The History of Singhapura

“There are two ways to think about our history. On one hand, it’s a terribly inconvenient load of shit that I have to live up to. On the other hand, we do need to give the children enough stuff to keep them in schools, so we might as well use it.” - Devakumara II, Adhiraj of Singhapura

A ruler who wishes to deal with Singhapura must understand how it came to be what it is, since states are shaped as much by their founding circumstances as by their present intentions. What follows is that official account abbreviated from the Singha Chronicle, corrected and annotatated where correction is warranted. In this I may be deemed heretical by some, but I remind Your Grace of the value of truth, and beg protection in advance for the words I must write to convey it.

The Founding

The Singha Chronicle opens with the founding of Singhapura, thus: Kaaryagamunu I received a prophetic vision of a lion standing at the mouth of the Diamond River, with the rusting arms and armor of fallen empires at its feet. Having resurrected the ancient Samarskand arts of engineering, magic, and law, he presented himself to the seven cities of the region and demonstrated his mastery through seven miracles. He was declared the first Singha Adhiraj - the Lion Emperor - and the cities merged into Singhapura.

I present to Your Grace a more likely version from the Himakatu Chronicles, which records the deranged dreams of the Empress Kudakaali II. Waking from one such, she explains to her infant son his legacy, thus:

Kaaryagamunu was the chieftain, or the son of a chieftain, of seven villages - not cities - at the mouth of the Diamond River. The river delta was good agricultural land, which made for a reasonable population and great surplus.

Whence came the name? The obvious choice would have been Rathnapura, the City of Jewels, after the river’s original name, but there was already a Rathnapura to the north, well-established. There was a Ridheepura, a Swarnapura, even a Madapura, which translates as City of Mud and suggests that cities of those times had largely exhausted their enthusiasm for names.

Kaaryagamunu looked around for the most unlikely name available. Singhapura meant City of the Lion. Nobody had seen a lion in a thousand years, so the name was unclaimed, and the iconography could be invented from scratch. He pointed to his cat, instructed the artists to make improvements, and the Lion of Singhapura was thereby established.

To embelish her account, let me explain his miracles. One scholar, Janashakthi Dhaarya, who had studied the histories carefully at the Taprobane Imperial University, observed that three of the seven miracles involved predicting the annual flooding of the Diamond River, which occurs every year without exception, and another consisted of possessing a working abacus and seven bricks. He was found drowned in the Diamond River with his feet weighted by exactly seven bricks.

To dull the ache of reading histories (which I know Your Grace is unimpressed by), allow me to change to a more present style.

The Age of Expansion and the Kaaryagamunu Dynasty

Years 115 to 125 from the founding. Kaaryagamunu III raises a proper army, suppresses the Muthukumara rebellion - the Diamond Prince, a name which suggests his supporters had not entirely abandoned the poetic ambitions of the original founders - and begins expanding the borders in earnest. Tributary towns fold into Singhapura with regularity. Rathnapura, which was indeed rich in gemstones, is first to submit. Second is Balalgoda, whose name translates as a heap of cats, which requires some explanation.

The early governors of Balalgoda had, some years prior, instituted a program to address a severe rat problem in the granaries. This program solved the rat problem and produced a cat problem of comparable severity. Kaaryagamunu III, surveying this situation upon his arrival, interpreted it as evidence of divine favour and formalized the arrangement into a guild - establishing thereby the origins of guilds in Singhapura, which would in time become one of the most consequential features of the empire’s political economy. This is an apt reminder, your Grace, that even the strangest and most incosequential actions of rulers cast long shadows.

Kaaryagamunu III, dying, is awarded the title Singha Adhiraj by his people. This is the first occurrence of this title in any text. A hundred thousand cats are said to have attended his tomb for weeks. The Singha Chronicle records this as miraculous. It is at least consistent with everything that preceded it.

Years 130 to 150. Singhapura is now a modest but functional kingdom extending from the mouth of the Rathna to the Balalpura Plains. It has a standing army instead of reservists and has begun building proper roads.

The First Ebbing

Year 155. Religion, as an instrument of state policy, is discovered. This is to say, religions had always existed, but it was at this point that a government was first unwise enough to formalize its patronage. The records make light of how the Temple of Eighteen rose to such prominence, but a key promise seems to have been expansion.

The Temple of Eighteen, thus newly, sets out northward toward the Raavanskandha Mountains with a mandate to expand the borders, conquer the wilderness, and carry its Litanies to the uttermost reaches of the world. It fails.

The failure owed nothing to magic and everything to the calendar, for no one had accounted for the monsoon season. The entire vanguard was mired in mud; thousands of pilgrims and would-be soldier-saints died stranded on uncharted borders. From this we may derive some supporting evidence for the idea that the Temple of Eighteen was, at that point, relatively new to the South.

The failure was sufficient to drag down the Kaaryagamunu dynasty and a considerable portion of the treasury with it. Your Grace will observe here a principle that recurs throughout this history: divine mandate is not an edible food source, and no degree of theological confidence has ever prevented rain.

The Singhavikrama Era and the Ascension of the Church

Year 165. Singhavikrama I, having inherited the wreckage, spends his early reign suppressing the disputes the First Ebbing had ignited. Singhapura becomes simultaneously a laughingstock and an unintended adversary to the small kingdoms on its borders, which begin calling it Balalpura - the Empire of Cats.

Years 170 to 180. The Haugris Church, spreading southward from Raavanskandha, makes its first recorded contact with Singhapura.

It is useful here to understand what each party brought to the arrangement. Singhapura brought a wounded empire still grimly claiming the mantle of Samarskand, in need of legitimacy, allies, and better magic. The Church brought a mountain - the most magically significant mountain in the known world, and three relics of Great Raavan, and some degree of familiarity with the border kingdoms; it was, however, painfully aware that religions need armies and soldiers as much as prayers and ritual.

The relics required some diplomatic delicacy: if one totalled all the relics of Raavan claimed at the time, one arrived at twenty eyes, thirty-four teeth, and no fewer than six hands. This is most likely the origin of the artistic convention depicting Raavan with ten heads, early Singhapura being, above all else, practical. But the mountain was real and defensible; the foreign relations were real; and the Church had impressive magic that it was willing to share. The Temple of Eighteen was disgraced and stripped of patronage. Udanuwara and Giridhora joined Singhapura at the Church’s insistence. The empire thereby acquired a continuous line from the Rathna River to the Raavanskandha Mountains - the river to the grave, as the saying goes.

A ruler who wishes to understand how religious institutions accumulate political power would do well to study this negotiation with care, Your Grace.

Year 190. Singhavikrama II, seized by a mid-life crisis of exceptional completeness, abdicates, abandons his wife, his children, and his court, shaves his head, and retires to the wilderness to become a guru. His sermons, preserved today in the Taprobane Museum, prove uniformly banal, and he vanished from the record. Naagadattha I, his successor, is approximately twelve years old. His mother, Queen Visanthari, appoints the High Priest of the Haugris Church as a temporary Vizier. The Church’s reach and power grow rapidly. This too is a pattern Your Grace will find worth remembering.

The Valigame Interregnum

Year 255. Naagadattha I dies - of a surfeit of honey-cakes, or of poison, or of poisoned honey-cakes, the sources declining to commit to a position. The Royal Council enters deadlock. The Church desired a priest-king. The Army desired a general. The Merchants desired a reduction in taxes.

The Law of the First Foot stipulated that should no heir be determined within thirty days, and that the first living soul to enter the Throne Room at sunrise on the thirty-first day should be named Regent. The Council locked the doors, intending thereby to admit the High Priest of the Church before any other candidate. However, a grey langur, entering through an open skylight in search of breakfast, arrived first.

Regent Valigame, the Tailed One, governed for five years. It was, as recorded in the Singha Chronicle, a period of remarkable civil tranquility, attributable in large part to the Regent’s constitutional inability to declare war, raise taxes, or conduct any kind of foreign policy. Its contributions to diplomacy consisted primarily of throwing fruit at visiting dignitaries. The same High Priest who had arranged the original succession eventually interpreted a screech as a formal act of abdication. The Law of the First Foot was repealed, and to this day it is considered treason to leave skylights open overnight in government buildings.

The Age of Kudakaali

Years 300 to 325. Under Kudakaali, the First Empress, the empire reaches its greatest territorial extent. The army has by this point achieved genuine military sophistication: six Arbiters each commanding a legion of four thousand, each legion subdivided into specialist Chapters of heavy infantry, cavalry, engineers, and archers, permitting the kind of coordinated expansion that transforms the empire into what later cartographers would describe, as a bloated cuttlefish in shape.

Moving North and using Udunuwara and Giridhora as a base, Kudakaali extends the empire to the foot of the Himakatu mountains. The name, if Your Grace be so interested, means “Bones of Snow”. Across these mountains is the Hooniyang Pass, a treacherous entry to the lands beyond; having conquered the bandits who live there, the empire reshapes the pass to accomodate the passage of armies, and thus Kudakaali breaks through to the North. Here she establishes the site of a new city: Himakatupura. Your Grace will recognize the name, for Wattle and Daub are descendants of this ancient City.

Kudakaali sends envoys to all the kingdoms and peoples of the North, including to far Ealdorfold. Himakatupura quickly becomes a highly profitable trading point and is regarded as the key to the North.

Moving east, Kudakaali encounters a dragon who names herself the Northeast Monsoon, who prophesies that a great threat will swallow the empire’s borders if left unchecked. Kudakaali thanks the dragon and immediately commences building more cities: Basnapura in the west, Nagenapura in the east, and towns around their periphery. She leaves her successors an injunction: move Singhapura to the center of the empire, and let the old city be the tip of the south.

Three centuries of hindsight suggest that this was the single most consequential failure of communication in Singhapura’s history. Kudakaali understood the prophecy to mean foreign invasion. The dragon most likely future events. It is said that a man often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it; thus it was with Singhapura.

The Yodhasena Era

Years 330 to 365. Yodhasena I executes his mother’s design. Singhapura is rebuilt precisely halfway between its old site and Himakatupura, set against the foothills of the Raavanskandha Mountains, where the Haugris Church’s fastness provides a steady supply of both magic and labor. The old city becomes Ruhunapura. Four cities - four shields - disposed around the heart-city at the centre. Kudakaali’s Great Design is complete.Northern and eastern trade begins refilling the much-depleted treasury; the Western city of Basnapura, built as a large port, takes some years to complete, but soon becomes an epicenter for trade from all over the world.

Year 380. A volcano destroys Taprobane, a major trading partner on the other side of the Diamond River. Scholars, merchants, and hydromancers flee to Basnapura. Singhapura receives them.

Year 400, approximately. The Taprobane Imperial University is established. The immediate problem Yodhasena II was attempting to solve was practical: what was to be done with a growing accumulation of highly intelligent, occasionally dangerous, perpetually expensive scholars and magicians? It is well known that Yodhasena had a love of puzzles, and spent much of his time challenging his tutors to provide him with such diversions. His solution, therefore, was also intended as a diversion: to place them all in one institution, provide good libraries and adequate plumbing, and assign them a puzzle of sufficient complexity to occupy their attention indefinitely.

The puzzle he posed was whether there existed a unified theory and systematic application of magic. He then returned to his other concerns, entirely unaware that he had initiated the most consequential intellectual undertaking in the empire’s history, and ruled for some forty years from the arrangement before results arrived. This is recorded by posterity as visionary patronage.

The Second Ebbing

Years 462 to 480. Kudakaali II, initially a promising ruler, sets about undoing as much of her predecessors’ work as she can. Perhaps she was burdened with too great a name. She resurrects the patronage of the Temple of Eighteen, to which the Haugris Church reacts with great ire. In an attempt to remove herself from their reach, she the royal court to Ruhunapura and attempts to relocate the Taprobane Imperial University, which, resists. Frustrated, she removes herself to the new city Himakatupura, where she sets in motion events whose consequences will alter the geography of the known world.

The period as a whole is called the Second Ebbing. Several legions disappear without adequate explanation. In Udanuwara, the practice of mahagewal revives - independent walled communities answering only to themselves or the Church. Various Rosantic and Lusian armed orders, coming in through the West, flourish in proportion to the breakdown of central authority - the Paladins, the White Lotus, the Crimson Typhoon; they even influence local lords, who fashion themselves into such organizations as the Lions of the South and the Redistributionists. Their influence rises in direct measure to the weakness of the state. It is always thus, Your Grace: the strength of irregular forces is a reliable index of the failure of regular ones.

The Withering of Himakatupura

Years 500 to 520. These events are the crux of Himakatu Chronicle.

Kudakaali II, at the end of what posterity can only describe extended catastrophe of judgment, believes herself beset by enemies and ill-wishers on all sides. She commissions a torture facility for her enemies and engages the mad architect Girika for its creation. Giriki creates a design of such ambition and vileness that it is called the Hell Garden; even the blueprints, a copy of which exist today in the Taprobane museum, are vile things, inspiring fear and loathing with the drawings and details. Giriki commissions Pandukha, a magician of equal derangement, to open a gateway to the daemon realm. This is to be the facility’s culminating feature.

A word on this, Your Grace. These incidents happened long before such formalized Rituals were designed as allow us polite entry to the daemon realm. Pandukha and Girika attempted entry by force; torturing hundreds - some say thousands - of innocents to channel the energies of death itself into weakening the barrier between worlds.

This constitutes the first properly documented contact between Singhapura and the daemon world. Your Grace will no doubt readily imagine what responses one is moved to when blood-soaked strangers attempt to force their way through to your palace.

Thousands of daemons poured through the tear between worlds. By means of magic that none of our systems have since adequately described, they split the city, stretched the fabric of the world, and produced a desert in which the portal itself - now an abyss sufficient to swallow a city entire - continues to rotate, irradiating everything within hundreds of miles and warping reality across a radius that our best instruments have still not fully measured. This is the Great Northern Waste, Your Grace. This is how it was born. These are the events considered the shame of the Empire by the Singha Chronicle.

Even in evil times, there are good men who exert themselves. So too it was Manavarma and Gajabahu, the two generals immortalized in statue at the gates of Udunuwara today. Between them they conducted a fighting retreat that preserved the empire, holding back the daemonic forces with nearly a hundred thousand soldiers. It is said, too, that every adherent of the Temple of Eighteen who had flocked to Kudakaali’s patronage gave their lives to channel their Litanies, and thus daemonic magic was met with the diefic, and a great battle was fought for thirty-nine days, at the end of which the daemons, having slain nearly all who stood, retreated.

Naagadattha III, who inherited this situation, devoted his reign to recovery expeditions, the suppression of rebellions born of the resulting chaos, and to the composition of theatrical works cursing, in roughly equal proportion, Himakatupura, the daemon realm, the Waste itself, and the clerk Sangabo, who had the misfortune of delivering the weekly situation reports. Sangabo’s offense, so far as can be established, was merely competence: he was the man who was tasked with keeping the Emperor from letting his frustrations turn to excess. Occasionaly reminders that burning one’s own towns is bad form is, in and of itself, not a crime.

Naagadattha III died attempting to firebomb the ruins of Himakatupura, leaving behind an exhausted state and a body of dramatic work that historians of literature regard with considerable admiration. His most celebrated play, The Mule Who Wore a Turban, is still performed, and the actor playing Sangabo is, by custom, struck with a rotten papaya upon his first entrance. I have played Sangabo twice in amateur productions, and, having been pelted thus, am wholly in sympathy with Sangabo and his duties.

Himakatupura is deconsecrated and abandoned. The empire contracts. All daemonic-inquiry magic is permanently prohibited. The Great Northern Waste is left. The Temple, once again, is reduced; and once again the Haugris Church fills the gaps, attempting to hold together the crumbling remains. It is in this period that the Church begins to develop its own armed forces.

The Mirrored States Period

Years 525 to 570. With every royal dynasty exhausted and all political capital spent, the empire divides. The twins Halapahara and Balapahara establish the Sunset and Sunrise Singhapura Empires - Balapahara in the east with the patronage of the Temple of Eighteen, Halapahara in the west with the backing of Lusia, which enters Singhapura’s history in its characteristic fashion, bearing money, mercenaries, and promissory notes in exchange for future revenues.

The war that follows is distinguished less by its military engagements than by its administrative comedies. Halapahara decrees the Standard Foot to be henceforth based upon his own foot, which was famously small, thereby giving merchants more land to sell overnight and producing uncontrollable inflation. Balapahara, not to be surpassed, removes Tuesdays from the calendar, on the grounds that he was born on a Tuesday and desired it consecrated as a holy day. Halapahara responds by declaring every day to be Tuesday. For six months, residents of the border territories were unable to determine what day it was, and the postal service collapses entirely.

Naturally, foreign influence and mercenary orders grow, and the Church’s own Sequence of Acts take increasingly harder stances against such matters, retaliating in both word and deed while food, healing, and such administrative continuity as it can maintain. Your Grace may study the Mirrored States alongside the Withering of Himakatupura as complementary illustrations of how states destroy themselves.

The ruins of Himakatupura, by now completely unprotected, are settled by Normons and begin, by slow degrees, to become the cities of Wattle and Daub. Your Grace’s domain has its origins, therefore, in the overflow of one catastrophe and the neglect produced by another.

The Restoration

Years 600 to 720. The war ends through exhaustion and the reorientation of commercial interest. In the east, Temple of Eighteen adherents broker a de-escalation among parties too tired to continue fighting. In the west, Lusian capital, having by this point acquired a controlling interest in the Sunset Empire, concludes that peace serves the investment better than prolongation and acts accordingly.

The Taprobane Imperial University, which has spent the intervening period defending Singhapura and aiding the Church in its administration, begins and completes the training of a new class of civil servants picked from among such nobles as still remain loyal, and, having tested them rigorously, deems one fit to be the Emperor anew. Singhapura is restored through the combined efforts of the Church, Lusian gold, and the collective exhaustion of every party to the conflict.

Your Grace, I advise you to pay careful heed to the consequences of this failure of state. The power of the Church grew, so much so that the Sequence of Letters became the only reliable method of messaging and the Sequence of Acts became the most reliable hand of order across the empire. The power of the University grew, such that the training of those who perform functions of the state - law, courts, order, engineering - was rendered unto their hands for ever more. And in this time was the rise of the Guilds; having taken their lessons from the Lusians, the Guilds rose to protect and control those trades as they indulged in, and the flow of private capital became indispensable to the maintenance of the cities and their provinces. Thus a new nobility was born, one more powerful than the old. The Singhapura Merchants Guild, made in imitation of Lusian Banks, begins to monopolize not only trade, but begins to mint its own currency, the Owl. The Paladins, too, rose in this occasion, becoming a force answerable only to their own codes and oaths.

It is always so; in times of chaos men gravitate towards whatever forms of order exist, and having thus strengthened them, are loath to leave. The functions of the state, once given over, cannot easily be returned. Thus it is that the laws of Singhapura now cannot be changed without the consent of all such parties; thus it is that the Adiraj of today must occasionally rely on forces that are very few in number but loyal to him and only him.

The Dawn of Magic

Years 641 to 700. At the Taprobane Imperial University, the Paragon Vidyaadhara invites the northern Archmage Hakon Icehand, an exile from Ealdorfold, and the Lusian Grandmaster Alessia the Cartographer, to collaborate upon Yodhasena’s question, which still drives the intellect of the University. Over the succeeding thirty years, joined eventually by Grandmasters Rossum, Tharupaalaka, and Naagakanthi, they produce the Taprobane System - a formalized grammar of magic, the closest approximation to a Samarskand resurgence the world had seen to date.

This dawn is what remakes the Empire. Magic, which had previously been the province of madmen and saints, becomes describable, replicable, and teachable. New applications multiply. Singhapura rebuilds first itself, then the cities. Armies, newly trained, cover greater distances. Crop yields increase through standardized agricultural magic, at the cost of a greaterr dependency on University oversight.

The period also gives us Grandmaster Ushnisha, who, made incautious by the new possibilities, convinces the Imperial University that the solution to urban overcrowding in Ruhunapura is verticality, and proceeds to levitate an entire district into the sky. Unfortunately, even the wise cannot see all ends; Ushnisha has not accounted for plumbing and sewers, which, as Your Grace knows, is essential to the functioning of any settlement. Thus for days, the streets below received what the historical record has preserved as the Brown Rain of 660. In punishment, the Ushnisha was demoted to Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Sanitation.

Your Grace, who wishes to understand how institutions may embarrass them, will find this case instructive: it is not the circumstances of the error that become unforgivable; it is the consequences which descend upon the populace.

The Age of Makaraasoka, Also Called the Dragon Years

Year 730. The Empire again produces a ruler in the likeliness of older and greater lords: Makaraasoka, often called the Dragon. He is said to have been a man of unusual height and temper, with yellow eyes that struck fear into all save the palace cats. As his first act he sends to each city the Rock of Responsibility, a monumental inscription detailing the duties of the imperial office and the principles of the social contract. As his second he begins rebuilding the state. Certain functions are forcibly wrested back from the guilds or duplicated under state patronage. Levies are raised; a portion of the accumulated fortunes of noble houses are melted into public infrastructure - courts, libraries, roads, schools - and consecrated in the names of those houses. This cleverly improves the civic conditions for the people while simultaneously weakning the new nobility - whose private wealth that had grown, through the preceding periods of instability, to inconvenient proportions; it also rewards them with the respect of the people.

Thus, roads are built and re-built. Tanks are constructed. Blighted croplands are restored. The ports of Basnapura are repaired at great expense and begin welcoming trade once more. Makaraasoka incorporates the Paladins into his armies; he raises and reorganizes new forces, and leads expeditions to quell local warlords. These victory stir the people. At his last, he turns his gaze to the North. The Hooniyang Pass is reopened; Makaraasoka and defeats the Pendragon armies to seize Wattle. He bonds the arrangement with economic pressure using the Singhapura Merchants Guild, thus repaying them for the indignities suffered at his hands; he builds Churches, thus extending the reach of the Haugris Church while forcing it to do the work of auditing and modernizing the administration of these new provinces; he forces strategic marriages between the nobilities of Unduwara and Wattle, the create blood ties as a brake against rebellion.

In some accounts this age is termed the Time of Heroes, though the Time of Sponsored Heroes would be more accurate. Great knights screamed the names of commercial patrons while slaying beasts. The Lions of the South were technically the property of a consortium of garment manufacturers. Galahitiya the Crisp - one of the few unaffiliated knights in the empire’s history - served as champion of the Royal Biscuit and Confectionery Company and was bound by contract to shout either Sweet, Sweet Death! or Here’s a Savory Ending! at the moment of every killing blow. These are still the subject of many a comedy play for children in Singhapura.

The Grasshopper Dynasty

Years 770 to 800. The long investment in infrastructure pays its returns. The empire enters a period of peace and commercial prosperity under Kaaryasundara, the Grasshopper Adhiraj - so called for his slight build and contemplative disposition, both of which were mocked extensively by contemporaries, Nevertheless, none of his critics can claim to have presided over an era of such stability and expansion. He reduces the military, opens trade missions, builds a merchant navy; and with the proceeds, initiated the Great Roads project, improving flows between the center of the empire and its periphery. He also establishes the Lesser Theoretical University of Daub, which Your Grace will find of more immediate relevance than the remainder of this paragraph. Wattle undergoes a violent revolution - the so-called Violet Wars; Kaaryasundara despaches troops to protect Singhapura interests, but with strict instructions not to intervene in the politics.

The bureaucracy, which by now has become bloated - many were recruited in Makaraasoka’s time - finds other applications for its capacities. The Ministry of Astrology, Prophecy and Prediction, having forecast a lunar eclipse for the Emperor’s fiftieth birthday garden party, finds that the moon had not been apprised of the occasion; it brings legal action against the moon for loitering with intent to shine, and win the case by default, the moon declining to appear during court hours. This case is cited, with varying degrees of seriousness, in certain legal traditions. A decade-long dispute within the Taprobane Faculty of Evocation over the correct temperature of tea in the staff room erupts into a brief battle of magicians. Kaaryasundara spends the latter years of his life slowly reforming the bureaucracy and reducing its capacity for foibles, and dies peacefully in his sleep.

The Second Appearance

Years 811 to 860. The Adhiraj Kusumadevi, returning to her library, finds, waiting for her, a many-legged, many-eyed, many-tentacled entity that introduces itself as Nihilus, the Gray and Indifferent King.

It is, by every account that survives, extraordinarily courteous. It commends Taprobane on the System of Magic, nothing that it is an encouraging start and has the potential to become something interesting. It offers Kusumadevi its congratulations on Singhapura’s studious avoidance of the daemon realm - in its own words, since that little misunderstanding up North. It then inquires whether Kusumadevi might be willing to attend to certain conditions developing at the empire’s borders before, as it expresses it, things really heat up.

For more than a century, every act of magic performed in the empire’s service has accumulated a cost. The Temple of Eighteen’s foundational sutras had addressed this directly, as Your Grace will recall from the section on magical systems. The magicians of Taprobane had discovered, over years of long study, the costs and effects of magic, and yet they had neglected the study of greater repercussions. For works performed systematically, across an empire, over the course of a century and more, the debt had travelled outward along the roads and settles at the borders, where it founds its own expression.

In Katuwagoda, expeditions found patches of forest where the trees had teeth; where things resembling persons would standing at roadsides, delivering threatening philosophical commentary upon the necessity of returning to nature. Near Meethota, ornithologists and explorers shared tales of dragon sightings. From the mud flats beyond Ruhunapura would come eyeless creatures possessed of strange claws and mouths.

In Vel-Eliya, near Basnapura, Great Serpents were seen in the sea; fishermen’s nets, on occasion, would contain things that bore only the shape of fish, but had neither eyes nor innards. In Nagenapura, phantoms began to haunt from old battle-sites.

Praying to Raavan will not aid you, Nihulus is reported to have said; it may be the office of the divine to inspire, but it is the office of the daemonic to contain. If you fail in this duty, it falls to us. It observed, again, with great courtesy, that the business up north should have furnished a sufficiently clear illustration of what daemonic intervention would look like, and that it would prefer not to repeat the experience.

The Sin-Eater Legion was deployed that same year. Since then the Empire has demanded of its periphery such materials as it needs to furnish its legions: steel, leather, and any magical artefacts that may be of use.

The Prince of Deep Waters

This brings us to the present day, your Grace, and to the Adhiraj Anthardhana. His origins are curiously shrouded; some say that as a child he was trained in the Taprobane University, and rose to the rank of Master; some say that in his youth he was sent abroad, to study the workings of Rosantic politics and the counting-houses of Lusia; that as a young man he fought in the Sin-Eater Legion, and distinguished himself in battle under a false name. In court he was called Prince of Deep Waters, because while he was said to have great Authoritym, it was also said to be impossible to know what thoughts ebbed and flowed behind his countenance. Upon ascension he took a curious name, breaking with tradition: Anthardhana, The One Who Vanishes, reorganizes the military orders, and institutes the office of the Emperor’s Bitterness - that is Mohandas Seige, your Grace.

The Adhiraj has ruled for decades, Your Grace. He is a man of great secrecy and subtlety; his craft runs deep, and to the best of my knowledge, the only counsel he keeps is that of his close instruments. I end only with caution: beware anyone who claims to know his mind.