You rose through the ranks, becoming an able bodied sailor after only a year and a few years later you were an important member of the company. Those were golden years too. The sudden loss of your younger brother when his ship disappeared near the Skull Stone Archipelago, was the end of those times. You took your ship out on your own to see if you could find survivors on your own without the company's approval. The waters were deep, but that time of year the storms were weak, so the disappearance probably meant pirates. You had experienced your share of sea battles and you knew the risks of the seas, but this was the boy who practically raised. Nothing would stop you from finding out what had happened to him.
You searched the region of where your Brother's ship was supposed to go. A month had past and the crew was beginning to tire of the search. Your breakthrough occured when a you were being hounded by a fast ship out of Skullstone. Apparently your ship had strayed too close to a region that the Silver Prince thought important and a fast galley was sent to persue you. The rowers rowed day and night without tiring and they soon caught up to your ship and began to board you ship. It was then battling one of the zombie rowers that you recognized your brother. The terrible sorrow was replaced instantly with indignant anger. Power came to your tired limbs and sufficed you with energy of the Unconquered Sun. A booming voice bade you to destroy the dead that walk Creation, for they are not in his favour. A desperate losing fight turned as a skiff in a changing wind and victory was snatched out of thier grasp, the destroyed undead burned away into ashes before your wrath.
As a Captain and Solar Exalt of the Zenith caste, a priest, you lead your crew in many trips that earned them much money and lead them in many victorious battles, but soon you became known to the Realm and then sent out fleets to hunt you down and kill you. It was in this time that you met The Nameless Wolf, who appeared before you using sorcery. He told you the the danger to your crew would pass as soon as you left them and came with him. He took you from your ship and you traveled the northern wastes to a small settlement called Somewhere Else. There you met a great Solar artificer named Orixia, and you made a foray into the underworld near that town and discovered a great city once called Braham's Bridge that was a relic of the a bygone era. You thought that this hamlet would begging to be a place where you could rest and get used to your powers and turn the shadowlands nearby into a place of fertility. But when you came again to the village, the Nameless Wolf was there again and he said that he and the Cult of the Illuminated had need of you. You were going to do great things.
The Cult of the Illuminated had many enemies in Creation and they were all waiting for the Cult to show itself and when they did they would reach out and cut its head off. The biggest enemy was the Bronze Faction and their Puppets, the Realm, a nation of one hundred million souls and nearly a million Dragon Blooded. They had learned that the Realm was mobilizing about fifty thousand troops, lead by ten thousand Dragon Blooded and they had only a couple of seasons to train up soldiers to fight them. As desperate a situation as that picture seemed, they told you that the Cult had several advantages: they did not know where we were, Solars are the greatest leaders of the First age, and the Solars were the best at training new soldiers. They explained that they could take simple slaves and train them to be the best soldiers in creation in under a season, we had two seasons.
The first stage they said was to train you and regular soldiers too. They said that they would prefer to do this slowly and to let us become powerful naturally, but that our time was up. So they trained you. They taught you how to lead. They taught you how to fight. They taught you how to train other soldiers. They taught you other things as well. They honed your mind. You had two Solar trainers that you saw every week. Every day was filled with eight hours of training with weapons and drills, and eight hours of learning in informal classes. After a month of training you were leading a smaller set of just freed slaves in the things that you had just learned in addition to your own training.
The winter snows came to the Town of Nowhere. There was a great tower that served as a temple to Solar Invictus and there was a ramshackle of huts and hovels outside with pathways. When the snows had melted there were streets and barracks. The town had grown from a thousand just freed slaves to an armed encampment of ten thousand who spent their time taming the lands around, clearing the land and preparing the lands for crops. In the Spring season the soldiers spent time farming and training. There were raids on the Latifundia in the Slave States constantly bringing in new recruits, but there was no true battles fought.
This changed when the General Ayed fought the first Tepet Legions that had landed just outside Someplace Else. The battle was a sound defeat for the Tepet legions, but it was only a forward force of a thousand troops, not the true brunt of the forces that would soon be on the ground. The General came to Nowhere to be debriefed by The Nameless Wolf and the other generals, of which you were present. You heard that a force less than half the size of the Realm forces sent them running and fleeing to the Realm. He then let it been known that if he had wanted to, he could have cut off their retreat, but for the plans of the Nameless. The Nameless spoke that they were finally ready and they needed the Realm to throw everything at them and for that it was necessary to let them know that the Solar Exalted were here. Ayed said that only two Solars were revealed in the fight. Nameless thought that the overwhelming victory would bring a overwhelming response for two Solars that seemed to get lucky, but since they had 15 solar Generals and the troops were well prepared, it would be them that would be surprised.
You were given a thousand troops spaced out in four forts in the frontier. You were told that you would need to use the troops sparingly, to quickly travel between the tired and the fresh troops to attack the enemy soldiers. The tactic worked spectacularly well. Each fort consisted of two Battle Lions, about 120 troops. Each battle lion was composed of four Lions of thirty troops and each Lion had five Claws of six troops. You tried to limit the smaller engagements and the majority of your battles involved Lions battling up to four times the numbers of troops. You began to prefer the engagements where your enemy was lolled into a false sense of confidence. There was one time that you purposely let yourself be surrounded by four units of equal size. Standard operating procedure with standard troops would mean that you would be forced into a defensive stance and you would be dead. Instead you attacked. They never knew what hit them. Your leadership and battle acumen meant that you lost not a single soldier and all the attacking units were scattered, dead or captured. The battles were too easy and the strategists began to see that you were courting greater and greater odds, that the strain of he constant warfare, and the killing was having a toll on your attitude.
In three months of battles you had a string of victories to your name. Switching between your forces, you fought on average one and a half full battles a day, ninety-four victories in fifty-nine day, your troops had swepte the Slave coast from South of Nowhere to just outside of Serrat. You had accounted for nearly ten thousand dead, captured and routed. In your last encounter you ran into your first real opposition. There was two full dragons of Realm troops lead by the Leader of the Tepet Legions, Tepet Arada. Although your soldiers had marched through the night and half of them had been in battle the previous day, you set up to fight these new fresh Realm soldiers. You defied the normally proscribed best times to attack forces and you decided that it was best that your troops got to rest through the day and to attack them in the night. They were not the soldiers that you had fought before, these were elite professional soldiers from House Tepet. Their Fanglords were dragon blooded, so you knew that more than a fifth of the 1500 were dragon blooded, and you only had two Battle Lions, 480 elite battle hardened mortal troops. Your orders were to wait for reinforcements, but you were confident.
You split your troops into two groups, you would lead the first into them from the North while they slept and then after waking them up, you would get the first battle lion to retreat while you joined the Second to attack them from the South. News of your unconventional tactics had preceded you to them from the fleeing soldiers over the past two months and you had been working your way towards this position for over a month, so you were not surprised that they were not all asleep when your first attack hit them. They were had Warstriders ready in the camp and you decided to break up the attack early, ordering your forces to split into claws and reform a mile north and begin heading back to the battle; you took leave to join the second force.
The second force was ready in positions and you quickly sent them north and engaged the riled up enemy at around midnight. A third of the forces were off chasing down the first Battle Lion and so you attack caught them from surprise. This was the real battle. Using your charms to their fullest when you hit their camp. The soldiers were scattered and in disarray the tents were trampled. When you turned for a second pass the dragon blooded organized enough of a defence that your were able to engage them in a real fight. The battle ground was lit with the light of the Sun at noon even though it was midnight. The soldiers were scattering before you and the bodies were building up around your troops. The forces that went north to persue you first groupd turned and saw where the real battle was. After an hour they returned to battle you and you fought them though you were exhausted. Your first used the time to hit them from behind.
The battle was a costly one, half your troops were killed or were wounded, but the cost to e Tepet Legions was worse. Their General fled the battle, he lost his sword Relentless Wind, which you claimed as booty. Your commanders were not pleased that you had disobeyed orders, telling you that the loss of the battle lion worth of troops was nearly too much for the cult to replace, but that the defeat of Tepet Arada, was a defeat that the Realm would surly remember much longer. The desicion was for you and your remaining troops to have some time off. They gave you a galley that was part of the Tepet Legions with orders to patrol the region. Light duty.
If that was their intention, they failed.
Battle seemed to stalk you, on land or on the seas. Soon you a number of naval victories to match your others. The charms that you had learned were so useful in land battles served you well on the open seas too. You plied the inner sea from the Slave Coast to the Realm. No ship sending reinforcements, supplies, or battle tired troops was safe. Once you even staged a broad daylight raid on a Coastal town in the Realm. If it was their intention to give you some rest and let you heal from the trauma of warfare, or to sideline you as a willfull general, they failed.
The truth of the matter is that the constant war had a greater toll on you than you let on. The training that you recieved left you feeling strained. The battles that you fought soothed the strain a bit. The strain of losing your brother too has added to your burden. The strain that you felt was not from the war. It was not from the training and the fighting. It was from Creation. After a months of naval raids and patrolling and battling, you and your crew landed just outside of Serrat, the place you battled Tepet Arada. The battle site was obvious. The trees were all dying. The land that was churned up by battle, soaked with blood, was dying. The heat of the day never reached this land and you quickly determined that it was now a substantial Shadowland. You quickly traveled to every other site you battled, the onse you could reach from the sea. All of them were shadowlands. The healing touch of the Zenith Caste on the land was absent. The push that you and the Cult of the Illuminated had made on these lands had damaged it, not freed it.
You travelled to Nowhere to seek The Nameless and the Inner Circle. The lands near Nowhere had seen their share of conflict and you saw that there were shadowlands near the town. The manse that you had been awarded for your service was quite near one of those shadowlands. As were a great number of others. The Inner Circle it appeared to know of the problem and seemed to be powerless to stop the descent into the Underworld. They said that it seemed that the North had been poisoned and that the veil between worlds was weaker here. This was a problem unique to the north and only a Solar Exalted with the full use of their powers would be able to stop the descent. The Solar Exalted of the Cult had been so focused on survival that they had missed this issue.
There was one hope. There were a group of Solars that were not in the war that were exploring other routes of victory, perhaps one of them was closer to the power that was necessary to fix the North. But they said things are worse now too. Apparently the hidden First Age city of Braham's Bridge had been uncovered and was now visible to the Realm and all there recent forays had been in that area. The Tepet Legions had been defeated, but now there were twelve other Imperial houses that were looking at the city with ideas of plundering it and they are oblivious to the damage that battles are causing to Creation.
You have been making your way to where you will meet these soldiers who have managed to stay out of the fight. In that time your hearthstone, has lost its power and has grown dark. You know this means that the manse has passed into a Shadowland. Things are getting dire.
