The Age of the Thief-Queens, Part 6: The Retaea Wars & Fall
Some historians pretend that Elmereth was the last Thief-Queen, and that her flight from Son in 17,643 marked the era’s end. While that may be mostly true for the Yaro Valley, it disregards the history of the Retaea region to the east, where Son’s erstwhile rulers had retreated, and where the Thief-Queens rump empire would not only endure another three thousand years, but would also for a time expand.
When Queen Vemereth II received Elmereth into exile, the Thief-Queens’ empire entered a volatile but dynamic phase: two queens surviving where once almost two dozen had ruled between Lake Arasene and the Shattersea. Aside from the city of Lea, their only remaining domain lay over the wild Retaea Clans themselves, from which they had descended, but who had ever been the most fractious part of their empire. Furthermore, neither queen could likely discount the old tradition of betrayal and assassination that had so marked the age’s politics.
Since Lea’s rump empire was too small to hold both, their only choice was to expand. This course Elmereth took in 17,652 ZS, nine years after losing Son, when she led a fleet of boats eastward across Lake Arasene and conquered Than, which previously had been a sleepy tradeburgh connecting central Asana to the great River Hisyho. The city’s control opened the river’s access southwestward, where Thief-Queen river pirates raided all the way to Nivaea. That ancient city, which had happily rested on the Formian Wars’ victories, frightfully made the mistake of paying tribute to the marauders, giving them incentive to return. Nivaea learned a slow, painful less to fight back, creating a protracted conflict for control of the Hisyho that would last for eleven centuries.
Twenty years later, Vemereth II, hoping to copy her rival’s success, attacked Tihes on Lake Arasene’s northern shore. While successful and garnering the fame and booty Vemereth desired, it also provoked an irresistible response from Ofu-Laubu further north in the Shemez, who viewed Tihes as a vital trade-partner. Thakasa-skyriders raided all along the lakeshore, striking farmholds and clans within an impunity the Thief-Queens could not answer, while a liberating army marched southward through the Voliahu’s edges. After a dogged war and siege, Lea realized they could not hold Tihes and abandoned it in flames, although they swore vengeance on the Northern Growngem and its flying lizard-warriors, which they never forgave and regularly raided northward to seek control of the lakeshore and Voliahu Rainforest.
Meanwhile, Son, whose half-Retaea population festered under a foreign-appointed military government, neither forgot nor was forgotten by their erstwhile rulers, who happily encouraged insurrection and the clans to send raids. A bold tradition of banditry grew within the Yaro’s Northeastern rivermarshes, although as partisanship yielded to profit and honor-feuds, the Marsh Clans grew hated by all. Slowly, painfully the Yaro matron-cities tried their hand at nation-building, inculcating the republican values they had championed for two thousand years. When Son’s revolt again military occupation finally occurred in 17,865, the locals agitated for the right of self-rule by their own Hall of Matrons, thus arguably bringing that project to a successful end.
The Thief-Queens, however, viewed Son’s independence as opportunity to take back their ancient capital, along with all the prestige possession of Burning-Mother’s first and oldest temple still carried. After several early attempts to align the savannah and marsh clans, Lea at last led a grand alliance in 17,906 ZS to reconquer Son for the empire. To everyone’s surprise, Son defeated the invaders even before the allied cities sent reinforcements from the south. Son-Tolloda - Son the Eldest, as often called - the gentrified, symbolic home of priests, philosophers, and psychics whose greatest fame lay in its nominal protection of the Hall of Stars atop Ta-Shestarue, after its Warrior-Queens had lost their empire and gotten the city razed nine millennia earlier, suddenly found itself the fore of the Yaro’s military strength.
Capitalizing on success, Son then led the Yaro cities in a bitter swamp-war for control of the valley’s eastern marshes, particularly the Great Eastern Dykeway first raised by the Sage-Queens, and which often led to the eradication of whole Marsh-Clans. After a century of warfare and stronghold construction, Son held sufficient control of the Dykeway and hinterlands to propose a bold new phase to its allies: the invasion of the Retaea and liberation of Lea.
Thus in 18,142 ZS armies from Son, Mahyat, and Hanazhyana (with nominal support from Reiefya and Qabarat) returned the favor Lea had sent 130 years before, with a grand invasion of the north, which followed the Canegrass Meadows’ northern edge until they struck northward at Lea. Swarming Retaea cavalry with boat-brought reinforcements caught them on the shore of Lake Aresene, where they were decimated: their Korasha slaughtered or enthralled, and their Damaya let free only if they consented to bear a Retaea-sired babe. Thus Son’s great vision to liberate its elder colony ended in shame.
Son and the Yaro Cities tried once more to invade the Retaea, largely under diplomatic pressure from Nivaea to open a second front against the Thief-Queen and misdraw from military actions in the Hisyho Valley. Four centuries later, a Son-led army, bribing clans to stand aside and bringing boats overland to challenge control of Lake Arasene, succeeded in investing the walls of Lea. After a protracted siege, the two sides negotiated an armistice, whereby the Yaro Allies withdrew peacefully from the Retaea (although not with clan-led raids until they reached the rivermarsh’s relative fastness in 18,549 ZS, marking the end of Yaro intervention in the Retaea.
The invasion’s high-water mark at Lea’s walls, plus the challenge to Arasene control, however, bred a fear of weakness within the last Thief-Queens, starting with a terrifying repression of the Retaea Clans who had not supported Lea, which also it decimated the Clan, made them never trust the city again. Furthermore, Nivaea had used the opportunity to seize a major stretch of the Hisyho and turned Than back on itself. Another attempt to wrest Tihes and the Southern Voliahu from Lauba control ended in failure. Desperate for the prestige essential to keep their warrior-societies from tearing themselves apart, Lea and Than turned on each other, which resulted in Lea’s victory in 18,601 ZS.
As part of the new conquest, Lea reinvented the ethnic caste system the Thief-Queens had enforced over the Yaro Valley (Than’s erstwhile Thief-Queens had shown too much leniency to the native Thana, so they claimed). Curiously, along with homegrown resentment, philosophers from Nivaea and Qabarat had made their way to that city, where they began fomenting republican values, as had their predecessors in the Yaro Valley. Scarcely a century later, Than’s matrons led a overthrow their last queen in 18,709.
Lea’s Thief-Queens now felt that the whole world had turned against them. They spent the next five hundred years pursuing various opportunities among Son, Than, and Ofu-Laubu, seeking the prestige to escape the barbarity with which their neighbors branded them. In 19,207 ZS, the Retaea Clans, after a long series of feuds, succession wars, and betrayed promised, had enough. The majority of clans renounced the queens and went to war against Lea, and although no alliance of clans lasts long, the breach had been bade. The Thief-Queens, themselves descended from the Retaea Nomads who had gone as sellswords to the Formian War, could no longer claim the Retaea.
The Queendom of Lea existed another eight centuries, a barbaric curiosity amid disdainful neighbors, while its rulers dreamed of their foremothers’ glory, endured the clans’ raids, and invented new atrocities to compel obedience. At last, of all things, a non-Lashunta figure arrived and took notice of the city’s woes. Sealnearas, the Golden-Monkey Hero, led an insurrection that became a revolution. His further adventures led not only to war with Ofu-Laubu, but also establishment of a Sealna-Monkeyfolk state east of Lake Arasene, the intervention of the Sage-Hero Yaraesa, and a new round of philosophical birth within Central Asana, thus bringing an enlightened end to one of the most savage periods in Lashunta History.
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