Valley Kingdoms: Empire of the Throne, the Fall

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SIFHEM

The Empire of the Throne
The Fall

Eastern tadunum armies at the Gates of Hrum

The Sifik Emperors expanded the influence of Sifhem beyond the mountains, colonizing the edge of the Eastern Steppe with roads, garrisons, etc. Imperial soldiery and civil servants stationed in what became known as the Hrumgae (the Lands Beyond the Hrum) were never required to serve for more than five years outside the Valley, lest they lose their connection to Yasivan. Sivanic temples were founded on the steppe, but the status of these extra-territorial temples was constantly under dispute at Medenva. This would eventually lead to the War of the Fire, which would encompass most of the empire in its bloodshed.

Archpriest Ruwan objected to the construction of temples for the Hrumgae soldiery under Emperor Varungath. He promulgated an edict stating that any priests assigned to those temples were themselves acting against the will of Ya. When the temples stood empty, and the fires unlit, there were riots in the Hrumgae. The soldiers demanded priests be sent to them to absolve them of their inhumanity.

Ruwan refused. The Emperor summoned him to Daredin and held him hostage in the Litha Palace, and contemplated bringing charges against him for treason. Instead, he forced Ruwan to capitulate and write instructions to assign priests to the Hrumgae temples, as well as appointing a High Divine to the Outremar. Immediately upon being released from the Litha Palace, Ruwan recanted the so-called Palace Writings. He issued countermanding orders, but by then the High Divine Ulcas was already appointed and residing in the Hrumgae.

Between the High Divine and the Archpriest, a fully-blown praxic dispute was underway. The Emperor obviously backed the High Divine of the Hrumgae. However, the nobility found in Archpriest a way to strike at the power of the Wizards, and the Great Thivatin. Outside of this purely pragmatic consideration, there was also deep religious belief motivating the resistance to the High Divine. Although the dispute did not become violent during Ruwan's lifetime, his successor was a much younger man -- the Archpriest Thibru.

Thibru immediately pronounced a declaration of anathema on Emperor Varungath. The Sifik Emperor replied predictably: he sent for Thibru to join him at the Litha Palace for a temple synod. Thibru went, but he did not go alone. He came with fifty chosen temple-knights and a retinue of thousands of faithful. When he met with the Emperor, the palace was surrounded by chanting, singing, bell-ringing penitents in white. Thibru sat before the Sifik Throne and smirked at the emperor, informing him that he was more than willing to go to his death for the Faith of the Fire.

The emperor obliged. He arrested Thibru and all his knights and had them executed moments later on the steps of the palace. The crowd erupted, predictably attacking the palace. The Sifik Emperor unleashed a wave of destructive magic against his own people, and open war was upon the empire. The War of the Fire lasted for three generations, on and off, and was only finally extinguished with the arrival of the Uvarun -- the people of the East.

Pressure on the Hrumgae settlements grew. Battles and engagements outside the Valley grew in number. The Archpriest Krulef ended the War of the Fire with a theological compromise and temple synod. The settlement was too late. The Empress Avatha died at the Gates of Hrum defending the empire from the Easterners. This began the Time of the False Emperors... which ended with the collapse of the empire.

Valley Kingdoms: The Empire of the Throne, Middle Period

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SIFHEM

The Empire of the Throne
The Middle Period

The reign of Emperor Katha the Scholar ended in the year 97 F.V. This traditionally begins what was known as the Middle Period of the Sifik Empire. The central imperial period was typified by a stable succession of power from emperor to emperor. The Sifik Emperors generally groomed their own replacements and presented them before the Thivatin assembly in Daredin. Each of the major cities of Sifhem was granted its own self-governing council. These small thivatin were regional centers of administration, each with its own code of laws that applied to its hinterlands. This was known as the Administration of Two Lords, meaning the Sifik Emperor (usually as embodied by his agents, the High Wizards of Shalpirith) and the local thivatin.

Local nobility were also semi-independent, although they were knit together to the general imperial culture by means of a growing corpus of Sifik literature and learning. Of course, as the middle period went on, the nobles began to dominate the regional thivatin. Strict laws issued from the Litha Palace, however, prevented them from ever obtaining too much influence in the Great Thivatin.

The Middle Period saw a number of wars in the west and south of the Sea of Yer, as Sifhem had yet to integrate the small states in those regions. The descendants of Othan were particularly fierce in their bids for independence, to the point where, though Dumyana had long ago been abandoned, the great city of Argot claimed to be host to a series of new Othan Queens, who formed the core of a Southern Alliance against Sifhem.

While the Southern Alliance resisted Sifik occupation for centuries, it was nowhere near as great an existential threat as the Medenleb. In the time since Medenleb's dominance of the Seas of Yer and Feb, the Great Library had become the primary political organ of the city. Ruled by academic wizards, it presented a directly challenge to Sifhem's type of authority—the Sifik Emperor claimed to be the premier wizard in the Valley, with his lieutenants the High Wizards as the only legitimate form of magical organization. Indeed, in each territory Sifhem conquered, wizards were taken in tribute and, under several of the more warlike emperors, were even tied to powerful standing stones where their magic was nullified by the presence of Yasivan and subsequently executed as a blood-tax from conquered nations.

Middle Period Sifhem also established a much more comprehensive road system in the interior regions. The so-called Throne Provinces became highly developed, with an extensive trade network overseen by imperial civil servants. The crowning achievement of this time was undoubtedly the construction of the Darish Bridge, across the strait separating Shalpirith from the Throne Provinces. This massive undertaking was a bridge of native Shalpirith stone with soaring arches high enough to permit the massive barges and roundbellied ships that plied the waters there. Towering several hundred feet high and crossing nearly ten miles of deep water, the architect of the bridge, the wizard Sawe, was so adored that she was made Empress later in her life.

Of course, one of the important things to note about Middle Sifhem was its extensive use of slaves. Several conquests and expeditions were conducted beyond the Valley. These extra-valley people, as part of the Cult of Ya's theology, were then and have ever since been seen as something other than human. To have the quality of being human (dunum in Middle Sifik) is to be connected to Yasivan. Both the Sifik Emperor at the very top of the hierarchy and Sifik slaves captured in war, at the very bottom, were thought to lack this essential trait or quality -- slaves might develop dunum through living in the Valley and slowly becoming connected to Ya, but the Sifik Emperor was something else altogether: as a wizard, he had purposefully severed the link to Ya that bestows dunum on the Valley-folk.

As the Middle Period came to a close, Sifhem conquered the holdout kingdoms in the south and west, save for the vassal-states of Medenleb and the Wizard's City herself. These autonomous regions would never be conquered by any Sifik Emperor.

Unlike most of the states of the Valley, Sifhem suffered only a handful of major civil conflicts during its heyday. These came in the form both of a few civil wars between imperial claimants, but also revolts from below -- both entire cities, provincial governors, and even in some cases, castes of nobles in some district of the Empire revolted during this period. Notably, however, none of these revolts ever seriously threatened the unity of the Empire, mostly because of the lack of external threats large enough to seriously challenge Sifhem.

All this would change in the Late Period, when the tadunum or Inhumans beyond the Valley began to make inroads against the power of empire and, eventually, through pressure on its borders, caused it to collapse.

Valley Kingdoms: The Empire of the Throne, Founding

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SIFHEM

The Empire of the Throne
The Founding

Pictured: Major roads and cities of Sifhem

Sifhem, the Empire of the Throne, was a great Valley-spanning empire that lasted for nearly one thousand years. The core of the empire was founded on the Isle of Shalpirith between the former Othan city of Vabaten and the newer, more northern city of Dariden.

In its early period, the Kingdom of Shalpirith conquered the neighboring island of Engen. King Tuvis the Magician led the conquest, overthrowing Engen's native armies and wizards and ending the independent Kingdom of Engen under Medenva. In what would become known as the First Year of the Faith (Fi Vosye, F.V.), King Tuvis made the archpriest of Medenva ruler over all the temples in Shalpirith and Engen both, beginning the War of the Cults, also called the Unification.

Under Archpriest Usar, brother to King Tuvis who was acclaimed after the conquest, Shalpirith began a war that spread through the northern kingdoms under the banner of Unification. Soon, the great leaders of the cults met Archpriest Usar and King Tuvis on the field in Pirian. This battle, known as the Field of the Faithless, decided the future of the Valley Kingdoms forever: the Lucklord of Vihu, the Twin Priests of Ram, and the Hammer of Iva were all slain there. The Sea Folk of Febass turned on their own allies, and submitted themselves to Usar at the climactic moment of the fight, when all seemed lost for Tuvis, who was alone with his honor-guard and surrounded on a hilltop.

The Febassan treachery, however, reversed the tide: the cults were swept into the sea. King Tuvis perished from an infected spear-wound several days later. On his deathbed, he bade his closest friends and allies, the High Wizards of Shalpirith, to choose a new leader. They did: the young sorcerer Ethas was elected king.

Thus, in the same battle that established the supremacy of Dariden over the north, so also was the Unification nearly completed, and the first Emperor of Sifhem elected. Ethas enlarged the Dariden army and provided for it to be purged of slaves and freedmen, to be a standing force supported by slave farms on Shalpirith, and to occupy the north. The remainder of his reign was plagued with rebellions and wars as a result of the Unification.

Ethas also began the Litha Palace, which to this day houses the Sorcerer's Throne upon which the emperors of Sifhem sat. The seat was the very first construction to be completed: a huge throne carved from solid purple Shalpiran stone, gilt and plated with gold and silver, set with jewels, and cut to resemble a massive tongue of flame supported by crouching basilisks. The throne became the icon of the Empire's conquest, and from every conquered land there were new gemstones and new tribute added to it.

The High Wizards became the great imperial electors at Ethas' decree. They served as a state council, generals, and masters of every aspect of the empire. Gainsaying them was impossible and even the old nobility struggled to keep them in check.

Ethas' successor, Katha the Studious, was elected on the belief he would make the High Wizards even more powerful. However, once he was reigning in the Throne of Sifhem, he undermined the authority of the High Wizards in favor of the nobility, attempting to balance the two forces in the empire before they tore each other apart. Thus, the High Wizards under Katha lost their immunity to the laws and their right to sit as judges and the nobility began to staff the high positions of the empire again as functionaries.

Selection of the Emperor devolved neither to a committee of imperial notables nor to the High Wizards, but to the people of Dariden themselves; while Katha provided that the Sifik Emperor had to be a sorcerer (and thus was very likely to be selected from the ranks of the High Wizards themselves), the sorcerer who would rule them was given to the legislative assembly of Dariden, which was known as the Tribe.

Thus, Katha established the three pillars of the Empire: the wizards, the nobles, and the common folk. This was a tripartite division that would inform imperial politics for centuries, even as the Tribe became the Thivatin, that is literally Those Who Are Called, a governing body that assisted in the administration of the entire empire, and thus was drawn from each of the Empire's major cities.