Ancient Kingdom of Destra
Once a mighty nation that dominated the north-east of the continent of Euristan, the Kingdom of Destra was cataclysmically torn apart when a rebellion of the nation’s mages overthrew the royal family and where then destroyed by the very forces they had called in to aid them.
History
Whilst not as venerable as the ancient monarchies of Thaleros and the Ancient Kingdom of Sparos to the west, for over a millennia the Kingdom of Destra was regarded as the strongest of the non-Elven nations on the continent of Euristan. Not only was Destra powerful, with large well-equipped armies, but its mastery over the terrain of their heartland, turning it from a waterlogged bad lands into a thriving agricultural paradise, made the nation and its royal family incredibly wealthy. This wealth enabled successive monarchs of Destra to invest in the arts and sciences and soon the nation was regarded in these areas as being as advanced as their Elven competitors, who had had the luxury of far longer to develop their own civilisations.
With this boom in the arts and sciences, came an increasing understanding, acceptance and finally reliance on the arcane arts and those that were able to wield them. As Destra became more ambitious and sought to reclaim more land for building and agriculture from their swampy homeland, larger, deeper canals had to be constructed to tame and funnel the waters, which proved to be far easier and cheaper to achieve through the use of the arcane as opposed to engineering. As Destra looked beyond its borders to the south, east and west and began to try and claim more territory for itself, many hundreds of battle mages marched alongside their armed forces, bolstering and healing the soldiers of Destra whist raining destruction down on their enemies.
Eventually, the mages of Destra found that they were indispensable to the nation and its royal family, and with this realisation, corruption crept in. In the kingdom’s twilight years the mages demanded higher and higher remuneration for their work until Destra’s coffers were almost depleted and the people began to suffer as public works and services were ceased in order to keep up with the mages’ constantly growing demands for payment. Eventually, dissatisfied with just pecuniary rewards, a group of the most powerful mages decided that they were tired of propping up the royal family, and that it was their time to rule.
In the year 460 of the Divine Peace, these mages carried out a coordinated strike across all of the major cities of the kingdom. But it was not just mages that took part in these attacks. For years this cabal had approached intelligent monstrous creatures across Kelbonnar, hoping to draw them into an alliance to help them destroy the kingdom and place the mages in power in exchange for great riches and slaves. Whilst many creatures ignored this petition, many more agreed, including several Dragons, who the mages in their hubris believed that they would be able to control.
This initial strike, though devastating, failed to completely quash the loyalist forces of Destra and a civil war raged for decades, those loyal to the Kingdom struggling against the fell forces brought to bear against them. Eventually, in the year 427 of the Divine Peace, the last stronghold of the loyalists nestled in the foothills of the Spears of Astartes Mountains was destroyed and the last heir to the royal line, Prince Asurraynaar was captured and taken away for execution.
However, at the very celebration feast that the mages held to celebrate their ultimate victory, the monstrosities they had contracted to help them, seeing the weakness that the conspirators’ hubris had created in them turned on the former allies and killed them all. For nearly a hundred years after this, these monstrosities ravaged the land of Destra, wiping out most of its people, with those remaining going into hiding in the wilder regions of their homeland.
Though the cabal of mages was eliminated and though eventually the most powerful and ferocious of the monsters grew tired of their wanton destruction and returned to their homes with the spoils, the Kingdom of Destra was completely destroyed, never to rise out of its own ashes. Without mages, labourers or farm hands to manage and maintain the irrigation systems and canals that stretched across the kingdom, the region began to return to nature. Water flowing down of the Spears of Astartes mountains burst the banks of the irrigation systems and canals, flooding most of the area and turning it into the Destra Wetlands that has remained there ever since.
Now all that remains of that once mighty nation are references in dusty books and scrolls kept in the Imperial archives and other collections of historical curiosity, referencing events that took place close to a thousand years ago; the ruins deep in the wetland that few from the Empire of Turelion will ever see and the ghost of a name that is still attached to the location.
The Survivors
Though the vast majority of the kingdom’s people were slain in the civil war and the various catastrophes that it brought, a small number of Destra’s people were able to survive in the regions of the kingdom that had not been terraformed from their original marshland. As the engineering and agricultural infrastructure of the kingdom decayed and the whole region became the Destra Wetlands, these survivors and their ancestors slowly spread across the area and over many hundreds of years became experts at surviving in this difficult and unforgiving environment. Feeling that to continue identifying themselves as people of Destra was both unlucky and shameful, they abandoned the name of their ancestral people and instead began to identify themselves using a corrupted version of the Elven word for wanderers, becoming known as the Hynafiad.Territories
The heartland of what was once ruled by the Ancient Kingdom of Destra is now the area encompassed by the Destra Wetlands, named after the erstwhile geo-political entity. This area of land was always, until its destruction, ruled by the Kingdom of Destra, but at many points over the nation’s long history it controlled vast swathes of territory within the Plains of Gold, the Relialo Plains and the Worfal Tundra.
1543DP - 427DP
Type
Geopolitical, Kingdom
Successor Organization
Location
Related Ethnicities
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