Nefkan Crusade of 1850

The Nefkan Crusade of 1850 is a historic crusade by the forces of Orthodox Desmianism against the second Empire of Nefka. Most consider it to be a stunning failure and an example of military hubris, an attempted conquest of a land that cannot ever be conquered. This reputation has started to thaw over the last few decades, as the scars of the massive crusading losses have faded: it did cut down the Empire of Nefka from a belligerent regional power to a more isolated local power, and largely put an end to larger Feywild raids on Desmian states, after all.

The Conflict

Prelude

The Feywild Push

From 1450 to 1790, the second Empire of Nefka ran wild across the region between Esken and the Empire of Avana. Desmia as a whole burned from invasion after invasion during this period, but by the late 1700s things were beginning to turn around. In 1790, a host of Avanan, Inaran, and Pakrayan merchants and warriors sailed to Kidon to redesign and rebuild the city. Kidon was an anchor for coastal occupations nearest the Feywilds, as well as an essential supply depot connecting the populous South to the Golden Crusade. When Kidon was fully rebuilt and refortified in 1795, it served as a headquarters for operations against the Feywild raiders and invaders, allowing several foreign Orthodox armies to formally engage with the Nefkan military on mostly-equal footing from 1795 to 1810. The Battle of Kegrin Hill, fought between the Kingdom of Torza and the main Nefkan army in 1805, served as the first major Orthodox victory over the Nefkan forces, allowing for a burst of activity and recolonization. By 1840, Orthodoxy had returned to the lands of Kidon, Odala, and Ireth, though Nefkan raids remained a nuisance. 
As Nefka's power weakened, its internal rivals gained power. The Orthodox world immediately set to work building connections to these dissenters. Iada the Bat, an Esken merchant and Vesper who had connections to the Southwestern Feywilds, was the most famous and effective of these Orthodox diplomatic agents. Iada built close connections to Nefkans and Nefkan tributaries that resented the trade monopoly of the Violet Company, and worked to funnel Desmian weapons and mercenaries to these merchant allies. Iada's allies launched an attempted coup of Nefka in 1845, that created ripples of chaos and unrest across the Empire. The coup failed, but the attempt revealed the Empire's internal weakness for all the tributary clans to see. This coup, even as a failure, primed a grand rebellion within Nefka. And, in 1850, a dispute within the imperial family of Nefka offered the spark for such a rebellion. One of the heirs of Nefka, Zetra Enetar, was able to escape her family's attempts to imprison her, and she set to the countryside to rally the dissenting clans in rebellion; she offered greater autonomy to the surrounding areas if they would support her claim to the throne. Zetra offered an opportunity for a Desmian crusade that was looking for a way to strike Nefka directly since 1805.

The Artena Family

The Nefkan Crusade was the product of larger abstract forces, but it needed actual people to organize and lead it. The Avanan Artena family were the primary organizers, fundraisers, and leaders of the crusade, whose name has become almost synonymous with the war effort. The Artenas were once a family of ordinary counts in Eastern Avana, who ruled over a stretch of hills and mountains that were considered comparatively poor and unimportant. Iron deposits were discovered there in the 1600s, but it took until the mid 1700s for those iron mines to really fire up. The Artenas capitalized on their new iron industry by introducing experimental new metallurgical methods, and began producing steel - not particularly high-quality steel, but steel. Through great effort and risk, the Artenas built a reputation as producers of superior weapons and armor. They also curated a family culture of militarism and discipline, with near-mandatory crusading service for all family members and a very large private military budget. 
This mixture of war and commerce profited the Artenas immensely during the first half of the 1800s. In 1790, the Kivish began their invasion of Kaluta to the East, and the Artenas stepped up to lead the counter-attack first. For their service, they were granted great lands and courtly positions, and they began intermarrying with the great ducal families of Avana. They were at their peak in 1850: they had intermarried with the influential Skevedrin family (which had great influence over the Perpetual Conclave), their eldest son and heir (Harnek Artena) had managed to snag the position of Crusader Marshal of the Golden Crusade, and they had become the Avanan Imperial Procurer of Arms - the ones to manage the hiring of crusading veterans for major city guard groups. It seemed inevitable that they would become Dukes in no time; their meteoric rise fed their increasingly endless ambition and risk-taking boldness. When Nefka seemed vulnerable to invasion in 1850, the Artenas leapt at the opportunity to exploit it. When the crusade launched, it was an Artena at the helm: Altor Artena, the Crusader Marshal's younger brother. It was a cashing in of every political connection the family had, and the fact that one family of Avanan counts was able to lead two crusades simultaneously is very much an artifact of the 1850s: a decade of relentless optimism, faith in the warrior elites, and Avanan cultural hegemony following massive Orthodox victories in Ralev, Boram, Kaluta, and the Platinum Order.

The Engagement

The First Offense 1850 - 1855

The first offensive of 1850 was a rushed campaign, smaller and less prepared than future campaigns of the crusade. The army was a cobbled-together swarm of adventuring parties, mercenaries, and auxiliaries under the command of a complete outsider - an Avanan aristocrat by the name of Altor Artena. This crusading army met up with an autonomous group of Feywild merchants and Esken adventurers that already had a presence in the Feywilds, and then further met up with the already-mobilized Nefkan rebels under renegade royal Zetra Enetar. The resulting force was decentralized, spread out, and entirely dependent on Feywild allies for basic logistics. There were no supply lines to the Orthodox world, and reinforcements arrived in bursts with little organization. Each war group suffered immense attrition entering the Feywilds and were heavily spread out across Nefkan territory. This approach deepened the chaos of the civil war and spread out Nefkan forces as well, but the crusaders were also more pursuing rebel objectives than the other way around.
While this first phase was awkward and wasteful in many ways, Marshal Altor was able to establish allies apart from Zetra's succession revolt as well as reliable Orthodox outposts along the fringes of Nefkan territory. These accomplishments saved the crusade from a quick end in 1855, when Zetra and Altor's alliance finally fell apart. Altor's influence quickly waned, but small holdouts and alliances survived; and he was able to retreat back to Drinika to prepare for a proper invasion.

The Second Offensive 1855 - 1863

From 1855 to 1857, Altor ran smaller skirmishing groups to maintain his Feywild strongholds while he assembled a grand army. In 1857, two large armies were marched in to the Feywilds from Torza and Kidon. Without supply lines, the plan was simple: rely on the Feywild's ambient magic to replace food or water, and just steamroll ahead to Nefka as quickly as possible before any Feywild complications arise. Pin the Nefkans down into field battles, overwhelm their forces, and lock down the imperial city - that was the plan. Unfortunately for this plan, the Nefkans had a general both experienced with Orthodox warfare and strategically gifted: Bezrin Agira. Bezrin was able to ambush the first army, which was worn down from No Man's Land and disorganized from the crossing, but the raw manpower of the crusading forces ground down the Nefkan forces despite that. The first army was dissolved, but Bezrin was unable to take on the second so directly. And so he began priming the imperial lands for a protracted guerilla war, and prepared his forces for slowing down Altor's personal army as much as possible.
Across 1857, the second army struggled to make its way to Nefka. The soldiers and their mounts, entire reliant on Fey magic to survive, found it twisting their minds unusually fast. The pack animals crumbled away exceptionally quickly, and the remaining warhorses were lured by the Nefkan heir, Hereta Enetar, into a feinted battle that wiped out the Orthodox cavalry. With mobility and knowledge of the land on their side, the Nefkans were able to wear down Altor's army, though Altor was still able to defeat Hereta in an open field battle in 1858, almost killing the Nefkan heir and robbing her of her personal army. At the dawn of 1859, the crusaders finally managed to besiege Nefka - but the siege lasted barely a week before arriving reinforcements forced Altor to retreat again. Having lost the numerical advantage necessary to storm the infernal city, Altor again retreated from the Feywild and stationed the remnants of his forces at several border-strongholds.
While the Nefkans fought one another, recuperated, and besieged the Orthodox holdouts, Altor mustered two more armies. This time, their approach would be gradual: Altor set them to work building the "Twin Roads to Victory" through the Feywilds borderlands. The plan this time was to create an inevitable, overwhelming force that could occupy their way to Nefka, denying the empire their mobility and dragging the war into a plain game of numbers. Small war parties were sent as reinforcements to those already in the Feywilds periodically, while fortifications and roads snaked their way North.

The Final Offensive 1861 - 1865

In 1861, the Twin Roads were finally operational and ready to funnel troops and supplies into the Feywilds. The final offensive began forming in the Feywilds, creating armies bit by bit in a safe and secure manner. In 1862, these armies finally began their offensive proper. They found their allies scattered to the winds outside of a few pockets of committed rebels, and the Nefkans rebels and Nefkan main forces united against the Orthodox intruders. 1862 and 1863 were years of Orthodox expansion, but intense attrition and more Nefkan field victories. Desmian morale was low, and the Nefkan war leader remained wily and committed. Despite this, Orthodox forces were only barely fought off from the gates of Nefka in 1863. In 1864, the crusaders were finally able to pin down and kill the Nefkan general Bezrin Agira and disperse the core of his army, allowing them to lay siege to Nefka itself.
While Crusader forces surrounded and began bombarding Nefka itself, the two Enetar sisters mustered forces behind Orthodox lines. The legitimate heir marched an army from the far North that included great hosts of Kivish warbeasts and magicians as well as Mathari-aligned tribes; the rebel sister was able to mobilize the neutral tribes with the terror of the Orthodox occupation. The Orthodox had become increasingly brutal towards Feywilders as the war dragged on, and whenever the Crusader Marshal was not present to stop them, they burnt villages they were ordered to occupy and cut down Feywild ally, neutral, and enemy alike. The supply lines Altor had worked so hard to build were gradually dissolving under unnecessary guerilla conflict. Altor was not aware of how deep the problem was becoming, so focused was he on finishing the war and finally hunting down Bezrin Agira.
When Princess Hereta's army reached the Nefkan siege in 1865, the Orthodox troops were numerous enough to try and fight both the city and the reinforcements - though they were hardly ready for what hit them. As the Orthodox troops fought desperately against Hereta's mixed forces on the Eastern fringe of the city, the Nefkans themselves opened the Vault of Nightmares and channeled a swarm of nightmares through the city, into the besieging army. The city suffered heavy damage, but the Orthodox suffered far worse. Altor was killed, along with much of the officer corps. Another orderly retreat was not possible - all of the Feywilds was bearing down on a headless crusading army, which was overwhelmed and panicking. While the crusading legions fled South, the rebel princess Zetra's army moved in to cut their escape points - not preventing them from leaving, but removing their allies from being able to give them permission to leave. Untold thousands of crusaders were swallowed by the mists as they fled, consumed by the Feywilds. No one who entered for the final offensive, left.
The disaster of 1865 ended the crusade. It was a loss of life larger than the population of smaller Desmian kingdoms, part of a crusade that helped undermine a generation. And such a miserable and public defeat opened the crusade up to a political scandal that would dominate Desmian ecclesiastic politics for two decades. As for the Nefkans, they had no will to continue fighting either - they had lost so many, fought for so long, and seen their city fed upon by nightmares. The two sisters turned on each other, and despite attempts at peace they would ultimately set the stage for a nastier civil war in 1890.

Aftermath

The Scandal at Ederum

In Desmia, the great rout at Nefka was a breaking point. Many began to wonder: why were so many warriors and resources even in Nefka after so many disastrous and deadly defeats in years prior? And then came the scandal. Speaker of the Heartlands Kinara Skevedrin came forward to The Perpetual Conclave of Desmia with a horrible tale: that Harnek Artena, Crusader Marshal of the Golden Crusade and brother of the Nefkan Crusade's own Crusader Marshal, had come to her begging for help concealing great financial crimes. Apparently, the two brothers had shared resources and collaborated on reports far beyond the realm of decency. Golden crusade resources had been siphoned off irresponsibly towards the Nefkan crusade, and reports of the resulting defeats on the Golden front were suppressed in order to keep the Nefkan crusade as the Conclave's priority. Two major problems had arisen in the far West that had been silenced or downplayed: the naval defeat of Desmians in the North, ending the blockade of the Mathari and allowing Samvaran reinforcements and fleets to arrive; and the fall of the fortress wall against the Western Ishkibites, who had overrun a century's worth of fortification efforts and become entrenched enough in them that retaking them was unrealistic.
Between financial misbehavior and military obstruction, the Conclave had no choice but to drag Harnek before them for a public trial. Someone had to answer for this, and someone had to answer for the failures of the Nefkan crusade. Harnek's trial was a disaster. Firstly, on the matter of cooked books, he revealed that the records of both crusades were already falsified before either brother took over - the Golden Crusade had not answered honestly about its finances for decades, and Harnek alleged that the Esken mercenaries and Feywild allies that helped start the Nefkan crusade had exaggerated their numbers for a larger budget from the Conclave. Both crusades were understaffed when the brothers took over, he argued, they just tried to fix it they best they could. The Esken gloryhounds were at fault, he said. The brothers just made a plan to actually fix it: to wipe out Nefka at any cost to allow all resources to be efficiently routed to the Golden Crusade, allowing for whatever losses that occurred to be eventually rolled back. Besides, the practice of taking money from one front to another was established in the 1840s when the Amber Crusade diverted resources to Ralev - how was this different? And this could all have been averted if reinforcements had been more forthcoming anyways. 
Harnek soon snapped under public pressure and humiliation. His family's honor, power, positions, and finances were on the line, and he was still mourning his brother's death (and his brother's post-mortem humiliation by those who doubted his skill as a general). The family had also taken loans far beyond what they could repay to help bolster the crusades, and depended on Conclave rewards and debt relief to recover. He flung blame in a thousand directions, revealing every other person's guilt or corruption during his time as Marshal and painting the entire institution as corrupt. This did not help his case, but rather dragged dozens and dozens of other actors into it to defend their own honor. The trial became a crisis of legitimacy, a judicial civil war of the priesthood where every silent grudge was brought out in spectacular melodrama. In 1873, Harnek was deemed guilty of military obstruction, but not treason or financial malpractice, and was sent into exile as a lesser officer in Boram.

Long Term Orthodox Effects

The Nefkan crusade was a point of mass death at the end of a long trail of mass death events: the Kivish crusades in the Platinum Order, Ralev, Belmay, Sikrek, and Avana; the century of strife before that; the plague of the Crimson death. Desmia was winning militarily, but slumping demographically, with villages and towns deserted from generations of conscription. People were sick of it, and the Crusade became the focal point of their wrath. The Nefkan Crusade became synonymous with wasted life and callous short-sightedness. After the trial of Harnek ended, decades of de-escalation began to allow the Orthodox lands to recover. Unfortunately for them, this de-escalation gave their enemies breathing room. The Desmians never regained naval dominance in the North and had to concentrate their naval forces on keeping their own coasts safe from Siashan pirates; they also never recaptured the great fortresses they had built to keep Lusaya at bay. 
The trial also revealed and intensified many regional tensions in the Orthodox world. Esken in particular was smeared by both sides, as untrustworthy gloryhounds who either started a pointless war or tried to take credit for one unjustly. The region was heavily demoralized by all this, setting it up for dual Ishkibite and Seruvian missionary campaigns in the 1880s and 1890s. In Avana, the crusader elite took its first major publicity hit and had its legitimacy called into question. Avanan hegemony was also made vulnerable and called into question by Pakray and Ralev, crystallizing the rivalries that would continue through the 1900s. 
As for the Artena family, they were left disgraced. They were stripped down to barons, and they spent a century fighting off creditors and rivals. They are now poorer than they ever were before, but in their spite they effectively smashed their steel industry and iron mines they once had. 

Long Term Feywild Effects

The Southern Feywilds had only recently recovered from the crusade. The Nefkan empire was left broken, the tribes were left divided and reduced to the point where their raids wouldn't pick back up for a century. The great population movements of the war also left all groups more intertwined and interconnected than ever, with Kobolds in the South and tribal bloodlines intermingled across regional boundaries. 
As for the Orthodox soldiers left in the Feywilds, most converted to Ishkibism. Those who refused were captured and ransomed back to their families - a merciful fate by many of their standards.

Conflict Type

War

Battlefield Type

Land

Start Date

1850

Ending Date

1865

Conflict Result

Crusade ended with mutual defeat; Orthodox army annihilated, Nefkan Empire broken

Location

The Feywilds

Belligerents

Orthodox Coalition

• Orthodox Desmianism

Nefkan Coalition

• Empire of Nefka

Strength

900,000 warriors in total

90,000 warriors in total

Casualties

700,000

50,000 estimated

Objectives

Conquer the Empire of Nefka;

Repulse the Orthodox crusaders, maintain their empire