to be.
It was likely that the aphorism that absolute power corrupts absolutely, for out of these high-minded morals came the most devastating war that the world of Arcana had seen. The apex of the destruction was the period in the middle of the war when the Necromancers managed to tap into and control the Tower of Life, fueling ever more destructive weapons and magics with the unending flow of mana. It was only the actions of a group of heroes that the node tap was destroyed in 5186, shattering the tower and unleashing vast mutagenic energies across thousands of miles, creating the Sea of Chaos. That was the tipping point and the Necromancer-lords never recovered. By 5200 Lemuria was liberated at incredible cost and soon afterwards the Alliance of Light dissolved, its various lords and kings returning to their games of state.
A century later, life has once again returned to normalcy, though rumors of a new land far to the west have began to make themselves heard at courts across Lemuria . . .