Alakoring Dragonbreaker was an Orlanthi hero whose home in Ralios was threatened by the ever-expanding Empire of the Wyrm's Friends. Alakoring went on mighty heroquests, and after he had pushed the Hunting and Waltzing Bands out of Ralios he led a host of flying followers across the Rockwood Mountains into Aggar to continue his fight against the dragonfriends.
In the Pelorian basin Alakoring met many Orlanthi within the EWF, and he found that while the tribes following a single king were a lot larger than those back home in Ralios, the kings had a lot less power over the fortunes of their tribes than those of his own country. The people really wielding the power were the priests, especially those of the cult of the Dragonfriends, whose exotic magics were powerful.
Alakoring found that it were these Dragonfriend priests who stood behind the enormous power-channeling which drained their subject lands from life and magic. They funneled these energies into a dangerous and esoteric project to create a gigantic dragon out of the very land they lived on, but the single priests kept more than their just share of their followers' life-force for their own, private purposes.
The Dragonfriend priests knew that Alakoring was a danger to their power base, and so they gathered and summoned Drang, the Diamond Storm Dragon, the one of their draconic divine creations armed with the magics of Storm, just like Alakoring's own Orlanthi magics.
Alakoring and Drang met in the hills of Aggar, and after a cyclopic battle within a raging storm it was Alakoring who emerged, alive and victorious. The Dragonfriends who had supported Drang were bady damaged, and their allies were dismayed. The Old Day traditionalists emerged from hiding and offered to follow Alakoring, and they accepted his instructions to defeat the dragon allies of the Dragonfriend priests along with his teachings how the smaller Ralian tribes kept their priests under control of the kings. Even though the Old Day Traditionalists had been raised in the tradition of Harmast, which had introduced the priesthood as the real power in Orlanthi society, they saw the wisdom in Alakoring's way, and so the cult of Orlanth Rex was spread among the hill people of southwestern Peloria.
The followers of Alakoring, who had founded a kingdom of his own in western Aggar, on the border to the Wyrm's Friends' heartlands, allied with the Carmanian dragonslaying knights and the Dara Happan rebels and waged war on the Empire and its magicians. Even after Alakoring was slain by an arrow from Tobosta Greenbow, after an exchange of insults, the new cult and social structure introduced by him flourished, and seeped even into the Empire, gnawing at its very foundations.
The Orlanthi within the heart of the Empire had been absorbed by the draconic ways for generations, and the Old Day Traditionalists were few and without much influence, for they had to perform their religion in hiding. Only when the leadership of the Third Council, as the Empire had renamed itself, fostered enmities and rivalries among themselves the non-draconic people of the land found new unity and purpose among themselves, and began to form new organisations while the most draconic of their countrymen left this world for a place of draconic existance.
When the dragonewts withdrew from theEmpire of the Wyrm's Friends in 1042, and troll assassins killed all of the draconic leaders, the surviving citizens of the empire found themselves leaderless and in disorder. Their Dragonfriend priests had lost most of their magic, and authority, and when the Old Day Traditionalists stepped forth and demonstrated the values of their magics and society, the people of the former empire embraced their ways.
As a result of this the large tribes - or rather nations - of the former age disappeared within the ruins of the empire, and small tribal kingdoms grew and faded locally. Only in the south, in the lands controlled by the Only Old One and the Hendriki, the old national tribes survived for a while, because there the old ways had never been totally abandoned.
Then in 1100 the allied enemies of the Empire of the Wyrm's Friends - Dara Happans, Carmanians, Sankenites and western Orlanthi tribes of Peloria, plus volunteers from the Elder Wilds and the Redlands - mustered the True Golden Horde and invaded the remains of the empire, intent on pillage and genocide. They gave no mercy, and even those tribes within the ruins of the empire who supported their cause suffered heavily from their depradations. A huge wave of refugees flowed southward, into Heortland and the Shadowlands.
The Only Old One, an old ally of the Inhuman King whose people were systematically extinguished on the Horde's path, feared that the Horde would not stop in Dragon Pass and invade his lands, and so he recruited an army from among the refugees and his own people and sent them northwards. The kings of Heortland tried to control the influx of refugees and granted them previously sparsely or unsettled land in the rougher valleys of the Storm Mountains foothills.
The True Golden Horde advanced slowly, but was unstoppable, and by 1120 they had arrived before the heart of the dragonewts' community, Dragon's Eye. They were joined by a large host of Praxian Beast Riders and other allies led by the immortal hero Jaldon Goldentooth. The Only Old One's army, gigantic though it was, was outnumbered ten to one, and the dragonewts seemed doomed.
However, when the final assault was commanded and the Invincible Golden Horde advanced upon the last line of defence between them and the birthplace of the dragonewt race, a multitude of dragons descended upon the invaders. Some dragons had risen from the earth, others came flying across Genertela from distant Kralorela, and yet others came from beyond the borders of the universe. Still, the invaders were mighty, and had developed powerful dragonkilling magics. Seeing no way to retreat, they charged on the defenders, or ensorcelled the dragons swooping down on their lines.
After the battle, less than one invader out of a hundred were still alive, and most of these were out of their minds from the carnage they had witnessed. The human and troll allies of the dragonewts had taken a lot of the brunt of the last desperate charge, and they, too, had lost almost all of their forces. Residual magics of the great battle flashed through the lands, and if there were humans left alife in the land, they went into hiding with non-human allies or feld south to Maniria. The Inhuman King had two borders marked with plinths taking the form of stone crosses, and forbade any humans to enter the land beyond. Those few humans who had taken refuge with allies were forbidden to leave their hideouts, like the subterraneous people of the Cannon Cult of Dwarf Mine, or the Wintertop priesthood of Kero Fin.
The Inhuman Occupation of Dragon Pass, as it came to be known, lasted for over 200 years. The first humans to enter Dragon Pass were the Pure Horse People survivors of the Battle of Alavan Argay, around 1250, and they changed their history and were adopted by the beast people of Ironhoof, King of Dragon Pass, technically ceasing to be human. Other groups had gone even farther, like the cult of the Bloody Tusk around the Ivory Plinth, who had bred with trolls and became the feared half-troll boar riders of the Stinking Forest.
The lands north of Dragon Pass had been depopulated by the True Golden Horde, and then the loss of all the weapon-bearing manhood of Peloria. The people in Maniria had lost many men in that battle, too, but these were replaced by the large numbers of refugees fearing the stray magics and dragon spectres of Dragon Pass.Those who had turned west into the Shadowlands were settled in North Esrolia, and merged into the populace there. Those who had made their way into Heortland settled south of the Troll Woods and the Haunted Lands, where only the Kitori allies of the trolls and their subjects were allowed to live.
In Heortland the new cult of Orlanth Rex gained many adherents wherever the refugees settled, that is outside of the Hendriki tribal lands. Like the leaders of the Third Council before them the Hendriki High Kings lost control over the small tribes of the land, and only the royal tribe remained large and intact, thanks to the subcult of Orlanth Aeolus and its wizards. Only the Hendriki and the Kitori tribes still followed the pre-Alakoring format, with a single king leading an entire nation. In both cases these had been different from Harmast's tribal organisation, so that the great Orlanthi tribes of the First and Second Age had become history.
The multitude of small tribes introduced by Alakoring was following the example of his East Ralian homecountry, where there are large areas of land unbreakable by plow or axe between the various tribes. The lands of North Esrolia and Heortland had much denser population, though, and what amounted to occasional cattle raids in Alakoring's homelands led to incessant petty warfare in the overcrowded land of Heortland. The de-centralization which had proved a blessing in the fight of the scattered cells of resistance against the monolithic Empire of the Wyrm's Friends now became a curse, threatening the stability of the entire people.
The Hendriki tribe had always emulated some of the Western ways of the knights who had followed Arkat the Liberator. Now, with their country aflame in war, they sought a different way of life. When the first Ralian Trader Princes had made their way from the Kingdom of Jorstland into the Shadowlands, they were greeted eagerly by the Hendriki kings, and they were hired as mercenaries and magicians to drill the king's own tribe. The cult of Orlanth the Wizard (aka Orlanth Aeolus) grew among the Hendriki, and was renamed the Aeolian Church of Heortland. the heavier armoured cnihts of the Hendriki bested the tribal levies of the minor tribes whenever they met in the plain lands of the Heortland Plateau, which soon was firmly under Hendriki control all the way from Jansholm to Duchamp.
Some of the tribal kings recognized the danger of being crushed by the growing might of the Hendriki tribe, and they formed alliances against the Hendriki knights. These alliances gradually developed into the three tribal confederations of the Solthoni inhabiting the foothills between the Troll Woods and the Bullflood, the Martofsaetan in the foothills south of Stormwalk Mountain, and the Bandori tribe in the southern ranges of the Storm Mountains, on the border to Prax. These tribes managed to fend off the Hendriki forces when their entered their hilly ranges, but they were not able to regain the territory lost to the Hendriki earlier during the wars. The Hendriki gained another edge over the hill tribes when they introduced a new way of plowing their field, imitating the Ralian methods.
All this time the Hendriki kings and the Only Old One maintained a careful exchange of tokens of respect, not fully trusting each other. The Argan Argar merchants of Esrolia were all but happy about the Issarian Trader Princes from Ralios pushing into the market, and the Hendriki support of the Westerners didn't contribute to better communication with the Only Old One, head and avatar of the cult of Argan Argar.
However, when Belintar the Stranger started a large scale civil war in Kethaela, the Hendriki kings remained true to their old alliance with the Only Old One, even against the urgings of fanatical church leaders proposing a general crusade of conversion led by the Aeolian Church into the human lands of Kethaela. King Harvar II of the Hendriki fell in battle defending the Kitori troll queen against crazed Axe maidens in 1316.
In the fourth year of his struggle against the Only Old One Belintar secretly visited Heortland, made contact with certain leaders of the land, and finally revealed himself in the royal court in Durengard. Little is known of his deeds or his offer to the teenage Hendriki king Eolred, but as a result the Hendriki knighthood withdrew from the battles around Shadow Plateau and the Haunted Lands, and left the battle to the Only Old One's own people.
When Belintar slew even the gargantuan Darkness demon whose dead body transformed into the Lead Hills northeast of the Shadow Plateau, blocking the Creekstream-River, he entered into a final duel with the Only Old One, during which he leveled the Obsidian Palace and slew the demigod in the place which became known as the Tarpit.
In Heortland the Hendriki experienced a wave of religious frenzy, and their knights pushed into the foothills and took over the manors of traditionalist thanes, supported by their superior armament as well as the magic of their chaplains. The new king Eolred and his advisors, dominated by high ranking wizards of the Aeolian church, stepped in when either side became over-excited, but there was a general trend that Aeolian knights took charge of the Hundreds rather than old-fashioned Orlanthi thanes. Some of the hardliners rose in open rebellion, but after suffering a decisive defeat at the Bullflood fords against the royal chivalry the ring-leaders chose exile over submission, and followed earlier refugees from the civil war into the newly opened lands of Dragon Pass.
King Eolred and his wizard counsellors managed to pacify the kingdom of Heortland during the next years, installing the kings of the Martofsaetan and Solthoni confederations as dukes of the northern and southern parts of Heortland, with residences in Duchamp and Jansholm, marrying them to his sisters. His reign was full of disputes, though, and one group of dissident nobles took the ruined lands of Karse, at the former mouth of the Creek-Stream River, now reduced to hold the trickle of the Marzeel River, and re-founded that city, taking it as a direct fief from the Godking.
Eolred had a difficult character, but he was a very religious man, and clever where he lacked wisdom. Under his reign the Aeolian Church gained many privileges inside the cities, whic led to the re-dedication of numerous temples as churches or even cathedrals of the Aeolian Church. The king sponsored the building activities out of his own coffers, filled recently by the recognition gifts of cnihts having ascended to leaders of their Hundreds.
Eolred ruled until about 1350. He married a daughter of the Eorl of Duchamp, previously king of the Martofsaetan. They had three sons and four daughters. Wildred, the eldest son, was crowned as co-ruler upon reaching manhood, in the year 1347. Wildred had been schooled by the best tutors among the Aeolian priests and wizards, and was a noted historian already at age 19, when he presented a translation of Jorstan's chronicles of the Machine Wars to the royal library of Durengard.
(To be continued)