The Age of the Sage-Queens: Part 1 (Yaro Valley Early Period)
Lashunta historians divide their history into ~kamathi~ = age/epoch. In last week’s posts we addressed the archaic Age of the Warrior-Queens. This post deals with the next of the historical ages: ~Kamathi Shaeavyrea~ - the Age of the Sage-Queens.
Many Lashunta consider this the classical age of their history, equivalent to China’s Han Dynasty or Hellenistic Greece and Rome in Europe. In comparison with Golarion’s history, this age oversaw that planet’s painful crawl out of the Age of Anguish with the foundation of the Jistka Imperium, and also the birth of Osirion, and the beginning of the Age of Destiny, spanning 5,000 Castrovellian years (2,500 Earth/Golarion years). Historians further subdivide into early and late periods, though some scholars claim that only the Early Period comprises the true Age of the Sage-Queens, while the Late Period merely chronicles their downfall.
Leading up to this new historical age, the fall of Old Hanat in 6281 ZS marked a low point in the Yaro Valley’s fortune. No successor claimed the imperial title of ‘Shazhaue’ (empress/tyrant). Instead, the alliance that had overthrown Hanat fell apart, as Heienya and Reiefya alternated between vying for supremacy over the Delta and each other and trying to force the Elves out of their enclave at Qabarat. Mahyat briefly strove to exert dominance over the upper valley, which ended when Son remilitarized and set them back on their heels. The Mahyat queens had to content themselves with ruling over the conquered descendents of Hanat’s diaspora. The Yaro Valley had become, instead of the center of Lashunta Civilization, a backwater swiftly eclipsed by its Shattersea daughters to the South. With the Retaea turned into a desert by a catastrophic series of Moldstorms, it had lost important trade to the north, and the old Warrior-Queen virtues of military honor and conquest had proven bankrupt.
And yet the seeds of the new age were already sprouting, exemplified in the philopher-sage Odimias, who delivered Son’s message to Hanat at their downfall. He was part of a new vocation that was beginning to hold sway, as part of a renaissance in the Lashunta’s animistic religion. With Son’s demilitarization under Hanat, the removal of influence from the Temple of Matarasse - Burning-Mother had come almost like a drug withdrawal from the priesthood. Instead of seeking to sway rulers, they focused on their relationship with the gods. As an outcome a new practice formed: Avyridi - Study of Wisdom, in the Classical Yaro tongue. The Lashunta had invented philosophy, moral, natural, and psychic.
Coupled with these new, sometimes radical, ideas spreading downriver, the Lashunta began to take severe dissatisfaction with the old Uthuroa warrior-caste that had grown out of Queen Lanare’s imperial dreams. When Son withstood Mahyat’s threats, they did so with a newly organized militia of hunter-peasants (since they had not been allowed to keep Uthuroa), mobilizing a larger army motivated by civic pride instead of personal glory, and keeping an ethical code that avoided the Uthuroa’s worst atrocities. Neither was Son alone, for as the Uthuroa continued to needlessly escalate conflict and foment insurrection for their own advancement, both the Lashunta’s peasant masses and the queens trying to keep order within their cities came to see them as more the enemy than rival cities. Slowly, and only after numerous revolts and coups, the old military-caste system was dismantled. Those Uthuroa families who would not assimilate into a new bureaucratic class of Zierae - noblewives, were reduced in status or outlawed.
Based on these developments, and under the new learning that interwove with the cities’ local priesthoods (under Matarasse’s auspices), relations among the Yaro cities slowly grew more peaceful, to the point they began looking at a new way of conducting affairs. In 7233 the queens met in a summit upon the Height of Aru, which would ever after be known as Shaola (“The Queens’ Stead") and negotiated the Pact of Peace, which would become a constitution for a confederation that would stand for five millennia, and under which the Yaro Queens agreed to resolve disputes peacefully and settle common issues by a parliamentary system. So began the Age of the Sage-Queens, whereby the most violent age in the Yaro Valley’s History was succeeded by the most peaceful one.
Thus under the new Pact of Peace, less than fifty years later, the confederated Lashunta queens established a peace with the Elves of Qabarat. Henceforth, though the Elves continued to hold themselves apart from certain functions, they had voice within the Queens’ Confederation and gained free access to the upriver cities. This development also witnessed the very first fad in Lashunta History, as suddenly all things Elven became popular. Elven clothing fashions became trendy, and even Elven cuisine, Lashunta scholars and noblewives spoke Elvish as a sign of education and distinction, and hundreds of Elven loanwards peppered the Classical Yaro vocabulary, for everything from spices to natural philosophy.
Under this growing new philosophy, which accorded well with Lashunta’s psychic empathy, the Yaro Valley became a haven for learning and study, advancing not only in moral inquiry but also natural science, best exemplified by the Hero-Sage Thessus, who (based on legend, according to vision) climbed Ta-Shestaru, the highest peak in the Southern Stormshields, and above the perpetual cloudline beheld not only the Sun in her brilliant, heavenly glory, but also: “all of Burning-Mother’s lovers and children shining under Father-Night’s shroud, as he later reported to Queen Vaharalle of Son, who provided a grant for him to build a Temple to Matarasse the Mother of Worlds and Stars, and came to be known as the Renzamya - the Hall of Stars. Here, over the next fourteen millennia, the Lashunta would slowly and painfully, but also patiently, almost obsessively map the heavens and come to understand their place in the universe, starting first with sundials and astrolabes, but then with the very first telescopes, in the first astrological observatory, and still only of a handful in existence.
The Sage-Queens showed their dedication to the advancement of knowledge, and not only of the physical world, but also of the mind, as Lashunta psychics developed their powers to new heights that came to rival the ‘Elven Weirdcraft’ on which Qabarat had built its predominance. With this advanced learning, the Yaro Valley found they had a new export to their daughter-cities across the Shattersea, with not only knowledge but the people who carried it, since with absence of war and burgeoning agricultural production, populations soared and spread outward, winning settlement from the Stormshields’ flanks and the Eastern Marshes, but also to recolonize the Southern Retaea, where the Moldstorms had finally rotted themselves out and contact was finally made with the Northern Retaea Nomad-Clans, the descendents of the Warrior-Queens’ cousins who had survived in lands that grew chill and white during Heaventide, and who brought back fantastic tales of strange beasts, including warriors flying on winged Shota. No few Lashunta from the Yaro sought new homes along the Western Shattersea Isles, and even further westward on the shores of the newly discovered continent of Marastra, which already was called the Colonies in slang, where no few docked at a bold new city raising towers on that far western shore: Valmaea. Here and through the Shattersea concepts and institutions from the Yaro were copied and adapted into local confederations, trade agreements, and dispute arbitration, though with greater or lesser degrees of success.
So it happened that just a couple years after the Pact was extended to the Elves, the descendents of Old Hanat were granted leave to found a new city, not on the original site, which the Yaro had flooded, but nearby, where the new-rising spires could find sight of the old towers’ ruins: Hanat-Yana - New Hanat - or Hanazhyana, as it would later be called. Also, as Elf-Lashunta goodwill was fostered, Qabarat allowed access to Lashunta explorers using their aiudara gates, letting Lashunta visit for the first time ever Sovyrian the Elven Homeland and El of the Everward Court, and furthermore to Qabarat’s new farflung sub-colonies to the Far North and East. Thus in Jabask and Candares the Yaro Lashunta met their distant kin, though so far removed that their language was unlike anything heard or recorded in history and who, though they rode Shotalashu, did not acknowledge Queen Tess as their foremother and held their own myths. Here the Lashunta first realized how broad their world truly is.
Despite the peaceful nostalgia that both posterior and contemporary Lashunta hold the Sage-Queen’s rule, a closer look proves not so peaceful as their descendents believe. Trade disputes festered with Lasahaua along the Shattersea’s Inland Passage, which city had enjoyed its strategic position and, prior to the Pact of Queens, had even played Qabarat against Reiefya to advantage. When that changed, the Lasana found themselves double-teamed by two rival ports, to which they answered aggressively. Yet by and large the Yaro demilitarized. The old Uthuroa was abolished, and the Uroha, the Queen’s War-band that had existed since prehistoric times was relegated to a ceremonial honor-guard. So eroded became the old militia system that, when Qoelu or other Megafauna threatened from the outer jungles, the queen’s support generally was limited to psychic beast-tamers, and any military resources were left to levies of local hunters. Thus the modern Lashunta word for warrior - ~moara~ - stems from the Classical Yaro word for hunter.
Yet due to this extended peace, under which exploding populations stretched resources to limits, a kind of petrification overtook Yaro Lashunta society as it struggled to maintain itself against greater internal pressures. Whereas, at the Age’s beginning when the queens had seen fit to rule with only the help of the scholarly Zierae to delegate and advise, by the Eleventh Millennium (4,000 years into the age), a complex hiearchy had grown, starting with the Princess-Houses most closely related to the Queen, to lesser houses of more distant royal kinship, down to the most ancient Zierae scholar-nobles followed by the younger, and then to the traders, crafters, laborers and farmers, who existed in an odd subservience almost resembling indentured servitude. Thus with small wonder chroniclers of the time describe mass emigration to other parts of Asana and the Shattersea, for Lashunta seeking better fortunes, and without much surprise they also describe revolts among the peasantry and even the townsfolk against aggrieved conditions, nor also the Sage-Queens’ lieutenants wielding their carefully hones psychic powers to quell and pacify.
Although some philosophers in their writings decried the social conditions and agitated for change, no consensus formed as to an appropriate course, assuming the queens and their aristocrats would have gone along. These rulers also ignored the warnings that the current course could only lead the Lashunta of the Yaro Valley to disaster.
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