Historical fiction is great and all, but have you tried fictional history?
You say her name is Anna? This may be a lark, but…is this Anna Vael we’re talking about?
Godshell. Then she’s really still alive. And you don’t have a clue who she is, do you? Fine, then, I’ll tell you while she listens–yes, I know she’s listening. Anyone would know that if they just knew who she was.
Anna Vael’s limited fame–or infamy, depending on the side you might have been on in a conflict that ended over a century ago–has to do with the events of the Blood God’s Dereliction, which I think you’ll agree is a poorly-recorded story these days. Piraeus keeps uncommonly good records, so around here, we at least know that the Dereliction did happen, but it’s worth noting that in the stretch between here and Ulrich’s Bend, most consider the Blood God a myth at this point. Something to tell the kids. The type of thing you don’t need to bring economics into–the Blood God disappeared, and his empire crumbled, that’s it.
Of course, in the real world, it doesn’t work like that. The Blood God disappeared, yeah, but he spent most of his time disappeared for the decades before that anyway. For the last thirty, forty years of his reign, he made a low-single-digit number of public appearances, all of them spectacular, filled with mass murder. Putting down rebellions, mostly. When you add in accounts from much earlier in the Kolai Dominion–recovered from the Blood Knight stronghold here in the city, actually; Peren Stratus made sure the archives were extracted before he burned the place–you get a picture of a Blood God who was interested, to a point, in a particular sort of rule, but very disinterested in personally ruling. So very early on, he handed the job off to the Magni Kolai.
The Magni were like his high priests, selected meritocratically, but the merits they were selected for–devotion to the Blood God and his philosophies, and absurd, raw, magical talent–mostly didn’t translate to skill in governance. You probably had one or two that figured out what needed to be done, and they channeled a whole lot of hostile work environment onto the Migni Kolai, their handpicked subordinates who went on to become the Dominion’s central bureaucracy.
This kept the ship sailing for a century or so, but as the Blood God grew less and less engaged, the Magni were left with way less pressure to get any of it done right, which meant that more and more of the Migni positions got filled lazily. On average, that meant you had folks in there mildly unsuited to keeping an empire running. As it got worse, it meant that more and more positions in the bureaucracy were filled–as a matter of course–by bribery and nepotism. Remember: Kol’s anti-corruption measures didn’t have moral norms. They were, collectively, “if you break it, I’ll turn all of your veins inside out”. As the guy saying that stopped paying attention, the backroom deals stopped having consequences. Then it took awhile, but eventually the cracks in the system caught up with them.
When, for example, the city of Cantabyz suffered a plague that decimated their iron output for the better part of a year, a skilled provincial governor might have channeled central resources toward aid to mitigate the economic disruption. They might have adjusted taxation, pushing that burden into future, less plague-ridden years. But should the governor not have reacted at all, the city, already impoverished by circumstance, would have been liable to snap when the Dominion’s unadjusted taxes dragged what was left of it into the ground. So they would rebel–and they did rebel, as it happened. The Blood God dragged himself out of his temple, put down the rebellion, then went back to bed or whatever. Except he put down the rebellion by killing everyone involved–along with a really-not-trivial number of bystanders–which meant that the economic impact radiated out to the rest of the Dominion.
Long story short, this all happened a couple of times, in this outlying province or that one, before the economic implications finally crashed into Kol proper, in the form of a famine. And this time, when the torches and pitchforks crossed that unimaginably foolhardly threshold of marching on the Blood God’s temple and throwing the doors wide…they lucked out. The bastard was gone. To this day, no one knows what happened to him, but that’s not the point. The point is that this was where the games began. It’s where Anna Vael comes in, in fact.
To clarify, when I say the torches and pitchforks lucked out, I mean their cause–and, again, the bystanders–lucked out. Those specific idiots all died very quickly, because the Magni were plenty capable of putting down a disorganized riot by themselves. Still, I don’t want that initial stall to detract from how big a paradigm shift this was. The Blood God was, not mincing words, a god. He killed the Dead Queen of Khet. There literally is no entity–not even a collective entity–that I am confident could stand against him. That’s a more nuanced qualification than I would like to make, but the point is: Overthrowing him was straight-up impossible. Overthrowing the Magni Kolai, on the other hand, was merely difficult.
At this point, I’ll add that the number of sources on the record declines precipitously. There were lots of corroborating sources for the rebellion at Cantabyz, the famine, the storming of the temple, but from then on, the only account that’s survived to today is by our friend, the Abbot Ezekiel Polyon, who, as you are well aware, may or may not currently have command of a stable nervous system. That said, he did keep regular journals up to a point, and those have since been copied extensively.
In any case, Polygon describes Anna Vael as one of the central players of the Dereliction. Prior to the riot that reached the Blood God’s temple, she was an underworld fixer of sorts, some mix of information dealer, mercenary, and assassin, earning her bread on whatever skulduggery the Migni let happen within their walls. Pretty sharp–she’d have to be for the ensuing events to be true–and apparently notable for her appearance. Her body was, he says, infested with flies–to the point where he was not sure whether she was carrying the insects with her or if, somehow, she was the flies, and the body was merely a vessel.
In any case, in the leadup to the big riot, the Migni must’ve seen the writing on the wall. They realized that if the Blood God got involved, it might not have been on their terms, so they raised a militia to keep the peace and recalled a selection of the Blood Knights–Polyon included–to lead it.
Solid short term plan, yeah? The problem is that militias are rickety things, lots of competing priorities and loyalties, cracks that will get exploited sooner or later if they don’t get cleaned up into a formally-administrated army. And despite the militia’s best efforts, the riot did break through to the temple, and the revelation therein meant that keeping the operation running wasn’t discretionary anymore.
The Kolai tried to recall more Blood Knights, but news traveled faster than their missives. A number of Kol’s outlying provinces rebelled outright–Piraeus included, and the question of loyalist reinforcements became one of if, not when. And in the meantime, they were left with this large force of conscripts and mercenaries, poorly paid and extremely sensitive to payment, trying to hold back a tide of suddenly-emboldened insurgent movements with whom they probably shared more in common than their Kolai overlords.
Vael was among those conscripts, and she made herself very useful very quickly by gathering intelligence on the rebel cells, which she provided to the militia, obviously–but also to Polyon and the Migni, who were at this point growing suspicious of the militia’s intermediary leadership. The commander who bubbled to the top of that mess, a former mercenary named Adrian Martell, was charismatic, clearly ambitious, and beholden to the Kolai solely on the basis of coin. His loyalties were in sharp doubt, but based on Vael’s surveillance, he was making no imminent moves to consolidate power. And with micro-rebellions breaking out all across the territory map–vandalism, attacks on tax collectors, mass theft of the Migni’s stockpiled food–replacing him would have been costly indeed.
The balancing act continued for months, as message after message rolled in, sending word of the slaughter of the Blood Knights in Piraeus and elsewhere, all confirming that, ultimately, no reinforcements would be coming. The Migni’s resources began to run thin. And then, gradually, they began taking casualties.
Assassination attempts. Poorly equipped, poorly thought out, by Polyon’s description. Usually they would fail, but occasionally they would get lucky. And all of them were fanatics, apparently brainwashed to the edge of sanity, all repeating the same mantra as they were imprisoned, interrogated, tortured to death, what have you:
“Forty hands with forty daggers will find the oppressor’s heart.”
Pretty cold, right? Wish I’d thought of it. Well, the Migni started dropping, either from these creepy assassins or just outright desertion. Then, the Magni started infighting. There were just nine or ten of them at this point, all wildly-dangerous humanoid death engines, but in their jockeying for power, one of them was killed, one severely injured before Polyon finally found an out for the Dominion. Vael delivered him a report one day detailing evidence from scores of witnesses that all of the insurgent movements in the city were being coordinated by a “Gutterway Oracle”, who she identified as Karl Hamlin, another militia conscript who had been selling tax collector schedules for favors and coin to anyone who would listen. And Hamlin, she said, was lying low at that moment at an inn on the outskirts of Kol’s pastoral territories.
Polyon interlaced his account of what followed with so much self-flagellation that it’s frankly hard to parse, but my translation is this: He took this intel to the Magni and gathered a task force comprised of most of the remaining Blood Knights in the city to go hunt down Hamlin. And as soon as he left Kol, Adrian Martell commanded his troops to slaughter the Magni.
The truth, it turned out, was that Karl Hamlin was nothing but a skilled distraction. He may, in fact, have been delivering the messages the rebels were coordinating around, but Anna Vael was writing them. She was collaborating with Martell to ensure the militia always kept a brisk pace just two steps behind. She was the one who brainwashed the Migni’s assassins, who coordinated the forty hands and forty daggers which bled out the Kolai bureaucracy, primarily to develop and test a method by which the militia might actually kill the Magni. Her answer was simple enough to be upsetting: snake venom. It stops blood from coagulating. Coat arrows and blades with the shit, and now you can make wounds a blood mage can’t easily close.
To Polyon’s credit, he smelled shit way sooner than he should’ve. He aborted his mission just a few hours after his departure, but he still returned too late. By his account, he made it to Kol’s central plaza just in time to witness the last Magnia, surrounded by dismembered militiamen, fall dead at Anna Vael’s feet.
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