Thoughts on Part 4: Chapter 24: War Among the Lashunta of Castrovel

So in Chapter 24, for the first time ever, we see open warfare break out between opposed Lashunta groups. This has been building for a short time. Yet it may bear some examination.
In my previous writings about the Lashunta of Castrovel, I have not tried to hide their warlike natures. My narrator Lady Vaeol is an Outrider-Knight, and her whole flag-pod is made up of warriors or the grooms who support them. I’ve discussed how many Lashunta cities of the Yaro Valley and beyond practice some form of universal military service as part of their youths’ coming of age. Additionally hearkening to Canon material, Paizo’s Pathfinder: Distant Worlds has this to say from a thematic flavor perspective:

“Educated, civilized, and matriarchal, the rulers of the lashunta city-states maneuver for political position from the backs of their terrible lizard steeds, fighting each other when necessary but more often banding together to protect their settlements from the verdant planet’s dangerous fauna and their traditional enemies…”

And Pathfinderwiki.com has this to add:

“Lashuntas constantly plot and maneuver for political positions within their scattered city-states, each of which is ruled by an elected or hereditary ruler. These connections are strengthened through trade alliances, interbreeding, and defense pacts, with conflict typically limited to feuds over honor and ceremonial combat. While they occasionally engage in ritual combat or raid each other, lashuntas always band together against external threats.”

Thus I feel there is a dichotomy, and even a moral conflict, with how Lashunta approach warfare against rival members of their own species, which I conceive as based on the following two assumptions:

• Lashunta, similar to Humans and appropriate for a eusocial apex-predator, have a strong capacity for genocide against perceived threats. This may even be exacerbated by their highly empathic, psychically telepathic natures, whereby if one member of a social group conceives a hatred toward a threat, it inflammatorially spreads to the group’s other members.
• Also based on their highly empathic natures, Lashunta have a strong compulsion for altruism, especially toward other Lashunta.

...The outcome of these two opposing moral poles is that, as conflict grows among Lashunta, they may become increasingly desperate to avoid open war. If, as Clausewitz says, “war is diplomacy by other means,” then most Lashunta will glady seek other means to achieve warfare’s goals especially against other Lashunta, until it becomes unavoidable.
How does this play out? Possibly in slow-simmering feuds that are only rarely punctuated with open warfare. Between cities where disputes may lie over territory, border skirmishes and raids become a likely norm, in conjunction with diplomatic missions operating under promise of safe conduct to resolve differences. Even among the nomadic Retaea tribes of the Northern Savanna-Moors (a group most cityborn Lashunta characterize as barbarically violent), annual negotiations occur at the Blighttide Clanmoot to curb the endless raids these wandering warriors engage in. If things advance to the point that an army call-up occurs, this is an event of catastrophic proportions, and will set off a new flurry of diplomatic efforts, even with forces in the field exchanging heralds to negotiate a resolution (not unlike how man earthly armies conducted military operations until well into the 19th Century).
Another feature of Earth’s ancient warfare that I envision often invoked among Lashunta is trial by champion (cue the soundtrack to Wolfgang Petersens’ Troy!). Here is the premise: instead of risking and losing the lives of hundreds or thousands of warriors and leaving your city open to ruin and deprivation, risk only your best warrior (or may a team of warriors if multiple fights are negotiated). The two generals, via heralds, negotiate the war/battle’s outcome as a high-stakes bet, each wagering their chosen champion is better than the other. Not only do most of your warriors not need to risk death, but they are also not forced to take another Lashunta’s life…it’s also a good way to mitigate risk of defeat if the general’s grasp of field strategy is weak or if one’s militia isn’t as highly trained as desirable.

So let’s examine how this has been applied in my homebrew rendition for the Lashunta of Castrovel. Historically, some ages have been more warlike than others, starting with the archaic Middle and Latter Warrior-Queens (note the name).

• Starting with Queen Lanare of Son, after the Lashunta of the Yaro Valley exterminated the alien Moqeva, they turned on each other, using the idea of one city’s imperial supremacy to justify a highly competitive warrior culture’s ongoing violence. While this period of internal conflict existed for almost 3,000 earth-years, and despite the invention of new atrocities on the battlefield, most of that time was not spent fighting.
• Similarly the Age of Thief-Queens, which usurped the Yaro’s rule from the Sage-Queen for 3,500 earth-years, and are luridly depicted as infamous for their warlike behavior, somehow existed as a stable civilization for most of that time and even managed to ally and with its matron-led opponents against such external threats as the Formians.
• More recently, the current Age of Pact was broken in half by the ~Rei-Zhizimae~ - the Thousand-Year War, essentially a series of conflicts between the cities of Qabarat, Lost Reiefya, and Nivaea for control of the Shattersea’s maritime trade, and which ended with the Fourth Formian Invasion.

,,,Did open battles and sieges occur within these time periods? Yes, occasionally. Yet I would propose their number is far outstripped by the quantity of truces, negotiated surrenders, and combat-trials. In all these cases, these disputes tended to end or be set aside whenever an external threat presented.

Within the context of _A Castrovel Adventure_, Lady Vaeol my narrator has seen conflict among Lashunta on five occasions:

1. Back in Part 1, when Qabarat tried to forcefully take possession of Brand and the Humans, she challenged Lady Semuane to a duel, knocked her off her Shotalashu, and healed her up right afterward, thus winning the dispute (though not without some legal repercussions).
2. In Part 2, Less and Oshis beat the snot out of each other as part of a judged combat, to gain the honor of becoming Remaue’s First Man for her bridetide.
3. In Part 3, when Vaeol and Istae were sent to mediate violence breaking out between the Lashunta and Elf clans of the Stormshield Mountains, and Kazos of Clan Sholasa tried to attack the peace-summit, Vaeol challenged and beat him in a fight, thus securing the Sholasa’s participation in the peace negotiations (wagered against the inducement of her virtue).
4. Finally in Part 3, Vaeol leads her flag-house’s raid on the freehold of Elahat to free Oshis from Lady Erenyae, and proudly reports she pulled off this coup with no lives lost on either side. All other combat among Lashunta has been either sparring or competitive game-trials.
5. Then now in Chapter 24, for the first time ever, Vaeol has witnessed Lashunta die under Lashunta blades (and also symbiant Shotalashu), which she remarks as something in which even her household’s oldest veterans have never participated. She captures her maidenmate Kaure’s reaction in a shock to moral sanity, something that makes her doubt everything believed in terms of rightness and her chosen vocation as a warrior. She also describes a symptom of that genocidal reflex kicking in, in which her warriors when confronting the four prisoners Taiase had psychically captured, were all too willing to slay them as a follow-up to the actual battled until Vaeol and Istae reigned them in.

On a certain level, Lashunta esteem warriorhood more than war itself, and not merely the complex Martial Arts skill and discipline cultivated but also the concept of noble martial virtue. War is easy when the target is an unsympathetic Other, possibly much like Elves and Orcs on Golarion or Middle-Earth have no compunction about slaying each other, or a giant Megafauna ~Qoelu~ rampaging with Godzilla-like abandon through fields and farmhold. Thus Lashunta in ancient times merrily extinguished the alien Moqeva, hunt ~Qoelu~ or beat them back into the jungles, and even nowadays throw themselves against the hated Formians in a war seemingly endless. Yet war against other Lashunta challenges their faith in their own goodness. It holds up a mirror showing an ugliness they normally reserve for alien foes. In Vaeol’s case (who has come to repent her involvement in the Formian War), it may even make them question why they wage such violence without questioning it.

For more background relating to this article, feel free to read _A Castrovel Adventure: Part 4, Chapter 24_ linked at this article's bottom. ~Samaea!~