Middle Warrior-Queens: Son Empire (Shazhavatha Sonna)
With the Moqeva’s extinction (though Lashunta expansion into the Shattersea continued to pursue remnants) and undisputed Lashunta control over the Yaro Valley, the city of Son reached its height in prestige and influence. Its queens had fought and won a thousand-year war against their ancient foe. That same success, however, bore the seeds of Son’s downfall, a situation it foresaw and strove to prevent.
Under the Early Warrior-Queens and war against the Moqeva, Son had capitalized on a carefully maintained system of alliances to maintain its primacy among the Lashunta of both the Yaro Valley and the Retaea Moorlands. Embassies of noblewives regularly headed northward, bearing gifts to the tribal queens, secured promises of warrior-levies for the next campaign, and offered conquered land in exchange. Furthermore, when these warriors from the north reached the Yaro, Son atop its Ofu acropolis with its shining temple to Burning-Mother, proclaimed a holy place from Queen Eieshe’s vision, was the first sight they beheld. Son leveraged this awe to secure the warrior-clans’ loyalties. In turn, they offered these reserves to Son’s daughter-cities further southward, who bore the Moqeva’s onslaught as the war progressed, thus keeping them loyal as well. Aside from minor disputes, this arrangement was largely voluntary.
With Lashunta expansion and pursuit of the Moqeva southward along the Shattersea, however, Son began to lose relevance. The first cities founded beyond the Yaro - Lasahaua in 1844 ZS, Nivaea in 2284 ZS - sent emissaries to Son to be granted recognition. However, the sheer distances meant they conducted affairs largely freely. Furthermore, Lashunta colonists leaving the Yaro created a population drain, moving more resources beyond Son’s control, while the distances also diminished interest from the Retaea, likewise decreasing the military reserves Son had enjoyed. The downriver Yaro cities, sensing this shift in the balance of power, began disputing Son’s hegemony. The Sonna queens’ first reaction was to proclaim their historical primacy as not only the first and mother-city of all Lashunta, but also as the spiritual and moral authority over all Lashunta as the center of Burning-Mother’s cult. Son began insisting that all other cities’ queens submit for the High Priestess’s approval and leverage this to select queens sympathetic and loyal to Son’s hegemony, all while trying to organize colonial expansion beyond the Yaro, as military proof of its supremacy. The situation, however, continued to degenerate and become more fractious over the next two centuries.
Then, 250 years after the Moqeva’s last stand at Qabarat, Queen Lanare of Son developed a new solution. In 1,589 ZS she declared herself ~Shae-Shaeue~ (Modern Lashunta ~shazhaue~) : Queen of Queens, and proclaimed her authority over all Lashunta, “from the northernmost Retaea, over Mother-Arasene and Father-Yaro, and until the furthest Southern Seas. So she became the first Empress, a word in Westerna Asana Lashunta that also means Tyrant. When the other cities rejected Lanare’s claim, she loosened her Korasha harem-generals to bring them under sway. For the first time Lashunta made organized warfare on other Lashunta.
Until Queen Lanare, while Lashunta had certainly warred and feuded since prehistory, these fights had taken the form of raids and ceremonial duels, often curtailed through negotiations and interbreeding, and lacking the communal ‘war-mind’ ferocity the Lashunta had inflicted on the alien Moqeva and monstrous Qoelu that came stampeding from the jungles. It is possible that Lashunta’s psychic empathy toward their own kind had worked to limit this level of animosity. Lanare changed all that by selecting generals and captains willing to take that violence to the next step, and so reap the military success their culture demanded, and to break their warriors to work bloody slaughter on their own kind. This strategy was shockingly successful, even as it wrought a moral crisis.
Under Queen Lanare, Mayhat surrendered after a bloody battle that saw 5,000 warriors dead. Old Hanat fell soon afterward, after a loss of 8,000 warriors in two battles. Then Lanare led her army across the Retaea, where the Sonna secured Lea’s capitulation. Lanare used this campaign to enhance her prestige among the Moorland Tribes and recruited those queens and warriors seduced by the opportunity she offered. Thus reinforced, she marched back to the Yaro, where even then the Lower-Valley cities - Hesenya at the Delta’s head and Reiefya at the delta’s mouth on the Shattersea - were marshalling to meet this new threat. After a lengthy and bloody campaign, Hesenya was besieged and sacked, whereafter Reiefya alone capitulated and gave its princesses as hostage.
Then the rebellions began. While Lanare largely achieved her vision of the Lashunta cities united under Son and a single overqueen, from her newly built pleasure-palace atop Mt. Eizoshu she never rested easy, or her daughters afterward, as even Son’s populace object to this new reign of terror. The Yaro Valley’s warrior-culture shifted from expansive conquest to a police-state. Whle Queen Lanare’s successors tried to expand on her example southward into the Shattersea’s young cities, these lay too far afield to consider anything more than perfunctory acknowledgement. Then in 2,377 Lasahaua outright rejected Son’s supremacy. In the first ever naval campaign, a Son-led fled attacked that city and was destroyed, forcing Son to yield all claims on the South.
Rebellions continued sporadically for another 900 years, which each time the Son empresses answered with overwhelming military force, when its princesses were not vying for supremacy amongst themselves. Then in 3,290 ZS, a series of huge Moldstorms wracked the Retaea Moorlands, exterminated Lea, and left none but a few survivors in the far north, beyond Lake Arasene. Son’s reserve of nomadic warriors, on which it had relied, vanished, leaving it alone to maintain control over its reluctant daughters. While Son hastily recolonized Lea, another Moldstorm struck the Upper Yaro in 3,426, causing massive loss of life in Son and to its agricultural base. The end had begun.
Although Son’s Warrior-Queens continued to insist on their supremacy, the next 800 years read almost like an interregnum. First Reiefya, then Heienya rejected Son’s authority, protesting taxes Son levied to rebuild after the Moldstorm. In 3577 ZS Old Hanat followed, first in defeating a Sonna army, and then in trying to wrest control of Mahyat. Son succeeded politically by playing off the lower-valley cities against each other while trying to reassert itself. Yet by 4,268 ZS Old Hanat had succeeded in not only binding the other cities in alliance, but in laying siege to Son, the stronghold that had once warded Lashunta from the Moqeva.
Then the cities of the Yaro Valley showed they had learned Queen Lanare’s lessons better than she had ever imagined. In the surrender and sack of Son, Hanat’s Warrior-Queens slew all of Son’s Korasha men and decreed that, if the Damaya wished to perpetuate their people, they must use Hanat’s men to do so. Then they cut down Son’s Soul-Tree and burned the city, though they spared the Temple of Burning-Mother, which even then stood too sacred, and scattered the survivors, forbidding them ever to return to the Isle of Aelau. Within the Yaro Valley, the seat of empire had shifted from Son to Old Hanat.
Yet a priestess stole and saved a cutting from Son’s Soul-Tree, and hid and planted it on the island’s southern side.
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