Many parts of Minaria suffered Cataclysmic devastation. Hothior, on the contrary, owes its existence to the incredible upheavals of those decades. Prior to the Cataclysm, the city of Bihestag was a thriving seaport of the Lloroi Empire. But the transformations of the Cataclysm warped the sea floor, raising up the silts and sands of the continental shelf, leaving ruined Bihestag far inland.
The Cataclysm created a warm, humid climate for proto?Hothior, but the exposed sea floor for a long time supported merely the rankest weeds. Only a few wretched family groups could eke out a livelihood in a land so raw, and these subsisted mainly on shellfish and waterfowl at the ocean front.
Gradually the growth and death of vegetation enriched the land, while the swift streams carried mature soil from the north in time of flood. The new fertility allowed the beginnings of forests and grasslands and the first noteworthy people to benefit from this virgin wilderness were wandering Trolls, who had established themselves at Stone Face. But the Trolls were not a settling race, and only an occasional circle of stones from some old Trollish roasting pits remain as evidence of their occupation.
Outside proto?Hothior, men had fallen into deep barbarism. As they leaned to survive in the new world of the post?Cataclysm, their population increased. Tribal war raged over planting and hunting grounds, and the smaller and less warlike peoples had to migrate to new territory of ancient Hothior. These men were more acquainted with village life and agriculture than were the Trolls and human hunter?gatherers who had come before them. For several generations the tribes fought the Trolls and savages and each other, until they staked out more?or?less permanent tribal territories.
At this point, the latter seventh century after the Cataclysm, written history begins to fill out the vagueness of myth and conjecture. The first of these in both age and importance are the state archives of the trading city of Zefnar, whose merchants had begun to sail far afield to provide goods for the growing markets of the south. To their account is added that of the traders of Mivior, who arrived only slightly later, and the city?state of Plibba, which knew the proto?Hothiorans as barbarian raiders.
The Zefnarites called ancient Hothior "Soraskier," which meant "Barbaria." They exchanged civilized wares for furs, amber, honey timber, and slaves. They were the first to label Hothiorans as fools mainly from the unfair trades they were able to foist upon them and for scorn of their different customs. Particularly, the Zefnarites ridiculed the barbarians' goddess religion and the high status of their women.
The Soraskier tribe to benefit most directly from the visits of the Zefnarites were the Milkyatens. The merchants built a trading town in their territory at the head of Kartika Bay. From this town, called Rocazha, they acquired civilized goods and knowledge of sophisticated ways, quickly achieving a superiority over their less-well?favored neighbors. Tribes that did not keep on good terms with the Milkyatens were denied access through their lands to the trading posts, hence the great men of Rocazha grew politically as well as economically powerful.
Exposure to foreign merchants and visitors acquainted the tribes, especially the Milkyatens, with new modes of warfare and social organization. The old religion could not accommodate the new ideas awakening in the people. Soon goddess?worship declined in favor of a patriarchal system on the Zefnarite model, but the woman's place in Hothior remained a relatively high one.
Eventually the Zefnarites fell out with the Milkyatens, who were becoming too wise for their unfair bargaining methods. Furthermore, the sea-farers resented Milkyaten interference in their trade with interior Soraskier trade. When they brought in Zefnarite soldiers to instill more respect into the obdurate tribesmen, the angry Milkyatens instead grew mutinous.
Envious of Zefnarite trade so close to their own borders, the Miviorans came to the aid of the Milkyaten's rebellion. Provided with Mivioran arms and advice, the tribesmen stormed into Rocazha and expelled the Zefnarite garrison. Yakami, the chief of the Milkyatens, donned a ruby crown and proclaimed himself king, adopting Rocazha as his capital but renaming it Port Lork. Lork was the father?god who, Yakami claimed, had presented him with the regalia which proclaimed his royalty and henceforth represented the guardian spirit of the Hothioran kingship.
Mivior replaced Zefnar as the major trading partner of the Milkyatens, while the Zefnarites founded a new town in Soraskier farther east, among a different tribal confederacy which had so far resisted capitulation to the rulers in Port Lork. This settlement later acquired the name of Castle Lapspell.
The founding of Hothior proper is attributed to Orenburt the Wise. By means of some cunningly-applied force and much skillful diplomacy, Orenburt managed to gather his neighbors into an inclusive confederacy. From this union Hothior was born. This name translates (from Mivioran, the language of tribal diplomacy at this point) as "Great Confederacy" (Hoth = Confederacy; Ior = Great).
Orenburt's reign was successful in foreign matters, too, making good Hothior's claims to extensive territories. To protect the northern wastes, Orenburt built a fortress on the ruins of Bihestag, called Tadafat. But it must be recognized that as king, Orenburt's authority was largely personal; the country as yet had scarcely accepted the kingship as an institution. Political development took the line of local privileges which were gradually augmented by an aristocracy of nobles and priests. Against these obdurate magnates, Orenburt's heirs had to contend doggedly, and the struggles between the aristocracy and the kingship formed the central point of Hothioran politics during this period.
By the early tenth century, Internal strife is all the chroniclers have to record. Even so, despite the disorganized condition of the kingdom, the Hothiorans rendered northern Minaria a signal service by holding a dangerous invasion at bay.
A nomadic people whom the Hothiorans called the Wisnyo, the "enemy," burst upon Southwestern Minaria, conquering even mighty Zefnar. In his old age, Simir Raveen, their chieftain, turned his aggressions northward against Hothior. Craftily evading the army waiting for him at the River Deep, he used the Zefnarite navy to land his troops at Castle Lapspell ?? still a Zefnarite colony. The Hothioran army was outflanked and destroyed at the Battle of Standing Stone. The Wisnyos swiftly captured and burned Port Lork, putting thousands to the sword, while spreading their dominance over most of the terrified and demoralized kingdom.
Fortunately, the Hothiorans still held out in Tadafat. In the following spring, serious revolts called Simir Raveen south. His chieftains stationed in the north, quarreling amongst themselves once their charismatic overlord was out of sight and unused to rainy weather, impassable swamps, rugged mountains, and dense forests, failed to bring the matter to a decision. The Wisnyos' impulse to expand ended with the death of Simir Raveen the following year, and the frontier settled down in the area south of Tadafat.
The second generation of Wisnyo warriors, softened by civilized luxury, began to lose ground to a determined Hothioran reconquest. Their garrison captains feuded endlessly and Simir Raveen's son, a lazy voluptuary, supplied no strong hand from the center. In a remarkably short time, the Hothioran counterattack became a victorious march, ending in the glorious liberation of Castle Lapspell.
The Hothioran kingship emerged with renewed prestige. A great hour seemed to await the nation, when all of the sweetness of victory was swept aside.
In the mid?tenth century, Minaria suffered one of the most terrible disasters since the Cataclysm: An invasion by monsters called "the abominations of the land and the horrors of the air." The few surviving contemporary accounts shun any detailed description of the creatures, but they seemed to have been unlike the ogres, wyrms, and sea serpents that roam naturally about Minaria. They struck Mivior first, but erupted into Hothior on the peninsula at the mouth of Kartika Bay, since then called "Cape Horror." They rapidly overwhelmed Port Lork and Castle Lapspell, both still physically damaged from the recent war. Veteran armies broke and ran, leaving the countryside to unimaginable devastation.
The monsters may have been amphibious, for they largely remained in the vicinity of the sea and rivers, which meant that Hothior's choice land was overrun. Despairing that even Tadafat would hold, the king, Urashim, fled with his family across the Wet Lands, seeking the Mivioran town of Addat. According to legend, while crossing the marshes on a raft, Urashim was attacked by "abominations" and drowned, though his children escaped to report the details of the tragedy, not the least of which was the disappearance of Yakami's ruby crown into the swamp.
Soon even the interior town of Tadafat had to be abandoned. What had been a civilized nation overnight plunged back to the level of the early post?Cataclysm. Unable to plant and harvest, subject to attack in broad daylight, the population decreased rapidly. For the next generation only hunger could drive the terrorized family clans out of their hiding places. The art of government and writing was all but forgotten. The Lay of Dyer recounts these years, but for all its heroic wording, it cannot disguise the prevailing desperation.
Years passed. Suddenly the Hothiorans sensed that the monsters were decreasing in number. At long last, days might pass before hunters sighted even one.
After the trauma of the "abominations," the Hothiorans picked themselves up very slowly. Tribal conflicts reasserted themselves and chieftains quarreled over the kingship, the Yakamite line being extinct. A legend grew up that the gods would choose the next king, and that he would be the man who recovered the ruby crown from the marshes. Yet, while disputes prevailed in Hothior, another invasion penetrated the unhappy land. The Muetarans had completed their conquest of Kalruna?Sasir and were eager to subjugate "Barbaria."
Popular legend remembers the Muetaran tyranny as a glorious age when commoner and noble united in one body to rid their country of the intruder. But this is certainly not true. The invaders were no so formidable as they appeared, since for all its outward strength, the Muetaran kingdom was beset by internal problems and myriad weaknesses. The enemy king knew that his armies could not sustain themselves indefinitely against a united people and so the royal policy of those years was to suborn the natural leaders of the Hothioran the nobles, whom they gave wide estates both in Muetar and in Hothior, and to educate young Hothioran lords as Muetarans.
Cautious and pragmatic, the Muetarans managed to induce most of the Hothioran nobility to accept privilege at foreign hands and work against their own country's interest. In all the pledges and treaties exchanged between the Hothioran mighty and the lords of Muetar, the interests of the common Hothiorans were hardly acknowledged at all.
Added by self-interested and suborned Hothiorans, the Muetarans, by fits and starts, seized all the lands east of the Ebbing and put lords of their own choosing over them. They conducted themselves with unbearable arrogance, regarding common people of Hothior were stupid savages fit only for slavery and serfdom. No one expected that these folk had a conscious will of their own. But they did, and that will did not favor being ruled from Basimar. The Hothiorans, toughened by the events of the recent past, found leaders from their own ranks and assailed Muetaran garrisons on the fringes with stubborn partisan warfare. As the situation developed, many a collaborating Horthioran noble saw his stock run off and his buildings burned. And more than a few experienced capture and trial at the hands of peasant insurgents, and ended their lives kicking empty air at the end of a gibbet.
It was a cruel war. Sometimes Hothioran nobles supported one side, then the other, and sometimes even betrayed the faction they were pledged to in the midst of a battle. A band of high-born turncoats even lured the peasant-general Sheldric to a parley and seized him for the Muetarans, who condemned him for treason and put him to death with torture. But their high-handed act only created a martyr which increased the fury of the resistance, which in turn drew leaders from the nobility, many of whom were coming to realize that the rebels were going to win in the end. Many collaborators fled the dangers in Hothior and took up residence on the Muetaran estates earlier acquired as bribes and gifts; hence their valuable services were lost to the beleaguered Muetarans. One day, before anyone realized it, Hothior's cause had become ripe for a final victory.
The epic poem Mandorai tells the story of Walkort of Mandora, the young heir of a great house who judged that the kingdom of Hothior might fall into chaos after victory unless a legitimate king were to emerge. He decided that he should be that king and went seeking the lost crown of Yakami. A character in the poem describes its hiding place:
The crown-fabled
pool with old blind fish filled
Is stagnant
amid the reeds centuries old
Under a low
sky with thunder rolling
There Trolls
cast torchlight upon blackened mold
Sinister and
deep, the pool is revealed
By the fearful
sound of croaking only,
Made by sluggish
frogs. The moon emerges
And observes
its own face, strange and lonely,
A death's head
lighted from within itself.
On the still,
murky waters reflected
One red ruby
eye in the old moon's skull
Awaits the king
that Fate has selected.
History records that Walkort returned to the tribes with what seemed to be the crown of Yakami on his brow, thereby founding the Mandora Dynasty. The free lands beyond the Ebbing made common cause with their enbonded brethren, inciting Muetar to launch a major invasion of the west to destroy their support, but Walkort skillfully decoyed the mailed knights into the dense woods near Port Lork and ambushed them. Only a few Muetaran knights escaped back across the River Flood Water in what is remembered Muetar's greatest military disaster. Bereft of soldiery, the Muetaran colonizers fled back to their own country. Hothior had been reborn as a nation.
But reborn Hothior was a very different creature from that which had perished under the attacks of the abominations. Walkort had grown intolerant of his disunited and quarrelsome chieftains during the war of liberation. The Hothioran king saw his victory as a golden opportunity to expand royal power; moreover, he possessed the military prowess and the moral authority to carry out his program. Walkort reestablished the crown's title to most of the abandoned and exile-owned lands of Hothior and created a new and loyal aristocracy depended upon royal patronage.
Unfortunately, Walkort went too far too quickly in centralizing the Hothioran government, and his less-apt successors went even further. These monarchs believed they were enhancing their personal authority by encroaching on regional and municipal rights, but in fact they were merely transferring power from the people to a class?conscious bureaucracy. This latter soon had grown too large and protective of its own privileges to be properly controlled by royal supervision. During reigns of strong kings it paralyzed worthwhile initiatives, and under weak kings it was actually the Hothior chiefs of government, the chancellors, who exercised real power.
Nonetheless, during this transition from strong kingship to rapacious bureaucracy, the nation's material prosperity grew. The most talented people of Hothior turned away from agriculture on the poor sea sands of the country and entered trading in a large way. Hothiorans built their own ships for the first time and vied with foreign merchants in the important market towns, such as Castle Lapspell. The royal family established vast horsehide tanneries as a state monopoly, enriching themselves and the exchequer. At times Hothioran soldiers adventured in foreign lands, such as when Muetar fell into chaos and they sacked Plibba, bringing back many captives for ransom or slavery.
But the general prosperity began to suffer as the self-interested bureaucracy increasingly pursued a program of ever?increasing taxes and inept centralized control. Many persons fled Hothior to saved their wealth from rapacious imposts and avoid the dictation of Hothior's new ruling class, the low?born but willful and insolent magistrates and judges of the administration, with the result that fewer prosperous people remained behind to meet the ever heavier exactions of the chancellors and his corrupt underlings.
A situation which was unhappy grew tragic in the early?middle 1200's when a secret demonist Mornard rose up through the ranks by scurrilous means and became chancellor. A master mage as well as a crafty power?grasping politician, Mornard's dreams of dominance were held in check for a time only by the wizard Farelann, the chief counselor to the weak and feckless King Pitheon.
Hoping to outmaneuver Farelann, Mornard found support by pretending to favor the growing merchant class against the nobility. He bypassed the traditional assembly for the discussion and recommendation of laws, but gave arbitrary power to the bureaucratic chiefs and judges, whom he alone had the power to appoint. But Mornard's spreading tyranny created fierce opposition, among which was a band of rebellious knights known as the "Forri." These quixotic heroes ranged the Mivioran border and the Bad Axe Forest, routing tyrannical magistrates, judges, and tax collectors and giving heart to all of Hothior's disaffected. When it became clear that the wizard Farelann was helping and sheltering members of the Forri, Mornard's men moved against him. According to the story, the good wizard committed suicide while trapped behind the stone door of his own magic room. With his death Mornard moved harshly to repress domestic opposition. Before long only the small band of Forri knights evaded his determined dragnet.
Mornard more and more openly betrayed his occult interests and invited many dark cults from foreign lands to enter Hothior to serve him. The chancellor also kept friendly relations with the Meutaran sorcerer Corfu, an even greater mage who ruled Meutar during the final eclipse of the Oyarostar dynasty, and whose secret aid had helped the Hothioran tyrant come to power. It is said that the wizards conspired to place other dark wizards upon the various thrones of their neighbors.
Through long years of despotism, patriots such as the Forri did battle with the minions of Mornard in fields, forests, mountains, and even the darkened city alleyways of Hothior. The contest might well have gone to Mornard in the end had not the forces of right found a powerful new ally in Farelann's beautiful daughter, the sorceress called Sheladeann. Farelann's heir championed Melwert, the exiled son of Pitheon, as the legitimate successor to the discredited king. Armed with magical powers which seemed to rival Mornard' own, this strange and mysterious figure fought doggedly for her country's freedom. At last, discomforted in war and facing a general uprising, Mornard hunkered down in Port Lork where, it is said, he sought to call upon the dark gods and promised them a holocaust of victims to save his power.
Sheladeann and the Forri pursued the mage into his stronghold before he could work his terrible sorcery and destroyed him in a desperate battle. Afterwards, the surviving knights of the Forri were justly remembered as heroes, while Sheladeann seemingly abandoned her adventurous ways, married a knight of the Forri, and retired to the quite life of a healer.
The coalition which placed Pitheon's son Melwert upon the throne of Hothior recognized the evil inherit in Walkort's system of rule. As zealots seized control of the revolution, the servants of the former regime were savagely purges, some of whom fled to the protection of Corfu in Muetar. The power of bureaucracy and judges was reduced and a powerful diet of gentry and merchant class. Thereafter the diet chose the chancellor, who thereafter required a majority vote to enact his policies. Limited tenure of judges and other appointed officials prevented the creation of bureaucratic fiefdoms which had for so long savaged the liberty of the people.
The system, though harshly established, was proving out a good one by the time Boewenn's invasion came out of Elfland in the reign of Melwert's successor Silvon. The Elves seemed bent on eliminating all human life from northern Minaria. Augmenting their modest-sized armies with frightful spells and magic devices, the Neuthans sacked Tadafat and advanced south. Fortunately, an alliance of northern kingdoms turned back the invaders, and advanced rapidly upon the collapsing Elven military, pillaging their capital of Ider Bolis in 1303.
After a wise and lengthy reign, Silvon's son Melwert II passed a strong country over to his noble son Boarhort.