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Region: The Universal Order of Nations

LodgedFromMessages
The Isaurian Republic of Achaian Peloponnese

FROM THE DESK OF THE LEGATE-ADMIRAL:

To the August Senators of the Atsumaru, and likewise to the Honored Senators of the Diet of Isauria; and furthermore to the hands and heart of Ban Rosane, Honored Governor of this Province of Isauria and also of Transisesen: Hail and Greetings from Noverra Redeemed!

This planet, origin and harbinger of our shared destinies, is once again free. Gorvikians trouble its people no longer; its surface, marred by their long occupation, shall soon flourish under our mutual care. Already atmospheric cleaning is underway at Rucigrad, and the brave Isaurian warriors that so lately hammered punishment upon the heads of our enemies now guide the world of their ancestors into a period of glorious rebirth.

I promised all of you victory. And so I have brought victory to your hands.

I beg you to forgive the brevity of this missive. Here upon the surface of Noverra, there remains so much more to do.

In faithful service to the Celestial Emperor—may he live ten thousand years—I remain:

AURUS ADENI
Admiral, Thirteenth Daimyokantai
Legate of the Atsumaru to the Province of Isauria

______

From orbit, centuries-old scars upon the surface of Noverra appeared no less agonizing or destructive than those that had been scraped upon the planet’s face within the last year of fighting. Captain Xianna So Scipiones frowned as she contemplated the old blast zones of Orteio, where the Lords Loria once incinerated uncounted throngs of Gorvikians amidst the millions of tortured Cielotes that had once held their noses in the presence of Gaivarvaran lord-generals and, at the last, begged the nobles of Isauria to save them from a fate worse than annihilation. When she compared the evidence of Orteio’s destruction to the blast zones of Cape Devinaria, dug into Cielote soil from the Thirteenth Daimyokantai four months ago as an expeditionary Gorvikian army revealed itself to orbital targeting while endeavoring to invade Glys over the sea in force, the captain could see a difference merely of scale: Orteio, the capital of Cielo, the last commercial and political hub of the Western Hemisphere, the crown and throne of five kingdoms even before the entanglement of the Grand Union, had been by necessity a massive city that had sustained hours of continuous bombardment before the Void Fleet had been satisfied that the Gorvikians assaulting it were dead to the last man; the isolated expeditionary force in Cape Devinaria had been annihilated with a single warhead. What struck Captain Scipiones most clearly, however, was that the rubble of Orteio seemed… fresh, perhaps—rather, that the visible evidence of the city’s destruction had not been eroded or softened by the passage of three and a half centuries, but remained as stark and brutal to the naked eye as the crater dug up mere months before. Time for Orteio had stood still.

Time for Noverra had stood still, in almost every place. Nothing progressed, nothing grew, and nothing aged on a world that had been all but dead for three hundred years.

Captain Scipiones turned her attention away from the visuals of the world below her to focus on atmospheric reports flashing across the main viewscreen of the Reclamation War’s bridge. Death in Gorvikia, at least, was finally giving way to life: The terraformers set up in Rucigrad Landing had begun their work, and had already accomplished a measurable reduction in particulate density in the immediate vicinity of Gorvikia’s former capital. The island itself remained barren glass for now, and the captain shared the doubts of many observers who wondered why such important resources were being wasted on a country that would not see its first harvest until long after every currently-living Isaurian was dead and gone. But Rucigrad, and the rebuilt ‘Fort’ Pseros settlement at the southern tip of Gorvikia, were symbols now, serving as statements of Legate Aurus Adeni’s power over the nature and the very history of Noverra: “I did what no Isaurian could do.” Already the Isaurian Diet had voted to memorialize the date of the Rucigrad drop operation as a national holiday, while tales of the battles to defend that place and Fort Pseros from the Gorvikian counterattack sped from mouth to ear and book to hologram as quickly as Adeni’s propagandists could manage, outpacing real news by weeks if not months in order to bring Evvia the ‘true story of the war’ in as much glorious, nationalistic detail as could be managed.

At least no one would remember Sarnath, at least until Adeni was no longer living to care about it.

Veteran Isaurians would remember Azarel and Tsoulio, however, and the Vergni Guard would remember Kircheburg with a mixture of pride and fury. Evvia would celebrate the rescue of Tsoulio easily, if its people cared to remember more of the war than just the ‘fall’ of Rucigrad, but knowledge of the true horrors of Azarel remained a dagger aimed at Legate Adeni’s throat, poised to strike him dead in the hearts of Isaurian and Zephyri alike should his handling of this war be revealed. The ruins remained garrisoned as they had been before, this time with fully-equipped divisions that had been produced, very literally in most cases, with the express purpose of holding the bloodiest battleground in Isaurian history, and maintaining its secrecy without question or complaint. When the inevitable leak came, it would surely not come from the soldiers posted there now, but rather those that had fought and bled and had watched their friends and family die there in the months and years before.

It remained a matter of concern just how Legate Adeni would manage to silence the thousands of surviving soldiers that had held the line at Azarel and had marched to secure Isaurian victory amidst the ruins of Pernigov. In the short term, clean-up operations would occupy the soldiers’ time, and even after the end of those deployments, Adeni could conceivably simply leave his troops on Noverra indefinitely and refuse to bring them back to Evvia. But that would be a poor solution in the long term, not least because it discounted existing communications methods between Evvia and Old Isauria, and the likelihood that the Vergni Guard was aware of at least some of the details of the fighting across the Scalian and Northern Oceans—and could discover more at its leisure as soon as it found disgruntled veterans of the Azarel campaign who were willing to talk. More permanent solutions included eliminating the soldiers entirely, which would have been in keeping with the behavior Adeni displayed toward inconvenient veteran Isaurians at Sarnath; yet the over-long war on Noverra had demonstrated the folly of ignoring or eliminating experience in the ranks and relying instead on an army made up entirely of fresh recruits, and Scipiones had Adeni’s own word on the matter that the veterans of this war, and of Azarel in particular, were too valuable to waste without a substantial gain in return.

The veterans of Azarel would survive, and somehow their tales of horror, neglect, and mismanagement—vindictive mismanagement, as the legate had defended himself to his own circle while the bodies piled high on the front line, purposely accomplished rather than produced by true failures of command—would remain untold, at least until the generations had passed in such great numbers that the revelation would merely prompt a small curiosity, rather than another likely civil war. Let Adeni solve that puzzle at his leisure, Captain Scipiones thought to herself, turning her mind back to the planetary atmospheric reports and targeting scans that made up her mundane tasks for the day. The Thirteenth was Scipiones’s duty, and so it would remain until—or unless—the legate made good on his desperate promises to lift her to greater heights in the wake of his rising star… and, for the moment at least, Adeni’s star had yet to rise quite so high as to dispose of the rewards he had promised those who had followed him through this disastrous war.

As the last year of conflict on some other people’s soil had already taught Captain Scipiones, this was utterly typical of the man.

______

Legate-Admiral Aurus Adeni reclined on a fine bed in the bedroom suite of the stateliest hotel in Sardavar, situated in the historic center of the wealthiest and most populous city on Evvia within sight of the absurd monument that he himself had raised in his efforts to win over its people, and sighed. He had had a busy day: bathing in the adulation of the city’s populace in a parade that would doubtlessly be the closest either he or his picked escort of soldiers would ever come to a true Zephyri triumph, receiving the solemn congratulations of the Isaurian Diet once the parade had concluded at Signature Square, presenting a speech before the assembled senators of Isauria in their assembly hall to still more applause and exhortation, and finally delivering another address to the assembled people of Sardavar at the opening of a public banquet to which one in every twenty households in the city received one plate to fill with the richest and most exotic foods known to Isaurian space. Yes, it had been an exhausting day, but it was a pleasant exhaustion that had settled on the legate’s shoulders as he laid back on his bed, a random notable’s eldest daughter on his left and a well-bribed Makarian priestess on his right, and considered his next moves.

The day had been pleasant, he reflected, but overall he was not at all content.

Fighting on Noverra was still ongoing, and it was only a matter of time before the families of the soldiers sent to fight there began to wonder when their loved ones were returning home. Adeni had already begun to officially ‘reward’ his soldiers for their service by announcing the construction of colonies on Noverra’s surface that would serve as their new homes—conveniently populating many of these ‘new villages’ with soldiers whose deaths at Azarel had yet to be confirmed to the wider public, of course—but enforcing a planet-wide communications blackout on Noverra would be difficult in the long term, given the presence of Old Isauria and the established governments there, in particular the surviving religious authorities in Vergni. Not only did the Vergni Guard know more details about Azarel and Sarnath than Adeni wanted any outsider to know, but their masters in Old Isauria had the means to communicate that knowledge to Evvia without going through the fleet channels of the Thirteenth Daimyokantai; indeed, that the Isaurians of Glys hadn’t done so already was due solely to the fact that they were unaware of the deception being played on Evvia under Adeni’s direction. The legate would have to begin undermining that connectivity as quickly as possible, but he would have to be careful about it. The sack of Aglai remained embedded in the Isaurian consciousness even now, as exemplified earlier that day when the Diet clamored to rebuild the ruined city as one of Adeni’s proposed military colonies in which to settle his glorious veterans (a proposal which had happily been redirected toward Poutalia for now). Ruining another pillar of Isauria’s Noverran presence would unravel the very purpose of the war he had fought to ‘liberate’ the planet from the Gorvikians.

The old element of distrust between the overly-traditional Isaurian establishment of Noverra, as seen from the Evvian perspective, and the morally-dubious leadership of worlds that were not Noverra, as the Gaivarvaran Church had contended almost as soon as the Isaurian League was established quite literally over Noverra’s head, certainly assisted Legate Adeni’s efforts to keep matters on Noverra as secret as possible to the rest of the province. The legate could already envision a Zephyri propaganda effort filled with reminders of his, and Zeikeutsyr’s, successes on Noverra—the eradication of the Gorvikian menace, the introduction of terraforming machines that Isaurian leaders had long possessed the technology to produce themselves, and the establishment and reestablishment of communities in locations that had once been the stuff of Isaurian legend—compared with the status quo that the patricians of Old Isauria had allowed to fester during the centuries after the Reclamation, from the last orbital strike to the downfall of Keram Damara. The Diet would surely appreciate being showered with still more praise for ‘demonstrating a great improvement of local governance when compared with previous Isaurian authorities,’ which would reflect well on Evvia as a whole. The only politicians that might complain would surely be those hailing from Noverra, but… well, with the illustrious Consul’s elimination of religious figures in government during her time as Governor of Isauria, the Noverrans that had been sent to Sardavar had been weak-willed and unremarkable, and their silence had been easily bought with the promise of riches far beyond their political worth.

These were his advantages, and Adeni was once again in a race against time to utilize them before they drifted away. So he was relaxed, and even pleased by his immediate surroundings, but he was not content. He could not be content until Noverra was truly his… in perpetuity.

And if Old Isauria could not be removed, the legate thought as he reached over the shoulder of the wealthy industrialist’s daughter and picked up a snuff box—and pointedly ignored how the women next to him eyed the box with interest as he opened it for himself—then an influx of Biotians would have to be enough to box it in. Let the Gaivarvarans have their whole damn continent, so long as it meant they would be powerless everywhere else; only then would Aurus Adeni win his war.

______

The carved-out cavern hall, one of at least twelve that had been discovered under the surface of central Rusnya, was a massive space in all of its dimensions, but its shadowy height, length of miles, and undecipherable width failed to alleviate any feeling of claustrophobia that had followed the Isaurian soldiers into the depths of this Gorvikian-mined, Bruvalk-infested nightmare. Evenly-spaced spotlights lit up the rocky hall, set up decades if not centuries before by its intended inhabitants, which served less to illuminate and more to intimidate the invaders from above: The Isaurians’ nightvision, both natural and technological, was utterly destroyed by the white-hot lights lining the hall, which revealed one side or another of several massive machines still shuddering and groaning despite being largely unattended by the time the Isaurians had arrived to discover them. The shadows left by these machines were deep, hiding all manner of dangerous debris that had already tripped up several soldiers in moments of inattention. And there were many such moments, since those same shadows in the distance served as ample cover for Gorvikian defensive emplacements and the occasional sniper, causing a necessary amount of distraction that was often deadly in its own right. It was impossible to know just how many enemies there were, or whether or not they were being reinforced and, if so, whether their supply lines were coming up from farther into the cavern or from a side passage that had yet to be discovered or even from a hole in the ground under one of the unidentifiable machines. The constant roar of churning metal, gunshots, screams, and the occasional order being shouted on the other side of the cavern combined into a smothering blanket of the senses, stimulating the Isaurians’ claustrophobia even in the open spaces between machines, where isolated soldiers might have mere moments to experience true panic before being shot dead by some defiant Gorvikian across the way.

This carnage had become the norm over the previous two months, as Isaurian soldiers continued to delve into the catacombs that had hidden most of the Gorvikian population from civilized eyes for the last three hundred years. Blood soaked walls and floors that were clearly no strangers to bloodshed, as soldiers under fire discovered both fresh corpses and dessicated remains as a mute testament to the unspeakable horrors of Gorvikian life and death. Above it all, in every cavern and corridor, the faces of the Gorvikian gods stared down at the carnage, Rucimir chief among them but by no means the only guilty perpetrator. Carved into the rock, painted onto the machinery, woven into the occasional carpet or tapestry, the gods in whose name this culture of Noverra had terrorized and destroyed the rest of its world looked upon their creation, and looked upon the Isaurians intent on purging it to the last individual fanatic… and were, perhaps, glad of the slaughter they witnessed.

Then again, perhaps they were equally glad of the Zephyri overseers that occasionally made the perilous journey into the catacombs with their Isaurian thralls, measuring their progress for Legate Adeni’s records and reports, and fulfilling whatever duties the legate demanded of them that could not be accomplished by Isaurian hands. Surely the gods of life and death would have noticed when these overseers took their samples of the dead, Gorvikians and Isaurians alike, and prepared them for shipment to labs on the other side of Zeikeutsyr. Surely, too, when the residences were found and the nurseries broken into, the gods of Gorvikia would have seen the Zephyri cloak the smallest and most helpless children away from the eyes of the vengeful Isaurian soldiers intent on total extermination. There was no question that Gorvikian culture, in all of its forms, had to be excised in order to return stability to Noverra; any remnant of it, no matter how benign, would only inflame Isaurian hatreds and prompt a return to violence. But Cheng I Sen had not simply ignored matters in her erstwhile province while she had been away, and her instructions, however brief compared to what Legate Adeni’s actions might have deserved (for good or ill), had to be carried out. There were experiments to do, and an argument to put to rest once and for all on the influence of blood on one’s true character. And if the Isaurians were too intransigent to do it, their masters would simply do it for them… not that the provincials needed to know anything that might cause them to doubt the wisdom of their overlords, of course.

Of course.

The fighting continued. The dying continued. The desperate soldiers pushed deeper into the tunnels of their enemies, wondering if they would ever see sunlight again, and knowing for certain that their homes on distant worlds were lost to them. But… the war for Noverra was over. And they, the grand heroes of Isauria, whose spilled blood flowed ever more freely on the ground, had most certainly won.

Of course.

Silberfluss and Farallon

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