The Order of the Hippogriff
Before the demise of the Lloroi Empire, the most sacred ceremonies of the official state cult were conducted in the slender pyramids called the Spires to the Sun, where the Sun God Taquamenau was worshiped in the icon of a Sky Dragon. For centuries the noble Lloroi sent their offerings to the Spires unfailingly, until the several temples of the god Taquamenau equalled the Imperial Palace in decoration and treasure.

Although the Emperors trusted in the protection of their Sun God, a being whom they credited with giving them by right of conquest the whole of the Minarian continent, and later victory over all challenges to that empire, such as the revolt of the Scarlet Witch King, they did not fail to maintain a elite unit of bodyguards ?? The Order of the Hippogriff.

All warriors who distinguished themselves in warrior service might aspire to being recruited into the Imperial bodyguard, though very few warriors actually achieved induction. Not every man, after all, could master the privileged mounts of the Troop, the hippogriffs ?? strange offspring of horses and eagles created by the science of the Lloroi, who also created many other strange amalgam beast, such as the chimera, griffin, and the manticore. The sublime horse-eagle, the pegasus, was strictly reserved for Lloroi of the highest rank, but the griffin-horse (the pure-blood griffins being considered an intractable mount) was easily the mount of the next-highest dignity, though fiercer and more obstinate than any pegasus.

Ten worthy candidates might be taken into the imperial training program, but normally only one of these should successfully achieve induction. That all the recruits should well-versed in the familiar arms of the warrior and had demonstrated grace, wit, initiative, and courage went, of course, without saying. But the emperors demanded so much more from a knight of the Order. They were trained in the protocol of the court, but in drawing intuitive guidance from a mystical source called the "Flow," which if mastered allowed fabulous feats of physical performance and mystical achievement.

A knight in mastery of the Flow was no ordinary warrior. A weapon knocked from his hand might be instantly recovered by an act of levitation, or the his blood would not flow from what should have been thought a fatal wound. The Flow was, in fact, nothing less than that same power that wizards habitually tapped in the working of their magic. But unlike wizards, the knights were drilled in making the Flow their second nature, not in performing vulgar feats of thaumaturgy. The emperors had enough wizards, whom they usually disdained as unreliable eccentrics or fuddy-duddies.

As time went on, the ranks of the Order was increased, thought not so greatly that it could not be filled by candidates meeting its exacting standards, and the emperors came to depend more heavily upon them, as a growing imperial decadence filled the imperial service with opportunists and sycophants, who promised much and delivered little. Special missions were increasingly delegated to the Troop's members. Most important provinces of the empire, for instance, entertained a military attache from the Order, and sometimes the knights took on the role of the emperor's personal police force.

In extreme emergencies, the Order might be placed in the line of battle as an elite unit. During the exigencies of the war with the Scarlet Witch King, the Order led a hundred battles, taking heavy casualties but covering themselves with glory. They were present at the battle against the Woida, allies of the Witch King who attempted to drive upon the imperial heartland from Girion in the south. The only major battle which they miss was the final battles with the Scarlet Witch King's personal army under the glowering Tower of Zards, which he had raised as his stronghold. That credit went to the bold Sir Morholt.

But the jealous emperor denied the worth Morholt the honors due his victory and in vengeance he stole the One Hundred and Nine Lenses from the Spires to the Sun. If he meant to demonstrate his courage and audacity, he did so. And he demonstrated his cunning by eluding capture for nearly three years. In desperation to punish the malefactor, the Emperor put the Order of the Hippogriff at the service of the imperial governors trying to apprehend the criminal. Finally Morholt was run to ground by members of the Order, who had been unerringly guided to the quarry it sought though the inspiration of the Flow.

These plain, forthright knights, rising above the corruption of the world, little understood the malaise which swiftly overwhelmed the Lloroi Empire in the wake of the Scarlet Witch King's defeat. To effect that defeat, the imperial wizards had worked many great and deadly spells, and these were blame for spreading corruption throughout the body politic of the empire. Taxes were raised astronomically, so that those who held power could buy even more power. They managed to corrupt vast sections of the public at large, who ceased to understand that property and freedom comes from hard work and keeping what one earns, and not from the condescension of a corrupt official who purchases patronage with other people gold. Yet it was those who argued that they had a right to keep what hey had won by their own efforts who were called "greedy" by the sophisticated ones of the ruling elite.

Not only did the politics of the Lloroi become corrupt, but the imperial governors cheat and stole whenever they could, and the bureaucracies which supported the whole ancient structure seemed to grow arbitrary and abusive, as if they had no reason to be except to remake the culture of the empire to fit with their own corrupt preference and practices. Landholder were forbidden to drain swamps, or example, with the result that malaria and a host of swamp fevers swept away the lives of thousands.

Most appalling of all, the generation growing up, perhaps revolted by their own cowardice and unworthiness, mocked at warriors and at the very idea of worthiness. They became a lost generation,devoting themselves to debauchery and excess, abusing distilled spirits, hallucinogenic herbs, and the deadly black lotus.

Yet most people of the empire remained moderate and honorable, despite the debasement of the ruling classes. No one really understood the reasons for decay and could imagine no solution for it. Many who still lived by the old traditions hence turned away from the world and established cultures for their own members, adding to society's fragmentation. Where this sad situation would have carried no one can say but when the Cataclysm struck a half century following the fall of the Scarlet Witch King, countless subjects died, the innocent with the vicious. The Sublime Emperor himself perished as his palace dropped into the sea with the peninsula of Umiak, which was inundated by a great earthquake. All way chaos and all the races of the empire seemed to lose their heads. Fortunately, some of the Order of the Hippogriff were on hand to lift High Priest Wynbiigo out of the doomed city of Niiawee.

The members of the Order who survived gathered together and escorted Wynbiigo inland to the Spires to the Sun. Central order had collapsed, but the knights held to the high priest as supreme law of the land unless an heir to the throne should survive and make himself known. But Wynbiigo was already dying, of remorse for the shattered empire. Before his death, he used the authority what had descended upon him to give the Spires over to the safeguarding of the Order and placed a blessing upon the warriors of it. The men would never lack for dedicated heirs, he declared, and thee would carry on their fathers' tradition. Neither would the flock of hippogriffs fail to increase with the needs of the knights. Seemingly the priest's words flew straight to heaven, for in the thirteen centuries since his dying, all he promised has come to pass.

Small wonder so many of the common people died, as hard set as were the knights themselves to endure not only the early upheavals, but the devastating blow from Heaven.

During the dark centuries following the Cataclysm, the worship of the Sun God was forgotten in Minaria. Even the people of the South Plains who held onto civilization rejected Taquamenau in favor of local cults. The knights of the Order are the god's last congregation.

History is indebted to the knight of the Order for so much that is now known about the early post-Cataclysm, at least in the South Plains. The journals and diaries of these warrior-survivors are a priceless source when so much else was lost, which is no wonder, for many were highborn and well-educated, trained to think in a historical perspective. Even Adeese was a small town with little in the way of scholarly inhabitants when the Cataclysm struck, and everything west of the Dry Mountains had been drowned by the sea, or devastated by the Punishing Star, which seemed to be the gods' intended death blow as it blasted a crater half a league wide and devastated the whole and between the sea and the Dry Mountains, and swept all trace of life from the region we call the Waste of Vah-Ka-Ka.

Confused for a purpose now that the empire existed no more, the knights at first dedicated themselves to protecting the Lloroi survivors as best they could. But it soon became a humanitarian gesture and not more. The Lloroi no longer held power anywhere. The stunned survivors blamed the Lloroi for angering the gods by the practice of sorcery and many were mobbed and slain in revenge. More of these hapless folk were driven from the ruined villages, doubtlessly to die in the wild. The Lloroi must have come very near to extermination in Minaria, but, as the centuries passed, they endured, without a Minarian state of their own, disliked and distrusted by their non-Lloroi neighbors, as a small, clannish population known for its scholarly inclination, producing many physicians, alchemists, and sometimes dominating the arts, crafts, and money-lending ventures, which earned them even more dislike. But though the Lloroi survived in Minaria, whatever political and martial genius that had animated them, it seemed to have departed forever with the Cataclysm, if not before.

In protecting the Lloroi, the knights established a tradition of protecting the weak and fighting for justice which was carried on by their descendants.

The Lloroi which sought protection were soon outnumbered by other survivors who found their way to the Spires to the Sun, for there only other armed men seemed to be marauding brigands. The Order allowed and a town came to be in the shadow of the Sun Temples, though water was never abundant enough to allow a city to rise. The knights of the first generation took mates, had families, and reared their sons to be future knights and their daughters the wives and mothers of knights. Also women tended the newborn hippogriffs, until their tempers grew bad with maturity.

A hippogriff is not an easy beast to master, since it had been fashioned as a creature of war. The Lloroi, with their arcane science, had created many hybrid creatures, some of them recreations of beasts that had existed nowhere but in their ancient mythology, for display, ceremonial occasions, for hunter's prey, for war-beasts, and as gifts to foreign courts. Some of these survived the Cataclysm, though usually in very small numbers. The griffin is a rare creature, but when mated to a mare, produced the hippogriff, which is fertile, though not overly so. Unlike the griffin, it may be tamed for riding, but it remains one-quarter lion, and one quarter eagle, the latter which predominates over the lion, so that its feline ancestry shows mainly in its ferocity, and in the need of a steady hand to train and break to the saddle.

Hippogriffs are gentled from birth to get them used to Man, but with adolescence comes a violence that must be faced down with the strength of a professional trainer. The trainer works closely with the young knight who is expected to claim the mount, the this river in expected to gradually take over the training role. Hippogriffs are trained with clipped wings, or they surely would fly away, and hoods that blindfold them and constrain their beaks, since sudden movement will excite an unbroken hippogriff to violence. The knight will ride the hippogriff about on the ground, guiding the hooded creature by rein and command, getting it used by degrees to the work of a mount of war.

Once it is fairly broken, only a hippogriff's personal trainer may ride it. A stranger will be tossed and bucked, probably to be thrown off high above the ground, to be set upon by beak and talon is he remains alive afterwards. It will take weeks of persistent training to orient it to obeying a new master no matter how skilled a rider he is. The beast must come to accept the sound of his voice, the smell of his body. Even then a man needs great strength and reflexes to deal with any sudden balkiness that his mount might present. Balkiness is especially common if the rider takes a passenger -- which he will rarely consent to do unless it means life or death -- such as rescuing a helpless victim from some danger upon the ground. Usually such a one is placed upon a pillion behind the knight, least the hippogriff suddenly turn its head and attempt to bite.

If a knight's mount is killed or permanently disabled he is in serious difficulty. Taming a hippogriff is so time-consuming that the richest knight rarely has a second beast ready and trained. The manner of war of the Hippogriff Troop does not readily accommodate infantrymen and so the unmounted knight loses face until he is finally able to take to the air once again. This situation contributes to the kind of doting care that most knights will lavish upon on their hippogriffs. And it would seem that beasts hold some affection for their masters, also. It has been said that should a knight fall, many a time his hippogriff will flutter to his side and keep his enemies at bay.

Whether by death or accident, a hippogriff will sometimes slip away. It is almost useless for other knights to give chase, for there is no way to bring a hippogriff to heel while airborne. Sometimes the fugitive is permanently lost, but more often it will soon enough return to the Spires to the Sun and the cages of its kind, as the creature has a flocking instinct and hippogriffs are not normally found in the wild.

The knights organized their community on the basis of a military order, and civilians under their protection fell naturally in the role of a support structure for that order. The community remained relatively small, and so the ancient rules and customs did not have to be greatly modified under the new conditions.

Courage is the paramount virtue of the knight of the Order. He is expected to be exemplary in courage and veracity. He is expected to protect those who ask his protection, and have not demonstrated that they are unworthy of such a boon. Women are not permitted to serve with arms, but knights are schooled in courtesy and graceful manners toward the weaker sex. To be a knight required real accomplishment in arms, but he is also the head of his own household, over whom he is expected to be a wise and fair judge.

The knights elect one of their own number to be Marshal of the Hippogriffs, essentially their military leader. The chamberlain, he who manages the affairs of the temple and the town does not have to be a knight, but is often an ex-knight, either old or disabled. Both the marshal and the chamberlain hold office for five years and custom does not permit either to succeed himself.

At first the knights essentially a military garrison of a desert redoubt, but with time and improving conditions in the world, they returned to a contemplation of the Flow and their old power was restored. Some knights achieve such a command of the Flow that they are little distinguishable form magicians. Ebersolt, marshal at this writing, is an exemplary war-leader, but also a healer of no mean fame.

From the early days the knights have taken the cause of one monarch or another, ostensibly to fight for a just cause, but the wisest marshals have always tried to remain aloof from the tawdry quarrels of kings. It is not honorable by the knights' lights to slay for reasons of rich tribute or the honey-sweet tongues of guileful diplomat.

Nonetheless, often enough the knights have distinguished themselves in wars which they have judged necessary, such as the War of the Three Tyrants and the Wisnyo War.

More frequently, however, the knights exist to perform individual feats of daring while gliding over the face of Minaria, going where the Flow might lead them. Often the has been led knight to his destined fate ?? perhaps to do battle with villains or monsters. Or, give justice to a village being ground down by a rapacious baron, or a parish terrorized by an evil witch, or a countryside menaced by rampaging beasts. All such adventures are the proper role of the Order of the Hippogriff.

Wynbiigo long ago promised that the Order would never perish, and there are perhaps few persons in Minaria who do not hope that the gods will continue to grant that priest's dying wish.


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