Ophelia’s Tale

Long ago and far away, there were a people who dreamt of change. Not a fleeting change, but a deep and long lasting one. After time beyond counting, the people realized something profound. Change is not something that you happen upon; it can never be caught in surprise. Change will not be seen by those who only sit and wait. Change is something that must be made. It is built by passion and drive. Determination and hard work are what change is truly born of.

These people were from Alisterra, the oldest kingdom of our world. Alisterra is unfathomably large, spanning all of our five kingdoms and more. Yet they are trapped by their gods, held tightly in the center. Demons watch the gates to the northern forest while beasts control the borders to the southern jungles.

Thosis, their god of knowledge and wisdom, said unto the Alisterrans, “You have all you need here, and here is where we can protect you. Here is a land of purity and goodness. Beyond our borders lies evil and death.”

And so the people practiced purity. Wehlria festivals cleansed the souls of any impure thoughts or deeds. And the gods were good. They kept true to their word that all would be protected. Alaumil healed any illness and granted fertility to all mothers. Sveris promised a rebirth of any who wished it and a place for eternal rest when they were done. All had faith in them as it was proven by their actions.

Still, in this holy and perfect land, a curiosity grew. A desire for something else, truly anything else other than the idyllic world that they were gifted.  A young and curious man was greeted by a god unlike any his people had come to know. He was told of a land across the sea that was different, unprotected by gods where he could have the freedom to live his life the way it was meant to be lived. A place where people could struggle and grow, be proud and confident, become more than they ever dreamed possible. Though, for all these things to be possible, there would be danger. There would be pain. There would be death. True death, one without the choice that they had all grown used to. No chance to be reborn would be found there.

Cluveleon was enamored with the possibilities of this new land and so he preached to all who would listen of what he had heard. He worked tirelessly, building a vessel that could sail the seas. The ordained of Alisterra called him a heretic and blasphemer. They cursed his name. Yet they let him continue as that was their way. Cluveleon had grown his following to ten disciples that cleansed themselves of their names and instead numbered themselves to prove their dedication to a new world. Those ten disciples took their families and they all committed their lives to Cluveleon and his vision.

They sailed across the sea and were watched by this new god. They encountered storms the size they’d never seen. They felt sickness the likes of which they’d never felt. They saw death come to those they loved. All the while the presence of this unknown god surrounded them, and he did nothing to help. They prayed to him as they were beset by pain, and cursed him as they saw death. Still he did nothing. Cluveleon called to his people to remain strong, this pain would make them grow more than any Alisterran ever could. They will be something greater, but first they must go through hardship.

They arrived in the new world and they were surprised to see a new people willing to greet them. The Wylaens offered them food and shelter. When Cluveleon told his people they must endure this trial themselves and that they must only provide for themselves, the Wylaens still yet offered to show them how to provide in this new land. Cluveleon refused and said they would live and die by their own hand.

They founded Oarna and constructed gates as they had seen in their old land to protect from the beasts in the wild. The Wylaen people had never seen a wall with no roof and were confused, but they allowed their neighbors to be rained upon as they wished.

Cluveleon led his people on great adventures of exploration. They found sweet fruits beyond anything they had tasted in Alisterra. They ate animals, a thought so foreign to them. And in this land, they prospered.

The Wylaen people of the time were divided with some living in the mountains, close to their goddess Pehlara, while others lived on the land feeling the open air. They worked together to survive, the hunters and gatherers above with the miners and creators below. They were typically smaller in size than their neighbors from Alisterra, and the ones who roamed the lands had been blessed by the sun with dark skin from their lives being spent exclusively in the open air. Alisterra was larger, and so were the people. Yet they had grown accustomed to buildings and were hidden from the sun. These differences, unnoticed at first, in time began to be the only thing the Oarnians saw.

As Oarna grew, it expanded its borders. Slowly at first, but with such bountiful resources, their people multiplied quickly and before long reached far inland and began pushing the Wylaen people out of their homes. The friendly Wylaens were not angered. They knew land here was more than any one people could ever reside in. There had always been and would always be plentiful land and resources.

But they soon saw how wrong they were. Cluveleon had preached peace with the Wylaens. Their struggles were meant to be for them alone, and not between other people. But the first king of Oarna had lived in another time and was long since dead. His dream of peace had lived on until there was no more land. Wylaen had expanded outward and Oarna pressed inward. Both people were growing into one another, and the first conflicts began.

The people of Waylinn tried to have missionaries spread the word of Pehlara to the Oarnians who believed in nothing but themselves. They thought if only they could be saved by their Goddess, they could be as one people.

The Oarnians scoffed at the thought of Pehlara. They had all but forgotten their old gods from Alisterra, and long since only believed in the power of people. A holy mother living at the center of the earth was an outrageous idea. But still the Wylaens preached their beliefs. They preached their canon; all must live honorable lives and care for the earth. Those who follow the path will be reborn from the sacred dirt and live again. Those who stray are sent to the sky to spend a lifetime away from the holy mother paying penance for their deeds before they are delivered back reborn by the purifying rains to grow again. They preached that Pehlara is everlasting and any can see her work deep underground where she still tends to her forests and rivers, far away from the sky. How else could such beauty and life thrive underground?

Some Oarnains chose to believe. They needed something to believe in, something in their lives needed to change. And so they believed. At first the stories of Pehlara were nonsense and the Oarnians ignored it. But as people began leaving Oarna to live amongst the Wylaens, it became seen as an attack. People were being taken, forced to believe something untrue. And war began.

Oarna invaded Waylinn and it came to be remembered simply as The First Oarnian Invasion. They had raised a makeshift army of angry farmers and wives wanting nothing more than to get their family back and to hurt those that hurt them. War changed them all. Evil grew just as the old gods had said. But none remembered the old gods.

Waylinn was not organized. It was a scattered land of small groups. Most were never even aware they were at war. And when the killing was over, Oarna forcefully pushed out all Wylaen people from their new borders. Feeling the desire for justice and vengeance for the first time, the Wylaen people began assaulting any new Oarnian settlers looking to expand.

With a new appetite for war, the Oarnian kings created real armies, true armies. The Wylaen people fought back but were no match. The Second Oarnian Invasion split the whole continent in two and reached all the way to where Kaldia is today. People beyond counting, some say hundreds of thousands, others say millions, were killed in the Second Invasion. The Waylinn people to the north were cut off from their families to the south.

But the Waylinn people fought back, the Karesh massacre saw Wylaens kill thousands of Oarnian families. The burning of Foudre Plains halted the expansion north. The battle of Firefall Valley stopped an entire Oarnian brigade from pressing to the south. The Wylaen people were holding tightly to their remaining land. But King Liefend organized his armies and crushed the remaining Waylinn villages to the north in the Liefland Conquest.

Time pressed on and death was like a plague. Not one who lived could recall a time in history with no war, and so the Oarnian people finally desired peace. They were a divided nation. Many had lost loved ones and wanted to crush what was left of Waylinn. Others had love for Waylinn and felt their own Oarnian people had perpetuated the wrongs, caused the wars, started the killing. Oarna was being torn apart from the inside. While the army was on the move to the next inevitable massacre of Wylaen people, a civil war erupted in Oarna.

Bastien’s Revolt began after thousands of Oarnians saw the wrongs of their kingdom and chose to make a stand. Bastien was the first to speak out and was the first to fall. Kiesek and Anice led the uprising in his stead. They took sword in hand and let it fall upon those who rallied against them even their own friends and family for they knew that the world could not continue this way. Charging forward, they fell upon the barracks, killing soldiers and guards and wresting control of the city. When the armies finally returned, Anice and Kiesek gathered their group and fled to the east. They allied themselves with the Wylaen people but took the name of Kaldia, feeling a separation of name would help their cause and attract other sympathetic people of Oarna. 

After decades of peace talks and years of tumultuous peace, a group of antsy soldiers from Veirdeaux gathered at a bar drinking heavily just over the Waylinn border. They were hoping for trouble to start so they could expend their energy in a fight. But a young woman, Ina, was the only one willing to stand up for her people that night. And she was killed over nothing.

Her love, Relahk, flew into a rage when he found out. He tracked the soldiers and murdered them mercilessly. His rage could not be sated so easily though, he wanted revenge against the one who commanded the soldiers. Revenge against the king of Oarna himself. He snuck into Veirdeaux, scaled the castle walls and murdered King Piers in cold blood. The first king of Oarna to truly hope for peace, a great man. But revenge does not care for greatness.

Relahk fearlessly slew soldier after soldier as the alarms sounded around the capital city. He was already slated as a hero of the Wylaen people before his deeds that night, and he became a god to those desperately seeking vengeance afterwards.

And this was the start of the Pehlaran War, the last hope of Waylinn to ever remain the people they were. Long hard years of war, wherever Relahk was sent, battles were won. They were making real strides towards taking back their land. But Relahk was only one man, and once his battles were won and he left, the Oarnian armies would reclaim the land.

Soon after, the Empress Pehlari of Waylinn and King Maxime of Oarna became deadlocked in every battle. Pehlari would send Relahk as a battering ram and Maxime would send Alestine to outmaneuver him. Neither would fall, but they were fast losing good soldiers.

In an all-or-nothing both leaders sent their full armies to lay siege to the capital cities. Pehlari had Relahk siege Vierdeaux and Maxime sent Alestine to siege the mountain fortress of Deldrin and of Fenrikstead in Kaldia. While Relahk had brute force on his side, Alestine used more subtle means of laying siege. She cut off supply routes, burned farmland and diseased fresh water. Relahk had breached the main gates and destroyed the city, but the royal family was evacuated to Antibellen.

Alestine had suffocated the last remaining holdouts in Waylinn and Kaldia. It appeared Oarna would be successful. However, Relahk had planned on the evacuation and captured the royal family. He tied them up and rode to Deldrin. He showed Alestine his prisoners and demanded she surrender. Empress Pehlari and King Maxime brokered a peace, and in her position of power Pehlari made demands. The land that Alestine had won for him would be returned to Kaldia and Waylinn. Oarna must be split in two kingdoms, completely separate so the size would not entice them into war in the future. And thus Liefland was born.

Peace was had at last. Centuries of war and death had finally been broken. Now centuries of peace and life were needed to help the people recover to what they once were. Relahk and Alestine became legends. But their deeds soon faded as did the war they fought so long and hard in. All stories fade in time, but there are people who still yet remember. For without stories of the past the future is surely doomed.