The Three Great Powers
Of the realms that endured the latter ages of Embar, three rose above all others in strength and remembrance, though never in likeness; for Valahir, Belkand, and Altamira were divided not only by sea and blood, but by the very manner in which each understood the keeping of the world. Long before the Great War joined their names in grief, each had already become mighty according to its own measure, and each had come to regard the virtues by which it prospered as truths that others had failed to understand.
Thus was Valahir founded upon strength, Belkand upon making, and Altamira upon keeping.
These words are poor vessels for all that the three realms became, yet much of their history may be understood through them.
Valahir was the greatest of the three in breadth, its lands stretching through climates so varied that travelers of earlier ages sometimes doubted they belonged to one continent at all. There were mountains whose heights remained white throughout the year, forests and lakes beneath colder skies, barren reaches where little grew without labor, and warmer coasts from which ships departed toward foreign lands. Such variety bred a people accustomed to hardship in many forms, and in Valahir there arose early the belief that what survived did so because it had been made ready to survive.
From this belief came much that Valahir afterward held sacred. Service was esteemed, discipline praised, and martial duty woven deeply into the life of the realm. Its rulers were not crowned chiefly by blood or sanctified by priesthood, but rose from the traditions of military command, and the authority of the state became closely joined to those entrusted with its defense. The golden minotaur, borne upon the old crest of Valahir, came to signify not merely strength of body, but steadfastness: the strength to stand when retreat would be easier, and to bear what weaker resolve might surrender.
No city embodied this more completely than Lycedyon. It had begun in elder years as a fortress raised for soldiers, yet houses gathered about its walls as generations passed, and new fortifications were raised around the old until the city became a labyrinth of stone enclosed within stone. At its heart remained the ancient military stronghold, where commanders were trained and the highest authority of Valahir maintained residence. Travelers approaching Lycedyon in winter wrote often of seeing little at first but walls half lost beneath snow, their towers crowned with engines of war and silver-armored sentries watching the roads below.
Yet Valahir was never wholly the stern realm foreign tales sometimes made of it. Aventis, once the seat of rule, became famed for revelry, contests, taverns, and the great colosseum in which champions sought glory before crowds gathered from distant lands. Saylen withdrew instead into the heights, turning away from much of Valahir's history of bloodshed and preserving a quieter life above the clouds. Along other coasts and valleys stood communities whose customs had little in common save the knowledge that all belonged beneath the same banner. Even in the realm most devoted to unity, Valahir had never been one thing.
But unity remained its ideal, and the Great War wounded that ideal greatly. Some of its bloodiest struggles were fought upon Valahiri soil, and there are places whose very names were changed by what befell them. Bloodmist, once known by another name, remembers a battle in which invading forces from Belkand and Altamira were broken amid such slaughter that later generations said the earth itself had taken the memory into it. Whether this be truth or only the language by which survivors explained what could not be forgotten, the people dwelling there became wary of outsiders long after peace returned.
The burden of caring for those left behind by war fell heavily upon Valahir's households and institutions, and the traditions of service by which the realm had long understood itself acquired difficult meanings in those years. Military authorities defended the employment of young auxiliaries and apprentices as a necessary means of sustaining the nation, while families and charitable houses often regarded such service with apprehension, particularly when children without guardians were concerned. The distinction between honorable duty and compulsion became a subject of dispute, though seldom one debated openly while the armies remained in the field. In later years, some Valahiri writers would ask whether a people so devoted to service had always remembered that duty might be owed to the vulnerable no less than to the state.
If Valahir sought endurance through order, Belkand sought mastery through understanding.
The lands of Belkand were rich in stone, ore, deep mountains, and precious metals, and its people learned early to draw from the earth not only what was needed, but what might yet be made. Among them invention came to possess a dignity elsewhere granted to ancient lineage. Artificers, smiths, engineers, miners, and learned craftsmen shaped the prosperity of the realm, and the foundries of Belkand produced works that altered life throughout Embar. Its crest, two great axes crossed about a central flame, was fitting; for in Belkand, creation and destruction had long dwelt nearer one another than either was comfortable admitting.
The heart of that realm was Vor Gahrum, whose name belonged first to the great volcano rising above the northern city and thereafter to the city itself. Houses, halls, taverns, workshops, and markets were carved against the mountain's lower stone, ascending with the natural incline until they reached the enormous doors leading into the hidden interior. Beyond those doors lay the Molten Quarter, a place seldom seen by outsiders and little better known among common Belkanders. There the most honored craftsmen, nobles, and rulers of the realm dwelt amid chambers built into the mountain itself, where rivers of molten rock were guided through ancient works and the sound of hammer upon metal seldom ceased.
From Vor Gahrum the industry of Belkand spread outward. Port Bolburn received ships burdened with ore, timber, stone, scrap, and the thousand necessities of a nation forever making something new. Smoke hung over its workshops and furnaces, and to foreign visitors its air could seem harsh; to many Belkanders it was the smell of labor. Kyrtana climbed the Dronoc Mountains in tiers, its homes and mine entrances bound together by great pulley-lifts that carried workers from one height to another. Stonespine stood near the threshold of a southern desert broken by fissures, where rumors of rare metals drew the daring below ground despite heat, beasts, and the instability of the earth.
Yet Belkand too contained its contradictions. Tyr Faerath stood among enormous trees rather than stone towers, its homes raised upon platforms high above a forest floor made dangerous by beasts and strange growths. During the Great War those same trees and tangled ways made the region valuable for concealment, and much of the forest suffered beneath battles fought among them. Farther north, the island of Meridius became known for another kind of refusal. Its people, living largely by fishing, farming, and gathering, kept themselves apart from the restless industrial spirit of the mainland and regarded much of Belkand's hunger for progress with suspicion. Thus within the most inventive of the great powers there remained those who believed that not everything capable of improvement was improved by being changed.
This difference was often misunderstood beyond Belkand. Foreign writers sometimes spoke of its people as though all were possessed by machines, wealth, and ambition, but such accounts mistook a cultural faith for simple greed. The deepest Belkand belief was not that all things should be exploited, but that the world could be understood, and that understanding imposed an obligation to act. A broken bridge ought to be repaired. A disease ought to be studied. A difficult journey ought to be shortened. A tool might become a better tool, and a better tool might change the lives of thousands.
It was only in darker years that this faith revealed its danger: for once a people has learned to ask what may be done, wisdom must still answer whether it ought to be done.
The Great War brought this question into sharper dispute among Belkand's learned and industrious houses. As the need for skilled hands increased, workshops, academies, and military establishments drew upon apprentices and young persons whose talents promised unusual value, including those gifted in arts not wholly understood by ordinary craftsmen. Some considered such instruction an opportunity by which the young might secure their futures and serve their homeland, while others feared that the demands of war had made distinction difficult between education and the preparation of children for dangerous service. Nor did every artificer consent to the works commanded in those years. There were those who refused commissions, others who completed them with misgivings, and still others whose names afterward disappeared from the public histories of their craft. Thus did Belkand inherit from the war not only inventions, but disputes concerning the obligations of those capable of making them.
Altamira held another understanding entirely.
Of the three great realms, none was so deeply bound to faith, land, and memory. Its soil was among the richest in Embar, and from broad farmlands came harvests that fed not only Altamira but distant peoples beyond its coasts. Forests, lakes, wetlands, rivers, mountains, and cultivated fields formed the wealth of the continent, yet these things were not regarded merely as wealth. In the traditions of Altamira, the living world possessed a dignity of its own, and those who drew from it inherited obligations alongside abundance.
Its rulers arose through religious traditions older than many of its cities and were chosen by its people rather than simply inherited through one royal bloodline. The great tree upon Altamira's crest, its roots spreading outward beneath three stars, came to embody the belief that what grew upward could do so only because something older and deeper held it fast beneath the earth.
The capital, Angloria, seemed at first an unlikely heart for such a realm, for it stood amid the Palu Desert where water was rare and the sun unforgiving. Yet there, beside the waters that made settlement possible, grew one of the greatest cities in Embar. Travelers wrote of turquoise roofs gleaming from afar, broad markets shaded beneath colored cloth, palms and gardens beside desert stone, and the vast cathedral rising above them all. Goods from across Embar passed through its marketplaces, and pilgrims, merchants, priests, scholars, farmers, and foreign visitors mingled beneath the same bright roofs.
If Angloria embodied Altamira's public life, Lewynd preserved much of its memory. The island was governed by monks, priests, and academics, and access to it was restricted by ancient custom. There stood Altamira's greatest library, academy, and temple, and in later centuries scholars from beyond the continent traveled there to study histories that had survived nowhere else. Many of the records by which the elder ages of Embar are now understood passed at one time through Lewynd's halls, though whether all that was preserved there has ever been revealed is another matter.
Elsewhere Altamira showed other faces. Flanoire stretched across farmlands so vast that merchants measured journeys by the succession of fields. Tel'Vari rested amid forest and falling water, its wooden paths and dwellings raised above the waters and served by great brightly colored fish beloved by its people. Harvenset looked toward the dangerous Murkmire, while Yukimi endured beneath the northern peaks where pilgrims passed on their journeys to holy ground. Port Naydra had been built with such care around its forest that early travelers remarked that the builders seemed more willing to move their homes than cut down a tree.
Such reverence did not make Altamira gentle in all things. A people certain that something is sacred may defend it no less fiercely than another defends a fortress, and disputes over land, extraction, trade, and foreign access had long poisoned relations between Altamira and the other powers. To Belkand, Altamiran restrictions could appear wasteful or obstructive. To Valahir, they could threaten resources judged necessary for security and survival. To Altamira, both complaints revealed the same failing: the assumption that need alone granted the right to take.
These convictions were tested no less severely during the Great War, when the sanctuaries and charitable houses of Altamira received great numbers of the displaced, among them children who had lost their families or been separated from them by the movement of armies. The protection of life was held among the highest obligations of many religious communities, yet the meaning of that protection was not always agreed upon. Certain authorities condemned the practice of returning the dead to life as a violation of the passage appointed to mortal beings, while scholars and healers questioned whether all acts of restoration must necessarily constitute such an offense. The treatment of battlefield remains became another source of contention, for the fear that enemies might draw knowledge from the dead stood against traditions requiring reverence for the body and its proper rites. Such disagreements did not overthrow the faith of Altamira, but revealed that even among those devoted to the sanctity of life, there could arise bitter divisions concerning where its boundaries lay.
Thus did the virtues of the three powers become also the causes of their division.
Valahir looked upon disorder and saw danger.
Belkand looked upon limitation and saw a problem awaiting solution.
Altamira looked upon excess and saw a debt the world would one day demand repaid.
None was wholly wrong.
None was wholly wise.
Before the Great War, these differences were sharpened by distance, dependence, and suspicion until each people learned to interpret the habits of the others in the worst possible light. Valahiri preparedness became, in Belkand and Altamira, evidence of aggression. Belkand invention became proof that weapons of unknown power were surely being made. Altamiran protection of land became deliberate withholding. What one realm called prudence, another called threat; what one named progress, another named greed; and what one defended as stewardship, another dismissed as superstition.
The war that followed nearly destroyed them all.
Its ending did not erase what had been learned during it.
Though Valahir, Belkand, and Altamira now stand together more often than against one another, their alliance is neither simple nor complete. The rise of the Phoenix gave the former enemies a danger they could name in common, and the Dying of Embar has made cooperation a matter of necessity rather than courtesy. Belkand supplies works and instruments no other realm can produce in such abundance. Altamira provides food, medicine, and knowledge of living systems increasingly precious in a failing world. Valahir guards routes, ports, and exchanges upon which all three depend.
Their governments speak now in the language of partnership.
Their peoples remember other words.
There remain Valahiri households in which Belkand is still named with bitterness, Belkand workshops where Altamiran objections are mocked as the fears of an older age, and Altamiran communities in which foreign soldiers are welcomed only because present danger demands it. Trade passes where armies once marched. Officers who might once have met upon opposing fields now exchange intelligence. Scholars cross borders that would have been closed to them a generation before. Yet beneath every treaty lies the memory of how swiftly trust once failed.
So endure the Three Great Powers in the year 925 P.D., bound to one another more closely than at any time in living memory and trusting one another less than such closeness ought to require. Each possesses what the others increasingly need. Each remembers what the others once did. Each believes, despite all that has passed, that something of its own ancient wisdom may yet prove necessary to the salvation of Embar.
Perhaps in this they are all correct.
For a world may be guarded by strength, renewed through knowledge, and sustained by reverence; yet history has already shown what becomes of those virtues when each is persuaded that it alone is sufficient.