The Shadow of Ylisaeua, Part 1

In my writings on the Lashunta of Castrovel, I’ve already alluded to a number of lost cities - Valmaea, Old Hanat, Hesenya, Reiefya. Yet these are merely the Lashunta cities, to say nothing of alien ruins like Hoshiasa of the Moqeva, and others. Yet here we will examine not only a city, but a lost Lashunta civilization. This is the tale of Ylisaeua, of which many Lashunta scholars, due to the tale’s almost legendary and unverifiable sources and its sheer unbelievability, refuse to accept as historical truth. However, if true, it may offer some clue to the fall of the Lashunta’s ancient foe, the serpentlike Moqeva, and how that alien species collapsed after having ruled Castrovel over untold prehistory.
In the Third Millennium since the foundation of Son, Northern Asana had long stood free under Lashunta control and the Son Empire, though in the south the Moqeva still stayed strong. The city of Lasahaua had emerged as the great power of the Northern Shattersea and had built a maritime empire. Thus it had uptaken the mantle of champion of the Moqeva’s extermination. From its coastal daughter-colonies of Nivaea, Timiyurael, and Alendrastya, armies set forth to scout and raid the Moqeva cities within the southern jungles, seeking opportunity and testing weakness, in search of the glory the Warrior-Queens and their harem-warriors craved, though they found the Moqeva wary defenders, and their wards treacherous.
Over time, reports came back of scouts encountering unknown Lashunta, whomwith they sometimes clashed. While free and unallied clans had ever migrated in advance and along the cities’ colonies, their manner in look and dress and cruel ruthlessness with which they fought even other Lashunta bore remark. Though chroniclers and scholars speculated, they could only guess at these unknown warriors' origin.
Then at Lasahaua’s colony of Nivaea arrived an embassy: a Damaya and Korasha, though unlike in shroud, aspect, and appearance as one could ever expect. ~Vehaea mi sheila~ - ‘queer and wonderful,’ wrote the report to High Queen Zhehuaemni in Lasahaua, with pierced faces (ears? lips? noses?) and elaborate scars upon their breasts, shoulders, and limbs. Even stranger, the priests (which in this age were one and the same with psychics) reported a shadow lay upon the outland ambassadors’ souls, so that their minds could not be read, though their words and manner disturbed even more. ~Ea Lashunta, ti Lashuntara di homa,~ read the report to the High Queen: “They are Lashunta, but love not Lashunta,” - ~Yitimi veara:~ - “nor even themselves,” as the scribe deemed by their disfiguring scarification.
The ambassadors told they hailed from the city of Ylisaeua, which lay in the Haunishu Mountains, and within which their city was built as a great stronghold. They bore greetings from their queen, whom they named Megaie, with offer of an alliance against the Moqeva, including detailed intelligence Nivaea’s army could use to advantage: if the Nivaean army and other Lasahaua allies would attack the Moqeva city of Yaethitha thirty days after Floodtide’s ebb but not more than sixty afterward, Ylisaeua would guarantee, with the ambassadors serving as hostages, that no other Moqeva city would come to Yaethitha’s aid.
The Lashunta were not so naive that they couldn’t suspect this offer sounded too good to be true. When the Nivaeans asked how the Lashunta of Ylisaeua knew their enemies’ secrets, the ambassadors answered that the Moqeva were: “busy with their own strife and doom,” and they should not let this opportunity pass by.
Rather warily, the Nivaeans, their Timiyurael allies, and their Lasahaua overladies made ready at the next Floodtide. When the rains ended and after thirty days, they invaded Yaethitha territory. To their shock and glee, only the local defenses answered, and no allies. For a full sixty days the Lashunta had full unhindered run of Yaethitha, slew many Moqeva, burned many homes, and even made a grievous attack on the city itself, which was thereafter greatly weakened. Of the Ylisaeua forces, however, the Nivaea Lashunta rarely saw them. They did not participate in the attack and were apparently involved in some other matter beyond the border. Thus Nivaea reported a great victory to the High Queen in Lasahaua.
Meanwhile the war was ongoing, the chronicler Elyne of Nivaea noted that the milk-tree growing within the palace courtyard where the Ylisaeua ambassadors were housed dried up and would give no sap, an ill omen ever since ancient times. Also, when a psychic priest finally came forth who was strong enough to achieve mindshare with the ambassadors, she went mad.
Despite misgivings, when High Queen Zhehuaemni heard these details, she determined to learn more about these strange Lashunta from Ylisaeua. Accordingly, Lady Maeori, a trusted priest, and furthermore a ~ralyse ahante~ - powerful soul-seer - and her household including other psychics, warriors, and servants, agreed to travel as an embassy to Ylisaeua, fully charged by the High Queen to foster peace with these unknown people and learn all she could. So Lady Maeori went with her hosts into the Haunishu Jungle and disappeared.
Three years later, Lady Maeori reappeared before the gates of Nivaea, alone, naked, and speechless, and gave no explanation of what had happened to her or her household. When the priests examined her, they could read that some sorrow worried her mind, though what they could not tell.
Lady Maeori was taken back to Lasahaua and given to the priests’ care. Later, they learned she was pregnant. As her ~rauzhiafi~ - birth-might grew with her pregnancy, the shadow grew as well, and some believe it the shadow of Ylisaeua growing within her mind and her unborn babe's. She grew wilder, even dangerous, and in desperation finally spoke odd details of her time in Ylisaeua. What she told frightened the priests. “They know the Moqeva’s secrets,” she confessed terrifiedly. “They hear the whispers from beyond Father-Night’s shroud.” Then she begged the priests to slay her, though the murder of an expectant mother was a sin too great to contemplate.
Then Lady Maeori’s birthtide came. When the babe came forth, the midwife-priests examined it and reached within its mind. There they beheld the shadow of Ylisaeua, unreadable but for the hint of madness. They left mother and child to report this news to the High Queen. 
When they returned, however, they found Lady Maeori gone. She had risen from bed, taken her babe out upon the palace wall, and had cast them both together down upon the sea rocks below.
Soon afterward, High Queen Zhehuaemni declared that Ylisaeua was ~tiqezha~ - anathema. She sent this message to all the cities and temples of the Lashunta, even to ancient Son in the north and the great temple of Matarasse - Burning-Mother, whomwith Lasahaua was at war. She commanded her armies and colonies to make war on Ylisaeua, slay any people they met, chop down any home-trees where they dwelt, and burn any settlement. Then Zhehuaemni abdicated the queenship to her daughter in penance, for fear she had incurred a debt-curse upon her empire for the alliance with these people so perverted from her own.
Even in that ancient age, Lashunta scribes speculated at what had happened to Ylisaeua and how they had become so unlike. The chronicler Larazuss proposed they had been: “Moqeva wretches who had been spared the larder but made thralls instead,” though how they had come to win freedom and found their own city he offered nothing. However, it had come about, sages agreed that Ylisaeua had learned the Moqeva’s eldritch lore and possibly used it to rebel, though in whatever dark deed they performed to accomplish their goal, their minds had been besmirched.
And yet, despite the ~tiqezhi~ upon them, Ylisaeua did not wholly leave the Lashunta’s mind. Though Ylisaeua warriors clashed, and even sometimes raided, emissaries would sometime appear with offers to the Lashunta cities. They were rebuffed, and the emissaries slain. Yet sometimes the offers of aid against the Moqeva were too tempting, as when they reported Yaethitha abandoned, and the coast cities might invade through its lands and so attack other Moqeva cities. Over time, the Lashunta queens realized Ylisaeua was not only meddling in their affairs, but also the Moqeva’s, playing both foes off against each other. Yet for what ultimate end they could not foresee.
Seventeen centuries after High Queen Zhehuaemni repented her alliance, and two hundred years even after Lasahaua fell to a dreadful earthquake, Alendrastrya conquered and razed Ianeseha, the last Moqeva city in the south or anywhere, and put all the ophidian fiends to the axe. Years afterward, Sifaene, the city’s newly crowned young queen, looked beyond her city’s borders and wondered how she and her harem-warriors could win glory to match her foremothers’ worth. She remembered Ylisaeua, reputedly sitting among the high Haunishu peaks, and the anathema Queen Zhehuaemni had spoken against them. So she thought to rid the world of these tainted Lashunta. She sent scouts into the eastern jungle, and emissaries to Timiyurael their neighbor-city ,to propose a joint campaign, and summoned her army.
At the next dry season, Queen Sifaene led her harem-warriors at the army’s head into the Haunishu Mountains. There they found strongholds barring the passes with shut gates, but unmanned. So with little hardship her Korasha warriors climbed the cliffs and opened them. They continued upward and found ricefields left to grow wild. They found houses - but no hometrees, for apparently the Ylisaeua found no haven in the boughs of milk-trees - standing empty, which they burned, but none dwelling within.
Then they found Ylisaeua, a great city filling a valley, larger than Alendrastya, even as Lasahaua had been in yore. It treeless streets were empty, its houses cleared of any furniture, stock, or possession. A great temple, like a giant altar under the sky, rose in the city’s midst, on whose flat crest a stain of ash and soot remained, as if from a great balefire. Yet nothing else remained, not of the cityfolk nor what had befallen, nor where they had gone.
Later, as the army made a thorough scout of the mountains and lands around the abandoned city, word came that they had found people dwelling in an upper dale and had taken them prisoner. Queen Sifaene rode forth to see them. She beheld a settlement of a few hundred Lashunta, nowhere near the thousands who had dwelt in Ylisaeua, and dwelling in rough huts. Yet their skins were covered in glyph-like scars, as the emissaries of Ylisaeua were described in the histories.
The queen demanded who they were. The people answered they knew not. She bade them tell their names, but they answered they had no names. When she asked what had happened to the city in the lower valley and what had befallen the people, they answered they did not know.
Then Queen Sifaene went to the people’s spokeswife. She reached into her mind and tried to rest the answers straight from her thoughts and determine whether these strange Lashunta were lying or they indeed had no knowledge nor memory of themselves. Within the Damaya wife’s mind the queen found only darkness, and no thought she could read. Even nameless and without memory, the Shadow of Ylisaeua lay thick upon them.
Queen Sifaene bade the people slain. Then she ordered her army to demolish the great temple at the city’s midst, and then the strongholds guarding the city’s approach. Then had her builders block the passes with their rubble. She led her army back to Alendrastrya, swearing an oath that none should ever return.
In the centuries and millennia since Queen Sifaene’s campaign, scholars and philosophers have speculated endlessly on the mystery of Ylisaeua. Few have offered anything beyond the “wretches who were spared the larder and made thralls instead.” Yet some details have challenged this simplistic statement. In another comment, Elyne of Nivaea mentioned that the Ylisaeua language “bears a rough likeness to Arasene speech.” Based on this, scholars have hypothesized that the Ylisaeua’s ancestors might represent the first wave of migration from Lake Arasene’s southern shore, where Than now stands, down the River Hisyho, and thence came into contact with the Moqeva within the Southern Jungles. There they might have been taken prisoner and enslaved, or in warfare had stolen and harnessed the Moqeva’s lore out of desperation, or had been unwittingly corrupted for the Moqeva’s unfathomable purpose. Whatever the case, Ylisaeua was founded long before the Shattersea colonies and was much older, possibly almost as old as Son. Isolated as they were from other Lashunta, they had fallen into the Moqeva’s circle of interest and apparently had competed with them politically, arguably as equals, until Lasahaua’s colonization of the Shattersea Shore created an opportunity Ylisaeua seized for its own advantage, and so offered its alliance of convenience to the new Lashunta cities.
The scholar Mianme proposed that Ylisaeua, despite the darkness upon their minds and the savage practices hinted by Lady Maeori’s disturbed confessions, were still motivated by an overweening hatred for the Moqeva, and that their political machinations were responsible for the Moqeva hegemony’s collapse in advance of the Lashunta conquest, thus rendering Moqeva cities ruined and desolate, and the snakefolk broken and degenerate before axe and Shotalashu swept through their jungle-ridden cities and burrow. Yet Mianme’s critics have countered her as mere wishful thinking, without proof that Ylisaeua ever acted in anything but their own twisted, selfish interest.
None can explain, however, what happened to Ylisaeua and its people, and why Queen Sifaene found the city abandoned. Did they flee over the Sea of Teeth to an unknown colony or take a worldgate to another planet? Did they perform some kind of mass-suicide as a horrific sacrifice, leaving the balefire’s ash upon the temple crest as their death’s evidence? Yet what prevailed to leave the odd few hundred survivors living squalidly in their upland dale, and under what eldritch witchcraft that left their names and memories bereft? If any explanation could have been wrung from a deeper psychic probe of the shadow upon their minds, however, it died under the axes of Queen Sifaene’s warriors.
To this day, the ~tiqezhu~ anathema steles stand upon the passes leading into the Haunishu Mountains. The only question lies in who has the courage to seek the ancient ghost-city.

This article's sources include chronicles from the Age of the Warrior-Queens, as well as later historical works and commentaries, mainly from the Age of the Sage-Queens.