Shadow of Ylisaeua, Part 2

After Queen Sifaene of Alendrastya placed her ~tiqezhi~ - anathema upon Ylisaeua and blocked the passes, the Lashunta of Southern Asana were perfectly happy to forsake the ghost-city, so successfully that it stayed forgotten for the next eight thousand Castrovel years (granted only four thousand Earth/Golarion years, though whole civilizations have risen and fallen in shorter timespans). In similar fashion, the Lashunta Warrior-Queens, without an external threat after they exterminated the Moqeva, killed themselves off and repented, letting a new world order bloom across the war-torn Valley of the Yaro River, the shores and islands of the Shattersea, and the newly discovered coasts in the far west, soon to be called Marastra (the Colonies) and Ukalam. The lost valley of Ylisaeua, hidden among the Haunishu Peaks, became little more than a warning to foolish scholars, or even a tale to frighten children.
Yet it could not be wholly forgotten. In the bloomtide of the Sage-Queens and the enlightenment they cultivated, the Lashunta still dwelled among the bones of the past and the monuments of not only their foremothers, but of the foes whomon they had inflicted genocide. Despite the jungles’ hungry growth, ruins sometimes emerged from the lushness: ancient purple spires etched in profane runes, pits whose bottoms could not be plumbed, whose depths lay so shrouded that not even the Darkfloor’s denizens dared scuttle through. Sometimes these accidental relics bore treasures, perhaps hidden by their erstwhile masters hoping to save them for further use, perhaps missed and lost when the Warrior-Queens’ harem-warriors had put another Moqeva warren to flood and torch. Perhaps these treasures had proved too hardy against the Lashunta conquerors’ wreck: stone too hard to crack or metal too firm to melt, so that, over centuries and millennia as this highly inquisitive species pressed their world’s secrets, they could not help but stumble upon hidden curiosities, and the blasphemy hidden within.
After some horrors and disasters instilled their legacy on this blooming civilization, the Sage-Queens realized they could not ignore the Past’s evil. They needed the knowledge and means to find and recognize it, contain it, and ultimately lock it away where it could do no harm. Thus the ~Honyaedi~ - Study of Secret Lore - was born, which exists even to this day. Study is restricted to select scholar and priests, well vetted and examined (with mandatory mind-probes) against any psychiatric weakness that such power might corrupt, as well as cities’ top leaders and ministers. By common agreement, cities shared the tools they could use to keep these dangers from their populace and anyone foolish enough to meddle.
And yet it is hard for such knowledge not to breed curiosity. Over time, some Lashunta loremasters have been tempted to experiment with the Moqeva’s ancient legacy, though to little good end. When their superiors caught them, however, the response grew overwhelmingly harsh. For most of their long history, the Lashunta have shunned capital punishment, but for this crime. Forbidden dabble in the Moqeva’s dark sorceries brought a swift death, the sinners’ body often tossed into the same hole from which they had dug their profane secrets, their houses and belongings burned, and even their families imprisoned with children separated and deported to new lives and names, and sometimes with new memories if the Sage-Queens’ psychics were potent enough. The ~Honyaedi~ became not merely the practice of study, but of suppression, with their psychic prowess bequeathing an efficient sureness of which any Human inquisitor would be overweeningly jealous, and so a force for stability in the Sage-Queens’ civilization.
That stability ended with the coming of the Formians in 12,572 ZS when they invaded and overran Marastra, conquering and driving out the Elves and Lashunta who had settled that lost continent over the previous five thousand years. As cities like Valmaea witnessed the ant-like conqueror-legions advance, they faced a crisis of conscience. One such is recorded in the ~Huael Valmae Yazantae~ - the Lament for Lost Valmaea, when Queen Anmae confides to her chief manmate Imaeuss that she has found, “in lost halls where once the Moqeva crawled,” an otherworldly, terrible power that could destroy the Formians and save Valmaea. In the epic, she vacillates and decides to enact the eldritch spell-ritual to save her city and people, until Imaeuss bursts into the laboratory and cuts his way through the cordon of warriors to reprove Queen Anmae as faithless for becoming “the same thing even the Moqeva feared,” and then takes his own life. Her manmate’s sacrifice so shames Queen Anmae that she repents and, instead of unleashing the Moqeva’s Bane, accepts her death and the city’s doom.
Not merely on the Colonies but across northern Asana, many other queens, high ladies, and lorewardens faced similar decisions as the Age of the Thief-Queens began, when not merely psychic lore was lost as these savage new Northern rulers destroyed not only every vestige of the means by which the Sage-Queens had maintained their authority, but also philosophy, art, and the natural sciences. In what remnants did remain, what keeper of of a shred of lost lore, even forbidden, might not be tempted to invoke and wield it, to find salvation from one’s enemies, or vengeance?
Despite Queen Anmae’s fateful decision and sacrifice, her own descendents, as embodied in the nascent nation of Valmaeana (New Valmaea) that coalesced in the aftermath of Marastra’s fall to the Formians, came to regret her choice. A grimmer, more pragmatic, and less sensitive mindset steered these new rulers, which is also enshrined within the same ~Huael Valmae Yazantae~, in what is perhaps the epic’s most famous passage, as spoken by the hero Lady Beareal:

~Hathis noa-sara tinya osassya rune shalya anmavya. Noa-va ka lavyoni eiaroni. Li-yi, shiafadame shi shali kafi ifaemi Hauavi. Mui anma di osa. Anma-va riola:~
“Keep your warm gods smiling through heavenly skies. My gods behold a darker, fiercer spirit. I, like them, was born under the South’s low, heavy skies. Heaven smiles not here. My heaven is the battlefield.”
…While the reference to the ‘darker, fiercer spirit’ is mostly commonly accepted as meaning the Qoaronae, the triple war-goddesses whose cult is based in Valmaeana and Southwest Asana, and not some acknowledgement of some elder, outer horror, it is worth noting that the Qoaronae are generally represented as having hair of serpents, tails instead of legs, and scales upon their skin, almost as if they are Moqeva. Per Lashunta myth, when the Qoaronae, the daughters of Burning-Mother and Father-Night, grew to maidenhood, they went to their father and asked to be taught the power to keep their home safe from the dark horrors lurking beyond the stars. So Father-Night let them beyond his protective shroud, bade them go forth and learn of the outer powers themselves. When they returned, they were changed and showed as so depicted, thus bearing the symbols of the Moqeva’s dread power.
While refugees from the Marastran cities flooded Alendrastya and Timiyurael, bringing their hatred for the Formians, the new confederacy’s leaders took stock of the hints in these hidden armories and questioned what weapons could be found anew. As the newcomers looked eastward, they spied the Haunishu Mountains not too far off. On learning the tale of Queen Sifaene, their curiosity grew. The ~Zihinma Osta Vehaeasta~ - the Council of Special Affairs - formed under the government’s charter, and with the patronage of Princess Oeli Tadosaeae, herself descended from the fallen queens of Marastra. The princess appointed her protege the lorewarden Master Ashuss to head a research into Ylisaeua and provided funding. Thus in 12,901 ZS Ashuss led a company of warriors, psychics, and scholars to rediscover the lost city. The expedition spent almost two years afield but returned in 12,903, reporting a full exploration of Ylisaeua’s ruins that exceeded anything in Sifaene’s hasty conquest, including discovery of artifacts with apparent glyphs and writing. With the princess’s support, Master Ashuss proposed a project to decipher the Ylisaeuan symbology and determine what could be learned, which permission the Council granted.
Twelve years later, Master Ashuss reported that his team had successfully deciphered the Ylisaeuan relics to the point they could use it as the basis for new research. He advised it would lead them into heretofore unknown or lost psychic mysteries which could indeed be used to create weapons against the Formians, and which might even allow the Lashunta to drive them out of the Colonies. Yet when he asked permission to continue, the Council lost its nerve. While Princess Oeli argued for her protege, others withheld their erstwhile eagerness, suddenly fearing to reawaken what had befouled Ylisaeua and turned them into the fiends who had tortured Lady Maeori and sewn their corruption within her.
Accounts, however, indicate Master Ashuss did not bother waiting but meddingly forged ahead.
Deadlocked, the Council appealed to the Valmaean High Staff, the confederacy’s military-executive body, who naturally grew interested in talk of a new weapon that could be used against their most hated foe. Sensing victory near, Princess Oeli visited Master Ashuss’s lorehall to ready their case for the High Staff. Yet on the night she went, the lorehall burned. The firefighters found the princess wandering outside, her bodyshroud soaked in blood.
Later, when they found Master Ashuss’s body, they saw he had been stabbed. Under the scandal of not only Master Ashuss’s research being lost, but also a princess descended from the ancient queens and seated upon the Valmaean Principal Council, committing murder, the High Staff conducted an investigation. Princess Oeli submitted willingly to arrest. However, she refused to speak of what had happened, nor why the lorehall had burned, nor why she had apparently murdered her former protege and collaborator. Some even tell she never spoke again.
After the loss, the surviving Council of Special Affairs turned to other opportunities to replace the one lost with Master Ashuss. These new directions did not stop them from trying to question Princess Oeli, but with little progress. Still, a rumor leaked that, after again she refused to tell what the princess had witnessed and learned before the disaster, the Council’s inquisitors threatened her with a mind-probe. When they invaded her psyche to learn the truth she kept hidden, however, they did not find her mind. Instead, they found within her mind a shadow hinting madness, the same as described within the chronicles of Ylisaeua.
Princess Oeli spent the rest of her lifetime in prison (itself an unusual punishment among Lashunta), for a crime the Valmaeans could not forgive, and for whatever lay locked in her brain. Some forbidden accounts, however, tell that, before she died, at times she did tell of what she had learned from Master Ashuss, of the blasphemy he had inflicted on her mind and soul. Some even whisper that scraps of that profane knowledge uttered from her mad tongue, hastily written down by the Council’s inquisitors, still survive.

Detailing how the legacy of Ylisaeua survived into later ages.