Age of the Thief-Queens, Part 3 - Hala & the Successor Queendoms
Prior to Queen Vemereth’s meteoric rise and fall, the chronicles tell that Queen Saeoel of Hanazhyana, one of the last Sage-Queens, survived her city’s fall and escaped. The epic tragedy ~Huael Saeoeli~ - Lament for Saeoel - recounts she lived the next seventy-six years in exile, fleeing the Retaea warriors, hiding in the snake-haunted jungle marshes east of the River Yaro among her surviving retainers and the barbarian Marsh Clans. There they toiled to keep alive a resistance against the conquering Thief-Queens, proving hindersome even after Reiefya fell and while the Retaea conquerors hemmed in the Elves of Qabarat. When at last Queen Koroaeth captured the elderly Saeoel, the queen of Hanazhyana walked freely to her execution. Then she cursed Koroaeth: ~Heienya o’distimi-illi evanis,~ spoke the old queen: “You will never know peace,” right before she knelt and let the headman cut her neck. The Lament then tells that, when Queen Koroaeth had the old queen’s skull silvered and set within the regalia of other queens’ skulls, the curse so became bound to all of Koroaeth’s descendents as the skulls were passed down through the Thief-Queens.
Neither was Queen Saeoel the only notable to escape the Thief-Queens’ conquest. Thirty six years after Saeoel fled Hanazhana’s fall, Princess Avyreamni of Hesenya, a cousin to the queen, also escaped her city’s conquest. She led refugees westward into the Southern Stormshield Mountains, where they settled in the Dale of Hala, a broad stronghold in the deep mountains inhabited only by Highland Clans. There they cut out a rough life while they curried the neighboring clans’ goodwill and fought back the stone apes and mobats for their survival, hiding from the Retaea invaders.
With the onset of the Thief-Queen Wars, the Yaro’s lowland usurpers could not be bothered hunting destitute exiles among the mountains, which gave Avyreaemni and her descendents time to grow and organize. From their highland fastness, they stayed quiet and watched Vemereth’s Empire reach its height unifying the whole Yaro Valley and Retaea. After Vemereth’s death, her empire fractured into three successor queendoms - Lea ruling the Retaea Savannah-Moors in the north, Son overseeing Mahyat and Hanazyana in the Yaro’s Upper Reaches, and Reiefya in the Southern Delta with nominal vassalage from Qabarat.
Forty years later in 13,307 ZS, Princess Erymi, Avyreaemni’s great-granddaughter, seized a Mahyata goldbarge bringing ore from the deep mountains, and then a Reiefya delegation heading northward to Son, incidentally ambushing them near the sight of Hesenya, the princess’s ancestral home. In an obvious gesture to the Retaea conquerors, her warriors left the delegation’s heads on spears stuck in the ground. Hala had declared themselves the Sage-Queens’ successors in a deed that stunned the whole Yaro Valley.
At first, Erymi’s twin attacks seemed foolhardy taking on both Retaea queendoms at once. Both Son and Reiefya, already at each others’ throats, set aside their differences to answer the threat from the mountains. Yet Erymi had thought through her strategy with an end in mind. The stolen gold bought both loyalties and intelligence from the neighboring Retaea noblewives and hedge-magistrates. When the Thief-Queens’ armies assayed the Stormshields, they hunted an enemy they could not find over land they could not map, and who seemingly knew where to strike them at will and whim. As the counterattacks lost momentum, they faced mounting losses as the Hala ruthlessly harried. Also, soon the Retaea conquerors realized they faced another problem: they faced a foe who spoke the same language, worshiped the same gods, and followed the same values as the Yaro peasants whom they had treated like dumb cattle for the last three centuries. With the right words from Princess Erymi (and a calculated application of the stolen gold) rebellion blazed in the valley lowlands with a clear, common goal: to tear down the Thief-Queens and all they stood for.
Although the Hala claimed to be the Sage-Queens’ inheritors, in practice they behaved more like the ancient Warrior-Queens. After the Sage-Queens’ paralytic pacifism, the Hala had learned how to fight, including psychically bonding and riding Shotalashu as the Sage-Queens’ had forgotten, and often copying the Retaea’s tactics. Whereas the Retaea ruling-class had to spend at least half its energy and resources policing the native Yaro population, Erymi’s followers united under a shared ideology, allowing them to fully commit to the war. As repressions progressed, they accepted refugees into their number, trained them up, and sent them back out to kill more Thief-Queens. This resemblance to the first Lashunta who had conquered the Yaro Valley and founded the first empires, coupled with the fact that the descendents of Princess Avyreaemni formally eschewed any claim to the title of queen until they reconquered Hesenya, earned then the name ~Hivaenmore~ - the Warrior-Princesses.
Hala’s location provided premium access to the Yaro’s delta marshes and the Stormshield Shore, which defined the next phase of their campaign, seizing control of the northern delta and isolating Reiefya. So desperate became Reiefya that they called for aid from the petty client pirate-queens they had fostered among the Shattersea, paying for their support and granting them port in Qabarat, whose Elves until then had been let to dwell autonomously within this largest Elven colony in Western Asana, secure in their privileges in consideration for a suitable tribute, on which deal the Reiafya Retaea now reneged. This development bore fruit when, nine years after the war started in 7991 ZQ (13,316 ZS), Qabarat’s Elves and the Lashunta descendants of the Valmaean refugees who had fled there after the Formian Conquest of the Colonies, rebelled. Not only did they drive the Thief-Queens out, they rejected the notion of queenship altogether. As part of the constitution the Lashunta and Elves tentatively negotiated in this first inter-specie-al government, the Lashunta convened a Hall of Matrons drawn from their most prominent families’ elder members, initiating a republican form of government that has sinceward spread to other cities and become the norm. For the first time ever, the Reiefya Thief-Queens sued for peace, recognizing Qabarat’s independence and letting Hala turn their attention back northward, to deal with Son alone.
Hala began war in earnest, controlling not only the Northern Delta, but also seeking to win Lost Hesenya, the site the Warrior-Princesses called home, which they accomplished in 13,366 ZS and founded Hesenyana - New Hesenya. At that deed, Erymi crowned her daughter Tessereie queen, marking the successor-queendom’s high point. However, Tessereie, after her mother’s death, fell in battle while laying siege to Hanazhyana, in 13,348 ZS. Then Son in the north and Reiefya in the south both set upon Hesenya and squeezed it like a vice while the Warrior-Princesses and rebellious Yaro peasants held at all costs. New Hesenya held on for another 136 years until it fell in 13,484 ZS, sending the Warrior-Princesses retreating back to Hala.
Despite the advantage the Thief-Queens held with New Hesenya’s fall (which they burned back to the ground), a stalemate arose after 13,547 ZS (8232 ZQ) when first Hanazhya, then Mahyat, rebelled against Son. The independent city-states first alternated between fighting Son in the north, and then Hala in the south, and then replaced these conflicts with a confusing shift of alliances when the central cities fought each other, which culminated in 13,745 ZS when Mahyat conquered Son, recruited a new levy of allies from the Retaea Moor-Clans, and used them to conquer Hanazhyana. They then pressed Hala until the Warrior-Princesses sued for peace and became a vassal-state to their empire, forsaking the delta’s rich lands, and allowing the northern Thief-Queens to launch a campaign at Qabarat. The Warrior-Princess’s fortunes again reversed when Mahyat’s empire fell apart in 13,817 ZS. Yet by then Hala’s alliance with Qabarat had irreversibly foundered, and the Elves henceforth treated their forays into the delta as merely more Lashunta raiders.
Despite refortifying its frontiers in 13,826 ZS (8511 ZQ), Hala’s defense proved ineffective as the Thief-Queens resolidified their power in the Yaro, which was further predicted when the sacred hometree around which Hala's palace was built, according to the chronicles, died of blight. Instead, they pursued a strategy of playing off rival cities, offering vassalage and tribute against the power they deemed the greatest threat. This proved enervating in the long term, until Queen Laraeth of Hanazhyana invaded the Dale of Hala for the last time.
The Warrior-Princesses of Hala, deeming their doom sealed, locked themselves in the palace amid the besieging Thief-Queens and set it afire, dying instead of returning to thralldom. Queen Laraeth razed the whole city and cut down all the milk-trees in 14,280 ZS (8955 ZQ), a deed whereby she declared all remaining Yaro self-identity harkening back to the Sage-Queens snuffed out.
With Hala’s fall, the Retaea ruling aristocracy of the Thief-Queens seemingly stood unchallenged over the Yaro Valley. Yet the Warrior-Princesses had already left a legacy, starting with Qabarat’s independence. Even after their alliance disintegrated and the mountain-princessdom fell, the Elves along with their growing Lashunta population had strengthened to maintain independence, finding faith in their nascent Shattersea trade network and their matron-republican government to inspire something beyond the Thief-Queens’ despotism. Qabarat also kept alive Hala's memory in the ~Shamyali Hivaenmorei~ - The Song of the Warrior-Princesses, considered by many the age's premier literary work, and which became venerated in the soon-forming cult of the Outriders.
On a more dismal note, Hala’s veneration of the Sage-Queens and the rebellions it had sparked among the Yaro peasants hardened the Retaea aristocracy’s prejudice into a formal system of repression. Where previously, native sympathizers could curry favor with their Retaea overladies and be promoted into the elite, a new vision of ethnic superiority dominated, as indicated in phrase: ~O’retae di limyela ti manyela, o’Retaea-dei~ - “If they don’t speak or look like Retaea, they are not Retaea,” where under law the aristocracy must speak only Old Retaean and keep alive the traditions that had originally evolved out of the moorland nomads’ way of life. While the lot of the Yaro peasant class worsened both during and after this thousand-year period of Hala’s resistance, this ethnic repression laid the foundation for the Thief-Queens’ ultimate downfall.
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