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Alliance Competition 11 - International Relations
Topic Started: Aug 1 2017, 11:29 PM (313 Views)
Shadowfyst997
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The Dark Wolf General

Hey guys, I know it's been a while, but it's time for a new Alliance Comp! This time, the goal is to create a piece of work(writing, art, etc) that showcases the history between two of the nations. It can either be a very important event that changed the way those two nations treat another, or a detailed history! So long as you are detailing relations between two nations(from any Alliance, or even from unaligned ones), pretty much anything is fair game!

You can find some of the nations in the World Index, although not all have been ported over yet. Those that haven't can be found in the old Alliance Comp Archive. If you find the time, please feel free to help port some of those nations over to the World Index, as that is definitely worth doing and will help everyone else out in the long run.

As it has been a while since our last true Competition, I'll refresh you on how they work. You may form a team(or go solo) to work on an entry. Teams are not limited to people from the same Clan(although you are more then welcome to do a Clan Team if you so choose) Or even people FROM a clan, meaning unaligned can participate. You can not be a part of two teams at the same time. When you have finished your entry, please post them here, and list any members of your team so that they can be credited later. The deadline is August 15th(two weeks from today) and voting will be another Week.

If you have any questions, you can ask myself, Catman, Robert Joe or Neshi, and we will be happy to help! I look forward to seeing what you all come up with!
Posted Image Posted Image <-- Courtesy of Safe Haven and Saucy Goblin respectively! :3 <3

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Catman
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Loneliest Stardust Crusader

I think what you meant to say is The Old World Index - http://www.goldensunrise.online/forum/3037280/
WHY ARE WE STILL HERE...Posted Image...JUST TO SUFFER?!
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Nedben
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Orzic Nedbens

Psicrystal memospore retrieval logger, init. Channeling...Approximate predicted expenditure 1PP (1PP paid by support generation structure, 0PP requested from user). If you are experiencing drainage of personal psynergy to fully utilize this facility, alert management to the damage.

Requesting memospores on topic; Loho-Voidland War during the Post-Unsealing Unification Wars.

Scrolling....Warning: Topic space wide and incongruous. Memospore retrieval too vast for immediate cognizance, wait may occur before full list generated. View precompiles instead Y/N?

Y.




SUNKEN CITY OF ERESHKIGAL, GREATER LOHO UNDERGROUND TERRITORY.

Point of reference: Dwarven forward commander Lieutenant Mark Charles, Venus Adept and veteran of the Loho-Voidland War, speaking to troops quartered in the Ereshkigal Containment Sphere about the sieging of Tower Irkalla and Arcology Dumuzid. He is an elderly dwarf still in dark grey heavy armor, the greying of his yellow-orange beard visible even under the darkened mythril of his helm. He takes the stand with that restrained decorum expected of an elder warrior who is perhaps less diminished than expected. Collective memospore is hesitant to ascribe a clear feeling to the audience: strong mix of interest and a slight sense of fear. They didn't know their precise feelings, so this spore doesn't.

Mark opens coldly but respectfully, with just enough implicit reference to the fallen as to apply deference. He hopes he isn't coming off too strong, but he is.

"It was the cursed city over there that began everything."

Direct statement. This really is a straight-up story of how it happened.

"We thought...the whole Royal Cult thought all the shadowfolk portals were sealed off from Dorifidia to Loho Village, locked behind ancient fortresses we inherited from the guardian cults since before the Stars were born, and naturally occurring vortexes that had covered the rest afterward. We were wrong. So, so wrong. But that wasn't the first of it. The first of it was that curse over there. Something the shadowfolk brought up as a weapon they barely just controlled, thinking if they opened with something this destructive they'd be able to claim the whole territory from within, because before we'd been fairly weak offensively and it was our lack of notability that kept us out of the eyes of others, so we were the ripe first target to aggress and just take over. And it was close, even with that in our favor."

He pointed out the observation window to the gunnery batteries below, all pointed to the bubble of seething expanded-space bigger on the inside and rife with impossible things to battle against whatever horde might pop up at any second.

"Before all of this was built, before this entire facility was constructed to seal away a whole star-city, it was just a major intersection of mining routes deep in Greater Loho. We barely knew about the shadowfolk back then other than that they were a banally aggressive faction which occasionally attacked Weyard. The only sign of the city of Ereshkigal was a shrine to the netherworlds dedicated to the goddess from which this city takes its name among mortals, which we had believed for the longest time was simply a relic from before the Alchemy Wars, but no, it was ground from the green-marble of this city. You can still see it out there, the big statue on one of 'em out there in the shifting spires, atop the front dome of one of the greater cathedrals, some of the prayer-strips still trailing white out there.

"One day it...it just burst, there's no real way to explain it. The shrine suddenly was the top of a cathedral, then the rest of the city began tearing its way into this reality, it was...There were very few survivors. The shadowfolk came in great droves out of that first cathedral, because they'd managed to kill clean most of the city for a while. They'd taken Irkalla and Dumuzid, the center and the supplies district, planning to use it as a starting point to take over us and get a Weyardside foothold for their plans to just take over the world and force themselves to be recognized by the nations that ages ago had thrown them down. Gods, how they came...We were caught by surprise, a good chunk of the army caught all the way up north in Dorifidia monitoring the Marslands and North Mercurians and helping with all the excavations, and the rest guarding Loho in the South. They'd made a beeline for Under Vulcan and...I was with the platoon pushing them back. It was a sudden attack, just the tunnels rushed up with a wall of living shadow and blades, it was...You know how they say those shades love subterfuge? Didn't even try. Just brought up a city and stormed ours. They busted up a few portals in the first few days, and we'd been so caught up trying to hold the network and keep 'em from expanding from the few portals that still worked right, we'd barely had the Under Vulcan guard alone, and a lot of other cities were worse. They were like...It was all drowning in monsters. I can't even speak it right, it was like the starry night had come down from the heavens and tried to crush us all, a storm of pitch-black and darkest blue and the eyes, the brightest jewels of twinkling stars for eyes! When the exorcists of the Cult say they've fought the night sky keeping out shadows, they were not kidding. And we got more than a glimpse of that for those days. They were almost impossible to tell apart, and their bodies...Have you seen how the more spirit ones barely leave a body and what they were wearing? That. That happened. It was like flakes of the sky and a pair of stars winking out and leaving ash. And they'd sent the most spirit ones first. People who were more than net half shadows, probably some of their ancestors too. I don't think those ones really die when you kill them. They'll fall back into shadows, sure, but they'll claw their way back out in that void of theirs. Maybe they all look the same after a while without something clear to pin 'em against like living silhouettes, but in the darkness of tunnels and the carnage of a tight battlefield, I could've sworn I saw the same people again and again, even without the blasted reviver-spammers bringing them back in piles of phoenix down and sparkling djinni-force. It was awful, awful. A Weyard war, you see people fall down and die. Not with them. Not with those monsters.

"I think a lot of them just walled us in the lines, cut us down, ate our corpses. Could barely see your friends die before you in a whirl of blades and glimmers of light. Those dead we got back were...Were in bad shape. You know how the clerics say that sometimes trauma sticks in your brain, 'specially with soldiers? That's it. That happened to us. The Royal Cult had to call down avatars of the gods themselves, it was awful. Took the gods themselves to really break the line and push them back down the tunnels, a parade of spirits chained by spirits and channelers all marching down the line spewing the elements like dragons' blessing-breath, us alongside them chopping down whatever shadow-peoples got too close. Was...was awful. You stop feeling like you're a person, the way the djinni sing. Crazy little spirits, singing madly the whole time and playing their little instruments while things that are more divine than us blaze with light, like you're in Odin's Wild Hunt but in the back where you can't clearly see anything but hear the carnage ahead. The shadows seemed spooked, spooked I tell ya, and you could just make out their faces of terror sometimes between the blades of angels and demons with all the light of crazy things going on.

"It was worse in the outer cities. We took a lot of losses, because the shadowfolk didn't just use Ereshkigal, they used a lot of eldritch stuff. Made some demonic pacts, called in a lot of squid favors, you can't really be sure what they're doing anymore. The armies were stretched thin trying to contain the spread, and the temples were stretched thinner trying to blast their way to the portals and seal 'em up again. For the first day or so while we got word out they thought it was just a lot of small attacks oddly close, but then once they went for Under Vulcan, it was...It was awful. I say that a lot, but it's true. War is like Hell, but your fighting might count for something if you shoot enough. We had field sanctums by the dozen, and most of the key tunnels' miner waystations are huge now, villages in 'emselves with surface gates and dedicated guards, because they needed more room to run through fixing everything they could fix and saving anyone they could save. Really terrifying, that.

"So somehow, we pulled through. Divine intervention was just the start of it. We called down every random adventurer we could find to do killing runs with us, we begged for the soldiers of anyone who had any to spare, we turned tunnels into killing fields, filling 'em up with elemental death then blasting them back open again. They said the dwarven army adepts reshaped the world at least nine times on every battlefield, twice with each element and one with as many secrets of the alchemy wars as we knew for good measure. We developed artillery meant for tunnels, bred and trained enough tunnel titan rodents we'd be able to make a fortune selling the postwar surplus, it was...For every tunnel we lavacasted, there were others where we couldn't, and fought in the streets and..."

He stood there for a moment, caught up in the long pushes.

"But that's not what we're here for. We're here for the end."

He seemed to falter for a moment.

"Five hundred and twelve days." he said softly, before resuming his speaking voice. "The final Siege of Ereshkigal took five hundred and twelve days for when it was still a siege. We'd battled and battled and with sheer dwarven tenacity and reformatting the earth from mantle to mountaintop fended them back, sealed off the new portals and resecured the old. We'd began pushing in from the city limits, the eldritch fields lashing at us with things we didn't understand. The shadows had...had lost control of Ereshkigal somehow. I think...Yeah, the Royal Cult made a special invocation to wish for a miracle. To ask the goddess to use her power over the cathedral to her in the city the shadowfolk made their great base to hijack that city and the great segments dedicated to her. It was a lengthy ritual sacrifice, and to this day a lot of priests of the death gods regard some of the things done as particularly scary even for death gods. But it worked. She did it. The goddess took control of her temples throughout that awful place and did something to the mechanics of the city that took parts of it back under her control. The rest, even the goddess did not know how to properly control, and without the stability the temples had provided the shadowfolk couldn't do the rest either. The monsters came back, in force. Five hundred and twelve days in, and late at night when the five-hundred and thirteenth was about to happen, the trenches were lit by the eeriest green with erratic dark spots. An avatar whose weapons were terrible to behold was summoned and the whole region shook in an earthquake that stressed even magical supports in the area nearly to their limit. And...and the monsters came back. The avatar dispersed quickly after completing its requested role and...The shadowfolk just ran at us. Running for their lives. Surrendering, fleeing, and screaming about things we couldn't understand. Fools among us pushed, the clerics thinking that if they could get closer they could seal the problems off. We made it into Dumuzid before any of us realized what was happening. Ereshkigal's attack had undone whatever the shadowfolk used to seal off some of the crazy nonsense equipment, and the monsters were coming back. In droves. We tried to keep Dumuzid, the priests and priestesses of a dozen faiths working in harmony to try and reach where they were spawning the most up in Irkalla, and...And they didn't make it, most of them. We lost a lot of people that day and got pushed back. Way back. By the 513th day's end, reckoning by Loho Village, we'd been pushed out of Dumuzid entirely, back past the city limits. The last of the clerics, outside the impure spacebreaking grounds of the city, were able to erect a series of barrier spells that formed the first preliminary bases of the Ereshkigal Containment Sphere. Eventually we'd all together just woven a big old shell around the place and said 'and stay out', and...it was content to do so. Maybe it was a last favor from Ereshkigal, for the city was now hers but for the monsters. Maybe it was a miracle from all the gods we'd called on. Maybe that was just what the city wanted for itself. Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was nothing but chance. But we did it. And the war was, for the most part, over.

"Umbriel begged for armistice after the loss of Ereshkigal City, and surrendered shortly after, again driven from Weyard. Tensions have been high, but analysts from both sides knew it then and know it now: with the way the shadowfolk were replenishing their forces, if it weren't for the territorial advantages we had throughout the Greater Loho network and the miracles of the gods we might not have been able to hold them back, and having paid greatly in energy tribute with the greatest of our adepts off the front lines to obtain the latter, we wouldn't be able to take it to Voidland where their madgods were better entrenched the same way we were at home, but contract wording meant with the amount we'd paid the amount we'd be able to call on later was really big.

"It was a pretty sobering peace, let's be honest. Neither side had gained much of anything, and while we were scarred rather greatly from our losses and stuck with an ugly eldritch hazard the size of a city in a major pathway to boot, we'd made military advancements other Weyardside factions wouldn't see for ages, even discounting catching up with some of the shadowfolk technology both looted and demanded in surrender proceedings, and we had been able to test how well our defenses worked from within as well as without so they wouldn't be able to pull things like that again. And that's how that ugly ball of city got there, and how we got the guns to keep it that way. Don't you forget it."

He walked off, to loud and confused applause.




Memospore complete. View further? Y/N

N.

Concluding assembly, ending psionic contact.
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