The Sword of Fire

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The Sword of Fire: Forged by Agni in The Celestial Temple, the Sword of Fire was gifted to the Mortal realm long before the fall of the Khaz Modanian Empire, and the rise of Shireroth. The sword belonged to the Line of Emperors who ruled the Khaz Modanian Empire and was seen as a sign of the royal throne of Khaz Modan. Legend tells that the sword was lost several centuries before the fall of the Empire and was not found again until Kaiser Raynor I vanquished the dæmon creature, Rrakanychan and reclaimed the sword for Mortal Man. It is said that the wielder of this Great Sword would have the power to command flame and bend it to their will. Under the control of the dæmon creature, Rrakanychan the sword was used to set ablaze entire villages, forests and plains, reducing even the strongest fortified walls to rubble.

Ownership

Shireroth

By the reign of Kaiser Gaelen IV, the Sword of Fire was noted as having been lost for centuries[1] but ws subsequently rediscovered in some forgotten reliquary of the House of Raynor during the reign of [2] Mira Raynora the Younger. In the folloing years it played a prominent role in the propaganda of the rulers of Lichbrook as they asserted the rule of the undead over the realm of what was once Brookshire. The heraldic display of Lyssansa, in her capacity as Queen of Lichbrook, used an armoured gauntlet holding a flaming sword, placed on either side of her cloth, as supporters.[3] The sword, being an ancient heirloom of the Khaz Modanian emperors, enabled her to stress her ancient lineage and the legitimacy of her rule. Furthermore, Raynor I's eldest child, Mira, was famously passed over in favour of her younger brother, Brrapa, on the grounds that a female could not inherit the Shirerithian throne. However, Raynor had inherited the Duchy of Brookshire from his mother- which proves that females were able to inherit the duchy. As Mira's heirs general, the Queens of Lichbrook therefore claimed sovereignty over Brookshire by ancient right of inheritance and the use of the gauntlets and swords in their heraldry was a very visible reminder of that claim.

Minarboria

The Sword of Fire, portrayed as being wielded by one of its latter-day possessors, the Empress of Minarboria.

In time the sword fell into the hands of Mira's daughter, Lyssansa, who in her turn became the Empress of Minarboria, a Gnostic and chthonic realm populated by the undead and genetically modified post-humans. In this manner it thereby passed once more out of the hands of mortal man and back to those powers which were long decried as demonic by the Cedrist religion. Another facet perhaps to the ongoing Benacian Schism between the bloodlines of the Kaiser who enslaved the demon tree Malarbor and those who worship that same tree's sprouting, the shrub Minarbor.

The Sword of Fire first came to the attention of Kizzy Drakland in the year 1620 when her failing efforts to curb the lawlessness endemic in Demonsfall led her to seek out the blade in order to craft a means by which to subdue the restless malignant spirits which plagued Ynnraille. [4] Consulting with Mira Raynoria the Elder in Lichkeep, Kizzy found herself direct to venture to Lyhigh, the administrative seat of the County of Lywind, where Lyssansa had exiled herself on account of some familial discord.[5] Miss Kizzy, as she was invariably known during that time, managed to disguise a penitential pilgrimage to the Cedar of Raynor, set amidst the Grove of Lovers in Mesior under the guise of a licentious river cruise as part of her leisurely journey to Lyhigh.[6] Whilst not evidently experiencing any profound spiritual benefits from the visit, Kizzy resumed her journey leaving Mesior richer in herself after collecting a branch torn from Raynor's Tree. In spite of being stalled repeatedly by Lyssansa, and held subject to her capricious whims whilst waiting upon her pleasure at the Palace of Winds in Lyhigh[7], Kizzy persevered and, having finally gained access to the sacred blade, used the Sword of Fire to craft a potent artefact hereafter known as the Emberbark.[8] Where upon she departed and set to work wreaking havoc upon the recalcitrant inhabitants of Demonsfall.

Kalgachia

The fate of the sword during the collapse of the Minarborian empire - a period of creeping torpor which slid steadily, almost seamlessly into chaotic anarchy - was not recorded in any detail. The Empress Lyssansa was last seen in the island fiefdom of Sangun off the coast of faraway Corum, the sword conspiciously absent from her person. It eventually resurfaced in the hands of an arcanist coven drawn from the Minarborian academic class who would become known collectively as the Troglodyti and establish a pervasive hold upon the policy organs of Kalgachia, their adopted mountain redoubt. How they had recovered the sword from Lyssansa's palace was never revealed although a combination of pragmatic barter, ideological appeals and armed strength might have been reasonably plausible in the apocalyptic conditions of the time.

Shireroth again

The chaos unleashed by the Struggle for the South combined with a certain familial misfortune resulting in her banishment from Goldshire, Kizzy once more found herself in Lywind, where the fates set her on a path towards reunification with the Sword of Fire.[9] Reunited with the sword once more, after a trial of worthiness by Kalgachi occultists[10]. Kizzy utilised the Sword of Fire, along with a coterie of demons harvested from Demonsfall, much to the displeasure of the Imperial Government, to establish a new state on the ruins of Lichbrook and western Minarboria - the Domain of Malarboria.[11]

Kizzy was, in turn, obliged to surrender the Sword of Fire to Daniyal ibn Daniyal Simrani-Kalirion in 1662 under the terms of the Convention of Drakorda, which permitted her to depart from the lands of what had then become the State of Modan following a Humanist revolt against daemonic rule.

The Sword of Fire, as the centre piece of the state regalia of Modan, represented the celestial fire by which the human supremacy was established upon the hostile alien world of Micras, and represented the reforging of the ancient continuity between the greatest empire, that of Khaz Modan, and the revived State of Modan in the fallen and degrade modern age where - in the absence of purifying fire from the heavens - coexistence with inhuman and nonhuman sapients had long been tolerated, to the ultimate degradation of humanity.

The Sword of Fire has been said to have only reached its full potential when it was used by Rrakanychan. Only a demon, it was postulated, could transcend the self-imposed constraints of moral scruples, such as which inform human conduct. The Liches, whilst pretending to a heightened sensibility beyond good and evil and possessed of an arrogance that was itself bordering on divine proportions, were still moral creatures, their residual fondness for mankind, even as merely the pupae from which their undead forms had emerged, limited the scope of their imagination and thus denied them access to the blade's full potential.

In the custody of the Prince of Modan, much was speculated about the sword's capabilities in the hands of one whose intent was to rededicate it to the archonic workings of the Celestial Temple. That a number of villages, known to have been withholding their taxes from state and imperial authorities, went up in smoke following personal visitations did suggest that the Prince obtained a reasonable proficiency in igniting the blade.

Kalgachia again

The late 1660s saw a marked degeneration of the Shirerithian ruling class, characterised by the oddly-simultaneous emergence of chronic physical maladies in rulers on both sides of the River Elwynn in concert with outbreaks of a global fungal pandemic known as The White Plague among the population at large. By 1668 The Prince of Modan was reported to have been struck hard by a case of aggravated gout, to the point that he elected to depart Shireroth for the more agreeable desert climate of Constancia in an attempt to recover his health. To the surprise of the entire Benacian political establishment his departure was accompanied by a systematic and somewhat unexplained disposal of his Shirerithian assets. The most prominent such asset was the Sword of Fire itself, which he gifted to the House of Yastreb. The Yastrebs, once the ruling house of Goldshire, had long since renounced the Cedrist creed and joined Lyssansa's colonisation of Minarboria, proceeding from there to the very deepest leadership stratum of Kalgachia. Long considered arch-heretics against the very Celestial Temple in which the Sword of Fire was forged, they were as surprised as anybody to be its new owners. In their Kalgachi home, as well as the more fearful quarters of the Benacian east, talk emerged of the grave omens inherent in the Prince of Modan's actions, a sign that the Imperial Republic might have forfeited the very Mandate of Heaven to which it owed its famed longevity.


See also: Cedrism, Religion