Latter Warrior-Queens: Hanat Empire (Shazhavatha Hanata)
The Fall of Son marked a climactic shock to the cities of the Yaro Valley and beyond. Eighty generations of Lashunta had lived fought and died under the Warrior-Queens reigning from the Temple of the Burning-Mother. At this news, Lashunta everywhere waited what fate would unravel next.
The queens of Old Hanat (~Hanat-Tolla~) had consolidated power in the Yaro Valley with Son’s fall. They had an opportunity to end a 2,700-year cycle of tyranny and inter-city warfare. Much as they wished to be acknowledged as the Lashunta’s liberators, they were seduced by that same power.
From this period’s chronicles, the Yaro Lashunta yearned for the unity they had known before the Moqeva’s downfall. The people longed for peace with their neighbors. Against this wish, lay the desires of a professional military class that had evolved, first under Son, and then among the other Yaro cities as well, to defend their interests: the ~Uthuroa~, a land-owning gentry in whom the aggressive martial virtues of the Warrior-Queens found their last evolution, and whose fortunes were counted in victories and spoils. Even as Hanat tried to consolidate its position and build a lasting framework with the other cities, these warrior-adventurers’ aspirations threatened to throw everything back into violence.
The first challenge to Hanat’s new order came within a hundred years of their triumph, and from an old enemy already defeated: Son. Unlike the haughty descendents’ of Queen Lanare, these were the diaspora of Son’s citizens who wished to return to their homeland. When the Hanat queens refused, Sonna resistance organized in the hinterland. Hanat dispatched Uthuroa warbands to suppress the insurrection, which grew into a messy guerrilla war among the Upper Yaro’s marshes and the Stormshield Highlands. After a string of Hanata defeats, Sonna freedom-fighters seized the Island of Aelau and began to refortify their ancient home. Alarmed at the perceived rebirth of Son’s menace, Hanat called on its confederates to war. To their queen’s surprise, the allies’ response showed half-hearted. Mahyat, sitting between Son and Hanat, proved more afraid of Hanat’s marauding Uthuroa, and their refusal (and tacit support to Son) effectively cut off control of the Western Bank. The Delta cities sent token support. In this response lay a test for Hanat’s empire: they wished to see how the new overladies would react.
In the end, Hanat tried to reconquer Son with forces at their disposal. When that failed, they at last negotiated a peace. Son was allowed to be refounded, though on condition that its queens raised no armies (though it was still obliged to provide troops and support to Hanat), and dedicated itself solely to support of the Temple of Matarasse. Son thus became a ecumenical city, and thereby a haven for philosophers, sages, and psychic studies, a tradition that even rings down the ages to this day.
Hanat then turned to deal with its erstwhile allies, whom it perceived as having forsaken them in the Son revolt, and yet who perceived Hanat as having failed the test they had offered. Tensions escalated with Mahyat, whom Hanat denounced as traitors. The feud smoldered into a long-running war, though full of more threats and demonstrations than actual battles, and fraught with broken truces and raids. When Hesenya and Reiefya sought to apply pressure for a peaceful solution, Hanat took it as a challenge to their authority. Escalation got out of hand when Uthuroa warriors took opportunity to mount attacks against rivals, and Hanat found itself fighting wars on two fronts. It mounted a truce with Mahyat, letting it focus on the greater threat from the South.
The Yaro’s situation resembled the violent interregnum at the end of Son’s Empire, when an unforeseen development occurred. The Azlanti Human outpost at Qabarat (chronicles from the time record the settlement’s name as ‘Kasutrovelaryuma’ - a rendition of Castrovelarium) disappeared. For the past 2,200 years the Azlanti had provided a stabilizing influence within the Yaro Delta, which, though they remained neutral in Lashunta politics, were not above doing favors for their neighbors, and whose strength and position upon the walls of Qabarat (and its new harbor, for apparently the Azlanti had opened the caves linking the walled lake to the sea, creating a new mouth for the Yaro). That situation ended when Earthfall happened back on Golarion, and the Qabarat Humans migrated through the Akiton Worldgate. Hanat and the other cities called a truce and agreed to investigate what had happened to their Aslanta neighbors, fearing an unknown threat.
Yet with peace on its southern front, Hanat took the opportunity to organize an offensive against Mahyat. This time, there were no demonstrations, no outdrawn attempts at negotiation. In a ruthless campaign of which Queen Lanare would have approved, Hanat laid siege, stormed, and sacked their neighbor city, and then installed vassal queens that would keep it under control. For the first time since Son’s overthrow, Hanat held the whole north in its grasp. Afterward, Hanat applied more aggressive pressure to bring Hesenya and Reiefya into the fold, with marginal success, though revolts required occasional suppression, and not only in the south. Things continued to smolder until 5003 ZS, when another disaster worked in Hanat’s favor: a Moldstorm wiped out much of Hesenya. In the generosity to rebuild, Hanat consolidated its hold over the stricken city. Reiefya on the coast was isolated, with support coming only from Lasahaua and other cities on the Shattersea. For the next three hundred years, the Yaro Valley belonged to Old Hanat.
That changed in 5326 ZS, when the Elves arrived. They had settled Sovyrian in Castrovel’s Southern Hemisphere, separate from Asana by the Sea of Teeth, eight hundred years earlier, at the same time the Azlanti disappeared, and had for the last half of that time been spreading out along Asana’s southern coasts, into the Bulwarks between that continent and the Colonies, and then northward into the Shattersea. Like the Azlanti, they were drawn and had purposefully sought the worldgate at Qabarat. While encounters with Elves had been documented even in the Age of Legend, they had remained an anomaly, with rumors of recently developments slowly trickling from the south.
Since the Azlanti’s disappearance, the Lashunta had largely left the Qabarat site forsaken, a ghost-town of buildings that would have looked more at home on Golarion. When Lashunta hunters first discovered an Elven ship in the shield-wall’s harbor, and Elven colonists settling among the Azlanti ruins, and despite previous arrangements, things went poorly. Violence escalated, and the alarm swiftly sounded through Reiefya, Hesenya, and further upriver to Hanat, that an invader had entered the Yaro Valley. For the first time in four thousand years, the Lashunta had a common enemy.
Henceforth, the native Lashunta chronicles have a heedful counterpoint in Qabarat’s Shining Jewel Chronicle, which describe the Lashunta in great detail, including the description of arrogant warrior-lords (the Uthuroa, both Damaya and Korasha) eager for a confrontation and the great muster of hosts under Hanat’s leadership, and also admission that the Elves had never intended to confront the locals in open warfare. The Elves already had a measure of the Lashunta, based on their contacts in the south, and realized the futility of meeting them in open warfare. Instead, they chose a strategy of denial and defense, avoiding the Lashunta’s psychically enhanced tactical strengths, and played for time. The next sixteen years held raids and protracted, broken sieges, wherein, though duels and deeds ring down through legend, the Elves, though they unleashed terrible and unknown arcane powers, never fought when they could lose.
At last, the Hanat queen agreed to a truce out of weariness. The Elves offered terms too good to be true. They would claim only those lands the Lashunta had already given away: Qabarat, including its harbor-lake and shield-wall, and the Akiton Worldgate at its crest, in exchange for a hoard of unbelievable wealth: elfgems, wrought gold and silver, and a gift of Elven swords, a new weapon heretofore unknown by Castrovel’s natives. The Elves ultimate goal came to light when shortly thereafter a foursome of aiudara Elfagates joined the Akiton portal upon Qabarat’s crest, linking them not only to Sovyrian, but to other parts of Asana they had chosen to colonize. It also meant they could now reinforce and resupply without lengthy voyage from the Southern Hemisphere. Whether the Lashunta liked it or not, the Elves had come to to stay.
For the rest of the Yaro cities, while Hanat might have been appeased by the Elves’ blandishments, other cities were not. Within the Yaro’s Delta, Reiefya and Hesenya took the swelling Elven settlement as a threat to their territory and interests. They judged Hanat’s deal with the Elves as betrayal. A new rebellion began, at first surreptitiously, until it had time to organize. Hanat withstood the threat for another two hundred years. Hostilities escalated in intensity until a new Moldstorm struck in 5595 ZS, weakening Hanat so that it could no longer keep up the conflict. The Delta cities pounced quickly, soon joined by Mahyat, and closed in for the kill.
As Hanat marshaled its last reserves to offstave the threat, it contemplated calling on its former enemy. In desperation, it sent word to Son, the city it had razed, whose Damaya it had made breed with its own men, for help. In answer, the Sonna sent a single Korasha, the philosopher-sage Odimias, who presented himself before Hanat’s queen to deliver his city’s message.
~Siyi riyasira kidali,~ came his laconic answer, in Archaic Asanan: "Reckon your sins."
When the allied cities overwhelmed Old Hanat, they drove its citizens from the city's site, just as Hanat had done to Son thirteen centuries beforehand, and burned it to the ground. When the Hanata were finally allowed to resettle, they had to do at a new site adjacent to the ruins, now called Hanazhyana (~Hanat-Iana~) - New Hanat.
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