In the Viking Age, seafaring men from the Ice Continent set across the Octagram, seeking out new lands to settle and riches to take. The Vikings made it to the continents of Light and Thunder, as well as the Central Continent.
In the wake of the ten years of terror that they inflicted on half of the world, after things had settled down and the Vikings became no longer raiders but neighbours, the most bloodstained pages of history were written; even soggier than the ones the Vikings penned just beforehand.
Gates opened, across the Ice, Light, Thunder and Central continents, gaping maws that opened right into the bowels of Hell itself. They spewed forth organised ranks of demons, armed with twisted weapons and evil armours, firing blackest magics and scarring the landscape with the emotional torment of those unlucky enough to survive their attacks. The year was 1066, and the Demon War had begun.
The world held its breath as desperate battles raged on for six months, with full-sized mortal towns growing rarer by the week, but with more and more demon lords falling to the blades and spells of mortal heroes. With no side winning, and untold suffering for those living in the battlegrounds, a group of people rose up to put a stop to it all.
There were sixteen former Viking leaders left from the old kingdoms, and after the calling of a council, they split up and went their separate ways. Eight of the kings thought that they must take back the lands, for the good of the world, and the other eight believed the world to be over as they knew it and wished to flee south.
The eight who remained behind formed the Order of the Slayers, dedicated to fighting the forces of evil until their last breath. They rallied the rest of the mortals living on the scarred continents and fought back harder than ever, eventually throwing the last of the demon lords back into hell after only three months of battle.
The other eight fled in longships across the sea, taking with them as many refugees and supplies as they possibly could. Each king had a fleet of four ships, and each ship held over forty cramped refugees and soldiers. Over a thousand and two hundred men, women and children headed south.
After days of clear sailing and favourable winds, they reached a place north of the Fire continent, between the Central continent and those endless deserts. The archepelago of islands was so vast that not one of the ship’s navigators could keep track of their location, and the fleet broke into several smaller fleets that went their own way.
Each fleet made camp on one of the larger islands of the archipelago, in defensible or hidden bays in case the demons of the sea – daemons – had followed them to their sanctuaries.
Some of the Viking refugees found native populations already settled onto their islands, and after learning their lesson from history, made peace and not war. The Demon War was all that war that they could take, and they knew that ultimately it had been their fault.
The Vikings taught the natives how to mine, make metal weapons and brew alcohol, while the natives taught their new friends how to build with local materials, what fruits were harvestable and shared the secrets of how they learned to navigate the surrounding waterways in their canoes.
With their combined knowledge, the ports and villages grew larger and larger, until the need came to expand to other islands, clear farms and become governed societies. Each new colony of refugees did not know about the fate of the other ones, until scout ships found each other, and the maps were drawn up.
In the year 1106, forty years after the Demon War had been ended by the Slayers, the surviving relatives and descendants of the other eight Viking kings organised their island nations into one nation, officially titled on their documents as “Freedom”.
Freedom from war, oppression and fear, the things that had caused the way of the demon armies to become clear; now the new nation of Freedom wished to only do the good that came from the Viking age. They wanted to trade and explore, as was proper according to their government, the Brotherhood of the Coast.
During the time of Freedom’s growth and the intermediary years from the end of the Demon War, the effected continents had rebuilt themselves with the help of the Slayers; who after the first cities were repaired, took a backseat role in government, and became more of a religious knightly-wizardly order.
The Light Continent, their satellite island of Montsegur, the Thunder Continent and the Central Continent formed an accord, to never let the events leading up to the Demon War happen again, doing the same thing that the Brotherhood had organised, but without the knowledge of the Brotherhood’s existence. Officially, the refugees had all died.
The Ice Continent stayed out of the Alliance, the first home of the Vikings trying to stabilise itself on its own. It was a proud nation, and they would never accept the caring-sharing terms that they would have had to agree to if they wanted to join. They couldn’t afford to share recourses, they needed them all. So they took on the role of isolationists in politics, a role they would continue to play for many years to come now.
The Alliance and Brotherhood set about their missions of trade and exploration, with new or rebuilt cities, and it didn’t take long before word reached back to each government, Brotherhood and Alliance, that the refugees had not died, and the Demon War had been recovered from.
There were celebrations on August 11th 1115, the day that the two governments met officially. The kings and queens of the Alliance nations and their chosen leader, the Spokesman, met with the eight captains that made up the governing system of the Brotherhood. They got off to a bad start.
‘Constitutional monarchy’, one captain said, ‘is what we had in place back in the Viking age. One cannot be born to rule, one has to earn that knowledge and that right’ the captain continued.
The captains of the Brotherhood were elected on a pure democracy basis, with one vote per person. A representative from one of the eight capital ports being chosen by their constituents to show the interests of their island in Brotherhood matters. They were usually the most popular member of local government, or the most influential person in town, like someone who owned all the taverns.
‘The Gods chose the monarchs to rule’ one queen replied, ‘you cannot substitute skill for divine guidance, any mortal may have skill but only we have the Gods to tell us what to decide’ she concluded, arms folded.
The kings and queens were not all like that, or they hadn’t always been. Before the Demon War, they had been great rulers, but also great mages or warriors. They fought and died alongside their men, and in their stead, their young and under qualified children had taken their place at the end of the Demon War.
It was with this clash of ideals, that the first of the arguments broke out. When it was finally stamped upon by the oldest of the captains and the Spokesman, to pursue a different topic, it moved onto something worse, for the Alliance.
Jamaica, the Earth Continent and the Dark Continent had refused to trade any more goods with the Alliance, who charged too much gold for their food exports, due to heavy taxing at the dockside.
The Brotherhood sold food to its friends at much cheaper prices, and in return, the Jamaican, dwarven and low-elven governments had cut the Alliance off from their various exports, and were shipping them gratefully to the Freedom islands.
Only the Fire Continent, the Wastes, the Orient and Scillia were trading with the Alliance, and they refused to cut off the trade routes they had with the Brotherhood too. It was a situation that could have been resolved with some careful negotiation, if both sides of the table were of the same mentality.
The Brotherhood said that it refused to cut its friends off from their food supplies, as the Dark Continent is on the poverty line at the best of times, and the jewels and metals of the Earth Continent were needed to support the economy and expansion of Freedom.
The Alliance refused to lower its prices, as the gold it gained from trade revenue was funding many social rejuvenation projects that were essential for the Alliance to maintain support with the people of each nation. The Spokesman and the eldest captain looked at each other again, and turned over the topic to another fresh one. But another argument came about in short order.
The Alliance had begun to rearm itself, putting a great deal of gold into the researching of new weapons technologies, exploring several possibilities from reputable nations, but others from sources that the Brotherhood said were ‘evil’.
The Alliance said that it needed the weaponry to defend from its enemies, because swords and sorcery hadn’t got the job done fast enough during the Demon War, that many lives had been lost because conventional warfare was too slow and ineffective.
The eldest captain then spoke, his only words that weren’t trying to calm an argument already in full swing.
‘But if you increase your arms, other nations have to increase the power of theirs. Then there will be no end to the need to constantly one-up each other’
‘We wouldn’t be using the weapons on mortal races’ one king said, ‘it is just a deterrent that we would keep locked up until the demons rose again’
‘The Demon War began because of emotional scarring that was left on the world after the end of the Viking age’ one captain said, a half-islander who was a very talented seer. ‘If we do not make wars again, then the barrier between Hell and the Octagram cannot weaken. We will just have to continue to deal with the ordinary levels of evil, which I’m sure the Slayers can keep an eye on’
‘I’m sure they can’ the Spokesman said, ‘but what if they fail? And the demonologists rip open another Hell Gate?’
‘Then we will deal with that rare circumstance’ the elder captain said, ‘The Slayers themselves are a backup plan, let us not make more weapons a backup to a backup. It is a waste of recourses that could be used on maintaining peace’
‘This is maintaining peace’ the Spokesman snapped.
‘By building weapons? I’m talking about education!’ the captain snapped back.
Then there was no stopping the actions that would come next. War. The very thing both sides had tried to put an end to forever was the very thing that they ended up brining about. It wasn’t like a war that anybody had seen so far though, this was a war of words.
Letters flew backwards and forwards from the Alliance headquarters on Montsegur to the Brotherhood headquarters in Port Royal. They were trying to negotiate the terms of anything they possibly could, just to buy time while each side armed themselves.
The lines of battle were being drawn, effectively. The nation of Freedom’s official borders extended only fifty yards in a rough circle from around their outermost islands, while thousands of yards were given from the coasts of the Alliance nations for their territories.
The non Alliance nations were considered neutral ground in all of these negotiations, free passage was of course granted to each other in those waters, but if any Freedom or Alliance ship strayed into enemy waters, there would be no second chance.
They talked more about trade price negotiations, but nothing budged on either side of the fence, the allies of both governments refusing to get involved in their ‘petty squabble’. To the backs of the negotiating table, the Brotherhood would always say it was petty, but while they were saying that, the Alliance would say the opposite.
The war preparations of each nation was different, but the end result was ultimately the same. Each government organised fortifications to be built at its main ports, and for there to be recruitment for the military, alongside efforts to obtain greater weapons from research of allies.
The Brotherhood, the name Freedom now almost unused for them, went to its Ice Continent allies to examine a piece of technology that the trolls had been using for almost a hundred years. With some enlargement, refinement and testing, it became the cannon, replacing ballistae as the main ranged weapon of ship-to-ship combat.
The Alliance, the names of its constituent nations now almost forgotten too, used Idividan research teams to come up with a powerful projectile launcher; and they had the cannon too, as the Idividans had based their research on the same trollish technology.
Both nations did the same experiments with ships, making them larger, stronger or quicker by learning the mathematical ways that materials and compositions effected every little thing about their ships.
They parted ways again, and now the true colours of each nation were truly shown, when it came to recruit troops and build fortifications.
The dwarven allies of the Brotherhood came to help them excavate the insides of cliff faces and mountain sides, creating forts that emerged from the very stone of the earth itself. They were paid in trade goods, food, alcohol and building lumber for the dwarven surface dwellings emerging on the Earth continent.
Then the Brotherhood manned these new forts with men and women who were infused with enough hatred of the Alliance to volunteer. They trained them up, showed them the ropes, literally and metaphorically, and built a professional army from willing populace.
The Alliance worked differently. They began with such tactics, and they still trained their men, but half of all recruits in their ranks were pressganged and taken aboard Alliance ships, or taxes were put up so high that the only way to get a hot meal was to join up and send the little money you made back to your struggling family.
Their forts were made in no less of a moral way either. The wages that they paid their workers were marginally better than that of servants or slaves, and the size that some of the forts reached were enough to make even the dwarf master engineers think twice.
Negotiations, or preparations, took so long that the old meeting was but a dusty page in a dusty book by now. This ‘cold war’ as some were calling it had been going on for almost one hundred years, it was the year 1205 before it turned hot. It would be wrong to say that all Hell broke loose, but there was always the chance that it would.