Age of the Thief Queens, Part 5: Rise of the Matrons & the Yaro Reconquest
With the extermination of Second Formian Hive on Asana, while war’s violence did not abate, Lashunta society entered a new phase. For the first time ideologies guided cities and politics, instead of survival and conquest, including direction of its conflicts.
In the South, the Valmaeana Confederation stayed united under their shared vision of the Formians’ extermination. For the first time they contemplated taking back the lands bereft from their ancient foremother, and so began a strategy of advancing control over the Bulwarks and the Straits of Glory. Their first invasions of the Colonies’ mainlands, however, found a coast well defended by bug-shelled caste-warriors. The Valmaeana withdrew, regretting their losses and taking their lessons home to build a martial society capable of sustaining the war-effort necessary to bring the fight to their enemy.
In the North, the matron-rulers of Reiefya and Qabarat dreamed of revolution. These cities successes against the Formians, coupled with Reiefya’s recent liberation from the Thief-Queens, tempted them to export matron-republicanism northward. Their wealth from the Shattersea trade allowed them to deny the Thief-Queens access to the Lower Yaro Delta at will and dictate advantageous terms. Furthermore, itinerant outriders and philosophers preached anti-monarchic sentiment and republican ideas to the hinterland populaces, dangerous ideas for the tyrant ruling-class maintaining their ethnic superiority. These wandering diplomat-scholars also organized alliances among the Stormshield Highland Clans to flank the Thief-Queens' positions. The matron-cities got their wish when rebellion broke out in Hanazhyana’s outlying provinces, whose repression they answered with military aid. After a century of peeling off provinces piecemeal, the delta cities lent support to a full revolution, which in 17,013 ZS drove the Thief-Queens from Hanazhya for the first time in almost five thousand years, letting it join Reiefya and Qabarat as republics.
With the Thief-Queen’s holding only the Yaro’s upper end, the opportunity might have seemed ripe for them to revise their theory of rulership. Instead, although they lavishly sued for peace with Hanazhyana and the southern cities, they doubled down on their ethnic despotism. The Retaea overladies tried to eradicate any thought that might challenge their supremacy. They made any education other than their approved Old Retaean dogma illegal. Possession of books or proof of literacy among the the Yaro underclass were punishable by death, sometimes by burning. The Thief-Queens’ brutality confirmed their international perception as barbarians, including the Lower Yaro’s popular sentiment that their northern neighbors must be liberated. As warfare flared sporadically among the cities, the matron-rebublics recruited allies within the peasant populations, until another push toppled Mahyat’s Thief-Queens in 17,546 ZS, leaving only Son.
As Son had been the first city to fall to the Thief-Queens, and its earlier Sage-Queens had first invited the Retaea sellswords into the Yaro Valley, a vindictive fever overtook the Yaro Cities to see this last foothold of tyranny expunged. Yet Son’s environs were the most heavily colonized by the Retaea, and as Thief-Queen loyalists had fled northward with the southern rebublics’ advances, their identity had retrenched. The Matronhoods mustered an allied army to forcibly remove the Thief-Queens, which Son put forth all its efforts to withstand. In 17,643 ZS, less than a hundred years after Mahyat’s revolution, Queen Elmereth, mistakenly called the Last Thief-Queen by Yaro Scholars, withdrew from Son and retreated eastward to the Retaea, seeking exile with Queen Vemereth II of Lea. The allied republics declared Son liberated and installed a military government that would last for the next five hundred years.
Yet the rule of the Thief-Queens had not ended, with Lea remaining under their control, the Retaea savannah-moors standing militarized and induced to seek hostilities against the Yaro Valley, and Retaea sympathies still strong in Son. A cold war brewed for the next six hundred years between the Retaea and the Yaro, with the Retaea seeking to agitate a revolution similar to what the southern republics had used, and promising ~Hithanara-Shaea~ - the Return of the Queen. Finally, a revolt in Son against the military junta allowed for the establishment of a matron-republic in 18,198 ZS to rule that city. In answer, the Thief-Queens in Lea organized a grand alliance of clans to invade and reclaim their ancestral empire in 18,206, which failed.
Comments