Great Ophionic Empire

The Great Ophionic Empire was a vast polity that arose in the crucible of the Legion-Regime Wars, its emergence and culture almost exclusively rooted in the Cults of the Three-Headed Serpent and the burth of the Virin-yal demiline. Even as the priests and alchemists of the cult created the first Divine Venoms, they guided the scattered tribes of central Cathlaea to unite in three nascent state-level societies under the umbrella of the Cult: The Stygian Union in the south,the Virin Confederacy in the north, and the Asphyxian Alliance in the west.
After perhaps eighty years of uneasy alliances and back and forth, the Asphyxians managed to broker a deal to forge a larger alliance, strengthening all three territories and bringing all of central Cathlaea under the rule of the Realm of Three Crowns. It was not long, of course, before plots were laid and knives unsheathed. Within only another decade, the Coronet of Stygis, the Diadem of Sythis,and the Helm of Asphyx all adorned the head of Queen H'se of Stygia, joined as a literal Triple Crown.
H'se's son and granddaughter - who, like the first queen, were virinem - inherited the crown, supported by the Cult of Stygis the Fearmonger. Juggling the demands of the rival cults of Sythis the Betrayer and Asphyx the Slayer, as well as the temporal dynasties which formed into the noble houses (including House H'se) of the Empire of the Triple Crown. As the virinem came to dominate both the religious and political hierarchies, the name was changed to the Taryn Ssuran, or Ophionic Empire.
With the forces of the three cults and the noble houses focused on expansion, the Empire had a level of stability and was able to push ruthlessly north and west into territory originally held by the Regime, until its borders reached the Great Delta and the Dustlands, the coast of the Crown Peninsula, the northern marches of the Darklands and the Great Shield.
The centre of imperial power was in Stygia, cult centre of Stygis and site of the Imperial Palace of House H'se and the Serpent Throne of the Thrice-Crowned Imperiarch. Located in the marsh country north of the Darklands, Stygia was once a small village, then a Regime fort at the southernmost extent of their advance, which in turn became a Legion work camp. The Horde took over the camp and grew it into a fortress, gathering a huge number of the local population as slaves and auxiliaries. The Virin-yal uprising took control of the fortress, which held out until the Uprising cut off any punitive action and allowed the Cult of the Serpent to consolidate their gains.
Imperial Stygia was centred on the hill where the village once stood, and the Imperial Palace was built from the stones of the Horde keep. Around the hill, the marsh was transformed by massive earthworks and drainage projects into building and farmland, a great lake to the west marking the site from which the soil for those works was excavated. A wall of woven wood, reinforced with enchantment, surrounded the city, with great gates in the east and north. To the west, the smaller processional gate opened on a short road to the Temple of Stygis, a fortified grove on the shore of the Lake.
Asphyxa stood in the central jungle, a fortress grown from interwoven trees and packed with clay daub. Three rings of these living walls surrounded the squat, stone temple of Asphyx and the old town, a broad, square ziggurat, twenty feet tall and rising in five steps to the high sanctuary. The huts of the old town had long since been replaced by the manors of the great houses in the imperial period. The second ring held the homes of the wealthy, and the third the great garrison, the holy army of Asphyx. The houses of the ordinary folks sprawled out beyond the outermost wall.
The last cult centre was Sythia, which began its existence as a refuge for those whose tribes had been destroyed in the Wars. Located in the foothills of the Great Shield, it grew into a stone built city. Two great, tiered towers of stone stood at opposite ends of the city, one the palace of the heresiarch and the other the Temple of Sythis, which stood over the true holy of holies, a deep cave system beneath the mountains. It was the wealthiest city in the Empire, but housed many of the poorest residents.
At the height of its power, the Empire stretched to Hannah, a city at the base of the Crown which watched over the unassailable Tore Ladon. Other imperial cities were also established: Jararka in the jungles, Agkistra on the norther coast, Bungara on the south, and Oxyura in the uplands west of the Coronal Peninsual.
Under the rule of the now-inhuman noble houses, the empire grew and grew. Enemy elites who surrendered - or betrayed their own rulers to the empire - could hope to undergo the rites and become Virin-yal, a fate open to both human and petari. The rest of the empire was dominated by fear and blood, its economy driven by vast numbers of human and petari slaves, and geared towards feeding the temple pyres.
The expansion of the Empire was a shared enterprise which kept the Houses and the Cults united. Eventually, the expansion slowed, as increasingly distant frontiers lost contact with the centre, while at the same time running up against increasingly stiff resistance from the orcs, the Regime remnant, and such insuperable barriers as the Dustlands and the Great Shield. The Empire ran on slaves, and the faith of the Three-Headed serpent was driven by regular eladrinate sacrifices. Without constant conquest to provide these two resources, the cults looked to each other's congregations, and the houses to each other's vassals and holdings.
With the resulting decline in the lot of all, but especially the slaves at the lowest tier of the social structure, the frequency of slave escapes - both successful, usually into northern Suto, and attempted - increased dramatically. The strength of the Empire began to be turned inward, leading to the rebellion of many of the outer territories, especially the Coronal Peninsula.
It was against the backdrop of this loss of order, and the slow collapse of the Imperial Centre as Sythia and Asphyxa asserted themselves, that a new threat emerged, quite literally, in the north-west. The Kindled of Benefice Zeranzeri appeared from a system of deep caverns over the course of a decade, occupying the territory of slaughtered rebel tribes and making alliances with their surviving neighbours, and swiftly became the pre-eminent power of the Delta shores and the Coronal Peninsula. The arrival of the Zeranzeri was the last nail in the coffin of the Great Ophionic Empire, and would have sounded the death knell of the Virin-yal, were it not for the actions of Lord Szareen Ysseth, a newly ascended Sagass of a minor house in Stygia.
House Ysseth had a noted skill with alchemy - including a keen understanding of the Blessed Venom - which gave them influence, but also attracted resentment. A series of attacks in the chaos of Imperial collapse left the house very short of transformed members, claiming the lives of many virinem and all of the house Aray. In an attempt to save the house, nineteen promising scions were given the Transcendent Venom, in violation of Imperial protocol and the laws of the cults. A dozen of the postulants died. Two were degenerated into a particularly large and aggressive form od varager. Four were immediately transformed into the Aray form, while the last, Szareen, transitioned directly into the ascended form of a Sagass.
Szareen Ysseth immediately took control of the house and began playing a long and ruthless game. They parlayed the house's alchemical expertise and eligible arad into a series of advantages alliances, and almost as swiftly turned on their new allies, wiping out their higher castes and absorbing their avinem and slaves. In this way, they gained military and arcane forces, and took almost complete control of the production of the Venoms. Almost in recognition of the treachery involved in this rise, they removed their cult centre to a site in Sythia and rededicated the house to Sythis.
To consolidate their power, the house absorbed or eliminated every other house with the knowledge to produce the Venom and sabotaged the independent alchemical works of the other cults. Enemies and rivals of the house suffered attacks and assassinations, and those who challenged them would find their supplies of the Venoms - both the transformative Greater Venoms and those used for vital religious activities - cut off. The house claimed the vacant Serpent Throne and moved it to a new Imperial centre in Sythia.
The Triple Crown they left, and had a new headpiece, called the One Crown, forged as part of the creation of a new empire

Type

Geopolitical, Empire