Holy Kingdom of Aramon

Old Aramon
Though many believe the kingdom to have been founded in the midst of the Age of Blood and Fire with the accession of Saint Agall to the throne of Old Aramon, the lands and peoples were culturally and economically unified long before that. In the early days during Mishra’s Rebellion in the Age of Heroes, Aramon was largely considered a stable kingdom. Occupying the lands that transition from the sweeping Steppelands in the west to the gently rolling Lakelands in the east, there has been a separation between the geographies that has led to a dual heritage for the people of the area. Though it now stands as a bulwark protecting the Lakelands and Free Realms from the Steppelands and the Garden of Geniché, Old Aramon was a trading center for the peoples from all of these realms.
The lands of Old Aramon were controlled by an elder dynasty of wood elven blood that gave way to half-elven and then mostly-human heritage as time passed during the Age of Heroes. Despite the rise of Nymarga and the establishment of the Black Empire, Old Aramon had maintained its relative autonomy due to the sheer amount of trade and commerce that came through these lands from each direction. To maintain that autonomy, the wood elven rulers merely collected an increased amount of duties and taxes and remitted most of it back to the Worm King’s coffers reliably. Their single focus was to ensure that the Black Empire never had a reason to focus any of its attention on these lands or these peoples. And for the most part, it worked for the ruling family, the Fyndhorns.
During the time of Nymarga’s Black Empire, the Fyndhorn bloodline was diluted by a dearth of suitable elven blood with which to intermingle. The Worm King and his lieutenants were tenacious in their bitter control over elven activities, and they were especially harsh regarding the high elves of the south. Fyndhorn elders were able to find suitable pairings with the wood elves of Othune, the Tannithi Forest, and the antecedents of Lyria. The restrictions over the centuries meant a dilution of their line with human nobility from the Lakelands and what would become the Free Realms. This led to a much more cosmopolitan attitude in the cities and market towns of Old Aramon, which enabled a broad expansion of the merchant class.
Old Aramon under the Fyndhorns came to an unceremonious conclusion near the end of the Age of Heroes, when the heartwood of the Fyndhorn Elder Tree was required for the completion of one of Nymarga’s Labours. The Fyndhorns resisted and were utterly annihilated by the cruelest lieutenant of the Worm King, Vrana Karastra, and her vampiric minions. In the aftermath, Karastra decreed that the realm would be put into a regency until the fully human nephew of the ruling Prince came of age. Thus began a period of weak rule under a diminished banner and bloodline.
The Post-War Transition
Old Aramon was a loose collection of holdings by the end of the Last War and the coming of the Long Winter. During this year of the famine, pestilence and death, the failing royal family was usurped by Varchild the Black Wolf -- a mercenary general from the Lakelands city of Aliira in what is now Mercadia. Varchild instituted rule by knightly orders, giving each of her captains a territory complete with a fortress and authority to rule and collect taxes. As time passed, these knightly orders explored magical capacities for the purpose of expanding their power and influence. It was at this time that the Orders of Aramon were preoccupied with battling neighbouring arcane powers such as the warring schools of Greyvale, the Oligarchs of Icatia, the Sorceress-Queen of the Steppes and even the Vampire Queen of Mercadia herself, Vrana Karastra.
The coming of Agall the Hero-King shifted the tide in the destiny of Old Aramon, and laid the groundwork for the Holy Kingdom we know today. Before he was canonized as an incarnation of the Divine King himself, Agall was an adventurer of renown. A cunning warrior and thief, Agall was supreme in his will, his passions and wielded no small amount of good fortune. In his time before becoming King, Agall was a renowned enemy of magicians and tyrants but even more well-known as a philanderer and libertine. Those who were close to Agall very nearly always fell into trouble, difficulty and danger because of it, however, and this was often believed to be Agall’s great curse: personal capacity and power, but he was a liability to everyone around him.
An example of this was the affair he had with Yalania Nera, the grandchild of Varchild. After a failed attempt at rescuing Yalania that resulted in her death, Agall took revenge and destroyed Amon the Archvile with the help of Varchild the Wolf Queen herself. In his campaign of vengeance, Agall tracked the dread sorcerer to an ancient temple of the Black Sun. With the help of both Varchild’s Order of the Winter Wolf and the heroic Order of the Griffon, they were able to defeat Amon the Archvile, destroy his tower and scatter his followers. In the hard victory Varchild the Wolf Queen fell. After honouring her memory, Agall was hailed as the new King of Aramon by the two combined brotherhoods of knights.
Agall, by this time, was in his late forties, and his adventuring days were sadly behind him. While he would take to the field when necessary, he mostly relied on his chosen friends and allies as the new Grand Masters of the Knightly Orders for the commonplace tasks of ruling. Roughly a decade into ruling, Agall was convinced that the greatest threats to Aramon, and the commonfolk from which he came up, were the petty sorcerous powers that ruled the human lands. He was a great patron of witch-hunters, especially knightly orders devoted to tracking down those who would commit vile acts to increase their power or life in unnatural ways.
By the time he was around seventy years old, King Agall the Grim took to the field for the last time against the forces of the Sorceress-Queen of the Steppes. And while his assembled knightly orders were successful in their overall campaign and able to force the nomadic armies out of Aramon, the old King took his bloodlust too far and overstretched his spearpoint assault too far from support and supply. He and the entirety of the Order of the Winter Wolf fell in the hard combat on the steps of a great pyramid being constructed by the Sorceress-Queen.
The Kingdom Without a King
Perhaps not surprisingly, the realm of Aramon settled and stabilized not long after the death of grim King Agall and his retainers. While Varchild and her ilk were just as cavalier with their battle thirst, they had been smarter about it than Agall. The late Wolf Queen was able to redirect the battle passion of her warriors in appropriate directions, and she was able to string victories together for strategic benefit and this led to the foundations of Aramon being secure for the thirty years of her rule. Grim Agall was driven far more by the flames of conflict, and during his time as King, they burned back onto the Kingdom more than once. While Agall was seen as much more positive than negative, especially by scholars today, it was believed at the time that Agall’s passing was a small reprieve from a man who saw only battles, only challenges, and only hardship. The Farrells of the Old Church and surviving aristocrats of Aramon got to work quickly in identifying a new royal house, which was quite unsuccessful and led to a war of succession that lasted over forty years in roughly five year increments of honest, active warfare and dishonest, peaceful spycraft.
Before the great houses of Aramon were completely exhausted, a coalition of surviving second and third sons came forth from the knightly orders forbidden to take part in the conflicts, and asserted a third option for the kingdom. Their solution would be to invite a nobleman of Abenton, Darien the Grey, to take up the Crown of Aramon. His mother was the last granddaughter of Varchild the Wolf Queen and his father was the second uncle of the current ruler of the Dragon Court of Abenton, High King Endrik the Pious. With this solution in hand, the two remaining great houses backed down from the brink of total destruction, and agreed to send envoys to the Court of the Dragon King himself.
Representatives from the two great houses, the five knightly orders, and the Old Church formally asked for King Endrik’s permission to allow his cousin to accede to the Crown of Aramon. The discussion took less than an hour before it was agreed upon. With much fanfare from both the Court of the Dragon King and the Farrells of the Old Church, Darien the Grey was crowned the King of Holy Aramon.
While Icatia was always a major center for the Old Church, it was the early support of it by both Abenton and now Aramon that led to the Old Church becoming the preeminent social and religious organization in the human world, perhaps even the entire west. Of the knightly orders, only the belligerent Knights of the Black Wing did not accept the Church nor the Divine King as their ultimate patron. They agreed to cede their holdings to the new King in exchange for the ability to leave the realm in peace, where they ventured to Greyvale to serve the autocratic Steward.
The Holy Kingdom
Aramon became a center of faith for the Lakelands much in the same way that Icatia was a center for the faith in what is now the Free Realms. King Darien the Grey ruled for five decades, even securing the Sun Crown from the ruined battlefields of Abenton after Endrik’s ill-fated son, Valleon, took the Lakelands to war. With the great houses in shambles, the King centralized his power and worked with the knightly orders once more to maintain control. The Holy Kingdom returned to form and succeeded in creating the trading empire that attracted Varchild’s attention more than a century ago. Taxes would be collected reliably for decades, and the money would go to strengthen both the temporal and spiritual infrastructure of the kingdom. As many bridges and highways would be built as fortresses and castles and nearly as many of these as churches, cathedrals and monasteries would be built in Darien’s time.
This early investment has created a stable, strong and resilient kingdom that has stood as a bulwark of the traditional good of the human world at its best. The Church of the Divine King was strong here, but never took over as it did in Old Icatia. The merchants were wealthy and active here, but never took over as they did in Orliac. The aristocrats were respected and influential here, but they never took over as they did in Abenton after the fall of the Dragon Court. Aramon was the stable kingdom that stabilized the Lakelands. This was only to be rivaled centuries later by the stability created in the Free Realms with the fall of Faradan in what is now the Kingdom of Eos under Elsin the Great.
The Coming of the God-Emperor
The Dwarven Legions were rolling over what they called the Shield Lands with a speed and momentum others had only seen on the Steppelands, and they were doing it marching on foot. At this point, the Holy Kingdom of Aramon had been stable and prosperous for several hundred years. They had focused primarily on maintaining the balance of power in the Lakelands, keeping the Steppeland nomads at bay, and holding the high elves of the Garden from undue influence. They were not prepared for the highly-organized and well-supported Legions of Victor Magnus, and while they put up an honourable resistance, the King of Aramon surrendered to the Dwarven Emperor himself after a third disastrous defeat on the field.
The Dwarven Emperor did not immediately accept the surrender of the King of Aramon. Instead, he sat down with the King and discussed future plans with King Darien IV, known to history as the Humble Sage, and agreed to a treaty that respected the balance of power that Aramon had helped to create. And despite its initial resistance to the Dwarven Emperor, it was the Kingdom of Aramon that came out of the initial conquest in the best shape and with the most resources. Working with the King of Aramon, the Dwarven Emperor invested time and effort into making Aramon a balancing influence on the Church which was increasingly Icatian in its culture and outlook. As he did with Eos earlier, Victor Magnus ensured that there would be continued Aramonian influence in the tenor and outlook of the Church that ensured Icatians would not take over and that there would not be any one power guiding the hearts and minds of the human world he wished to rule.
The Holy Kingdom would not be much affected by the sweep of history during the thousand years of relative peace brought by the dwarven legions. It was not until the coming of the high elven “Radiant Queen,” Riga the Magnificent, and her war against dwarven rule. By now, the dwarves and many others had taken to calling the dwarven ruler the God-Emperor and the Imperial Cult was at the height of its power and influence. True to fact, Victor Magnus was still alive -- an impossible feat for a normal dwarf -- and he had been focused primarily on issues in the far west with the gnomish peoples. The ascension of Riga Oréna an-Hava would have reverberating impacts upon all in the Lakelands, especially Aramon.
High-Elven Occupation
Riga and her army forced the dwarven Ninth Legion to withdraw from Aramon after a succession of battles. Aided by her personal troops called the Green Knights, the ninth legion’s commanders were either killed or ensorceled before the collected Aramonian Knightly Orders were able to do much beyond act as a rear-guard for the retreating legionaries. Riga herself bewitched the Grand Master of the Order of the Griffon, and the inner circle of the Knights of Reton, which neutralized many of the powerful individuals responsible for keeping King Darien the Seventh in power and sowed chaos in the Kingdom to effectively remove it from threatening Riga and her goals.
With the dwarves in retreat and the close retainers of the King turned to the green tabards of Riga, the annexation of Aramon was over by the end of the campaign season. The King was taken into custody and brought before Riga. It was found that he was immune to the charismatic powers of the Radiant Queen, and in refusing to legitimize the occupation, he was executed by his own enraptured men. In the next year and a half, the high elven occupation did what it could to strip the useful resources from the land and bring them back to their homeland. While there were fleeting rebellions against the occupation, the skirmishing and individually skilled nature of high-elven troops quickly put an end to any organized resistance not backed by strategic and realm-level military intervention.
Aramon would not be free of the high elves until the Dwarven God-Emperor himself would take the field and pull together disparate but determined troops to humiliate the Radiant Queen and her generals every time they would take the field against the dwarves. Of the remaining knightly orders and aristocratic troops loyal to Aramon, they would flock to the dwarven campaign and engender a sense of respect and cooperation that would last into the current age. The campaign that began in Southern Icatia and ended on the eastern shores of Abenton would push the high elves out of the realms of the Divine King. Riga and her close retainers would disappear for months, and the high elves would be pushed back into the lands in and around the Garden of Geniche.
Riga would reemerge some months later in the far western lands of the gnomes. She would call down Yhera's Tears, which would annihilate the new imperial capital and the most venerable gnomish city. The war would reignite in the far west and Steppelands, and while the famed Thirteenth Legion would forge a path back to dwarven lands for themselves and refugees, the Knightly Orders of Aramon would coordinate probing attacks into the Garden of Geniche with the Steward of Greyvale, the Southern Princes of Mercadia, and the Kingdom of Abenton. With a common foe, these three realms would cement a delicate peace long enough for their injured realms to heal and strengthen. In Aramon, the collected nobles and aristocrats took stock of themselves and their holdings. Each would avoid asserting control, seemingly waiting for someone to make the first move. After a decade the battles against the high elves would drop to a tenuous peace, and the nobles once again began sizing up one-another.
Return of Royal Blood
Right before the realm descended into civil war, it would be a strange alliance between the Church of the Divine King and the wood elven Realm of Lyria that would prevent more bloodshed. Flanked by a Holy Prominence of the Divine King and the Queen of Lyria, a young noble by the name of Garran was introduced as the great-great grandson of Darien the Fourth. It was explained and seemingly verified that he was the great grandson of Darien IV's daughter Varanya, the youngest child who disappeared shortly before the last battle between Aramon and the Grand Conqueror. It was revealed that she ran away from her betrothed, a noble princeling from Southern Mercadia, and joined an adventuring fellowship that traveled the seas for decades. From there, she lived, fell in love, married and had children. While Garran was the sole remaining descendant of a runaway princess, he bore the royal blood of Varchild and Endrik, Darien the Grey and Darien IV which was something that no other aristocrat in Aramon could claim. To avoid war, and to ensure that the Kingdom remained stable and peaceable, it was agreed that Garran would ascend to the Throne and wear the Sun Crown itself.
Garran was a studious monarch who focused primarily on establishing practices that would engender respect for the Throne and ensure that the ambitions of various other noble houses would be channeled in a direction that would create a more stable realm. He would be a generous patron of the Knightly Orders granting money and land to ensure that the Orders could support a large roster of Knights who could then be challenged to quest for glory, riches and justice. The Holy Kingdom would mirror the activities of the Realm of Lyria with their fellowships and the effect would be mostly beneficial to the overall fabric of both the Lakelands and the Free Realms.
A Return to Form
While Icatia limits itself with the rivalry between the Church-run east and the Republican west, the Holy Kingdom of Aramon has been expanding their influence in the faith itself. While Icatians still hold a plurality of all the High Farrells in Creation, the Aramonians have secured a majority of the ruling Council of High Farrells, now referred to as the Holy Prominences, who number five of the nine who currently sit. As a result, the theological and political approaches of the Church have turned from one based on hierarchy and mundane politics to one based on how the teachings of the Church should influence the behaviour and outlook of all who hold to the Divine King in a cohesive and broadly-applicable manner. This is often in contrast with the more-centralized controls that the Kings of Aramon had established, but it has been embraced as a means to balance the autocratic tendencies inherent to those who hail from the lands of grim Saint Agall.
The same holds true over the past several generations regarding trade and commerce. While Aramon is not nearly as dynamic as the free-wheeling city-states of Mercadia, or as focused on commercial profiteering as the Lyrians or the Grand Duke of Orliac, it is a well-balanced economy that benefits very much from safe and open highways and widely-accepted tariffs and levies. There exists a relatively small merchant class, but the King is well-aware of the disparities between his vassals and the commonfolk. Thus, the King presides over much direct charity and investment in the Holy Order of the Swan and the Knights of the Silver Moon, which both employ healers and educators in addition to those who train commoners in the arts of unarmed combat and those who would protect the powerless from that which stalks the night and the shadows. So far, the current King, Awain the Wise, is well-respected throughout the human lands. He is currently dealing with the untimely death of his heir and grandchildren by him. He is looking to betroth his widowed daughter to a suitable nobleman, anointing their future child the heir, and appointing a Council of Regents.
It is believed that the Council of Regents will be a triumvirate consisting of the highest-ranked Aramonian Church official, the Grand Master of the Arcanum in the Lakelands, and a representative chosen by the Steward of Greyvale. The decision has raised many eyebrows at Court and in the manor houses of the Aramonian nobility, but it seems as though the Arcanum may choose to invest in building a new Great Tower in Aramon which may shift their favour from Mercadia to Aramon. This move alone may be extremely lucrative, but it also potentially alienates the Mercadians and the local nobles from the Throne. Only time will tell...

Faith and Iron

Type

Geopolitical, Kingdom

Demonym

Aramonian