War Cantos, Begin

On histories yet written...

This series of updates - the War Cantos - will be a record and notebook chronicling my attempt to compile a record of my personal vision of the future history of Man in an archeofuturistic, science-fantastic, post-cataclysmic, weird, Gothic space-opera. This series of posts will, if successful, will serve as the foundation of works to come. It’s not quite creating Elvish from scratch, but I’m an amateur historian and former grunt, not a professor of philology.

What is this vision?

In the Remote Far-Future, Boy-King Arcturus Pendrakul takes the Cross and joins the First Star-Crusade; by this he hopes to gain Glory for God and his House, reaping Ancient Treasures and Martial Renown, to capture besieged Valinor's Ivory Tower, to win the hand of the Elf-King's Daughter in marriage, and finally to reclaim his rightful place as the Hegemon of Man, Grand Duke of Earth, and Lord Paramount of the Solarian Sphere, to finally be seated on the empty Phoenix-Throne of the Holy Solar Empire of Man, left vacant by coup, regicide, and the death of his own father.

OK let me unpack that a bit.

After the cataclysmic fall of the decadent post-human trans-humanist oligarchic dystopia (think Deus Ex Invisible War: Illuminati Ending) that colonized the stars in the distant past; mankind is forced to return to older, more traditional modes of living. It is perhaps ironic that the core of survival emerges from one of the troika tripod legs supporting Corporate Elite rule in the old Corporate Republic; namely the Esoteric and Dogmatic Order of Maitreya.

This synthetic, syncretic, one-world, new-age faith supplanted the old religions of Man at gunpoint. As it came to pass, many Order Acolytes preserved their ancestral ancient faiths in secret, and as the dystopia of the Republic eventually crumbled under the hubris of its hedonistic and degenerate elites in the fullness of time, these Secret-Priests soon controlled a shadow-state within the State, providing for their faithful where the Republic could not or would not.

When the Stars themselves began to Occult and Fade, and the Darkness-Filth began to eat away at the fabric so-called Final Society, these Secret-Priests rose up against the blood-soaked chaos and madness; casting down the black and red-robed diabolists of the Maitreyan Order and the malfunctioning Murder-Machine Legions of the Republic and her Corporations in Atomic Holy-War against the Thinking-Machines and their Machine-Men masters.

The Old Republic died in cataclysmic fire, chaos, madness, filth-tide, mutation, and magic. The Sword-Lords of the Solar-Hegemony rose in it’s place.  The Old Republic had reduced the hives of Earth’s children, planted on a thousand worlds, to grey-faced, lumpen-prole consumer-drones without culture or spirit, but on the periphery of the Solarian-Sphere rose new nations, and from these hardy frontier peoples a new aristocracy. 

These Sword-Lords established the Great Houses of the Solarian-Hegenomy, and under the Legendary Karl the Hamner, founded the Great and Bountiful Holy Solar Empire of Man.  But all is not well; the Cultist, Revolutionary, and the Mutant threaten the Tranquility and Harmony of Order from within and the blasphemous Qliphoth Convenant; The Yuggothim, Xothim, Yrchlings, and other Wyldfae-Xenos and Demonic-Aliens menace from without.

The aloof Zindari Aeshi, Prime-Eldest but exiled from the ancient and mysterious Valin’a Cosmos in Gal-Center have brokered a peace between the Solar-Hegemony-in-Exile and the Zindari-Empire-in-Exile. This alone would be shocking enough; but the Zindari seek to bring the Human Sphere formally into their ancient Empire of Empires and seek to wed the daughter of Ingwe Ingweran, High-King of Valin’a, to the crown prince of the Empire of Man.

The problem is that the throne sits empty, none of the great houses can agree on who should take up the purple and the legacies of Karl the Hamner and Nikolai Hammer Rhomanov-Stirling; Founding Emperors of Man. But the Zindari are hard pressed by the spreading Darkness of the Qliphothim which has subverted and enslaved nearly all of the free peoples of Valin’a and desperately seek human military aid anyway.

And so it came to pass in the Year of Our Lord 3,880 that the First Star Crusade was preached against the foul taint of the Qliphothim Covenant and their Dread Prophet Morngroth by the Pontifex Maximus on Eden to great shouts of Deus Vult!  The prize for the Noble House that drives the Darkness from Known Space is the Throne of Man. The great race is on.

Now the Great Houses gather their fleets and banners and set forth in armed pilgrimage and holy war, sending forth scouts and questors to secure supplies, intelligence, and ancient treasures along their routes and seeing the warlike hosts of half-barbarian men descend on the quiet shire-worlds of Valin’a Space, the Quorum of the Zindari State begin to question just what it is their Immortal Emperor has done.

As for what comes next, well that’s for future Cantos my dear readers.