THE ARGUMENT OF EMPIRES
Book One of the Corrossan Trilogy
By Jacob T. Helvey
© 2018 Jacob T. Helvey
All rights reserved
Cover art by Frank Attmannspacher
Map by Robert Altbauer
1st edition
The Argument of Empires is a work of fiction, and all names, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
THE
ARGUMENT
OF
EMPIRES
Book One of the
Corrossan Trilogy
JACOB T. HELVEY
Contents
~ Map ~
Acknowledgements
The Gods and Peoples of the Corrossan Empire and Its Surrounds
Prologue: Four Hundred Years Ago
One: Grith
Two: Kareen
Three: Grith
Four: Kareen
Five: Grith
Six: Kareen
Seven: Grith
Eight: Kareen
Nine: Kareen
Ten: Grith
Eleven: Kareen
Twelve: Grith
Thirteen: Kareen
Fourteen: Grith
Fifteen: Kareen
Sixteen: Grith
Seventeen: Grith
Eighteen: Kareen
Nineteen: Grith
Twenty: Kareen
Twenty-One: Grith
Twenty-Two: Kareen
Twenty-Three: Xisa
Twenty-Four: Grith
Twenty-Five: Grith
Twenty-Six: Kareen
Twenty-Seven: Grith
Twenty-Eight: Grith
Twenty-Nine: Kareen
Thirty: Xisa
Thirty-One: Grith
Thirty-Two: Xisa
Thirty-Three: Grith
Thirty-Four: Kareen
Thirty-Five: Grith
Thirty-Six: Kareen
Thirty-Seven: Tain–Grith
Thirty-Eight: Ytan
Epilogue
A Note from the Author
About the Author
For my mother, who supported me through this wild journey without question.
For my father, who stoked my passion for reading, and ultimately for writing as well.
And for my supporters,
I can’t thank you all enough. You made this possible.
~ Map ~
Acknowledgements
The Argument of Empires is the culmination of a year of work, and close to a half-decade of intermittent practice at the art of writing. And while it may seem like the work of an author is a solitary affair, I assure you, this sentiment could not be further from the truth.
It would take me a dozen pages of this already lengthy novel to properly thank every person who has had an impact on my style, the story’s plot, and the characters within.
Still, I will try my best…
To my parents, Greg and Tracy Helvey, for raising me with an equal dose of creativity and discipline, without which this novel would never exist. And to my grandparents, Connie Helvey, and Randy and Linda Jeffeaux, who provided me constant support through this rocky endeavor.
To Scott Turner and Steven Price, who have always been like a second set of parents.
To my friends Jordan Hahn, Logan Byrd, Zach Ellis, Jay Bostic, and Aaron Lane, for giving me as many jabs as you gave words of encouragement.
To my cover artist, Frank Attmannspacher, and map maker, Robert Altbauer, for giving life to a world I thought only existed in my imagination.
A Special Thanks to my Kickstarter backers: Greg and Tracy Helvey, Randy and Linda Jeffeaux, Jesse Helvey, Don Cote, Jeff Helvey, Scott Turner, Mike Helvey, and Connie Helvey. Thank you so much for your donations.
And finally, to my other backers—sorry if I don’t have your full names: Chase, Graham Cheshir, FinalStrigon, Derek, Jinxsoft, Tevin Deante’ Hill, Aaron Lane, Jay Bostic, francisimo, Travis Callan, Megan Brazel, Zach Ellis, Craig Senatore, Hylke, John Truong, Dagmar, Donald Ferris, Christina Gale, Brian Griffin, Kenneth Shee, Ross O’Dell, Benjamin Widmer, Michael Burns, Davyd Martyn Coe, George Panopoulos, Logan Byrd, Eric Childress, Jordan Hahn, and Greg Levik.
To all of you I mentioned, and those I could not: thank you.
The Gods and Peoples of the Corrossan Empire and Its Surrounds
Gods and Other Divinities
Tirrak—Chief and many claim, only deity of the Corrossan Pantheon. God of the skies and seas. Often associated with the binary planet of the same name. Called the Sky Father by the Shaleese, and the Celestial Peak by the peoples of Bas’son.
Kushil—Goddess of the sun in the Toashani Pantheon. Wife of Tirrak. Considered apocryphal by most Hadalkiri.
Taman—God of luck in the Toashani Pantheon. The Hundred-Fingered Lord. Worshiped by merchants and criminals. Considered apocryphal by most Hadalkiri.
Zabrel—God of the long road in the Toashani Pantheon. Worshiped by travelers and soldiers. Considered apocryphal by most Hadalkiri.
The Pentad—The five Heranan gods. Considered fanciful superstition by Hadalkiri and Toashani alike.
Prosperity and Progress—Worshiped by the conquered peoples of Fanalkir. Discouraged by Corrossan occupiers.
The Stars Eternal—A common folk religion among the tribes of the Kelil Desert. Famously practiced by the warrior priests of the El’kabal Temple.
Peoples and Ethnic Groups
Hadalkiri—The disparate and diverse people of the Corrossan heartland are known for their proud traditions and warlike practices. From the hill men of Whitestone, to the well-bred nobles of Selivia and Malgin, they are defined more by geography than any shared culture. Sometimes called Ashankiri in archaic texts.
Toashani—An ancient group of cultures, when compared to their neighbors to the west. Famed for their wine and cotton, as well as for their sailors, second in skill only to the Heranans.
Heranans—A civilization thousands of years old and once possessed an empire that stretched across the coasts of Toashan and eastern Hadalkir. Famed for their sea-faring abilities.
Fanalkiri—The Corrossan name for the peoples of the southern continent past the eternal storm, the Eye of Tirrak. Once a loose confederation of city-states, they are now united under Emperor Hadan’s control.
Cutarans—Tribal humanoids of the southern plains of Fanalkir, they have been at war with the Corrossan Empire for nearly two years. Massive, immensely strong, and quick to anger.
Fire, it appears, was the secret to Hadan’s reign. The fires he ordered set among the fields of the Shar, when they refused to pay him tribute. The fires off the coast of Heran Akk, when he burned the fleet of the last High Minister. And it was the fire of the Burning Night that sped along Hadan’s rise into legend.
That singular destructive catastrophe is an event with which our ancestors seem to have been intimately familiar, for it shrouded the world in ash and killed a full half of Hadalkir’s population in its passing. Strange then, that you have likely never heard its name uttered amongst the Emperor’s other great exploits.
Hadan would prefer us to believe he conquered two continents through strategy and guile alone. The deception at Trebak Pass, the Battle of Scallarelle, they have all entered into legend.
But as is oftentimes the case with history, the truth is a far harder pill to swallow. For Hadan won his throne as much through brutality as genius, brutality in the face of the apocalypse
.
From The Argument of Empires, Page 2
Prologue:
Four Hundred Years Ago
Lyle had been robbed, robbed by gods, demons, Titans—or perhaps fate itself, had seen fit to break him. The Burning Night had left him without a father, without a kingdom, and without lands to call his own.
Gods be damned! He was a prince, even if that empty title meant less and less with each passing day. The truth was, he was little more than a beggar now, a homeless ruler, a wanderer bereft of even his crown.
But Lyle would change that, he had sworn—would rise where all the others had failed. He had not died as had his father had, torn apart by his own people when ash had filled the skies and made the crops fail. Instead, he had done what few others dared, striking out, taking a hundred soldiers with him, bent on finding a new home.
These men were his most loyal servants, tasked with protecting him when he had been forced to take shelter in the caves north of Whitestone following a series of riots that had all but destroyed his family’s ancestral stronghold. They were the last of his army, a single broken piece of a force that had once been feared by his father’s rivals.
Along with this paltry retinue, he was accompanied by a dozen priests, men who would be invaluable when he was finally crowned king.
King. He would likely be the only surviving monarch on the continent. The Burning Night had purged the rulers as surely as the ruled. When the ash had clogged the sky and the harvests had failed, all men had quickly become equal.
“Keep up!” Lyle called back to his retinue, scaling what he hoped was the final hill of the day, perhaps the final hill of this entire journey. He had thought of every hill that way for days now. It was the only thing that still kept him going through the scrub, bare rock, and cold streams of this wind beaten land
Their party had traveled for weeks, making their way out of the northern highlands and south along the Akivan Coast. When the going had gotten hard, they had been forced to slaughter their horses and continue on foot. The meat from the animals was stringy, and Lyle had to admit that the thought of eating his prized stallion revolted him, but horses were simply a burden in such desperate times. And desperate times often called for unsavory acts of violence. If he didn’t get used to this kind of brutality soon, he would likely find his reign cut short, ended by the swing of a rival king’s sword. Or whatever would pass for kings, when all this was over.
“And Alwyn,” he said, knowing the old captain would hear his order. “Get Dein up here.” Alwyn, as was his way, had advised against their journey, pointing out the leagues of enemy territory their small retinue would be forced to cross, and the danger they would be placing themselves in. But, other than a few bands of roving peasants, half-mad with thirst and hunger, Lyle’s enemies had been destroyed as thoroughly as his father’s own kingdom. The ghosts of empty holds and castles, either abandoned or destroyed, had attested to that.
“Yes, my lord?” the youthful Dein asked, climbing up the hill to stand beside him. He was the youngest priest in Lyle’s retinue, perhaps sixteen, but possessed of wisdom and power beyond even the most learned of the others. And that skill with Delving—it would prove useful in the days to come.
The pair stood overlooking a deep depression. Twelve small hills sat in the basin, built in a wide circle around a single roughly hewn standing stone. The land ended abruptly a few hundred paces to the west, where the rough crags plunged into the roiling sea. Just as the books had said. “This is it,” Lyle whispered. “What we’ve been looking for since we left home.”
“You were looking for barrows, my lord?” Dein asked. The boy eyed him incredulously from under his cowl. He would never question his prince openly, but Lyle had seen that look more and more frequently as their journey had turned from days into weeks.
He still thinks I’m pursuing some fairytale, Lyle thought. By now he didn’t care. The boy was entitled to his opinions, even if he was wrong. There was power in these desolate hills. The books in his father’s library, the ones that the old man had foolishly never bothered to read, spoke of this place.
The souls of the dead still haunt the barrows of Akiv, the first text had read, the one that had sparked his imagination. Great kings do not sleep so soundly.
Lyle waited for his retinue to catch up, taking a moment to let the cool autumn wind blow through his blonde hair. His eyes were invariably drawn skyward, watching Tirrak. The world stormed above, as it always did, the cloud layers writhing in a dance of blue and white so slow that it could take minutes to spot any change in their pattern.
Are you watching us down here, Great Father? He was tempted to ask. Have you stood idly by while your creations have been destroyed?
There was only one answer to that single terrible question. The gods had abandoned them to the Burning Night. But Lyle would not abandon the world as the gods had. He would reforge it. That, he had sworn the day he had left Whitestone, sanctifying the rite amongst the tombs of his ancestors.
“Captain Alwyn,” Lyle said. In response, the older man gave a crisp salute. “I want a camp set up around the barrows. There’s a forest in that direction, if I remember correctly.” He pointed inland towards a cluster of hills in the distance. “Start your men building a palisade.”
“Yes, my lord.” Alwyn trudged off to give the order to his soldiers.
Lyle sighed. “That should keep him busy for a while.” He needed peace, quiet, and the company of as few men as possible for what he was about to do.
“Dein, with me.” The boy nodded and followed Lyle as he descended towards the barrows. Withered grass crunched beneath every footfall and without the voices of the soldiers and priests to keep back the silence, the burial ground took on the guise of a place dead for millennia.
“Look, my lord,” Dein said. “The grass shoots.” He motioned towards the ground beneath their feet. Lyle took a closer look and for the first time noticed the tiny green sprouts poking up between their fallen kin. He smiled. Amongst the barrows of kings, scoured with ash that still clogged the rivers and blotted out the light of the sun, life carried on.
“Perhaps the world will survive this yet,” Lyle mused, trying to focus on the tiny blades rising up around his boots.
But like a lodestone, his attention was drawn toward the closest barrow. The squat mound was covered in decaying turf down to its base, hiding the heavy stones that would have been piled high around the burial chamber. Ykil of Herana, an author of the late Twilight Era, had spoken of a top layer of chalk covering each barrow. They looked like snow, he had written, even in the heat of summer.
Kimac, his father’s chief priest, had doubted Ykil’s claims. “How can a man from Herana, far to the east, have ever traveled the thousands of miles necessary to see the burial mounds of the Akivians?” he had once asked Lyle.
He had argued with the old man for hours, pointing out the sea-fairing abilities of the Heranans, and the author’s knowledge of western Ashankiri cultural practices, as evidence for Ykil’s fantastical claims.
At the time, he had hated Kimac. His training in the academies of Harrek and Angea had given him knowledge of logic and rhetoric far beyond what Lyle had managed to scrounge from the book in his father’s drafty library. But the priest was dead now, and more and more often he found himself wishing he could speak with the old man once again. Sometimes, Lyle thought, he needed someone to challenge his theories.
But this time it didn’t matter. He was right. By Tirrak and all the gods in the sky he was right. The secrets he sought were buried within these mounds, the power to build a new nation, a new order, and perhaps a better one.
He circled the closest mound several times, keeping a respectable distance from it sides and trying to contain his excitement. The surface of the barrow was entirely covered with brown grass, save for an entrance on the side opposite, the way Lyle and Dein had taken to get down the hill, faci
ng inward towards the lone standing stone.
Lyle took a careful step closer. There was no mistaking it, a door was set into the side. No, not a door, a rock. It was as large as a man, and covered with strange pictograms that swirled and writhed in patterns that he was unfamiliar with.
Ykil had mentioned these as well, adding credence to Lyle’s theory. But the author hadn’t described them in any detail except to say that they weren’t in any language he knew. Perhaps the patterns had no meaning. Perhaps they were simple decoration, carved in reverence for such an important man as the one buried here.
Lyle frowned. Perhaps… but the longer he looked the more he swore he could see a uniformity in the carvings, if only he could read them….
He took a step closer, brushing his hand along the stone. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he could almost feel a tingling coming from the rock itself. His first reflex was to draw his fingers back, but he forced himself to keep them firmly planted against the markings.
I’m about to rebuild a kingdom, he told himself. I can’t be afraid of ancient stone.
Dein came up beside him. He stared at the carvings for a long moment, his pale eyes seeming to go out of focus. A wind blew, sharp and fast, whipping locks of red hair from the boy’s face. Lyle shivered, and looked away, drawing his cloak close around his body.
“This place,” Dein began, his voice full of reverence. “There is power here, as you said.”
“I didn’t think priests believed in silly superstitions,” Lyle replied, wryly. “Isn’t the glory of Tirrak supposed to elevate you above such things?” He nodded towards world’s place high above.
“There is a difference between superstition and fact, my lord. I can see this tomb with my own eyes, feel the power within.” He went to turn away. “My abilities-”
“The nature of your abilities are none of my concern. All I care about is what you can do with them.” He gave Dein the kind of serious look his father had once used on foreign dignitaries. The man’s eyes had silenced complaints and protests as swiftly as the cut of a sword.
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