Prior to the Lloroi invasion 2500 years before present, Minarian history is, essentially, lost history. Undecipherable steles and hieroglyphics exist to be sure, as do artifacts and ruins, but the story behind these crumbling monuments and fading traces must go untold.
The most widely-available account of the foundation of the Lloroi Empire is found in the Histories of Khersemo, a widely- traveling scholar of Mivior writing prior to the "Invasion of the Abominations of the Land and the Horrors of the Air." Born circa 880 A.C. (After the Cataclysm), the historian's death is traditionally given as 929 A.C. Though the disaster which befell Mivior in 949 cast his efforts into obscurity, a revival of learning in the late Eleventh Century brought his work back into the light of day.
Khersemo, by virtue of his early date and extensive travels, gained access to many manuscripts which are not now extant. Even the libraries of Neuth and the Eaters of Wisdom have been sadly depleted by war and invasion since Khersemo wrote, and so much of what our authority says needs to be taken on faith, at least until chance finds or diligent scholarships provide the means to confirm or refute him.
More than any other early historian, Khersemo revitalized antiquarian research, so much so that he is called "The Father of History." His overall theme was the growth and glory of Mivioran civilization and power, but he took a very broad perspective on his subject. Those chapters which he devoted to the Lloroi represent, by and large, all that any modern-day non-specialist knows about the subject. While some scholars may claim to see errors enough to cast doubt on some of Khersemo's assertions, their own academic quarrels and lack of consensus have prevented any historical scheme alternate from Khersemo's from emerging. Our account of Minaria's primeval days must therefore be drawn largely from the traditional sources which have served so well for so long.
In Book I, Khersemo tells us that the Lloroi race originated outside Minaria, a region which he was one of the first to define. It traditionally includes all the land bounded by the barbarian territories to the north and south, the sea to the west, and the Mountains of Ice and the Barrior Mountains to the east.
The great mystery is why should the Lloroi people have ventured West? Did some ancient emperor in the Far East send Lloroi armies and families into Minaria to extend his sway? Had their nation in the fallen to attack or natural disaster, forcing them to flee West? Were the Lloroi a subject people driven into revolt against a foreign tyranny and seeking a free land to settle?
Whatever the truth, the Lloroi people still exist in Minaria today and their physical type is well-known. The typical Lloroi is tall, thin, and very pale of skin, with a longish face and a narrow nose. His eyes are heavily-lidded, his mouth small and his lips narrow. The Lloroi's litheness is belied by their physical strength, but most of all he excels in intellectual endeavors. Though generally disliked by their neighbors, Lloroi individuals often rise to prominence in the fields of scholarship, surgery, trade, and banking. Frequently, the charge of crime and vice is also laid at their feet. The clannish way in which the Lloroi keep to themselves and their high degree of group-loyalty suggests to outsiders a conspiratorial bent which draws even more suspicion down upon their heads.
Most encylopedists class the Lloroi with the Elves, and some have even described them as "high-elves," as opposed to the "common" or "wood" Elf of Neuth. Interestingly, while men may breed with Elves and sire healthy, fertile offspring, the mules derived from the union of men with Lloroi are invariably sterile. On the contrary, the scion of Elves and Lloroi are fertile ?- leading some to conjecture that the Elves represent a racial stock intermediate between men and Lloroi.
Although the present-day Lloroi of Minaria have for a long time existed in scattered communities, travelers from Girion, the southern sub-continent of the Minaria, inform us that a state under the political sway of Lloroi living free still endures, though it is a closed and xenophobic land. This domain, called Anuwin, is said to occupy a mighty mountain fortress that neither time nor the hand of man has to date has permanently overthrown. Some Minarian Lloroi have made pilgrimages to this distant haven, but the way is hazardous and many never return.
Khersemo's account of the Lloroi begins with their irruption from the East, mighty in war-craft and skilled in sorcery. The invaders soon found their route of advance blocked by indigenous people, especially Khos, a city of mystic wisdom ruled by a priestly aristocracy and war was the result. When the hosts of the Lloroi appeared before Khos, its towering walls and potent sorcery held them at bay. Neither did the Khosites stand alone, for they headed a powerful alliance which came together to repel the invaders.
The war lasted many years, but was not continuous. The Lloroi sidled around Khos into lands less well-defended, but they knew that their hold upon any new conquests must remain insecure as long as the wizard city stood. When direct assault on Khos failed, the invaders fought a calculated war of attrition, raiding the hinterlands and oppressing the Khosite-allied towns. Eventually, for surcease from battle, many allies eventually defected and made peace with the Lloroi.
The Khosites grew ever more isolated, but knew that yielding meant annihilation.
At last the main army of the Khosites was brought to battle; a ballad based
upon Khersemo's account tells the tragic story:
(Chorus)
When the phantom
knights ride by
The owls startle
high
Drumming hoofbeats
in the night
Sweep the land
with fright --
Echoes of the
wraiths who haunts the ruins of Khos.
It's been two
dozen centuries since that dead city thrived;
The million
souls who peopled it have left no seed alive.
Our elders still
do shiver yet for reasons dread and fell,
They know the
Khosites as their ghosts still rule upon the tell.
There is little
that we know,
But centuries
ago
The Lloroi sieged
this city on the plains.
Possessed by
fear and hate,
They pronounced
a dire fate,
Waging slaughter
till not one Khosite remains.
(chorus)
They fought a
mighty battle as Khos' hopes were growing dim;
Cornered 'gainst
a canyon cliff and driven to its rim,
Khos could not
stem the Lloroi press, outnumbered by the foe;
So they turned
to leap the precipice, but plummeted below.
When they searched
along the floor
The knights
were there no more,
Vanishing like
vultures who had flown.
But rather than
be lost,
They were conjured
back to Khos
So that wizard
city kept its own.
(chorus)
Their king had
rent his garments, stunned by anger and regret,
Then summoned
up the priestesses who served the Lord of Death.
He offered Doom
his city, whatsoever be its fate,
If God but turn
the golden key that opened up His gate.
There was no
end to strife;
The besiegers
lost their life,
Vying with the
ghostmen of the town.
In a bone yard,
so it's said,
Shriek and wail
the Lloroi dead,
Still roaring
maddened laugher all around.
(chorus)
After a century
of battle the living quelled the slain;
Of Khos's vanished
people scarce two memories remain.
But there's
still an invocation that permits its sons no rest
And by its doleful
summoning to strife and war they're pressed.
(chorus)
The cities of Minaria fell to the invaders one by one and even less is known about these lost lands than Khos. The Lloroi deliberately destroyed all knowledge of past civilization so that history forever after would seem to begin with them. Since humans predominate in Minaria today, they must also have predominated in ancient times, but the conquerors also encountered Elves and Goblins, Dwarves, and Trolls. Presumably they met the Ogres, too, but if they did they could have done little else except drive them beyond the borders of their realm. The tide of Lloroi conquests reached south into parts of the subcontinent of Girion, but military expansion was eventually succeeded by a process of consolidation.
After the Lloroi conquest came the Lloroi peace. The ruling race enforced law and order throughout the realm. Roads systems were build and merchants followed well-laid tracks to spread prosperity far and wide. Lloroi soldiers, increasingly supplemented by native volunteers, guarded outposts the length and breadth of the domain, protecting it against foreign raiders and suppressing banditry and uprising. Trade flourished and the Spice Road from Girion brought exotic items north to grace the homes and tables of the conqueror and conquered alike.
A vibrant culture flowered over a period of a thousand years. Heated homes and indoor plumbing eventually became too common to remark upon. Wise policies of agriculture fed a burgeoning population. Poets and playwrights worked to edify, and architects designed cities which were both great and beautiful ?- the most imposing of all being the imperial city of Niiawee on the peninsula of Umiak. Invaders disturbed the peace from time to time, but these came like dogs hoping to snatch a joint of beef from a well-ladened table, not with dreams of prevailing over the mighty Lloroi.
The Lloroi chose not to dwell in close proximity to their subject races, a trait which became more pronounced as the centuries passed. Lloroi families tended to be small and most of these chose to inhabit the fairest part of their empire, Umiak. From Umiak governors and soldiers were dispatched under imperial writ to give law to places far distant, but the Lloroi bureaucrats and soldiers ever pined to return home and few Lloroi settled by choice among the provincials.
In time, the conquering race changed in character. Long peace caused their sons to forget the military ardor of their forefathers. In the middle imperial period non-Lloroi came to fill the lower military ranks, and then, by the late period, the middle ranks, also. Instead of continuing to train military leaders carefully as in days of old, the Lloroi came to regard army command as merely another office to fill for a short while in the course of a successful public life. The later Lloroi armies depended upon the skill of subordinates to retain its combat effectiveness, not upon its untutored, dilettante generals.
The ranks, of course, were almost wholly filled with humans, with special units recruited from Goblins, Trolls, Dwarves, and Elves. The later elite formations were of use in keeping check on hundreds of thousands of humans in arms. Inevitably, querulous military cliques developed and increasingly the story of Lloroi military feats amounts to nothing more than the story of suppressing domestic mutiny.
Old states must grow corrupt and the first sign of an abandonment of leadership is the desire for those in government to exercise minute control over every aspect of people's lives. The multitude of bureaucrats and inspectors required to enable the despotic outlook is as costly in life and wealth as its methods are inefficient and its worthwhile results paltry. In the Lloroi Empire taxes rose to extortionary levels simply to pay the burden of expanding government. The vigor of the ruling family simultaneously waned and whole reigns were sometimes given over to neglect. Weak emperors allowed self-serving favorites to rule from behind the throne and the predations of court officials in the imperial center and the provinces impoverished and angered subject peoples.
As bureaucracy replaced direct rule by emperors, intellectual decadence added to the decline. Philosophical fads popular among small groups sometimes were forced on the empire by enthusiasts in the government. Change for the sake of change was favored, and Human, Elven, Dwarven, and Goblin traditions were insulted as petty tyrants attempted to remold the world into dream-utopias modeled on the lotus-dreams of obscure philosophers -- many of whom were personally immoral, atheistic, or even mad.
The Empire rotted from the head. Intellectual pursuits fell into decline as effeteness took control of the academies and self-important zealots taught not wisdom but prejudice. Artists put aside traditional forms and sought only to shock and offend. Atheism spread with government assistance and many god-deniers were not content to merely revile the deities, but also wished to banish holy worship from civil life. Underlying such persons' fanaticism was the egotistical hope that if the gods were subdued their own thoughts and works would stand as the greatest glories of Creation.
History in the later days became transparent propaganda, poetry and drama sank to mere obscenity. Science, too, declined as naturalists as Nature was expected to conform to the follies of the new philosophical fads.
A sterile society thus developed which was both stultifying and oppressive. Towns and districts sometimes rose under the weight of taxes and degradation, but their brutal suppression always followed. Yet repression did not eliminate the causes of discontent.
In time, men decided that life offered no choice except the choice of tyrants. At last the greatest of all would-be tyrants appeared in the form of the mightiest wizard ever known. He called himself the Scarlet Witch-King and raised a tower of power on the far-northeastern frontier. The rebel sorcerer then gathered the wild barbarians behind his standard and rallied the angry and the alienated from all across the empire.
The emperor sent his armies against the usurper and the war was a long one. Army leadership was poor and oftentimes the survival of the Lloroi state hung in the balance. In one desperate moment the Witch-King found allies among the hosts of barbarians then invading Girion from across the sea. A vast horde of these, the confederacy of the Woida, took the Witch-King's gold and moved toward Umiak protected by their paymaster's magic. Alas, the Lloroi hero Gappa stole their magical safeguard while Lloroi priests called a terrible purification spell down upon their heads. Its effect was an appalling mass death and the invaders' magic-cursed bones still lay scattered upon the "Plain of Bones."
The Lloroi sorcerers could now command such power because, driven to extreme measures by the Scarlet Witch-King and no longer respectful of the gods, they had erected a great and forbidden work, a pole of negative energy surrounded by blood-altars and shunned to this day as Greystaff.
Now that the Power of Evil had been brought to bear as the mainstay of the Empire, the advance of the Witch-King's armies was halted. Priests of the still-pious cults, especially those cleaving to the Sun God Taquamenau, warned the Lloroi leaders that a civilization based upon black sorcery did not deserve to survive and would not survive. They urged that Greystaff be destroyed and all the evil works of the ruling cast be repented, but bedazzled by the prospect of imminent victory, the counselors of the emperor refused to be diverted from their reckless course.
More than any other, it was the hero Morholt who led the hosts of the beleaguered Empire to triumph. His might shattered, the Scarlet Witch-King was driven by his conquerors into another world, from whence he found himself unable to return for many centuries. Alas, though the rebellion had been quelled, the malaise which had caused it still festered.
Peace ensued not because people were happier, but because they were too exhausted to fight against their rulers in the decades following the great war. Nonetheless, these were years of trouble. Spurning true reform, new tax laws required that all imposts which fell short must be made up out of the private resources belonging to the cities and rural nobility, with grievous results. With the merchant class impoverished, a chain reaction of unemployment resulted and only those who avoided taxes through bribes to officials could thereafter afford to plant and harvest. With no merchant class to handle the flow of goods from one place to another, each region gradually fell back upon what was grown or produced locally. The whole idea of imperial unity began to fade from the consciousness of its subjects. Imperial agents and their enforcers came to regarded not as part of the natural order, but merely as hostile occupiers.
The lesser nobility either lost their lands and homes to the rich magnates and vanished into the general population, or they turned to brigandage and made the roads unsafe for travel. Local law-enforcers, their wages unpaid by a corrupt exchequer, sank to accepting bribes from robbers and even helped them make more lucrative hauls.
Religion, so long under attack, weakened and lost its moral courage. Even a hero so noble as Morholt sullied his honor by stealing the sacred Hundred and Nine Lenses from the Spires to the Sun in an act of personal vengeance. In place of holy rites, dark witch covens flourished and demons were worshiped.
Most of the writings from this late era proved unworthy of preservation. One document, a diatribe attributed to the sage Ojiweii, denounces the Emperor Tenguit, son of Nibagisis, and gives us a picture of the evil state of government and society in the last years of the Lloroi Empire:
"Great was the iniquity of Tenguit, that unworthy man. He perjured even while he clasped the holy books in hand, he defrauded his people and enticed other men's wives into adultery. Never since the days of fallen Khos had such evil sat upon a throne of grace."
Ojiweii relates that Tenguit in his youth shirked training for war and went away to Muskwessu to study law. While safe behind its walls he derided virtue and spoke with eager anticipation about the coming victory of the Scarlet Witch-King. In truth, Tenguit hated the Empire out of boredom and esteemed anyone who hated it equally. Many hated the state for its corruption, but Tenguit favored corruption and looked forward to the day when he could put it into practice.
When victory over the Witch-King came, Tenguit returned to the world and was made governor of a province ?- a province which he proceeded to pilfer without restraint. He married a woman as wicked as he and together they worked with lawless speculators and smugglers to enrich themselves at the expense of the people. And his corruption was not only pecuniary, for Tenguit oftentimes summoned virtuous wives or priestesses to his apartments to offend them with his lasciviousness. As if seeking the very limits dissolution, he and his inner circle the black lotus in depraved merry-making and even imported it for sale to others at vast profit.
When Emperor Nibagisis died, his unworthy heir ascended to the purple, but his conduct only worsened. Says Ojiweii: "Tenguit believed in no god, though he swore perjurious oaths in the name of every hallowed deities. Indeed, he took divine honors upon himself and forbade his people to speak the name of any god at all in public. No one might serve him in any high office unless they, too, denied the existence of the gods. The imperial constables were dispatched across the land to pull down the symbols of Taquamenau during the greatest of all Lloroi observances, the Day of the Sun's Renewal, because these displays offended the wicked. Tenguit saw robbers and murderers as brothers. Oftentimes he would free the worst of condemned criminals by imperial decree in exchange for a share of their loot. Yet, he oftentimes sent his agents to attack and burn temples at random, usually blaming his enemies for the depredations.
"While the emperor did his evil will aided by willing underlings, the wicked Empress defiled law and custom. She dismissed the servants of the state at will and put worthless favorites in their places. Worse, she claimed imperial dignities for herself, though the law forbade her, and averred that the people of the Empire must bow to two emperor forevermore, and offered herself as one of them.
"Because Tenguit appointed the basest of men and even women to the courts, the law ceased to be the shield of the lowly and became the sword of the strong. Those who protested injustice and corruption were beheaded if they were of lowly status. If they were mighty they were struck down by hired assassins and their were bodies left in lonely woods, cloacas, and parks as a warning to others.
"At long last the people demanded the deposition of the false-hearted emperor. Alas, when the mighty of the empire gathered to deliberate his crimes, the honest among them quaked with fear and the wicked hailed Tenguit as the greatest of all his line. In the end the verdict of the Great Assembly declared that the emperor had done no wrong. This made Tenguit even more arrogant and his abuses grew even worse.
But the gods heard the people's cries and the Great Cataclysm descended upon the world to cleanse it of the foulness that the Lloroi state had descended to.
All races have regional myths to explain the Great Cataclysm. Some say it came to punish Tenguit. Others said that the raising of Greystaff and the practice of black magic brought the vengeance of the gods upon the world. Still others held that the catastrophe was engendered by a war between the tribes of Heaven. The Dwarves maintained that the Sky Wolf attacked the Sun and brought ruin to the earth beneath.
The astrologer Benvir of Acalin, eschewing gods and myths and setting down his theories in The Harmony of the Planets, sought to prove that the world had possessed no moon before the Cataclysm. He believed that it was the lunar object coming from the Outer Voids to join with the earth that resulted in the destructions of the Cataclysm.
Whatever the cause, the tally of devastation was incalculable. Where there had been plains, mountains burst from the substratum, while in other localities great tracks of land subsided into moors. As if singled out for special vengeance, the peninsula of Umiak fell crumbling into the sea. Millions of Lloroi died and forever after their watery tomb would be called the Sea of Drowning Men. The evil emperor Tenguit himself perished that day, taking with him the thousand-year empire -- an empire no longer loved or honored even by those who dominated it. It was also the end of the greatness with which the gods had endowed the Lloroi race; their inheritance would in later years be one of suffering and shame.
Umiak lost, the Lloroi of Minaria became a race without a home. Few in number, the survivors were despised by the provincials, many of whom blamed their sorcery for having destroyed the world. Others disdained them as the most immoral of beings. Subsequently, the Lloroi were forced to live in scattered bands and isolated villages and, in later times, in city ghettos.
The land's climate changed, warming for the most part, but in many places fertile land suffered endless draught and finally scorched into desert wastes. Whole nations perished where the land reared up into mighty peaks. Even then the gods did not stay their avenging hand, but sometime in the early years of chaos a great stone was thrown from the sky and struck the south of Minaria, slaying all around for many leagues. The cavity formed is remembered as the Crater of the Punishing Star.
In the aftermath of the Cataclysm, each race slowly sorted itself out into tribes, all of which struggled separately to survive. Only here and there did civilization maintain a feeble light -- such as the Temple of the Kings, the ruined cities of Neuth, the fertile heartland of Kalruna-Sasir, and the trading cities of the South Plains. Whole peoples were reduced to cannibalism and brute savagery. Barbarians, better able to endure the new hardships than were civilized men, moved south conquering and barbarizing whatever survivors they spared from the sword and the axe.
The seas ceased to be avenues of commerce and became barriers separating the continents with their great expanses. Girion to the south of Minaria suffered less than Minaria, all told, but even there the extensive areas flooded, creating the Shrouded Sea. In the early centuries, uncouth people migrated from the isles and their cruel invasions beset the Girionese races. But to the north, across stretches of scorching deserts, Minaria dreamed on, almost unaware of the trials being undergone by its southern neighbors.
The destruction caused by the Great Cataclysm healed but slowly, and this healing process is the story of the rise of the independent kingdoms of Minaria. It is the story of great heroes and proud races which had emerged from terrible trials, strong, defiant, brave, and, sometimes, wise.
Let the story be told.