Founder of the kingdom of Asvidere.
A military officer of the continent-spanning Celdic Empire1, Marshal Tozin lived at what historians now call an “inflection point”—the moment in the Empire’s history when its long and almost imperceptibly gradual decline turned, finally, into the beginnings of a full-on collapse.
Details of Tozin’s life are easy to come by, as there is no shortage of stories about him, all told by credible sources who were well-acquainted with the great man. Those details, however, are far too numerous to fit into a single lifetime, and the stories are blatantly contradictory. Tozin himself had no biographer, and scoffed at the idea of writing memoirs. By all accounts he was a boundlessly energetic man, who could not stand to waste even a moment in fruitless contemplation of the past.
What is known to a certainty is that he was a brilliant commander, among the greatest in the Empire’s history (and certainly Celdanna’s last military leader of any real note). At the height of his career, not long after he had risen to the rank of Imperial Marshal, Tozin returned to Celdanna from a campaign in which he had won a string of stunning victories against several of the Empire’s neighbors—only to discover, to his shock and bitter disappointment, that the reigning Emperor had no intention of properly taking advantage of Tozin’s victories, indeed had no idea what to do with a vanquished enemy nation. The Emperor had sent the army on this campaign not with an eye to expanding the Empire’s influence or extracting tribute from the conquered rulers, but merely to keep Tozin far from the capital and the court, as he feared that the popular and well-respected Marshal might attempt to usurp the Imperial throne. The result of Tozin’s brilliant campaign, in the end, amounted to a list of casualties, and absolutely nothing else.
The Marshal’s loyalty to the Empire—long eroded by the growing disillusionment that accompanied his rise in rank—was finally shattered. So disgusted was Tozin by seeing such incompetence and cowardice that—without announcing his plans, or informing the Emperor of what he was about to do—he took his army, of which not only the officers but every soldier, to a man, was fiercely loyal to him, and went north, to the land which was inhabited by a loose cluster of tribes and nations known, collectively, as Viderans.
The Videran peoples then were ruled by a dozen dukes and minor princes, and a constellation of feudal lords and nobles under them; they were not united, but perpetually warring amongst one another, making alliances and breaking them, conquering and being conquered, gaining and losing land, raiding, and squabbling. Across this chaos Marshal Tozin’s army swept like a tsunami. With lightning speed the well-trained Imperial forces, veterans of many foreign wars and countless battles, crushed the hastily assembled feudal levies and the knights and nobles at their heads. Having decisively subdued the Videran rulers, Marshal Tozin (taking a new name, in accordance with an ancient custom of the Pelorite religion) crowned himself Johann I, ruler of the newly founded kingdom of Asvidere.2
The new king was swift in consolidating his power, and at once made it clear as day that his reign marked a new age for the Videran people. The defeated princes and dukes he simply executed, along with their families and all relations and descendants.3 The nobles and lords who owed the princes fealty, he stripped of their holdings, appropriating all their lands for the crown. To those who bent the knee, and openly declared their submission and allegiance to the new kingdom, the king parceled out land exploitation rights: hunting rights, fishing rights, logging rights, and so on—making these hereditary privileges of noble titles (transferable by legal inheritance only, and not subject to sale or trade). He also formed the Council of Nobles; and from its ranks, as well as from the ranks of his generals and senior officers, he chose his cabinet of ministers and advisors.
Nor did the new king stop there, for there were many more reforms to put in place for Asvidere to conform to his vision of what his kingdom was to be like. A new code of laws was instituted—one which eliminated almost all legal privileges of the nobility. All serfs and peasants King Johann freed of their obligations, abolishing in particular the taxes on production of grain and other goods. The land which the peasants worked (which now belonged to the crown) was rented, under contracts of long duration, to any who wished to farm or otherwise make use of it (with preference and discounts given to current inhabitants). A series of public works projects was begun: roads, hospitals, schools, orphanages, military academies, and more.4
The greatest of all of King Johann’s projects, however, in whose shadow all others paled and shrank to insignificance, was the city of St. Annesburg.
Where the river Arter flows into Lake Lesenne is a vast expanse of swampland. The buzzing of mosquitoes and the noxious exhalations of deep, stagnant pools fills the air in summer, and in winter bone-chilling fogs hang over the impenetrable marshes, through which stalk spirits of the dead and fell creatures that take the shape of lost children, devouring those kind-hearted or foolish enough to come to their aid. On occasion, one Videran prince or another, hoping to secure the river mouth and tax the trading barges that sail downriver with furs and lumber, or upriver with spices and slaves, had built forts on the Arter delta, only to see them sink, despite the builders’ best efforts, into the bogs; or the soldiers posted there take ill with some horrible, wasting sickness that resisted even the touch of magic, or go mad from the isolation and strangeness of the swamp mists pressing in from all sides.
In this place Johann, first of his name and the first King of Asvidere, chose to build his seat of power.
It is said that Marshal Tozin, who himself lacked even the tiniest shred of magical power, nonetheless understood magic better than any wizard in the Empire. This should not, historians will hasten to add, be taken to mean that Tozin knew the abstruse details of magical theory, nor had any interest in the esoteric arcane lore beloved of wizardly scholars; such things were nothing to the Marshal, who was above all a supremely practical man. No; to Marshal Tozin, magic was a tool, and a weapon; and among the lessons taught in the Celdic Empire’s military academies was this: that a warrior should have such knowledge of his weapons that they become an extension of his will; and that mastery is achieved when the ways in which a warrior can use his weapons are limited no longer by his skill, but only by his mind. All Celdanna’s officers were taught these lessons, but only Tozin learned them perfectly.
Through his wizards, the Celdic Empire’s famed “Arcanum officers”, the Marshal wielded magic instinctively, like a swordsman taught from birth to grip a blade. It was known among his enemies that predicting how Tozin would use magic in battle was impossible.5 Now, as King Johann of Asvidere, First of his Name, he turned his creative energies to the diametric opposite of war: the task of building a great city, in a place of mud and mist and madness.
It need hardly be said that many doubted him, and called the project foolish. They cited reasons: the cost would be titanic; nature would be dreadfully disrupted; thousands would die, before it was finished. To anyone else, these would be deterrents; to Johann, they were variables in a strategic calculation. Very well, said the doubters; still, it couldn’t be done.
To this day the construction of St. Annesburg stands as the most large-scale use of magic in a single civilian project, in recorded history. Battle-magic was repurposed in a host of ways, great and small. Spells created to stop armies now held back mud and water. Magic used to shape a battlefield was put to use in easing excavation work. Legions of spell-casters exhausted their capacity on spells of enhancement—used, in war, on soldiers, to improve their fighting skill, and now cast on peasant laborers who hauled, or dug, or chopped. Battle-drums beat, their subtle magic echoing through the fog, exhorting workers to carry on their labors, despite weariness and hunger. Mighty artifacts of war were spent, their magic used up to the last, on eradicating the foulest evil presences that haunted the mists. Not a drop of rain fell, nor wind blew, for the duration of the efforts, the weather in the region being thoroughly controlled by ceaseless efforts of the King’s loyal priests. In these and in a thousand other ways, King Johann put to use all the resources that he had—things which he had used, before, only for destruction—to shape this most intractable part of his new kingdom according to his will.
And in the end, all the predictions of the doubters came true, save one. The cost of building St. Annesburg was unfathomable, measured in the wealth of kings, and ancient weapons that were priceless, without equal. The land on which the city rose had been scarred, the druids said, and would never truly live again. The death toll was horrific; few of those thousands who’d been enticed or pressed into labor had survived. All of these things came to pass, as Johann had been warned about—all save one: the city stood, triumphant—and still it stands today.
1 Also known as Celdanna or the Empire of the Most Holy Dawn. ⇑
2 It is said that the Emperor of Celdanna, who was more concerned with petty court intrigues than with the fate of the Empire, was so oblivious to the doings of the world beyond the walls of his palace that he did not find out about any of these events until he received a letter, not from Marshal Tozin, but now from King Johann I of Asvidere; this letter informed him that the new kingdom took a stance of strict neutrality toward the Celdic Empire, offering neither friendship nor enmity, but peace and fair trade, but that, however, he, Johann, would tolerate no Imperial incursions or expeditions northward, which would see swift retaliation. This (if the story is to be trusted) was pure mockery, as the king knew all too well that with his army’s desertion, the Celdic Empire would now struggle even to safeguard its own borders against its neighbors’ vengeance, much less attempt any wars of conquest against Asvidere or anyone else. ⇑
3 Perhaps no other episode in the history of Asvidere’s founding so starkly illustrates the kind of man that Marshal Tozin was, as his decision to eradicate the entire ruling class of the Videran lands—and the ingenious and ruthless way in which he put it into action. Many of the newly crowned King Johann’s allies advised him against this move, which they feared would irrevocably turn even the common people of the fledgling kingdom against him. After all, it was not only the dukes and princes themselves which the king ordered put to death, but all of their descendants and relations, and all their most loyal servants. Many of these went into hiding during the conquest, and had to be tracked down; and while the common folk had no great love for their rulers, neither would they—out of national pride, or compassion, or plain stubborn recalcitrance—cooperate with an order, issued by a foreign king and delivered by his conquering soldiers, to aid in hunting down the remnants of the royal families and courts.
There is, however, a certain sort of person who will always and everywhere gladly take up any dirty task, and they will do it with relish and enthusiasm, so long as there is the promise of gain. King Johann’s people made it known, quietly and without fanfare, that the king’s favor would fall on any who helped to hunt down the remnants of the old rulers’ families and courts; and out of the woodwork of Videran society came crawling bandits, thieves, and scoundrels of every description, eager to provide their services. These people, despised and outcast though they were, knew every nook and cranny of every county, town, and village in the land; and with their help, King Johann’s soldiers quickly rounded up everyone who might have threatened the king’s rule, and quickly and quietly killed them.
As for those former criminals and ne’er-do-wells who made this massacre possible—they now walked about with heads raised high, it being known by all that they had done the king a great service, and presumed, therefore, that they had the king’s gratitude. There even began to spread the perception that they were, in an unofficial way, deputies of sorts, that they represented the king’s will and wielded his authority. It’s true that King Johann’s people did nothing to encourage this perception, but neither did they take steps to discourage it. It was not long before these “deputies”—to whom the people’s timidity and fear gave nearly as much real power as any royal decree—began to take liberties with the common folk, secure in the expectation that no punishment, or perhaps only punishment of a token sort, would be forthcoming. There were drunken revels, and brazen daylight robberies, and rapes; and even a few murders. Meanwhile, the king’s soldiers had withdrawn from the towns and cities, and it began to be whispered that under the old rulers at least such scum kept to their dark corners, whereas now they walked about openly and preyed on decent folk at will.
The people’s discontent had almost, though not quite, reached the point where it might overflow the limits of their respect for their new sovereign and fear of the army he commanded. It was then that the order came; and at once, throughout the kingdom, the king’s troops moved swiftly into the towns and cities they had left, in one fell swoop arrested all the erstwhile “deputies”—whom it was, now, no trouble at all to identify and locate—and, to the vengeful cheers and grim smiles of the citizens, gave all of them, without exception, very public executions. Trials there were none, as none were called for, for the guilt of these upjumped thugs and crooks needed no demonstration—especially after recent events—and not a single law-abiding citizen would even think to speak for them. Sentences, however, were handed down not by officers of the king’s army, but by the newly installed royal magistrates—who, with this universally popular first act, firmly established themselves in the people’s eyes as instruments of Order, and as defenders of the common folk against the depredations of the worst of humanity’s breed.
King Johann, meanwhile, had rid himself not only of all possible seeds of rebellion, but in a single master stroke had cleansed from the land a thick and oily layer of scum and human filth, and at the same time induced a stubborn and suspicious people to accept his law as that of the land, and him as their protector. Those who had advised the king to let his defeated enemies live, and had counseled caution and patience, could only marvel at how events had played out, and told themselves that they were fortunate to be allies of King Johann, and not his enemies. ⇑
4 These were funded partly by the confiscated wealth of the Videran rulers, partly by the land rents which quickly began pouring into the royal treasury (as all who had any scraps of savings scrambled to secure rental contracts for the most fruitful and productive lands), and partly by the treasures which the Imperial army had plundered on its last campaign—and which the forward-thinking Marshal Tozin had neglected to turn over to the Emperor’s coffers. ⇑
5 A story, apocryphal even by the standards of all those told of Tozin’s life, holds that on the eve of battle with the elusive desert tribes of Yerak-Yer, Tozin summoned Arcanum General Javid to his tent to issue instructions to the archmage for the next day’s fighting; and that after conferring with the Marshal, Javid went straightaway to his own tent and, having retrieved a copy of the book on battle-magic tactics which he himself had written (from which the Empire’s Arcanum officers were taught, and in the margins of his own copy of which it was Javid’s custom to scrawl notes and corrections), ordered a pit dug in the middle of the camp. This being done, Javid threw the book into the pit; then, with an incantation which was half strangled scream, half snarled curse, the wizard called forth a pillar of infernal flame which struck the tome, incinerating not only that copy of the book but all copies, everywhere. ⇑