Old Myltev
An ancient empire of mages that ruled over Pescaliat for much of the 2nd Cycle. Starting as an unscrupulous band of spellcasters, the group's join-or-die ethos helped it monopolize studies of the arcane and overwhelm any opposition to its rule. The Empire's greatest rulers were archmages capable of interplanar travel and bending reality to their will, defended by legions of aasimar bound by powerful enchantments to their overlords.
To date, the Myltev Empire is the only kingdom to establish total control of the Karaga Sea and at its peak stretched from Sheyuan all the way to modern-day Avicenna. Many spells like 'Unseen Servant' and 'Prestidigitation' were first invented by the Empire's greatest wizards, creating the foundation for modern-day spellcasting that many mages now take for granted. The Empire's rulers showed little regard for the lives of its citizens, seeing its vast population as another resource to be exploited towards the study of godlike levels of magic. With such riches and lives at its disposal, the Myltev Empire made innovations in all arcane fields unrivaled to this day.
The Empire's hubris proved to be its undoing, its greatest minds seeking glory and power over more practical concerns. Whether the fault of a single mage or a reckless cabal, a magic item known as the Ostry Blade accidentally opened a portal to the Far Realms large enough for all sorts of aberrations and monsters to rush through. The Empire's greatest strength soon became its downfall, aberrations turning magic portals and other arcane effects against their creators to ravage Ekal. Old Myltev fell in a matter of days, its greatest minds either killed or worse by these interplanar invaders.
Remnants of this once-great empire can still be found in modern-day Myltev, landmarks like Kolya Bridge and the Sterry Khram weathering the Ostry Apocalypse and several millennia of neglect. Old Myltev's reputation failed to survive the passage of time, the Ageless One condemning the Myltevian mages for their godless spellcasting and disregard for life on Ekal. Rumors of the Empire's arcane laboratories have surfaced more often in the modern era, but few but the bravest adventurers dare to explore the terrifying secrets hidden within these ruins.
Structure
A single powerful spellcaster (usually tiefling) would take on the title of Archmagus Autokrator, sometimes ruling for centuries through arcane extensions on their lives. These Archmagi would establish dynasties to ensure stability within the Empire, adopting promising wizards into their family to prevent challenges to their authority.
Culture
The pursuit of arcane power and loyalty to the empire were valued over all else, a person's life valued by how much magic they could wield. Once Pescaliat was conquered a majority of the empire's resources were focused on the inventing of new spells, to the detriment of all other areas of life under imperial rule.
The archmages of Old Myltev scorned the world's deities and refused to turn to them for arcane support, tolerating small temples and shrines as a small glimmer of hope for the oppressed commoners to prevent them from breaking out into total unrest.
History
Records are scarce from the Old Myltev era: while the dragon god-kings of the 1st Cycle erected stone monuments chronicling centuries of accomplishments, the empire's archmages in their paranoia made it difficult to share knowledge or keep consistent records. If a wizard passed away before sharing the password to their demiplane laboratory, their life's work would die with them. Clerics of the Ageless One were content in using the empire as a simple cautionary tale against godless greed and selfishness, limiting scholarship of the era to wizards seeking breakthroughs in their own work. A history of Old Myltev can only be recounted in fragments, defined by the surviving records of a handful of archmages throughout the 2nd Cycle.
From the writings of Sviatoslav the Diviner (ca. 900 - 1100's, 2nd Cycle), it's apparent that Old Myltev first came to power in the centuries after the disappearance of the last dragon god-king from Pescaliat. It started as a confederacy of tiefling mages in the islands of Myltev as a means of self-defense, the region's brutal winters and frequent raids making any kind of large-scale settlement difficult to maintain. After being attacked one too many times by invading spellcasters, the group radicalized and forced every magic user it captured to make the choice: join or die.
The strategy worked, and within a couple generations Old Myltev became one of the largest kingdoms in the region. Rival monarchies in Liat and Southern Pescat tried to combat this new empire on the rise, but when a kingdom's court mage abandoned their post to join Old Myltev it became a matter of time before these rivals were conquered. Vsevold (ca. 1900's, 2nd), a war mage on the front lines of Myltev's greatest conquests, describes how these successes led to Old Myltev's exponential expansion throughout the 2nd Cycle's second millennium. There came a tipping point in the middle of the millennium where every other spellcaster on Pescaliat was allied with the empire, making it all but impossible for non-aligned spellcasters to band together and fight back this arcane empire.
A hierarchy of magic users began to take shape in the empire during this period, wizards vaunted as the arcane ideal for their years of meticulous study and mastery of the craft. Druids and warlocks were treated as second-class spellcasters since they relied on external forces to amplify their magic, and sorcerers were often treated as sub-human components in various experiments. Clerics were tolerated but barred from holding any kind of power in Old Myltev society, as the empire conquered the world it quickly began to see gods and their followers as the greatest rivals to their power.
In addition to monopolizing the use of magic on the continents, Old Myltev relied on a legion of aasimar to fight its wars when kingdoms couldn't be intimidated into surrendering. Conjured by some powerful wizard rumored to have killed a deity in a duel, these celestial armies were enchanted to follow any orders given by their archmage overlords and were nearly invincible on the battlefield. 'Swords shatter and arrows splinter against our armies,' Vsevold wrote during the Seige of Kaifeng. 'Gods weep for they know we hold the reigns of omnipotence'.
Old Myltev's golden age started after the conquering of the yuan-ti kingdom of Sheyuan, a feat that not even the dragon god-kings had managed to accomplish in their cataclysmic wars of the 1st Cycle. With three-fourths of Pescaliat under its control and the other quarter humbled into annual tributes, the archmages of the empire were free to pursue their arcane experiments with no limits save for their imaginations. Fireballs that could level entire cities, spells that could kill a person with a single word, the empire's greatest minds started traversing the multiverse for further power and enlightenment. Efrosenia Vennitsa (ca. 2400 - 2500's, 2nd Cycle) is a curious representation of this period: while she left no records of her own, her travels throughout the planes were chronicled and gossiped about by multiple contemporaries to provide one of the most complete profiles of any archmage from Old Myltev. This golden age was also the deadliest in the empire's history due to the manpower required to create so many spells and magic items, even more so than the centuries of warfare preceding it. Dozens of apprentices and slaves were killed during Efrosenia's expeditions throughout the multiverse, not to mention the thousands of lives lost mining for the diamonds to fuel her interplanar gates.
It's hard to obtain a clear picture of what first started Old Myltev on the road to destruction, but what's apparent is that 4,000 years ago an item known as the Ostry Blade made it possible to travel anywhere in the universe with just a flick of the wrist. Whether intentionally or no, this item was used to create a portal to the Far Realms, triggering the Ostry Apocalypse and the destruction of this millennia-spanning empire in a matter of days. Decades of suffering would pass before the creation of the Ageless One and their banishing of the aberrations back to their home plane. While Ostry Gregorios, the archmage and craftsman who loaned his name to the Blade, has been given much of the blame for the calamity there are recent scholars like Prof. Klute who propose that it was other more devious mages like Naum Kulikov who tricked Ostry into crafting the blade for their own nefarious purposes.
Unlike the reverence sometimes attached to the dragon god-kings of the 1st Cycle, there's a cautionary tale baked into any discussion of Old Myltev and how hubris led to its own destruction. Magic guilds like the Magus Collective would exist well into the 3rd and 4th Cycles under the oversight of the Elflands Empire, but they were never allowed to accumulate as much power as their Myltevian predecessors. In the modern era individual spellcasters may become obsessed with reopening portals or summoning aberrations once more, but these threats are much easier to combat rather than an entire Empire devoted to such selfish ends.
Demography and Population
Major Arcana
- The Fool: Ostry Gregarios
- The Magician: The Magician
- The Lovers: Kidma Nikoliakis
- The Chariot: Vsevold
- The Hanged Man: Monomakh the Foreseer
- The Hermit: Sviatoslav the Diviner
- The Tower: Naum Kulikov
- Judgement: Afron Egorov
- The World: Efrosenia Vennitsa
'Magic is Might'
600-900's, 2nd Cycle - 001, 3rd Cycle
Type
Geopolitical, Empire
Capital
Notable Members
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