Viedskavn
Viedskavn, the Crimson Emperor and Great Tyrant of all the Drakhul, rose to power through a war that consumed his own father’s house before he extended its reach to consume his neighbours’.
Birth Name
He was born Tergarus, eldest son of the patriarch then bearing the dynastic name Viedskavn. He had two younger brothers, Argarus and Pygarus. The Drakhul now sung of across the north as the Crimson Emperor did not bear that name for the first half-century of his life; what is now called “the rise of Viedskavn” is properly the rise of Tergarus, and what followed was the seizure of an existing title from the father who had held it before him.
The Patriarchal Civil War
What began as a dispute over succession became fratricidal war. Argarus sided with the Dai’dou against his eldest brother. Tergarus prosecuted the war ruthlessly, but on one point he was emphatic: Argarus was to be taken alive. He did not get his wish. Pygarus killed Argarus in defiance of the order, and Tergarus, true to the spirit of an order his brother had broken, blinded Pygarus and cast him out.
Watching his dynasty devour itself from the patriarchal seat, the elder Viedskavn could no longer bear the office. He abandoned both the title and the city and went into self-imposed exile, taking back the birth name he had not used in centuries. Tergarus assumed the empty seat, took the dynastic name, and from that day was called Viedskavn.
Spoiler: the former patriarch's post-exile fate
The father who went into exile did not die. He lives still in the frozen wastes north of Raetun, where he is known as Antygrieous the Slumbering Serpent, and where, during the Crisis Upon Raetun, he is encountered by Jargsnek and Argamus in flight from Maelar’s horde. He has watched, from the centuries of his exile, his eldest son become a tyrant, his second son die at the hand of his third, and his third son cast out blinded. He chose oblivion over witnessing further. The Crimson Emperor does not, to anyone’s knowledge, know his father is alive.
The Rise
The Drakhul who had fled north from the eruption of Mount Eksnothrar had spent decades dispersed across northern Mok under the leadership of twelve warring city-states. Viedskavn’s accession to the patriarchal seat had made him only one figure among many. The Warring City-states Period, beginning in 36 AFS, was the war by which he consolidated the rest.
He prevailed in 50 AFS, and was crowned Grand Tyrant of all the Drakhul that year.
It was during the earlier years of his ascent, long before the crown was his, when he was one warlord among twelve and few outside the Drakhul had any particular reason to know his name, that Viedskavn met and slew Orling the Wary in single combat. Orling had been pursuing a private vendetta against a mercenary whose path he was destined never to cross. Viedskavn was that crossing. Whether the Crimson Emperor of later years remembered the encounter at all is not recorded; he had, by then, killed many.
The Reign
Viedskavn’s capital was begun in 77 AFS atop the mountain known as Yyingrigotl, at the foot of which lay the Lochnormouthin (“Lake in the Mountain”), decreed holy site of the Drakhul that same year. His palace overlooked the lake from an outcropping hewn from the mountain itself; the great vaulted hall behind it bore murals of slaughter and bestial depravity the Drakhul of his court took as their birthright. Crimson lightning sundered the ground in the country below, a feature, by then, of any country Viedskavn ruled in for long.
The Drakhul of his reign worshipped Saeiligarkeuss, the sun deity, by every observance their old faith demanded. Their emperor’s preternatural gifts, a precognitive sight that detected betrayal before its bearer had fully formed it, a dexterity beyond what any of his subjects could match, were taken to be marks of that god’s particular favour. The empire’s most observant clerics did not feel the need to question further.
Spoiler: the Crimson Emperor's true nature
The clerics were not wrong, exactly, but they were not as right as they knew. Viedskavn is not merely favoured by Saeiligarkeuss. He is Saeiligarkeuss, the primordial sun god in his final mortal vessel, settled at last into the scaled form of the Crimson Emperor after a long passage through hosts the Drakhul of his court would not have recognized as their god if named. The Drakhul who pray to their sun god each morning are praying to the figure on their own throne. He has not seen fit to tell them, and none of them have the eyes to see it for themselves.
His closest companion across the reign was the Drakhul Relikaart, the Mildrogna (“one-in-a-million”), a Drakhul possessed of empathy and honour where most of his brethren had neither, and Viedskavn’s blood brother and royal guardian. Relikaart’s morality stood at obvious variance to the Emperor’s. Their friendship did not, for many decades, suffer for it.
The First Drakhullic Invasion
In 85 AFS, Viedskavn’s legions began the First Drakhullic Invasion of Raetun. The campaign was the work of forty-five years’ preparation: ships, levies, and the systematic acquisition of Primevean thralls from across the Sea of Garðwin for what his court called “tests of the conquered lands”, in plain speech, the ritual butchery and consumption of captive families to ensure that the meat of the peoples his army intended to take was found acceptable.
Relikaart led the raid on Poderrikhaus himself, slaying the knight Anjor in his armour and delivering Anjor’s daughter Sellandra back to the palace as one of the night’s prepared meals. The girl made an attempt on the Emperor’s life at his table. Viedskavn, fascinated by her defiance, elected to keep her alive as lightbearer for the campaign and intended vessel for his progeny, rather than have her killed.
Spoiler: what Sellandra and Relikaart did with the chance they were given
The decision to spare Sellandra would prove the costliest of his life. She was marked at birth as the final vessel of Jehovannah, a fact Viedskavn no more recognized than he recognized himself. Before the campaign was over she had aborted the child he intended to father on her, wounded him, and defected with Relikaart, his blood brother and royal guardian, who had, somewhere in the months at her side, broken faith with the only friend he had ever kept. Relikaart’s defection was the deeper wound. Viedskavn would not, in the centuries that followed, find another to take his place.
The invasion culminated in 95 AFS in the climactic battle of the Crisis Upon Raetun. Viedskavn won, barely. He slew the Doghul commander Mathgar, son of Niverine, in the engagement, earning the lasting wrath of the surviving line of the Doghul and the Old Empire of the Daia. The cost of the victory was such that the campaign could not be continued; the Drakhul withdrew, and the Crimson Emperor returned to his palace above the Lake in the Mountain with fewer legions than he had taken to it.
Legacy
The chronicles of the Drakhul remember Viedskavn as the patriarch who reunited a fractured people and led them in a war the world will not soon forget. The chronicles of the Doghul, the Nortr, and the surviving Primeveans of his “tests of the conquered lands” remember him as something else. Both remember the crimson lightning above his palace.
Spoiler: Viedskavn's career after the Crisis Upon Raetun
The Crimson Emperor’s reign survives the Crisis Upon Raetun but does not survive Praethornyn.
Centuries later the Crimson Emperor mounted the Second Drakhullic Invasion of Raetun, and lost it. The campaign was thrown back into the sea by Garðwin II, Daiā-syuer, whose son Rallock the Bloodthirsty in turn took the fight to the Drakhul: the great crusade called Tuendahr-svesvar (“Thunder War”), which drove deep into Drakhullic territory. With the Drakhul reeling and the crusade unstoppable, a distraught lord of the lower nobility exhumed the entombed Imperator of Ruin, the First Emperor of the Drakhul himself, in the desperate hope that his return would save his people. Praethornyn, by then a greater extra-mortal far beyond anything the Crimson Emperor could muster, deposed Viedskavn directly upon his release. The Imperator of Ruin then reshaped the world above into what the Desolate Era would know as the Undying Empire.
Viedskavn was kept alive, broken in body and denied even the mercy of death, in a torture-dungeon of Praethornyn’s keeping for three centuries.
He was released at last, gaunt and thin as a rail, by his loyalists after Praethornyn’s eventual defeat at the hand of the fal Rael’dunor. Reclaiming the north of Mok but visibly diminished, the Crimson Emperor turned the Drakhul, for the first time in their history, toward technology and contemplation, a near-total isolation the Doghul themselves could scarcely surpass. He is, in the chronicles of his people, remembered ever after as the Rightful Tyrant, the patriarch who returned.
The deeper question of how a Drakhul could survive three centuries of such treatment is one his returning subjects, in their loyalty or their faith, did not feel the need to ask.