Unbroken Empire

Introduction

The Unbroken Empire, sometimes known as the Beleran Empire, was and still remains the most powerful nation ever built on Atharen. At its greatest extent, it encompassed nearly forty percent of the global landmass, including all of Calanon, most of Vividim and Lukhan, the region of Daravin, Radenor, Galena and Sil-Elaine, as well as its capital province of Mithira, which no longer exists. The Beleran Empire expanded over the course of nearly six hundred years, founded amidst the collapse of the Elven Kingdom of Silor and expanding based on what were — originally — principles of human nationalism, stoked by centuries of slavery beneath the boot of the Ashen Elves.

Over time, the Unbroken Empire traded those principles for a new, Beleran Enlightenment doctrine, focused on bringing prosperity to the people and races of the world without necessary oversight or intervention from the Gods. As the political system of the Empire developed, a council of twelve Draedan eventually monopolized power within the state, and with the growth of their reach the Empire gradually shifted to an anti-theocratic force, dedicated to the destruction of the Living Gods' presence on Atharen.

History

The Empire originally began as nothing more than a localized slave revolt. Valen Dres, the man who would go on to become the sole ruler of the Empire throughout its expansion, awakened his abilities as a Draedan after being flayed as a sacrifice by an Ald'Norai Vandikar. He awoke in a mass grave, flailing within a mound of bodies, and eventually crawled out from the mess of gore and swarming of insects, returning to the village where his fellow slaves were watched and managed. He was met with a hero's reception, recognized for what he was: the son of a Living God, come to liberate his peers from their subjugation. Though startled and confused, Valen anxiously succumbed to the roaring pleas of his fellow slaves, murdering the guards that looked over them and freeing his fellow humans after they had been dispatched.

This all occurred amidst a time of destabilizing strife for the Ald'Norai, who had lost their Queen and much of their ruling and military elite to a plague borne of the Black Sigil; a punishment given to them for seeking immortality against the will of Malek. Because of this, there was no response to Valen's liberation of this village, and he organized his fellow slaves into a small militia that began rolling over other encampments and freeing human slaves by the thousands.

In the span of a few years, Valen had become the King to nearly a million freed slaves, and had facilitated their migration to a large land-mass off of Daravin's eastern coast, known as Bel-Mithir, or eventually, Mithira. A decade later, Valen accumulated an army of over a hundred thousand soldiers, and the Slave-King — known now to be the son of Venadak — had awoken much of his divine power. He declared a formal war against the scattered and ailing Elven Kingdom, and after four years of brutal skirmishes captured their capital of Arlain.

Conquest of the rest of Daravin, Silor's heartland region, was quick, and followed by decades of grievance-fueled revenge.

From Ald'Norai: "It was well-known by Elves with any knowledge that when human slave revolts occurred, they would often massacre as many Elves as they could in their wake, leaving a trail of brutality behind them. When Silor fell, this reality played out on a scale unprecedented in history. Within the first decades of its collapse, millions of Elves were killed by the revolting humans. Their cities were sacked, monuments were destroyed and the Elven Gods were even hunted ruthlessly, though none of them were killed."

Subjected to the dominance of human masters who loathed the Elves with the core of their being, the Ald'Norai were punished with Atharen's first genocide, leading to their forced relocation into Sil-Elaine and the death of forty million of their people. Those that survived were monitored via Cultural Inquisition, an attempt to force them to conform to the values and beliefs of Mithira's humans, who saw the Elves as hateful, backwards relics of the ancient times, permanently in need of restrictive supervision.

Daravin was cleared of all Elves, and it became the bread-basket of the nation that was — as of the Year 3419 — called the Beleran Empire, which ruled Mithira, Daravin and Sil-Elaine.

Over the next century, the Beleran Empire conquered Galena and Khadai, cementing itself as a true Empire, similar in scale to Silor before it. The century following that saw little expansion at all, and was known as the Empyrea Belerica, or "Beleran Ascension". The Empire, in communication with the Gnomes of the Kaedic Mountain Range, began to develop advanced technologies triggered by the intersection of Artificing and pre-Industrial engineering. The Empire developed technologies known today simply as "Unbroken Tech", their schematics strictly controlled as the engineering processes behind them were kept to the absent province of Mithira. By 3800, the Beleran Empire had developed trains, aeroghasts (their Skyvessels) and the early precursors to the vehicles that would eventually become the Chariots of the Badlands. They developed metal infrastructure and even functional, long-range artillery, as well as semi-sentient automatons that did not rely on Artificing to function.

By 3850, the Beleran Empire had conquered the small states that pre-dated Tyrclaid, ruled over the mostly empty land of Seres (now Rokhan) and had colonized most of what now constitutes the Griscian Commonwealth. In the year 3853, the nation renamed itself the "Unbroken Empire," after a coalition of all of its surrounding nations failed to ever penetrate into its land. It was clear that the Empire was Atharen's first, truly unstoppable force, and over the next century it would grow to encompass its greatest land mass, threatening even the Gods that dwelled above.

Fall

The fall of the Empire was certain the moment they appeared to declare war on the Gods. While the Unbroken had conquered all of Atharen's earthly threats, its rulers appeared to have little understanding of the might of their creators. The Empire began with "limit-testing," targeting acolytes of the Gods in the form of mages, magic becoming illegalized and punishable by death. By the 3910s, simply being a public professor of the Path — the faith of the Living Gods — was made illegal, and most were subject to a decade of cruel reeducation, an experience many did not survive. The Gods responded minimally, but began to arm their followers against their foes, initiating many into magics and sending loyal Draedan of theirs to infiltrate the Empire, teaching mages how to progress in their magics or directly compromising Imperial facilities.

The Empire responded by initiating Draedan and Dragon Hunts, rewarding enterprising elites with vast amounts of currency and even public title in exchange for culling any Draedan or Dragon found within the Empire's premise, save for the Draedan involved in Unbroken leadership.

This was a step too far for some, and Venadak began to encourage greater measures be taken. For decades, the other Gods — under the influence of Tenebrax — stalled him, and encouraged Venadak to engage in minimal interventions that appeared to distract him away from the rash measures he had frequently proposed. Internal strife rapidly circulated within the closed circle of the Living Gods, and lines were drawn between them as to the fate of the so-called Unbroken Empire, and the level of interventionism necessary to subdue the threat.

Eventually, in the beginning of 3962, Venadak commanded Evitrix to go against the majority of the other Gods, using her prototype of Eridan-5 to assault the Empire directly. In the span of hours, city-sized rays of golden light ripped through Atharen's skies, obliterating every population center in Mithira and leaving eighty million people dead. Amidst the wreckage, Venadak confronted the twelve councilors of the Empire outside of the scorched husk of Adena (the Imperial Capital) and defeated them all.

Venadak was the father of Valen and another member of the Empire's council, Cora. While ten of the councilors lay incinerated and dead, the bitter God found himself reluctant to slaughter his own children, and pondered offering Cora a chance for remediation. Valen utilized this opportunity to strike through his back, impaling him with a bladed artifact designed to kill the Creator. Venadak did not die, but his injuries led to the events of the Bleeding, which devastated the world as raw energy razed cities all across Atharen, and afflicted the planet with a scourge of entropic waste.

What was left of Mithira became the sundered hellscape of Bel, and its capital became Bel's lowest Mantle, the realm within which an injured, corrupted Venadak reigns.

While the Empire grew to immense prominence in the span of six hundred years, it took a single night for it to utterly collapse. The destruction of Mithira, the Bleeding and the death of Beleran's rulers saw the total dissolution of the Empire, all of its imperial provinces declaring themselves as independent nations not long after the Bleeding's effects tarnished their lands. Atharen spent centuries, after, recovering from a cataclysm, the vanishing of their Gods, and the dismantlement of the order brought about by the once-thriving Empire.

Legacy

The collapse of the Unbroken Empire threw Atharen into a centuries-long dark age, though old texts and histories relating to Imperial technologies eventually spurred the advent of the Age of Industry, around the year 4500.

Since well before then, two nations have fought to be known as the Empire's successor. The Empire of Rust, or Daravin, claims cultural and geographical successorship to Beleran, while the Griscian Commonwealth seems to follow their footsteps in almost all other ways. Most consider the Griscian Commonwealth to be the true successor to the Unbroken, guided by many of the same moral and ideological principles, and wielding similar technology. In recent decades, Grisic has proven itself as Atharen's most powerful nation, and as a prominent colonial state there are fears they may eventually come to rule the continent as Beleran once did.

The Bleeding, as well as the continued proliferation of anti-theist and anti-magic sentiment by the Griscian Commonwealth, has led to what is effectively the death of the Path. Many consider the Unbroken Empire to have ultimately won their war against the Living Gods, as the aftermath of their conflict annihilated any divine presence still left within the world.