Vladican Steedbeds

Three miles north of the city of Vladica is a wide stretch of land much like any other vacant spanse leftover from the many wars that once ravaged the area. However, this particular stretch is now known to be the final resting place of nearly eight thousand warhorses from the ancient Wars of Liberation. Their bones lay underneath the rolling plains along with several thousand ancient blades, and not even the orvon inhabiting the neighboring city are certain as to the meaning of such an orchestrated burial.

I have lived the past year in a place that is so foreign to us Ethanians, that still blames us for the utter destruction that we have laid upon their lands. I have been interrogated by the Beourjen Confederacy more times than I can count to attest to my integrity and intent as an academic. Even after all that, I have spent the past few months preparing this very thesis in solitary confinement and reviewing it with Vladican and Reservation authorities before it could be brought here before you.

And I am so thankful for every second of it, because I have been granted a privilege that no other common man or woman has—ever.

— Essina Pastigarde, 1458 thesis

Horns

Due to the nature of the burials and limited information known to the globe about orcs as a race in general, Pastigarde was unable to determine whether the horns buried with the horses had been broken from the horse skeletons themselves, or rather had been the horns of their orcish riders. As exciting a prospect it might be that the warhorses were actually unicorns, several of Pastigarde's colleagues expressed the idea as the "romantic and fantastical musings of youthful scholarship" (Latven, 1459).

Raea

Pastigarde believed the horses may have been sacrificed as a thank-you to the goddess Raea in aiding the orcs during the Wars of Liberation, or perhaps were offerings asking for her forgiveness. The fact that there are horns buried with many of them is equally fitting, as Raea in her horse form was made a unicorn. It is, however, just as plausible that the horses were killed during the Wars of Liberation and then buried afterward.

Orvon culture as a whole has always greatly valued horses so the theory of sacrifice does seem unlikely in that regard, although Pastigarde did remark that in multiple other burial sites from the Wars of Liberation, horses and orcs who died in battle were usually buried together so that the orc could ride their steed to the eternal feast.

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