Four words which launched a world into a trajectory. They were said by a Verin man named Kyzan; Kyzan said the words before wars and sacrifices, and after births and executions.
He first said them on the night he returned from the dead. No flesh. No meat. Just bare bones floating untouched, shrouded in shimmering memories of the man who once stood there.
He was the first to ever do such a thing. In a world that had only just got the hang of iron and was graduating to copper, Kyzan returned from the dead with fire in his hands and ice in his eyes, and if anyone disagreed with his hypothesis then it was their blood that the Wheel happened to be demanding.
Kyzan's fixation with blood became a religion as those closest to him began to experience their share of power—possessing a grace and strength far above the norm. Blood soaked into the land. Verin had long lives and many children, and many families died fighting for and against Kyzan's reign.
Kyzan's long reign ended in bloodshed as well, but even in final death, his afterimage continued on. To some, that way of life had worked to a mythic degree. That memory did not wash out of the Procession of rulers which followed. It was the lodestone for generations more of bloodshed and tyranny, even as interpretations and translations and the vagaries of aeons altered the message and the perception of it.
21,000 years later, the original message has been lost. Those who should know such things say that the message may not have been that the Wheel Demands Blood. Kyzan was a creature of his time, a creature of survival making sense of the blessed words of the Wheel—if even Kyzan truly had spoken to the Wheel, he may not have had the experience or history to understand its words.
Instead, these descendants within the Vanthric Haimarchy interpret the Wheel as meaning that experience comes at a steep price. The Wheel represents harmony. Not the harmony of peace but the harmony of an ecosystem — a universe in harmony is an ecosystem of the growing and the rotting, the biggest gardens grow from the healthiest graves.
The do not wish for war, but the wounds of the past take long to heal. Some of them paid for their crimes, and lived on, some escaped atonement. This has bred ill will from within as much as without, and so war becomes inevitable.
When the threat of war becomes the promise of it, the Vanthric Haimarchy finds within itself a memory of the old ways.
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