History
The Poison War; Creation of the Thrall (390 years before story setting)
What started as a minor Savosi-Brair conflict swelled to encompass their vassal states, and eventually threw an entire continent into desperate violence. For the first time in generations, the mage heads of great houses, and eventually the emperors themselves took the field. Their magic poisoned crucial farmland, and started plagues and famines that claimed millions of lives.
The Savosi were the first to break the taboo on human transmutation. After a lavish parade and feast, the imperial family requested volunteers from the lowest castes of society. They promised compensation: the volunteers would be heroes, and they would be given forty ounces of aurum apiece – enough to feed a family for several years. If any (unlikely) damage was done to their bodies, they would receive a lifetime of care from the mage castes. Their descendants would be cared for as well, in perpetuity. The law was already written.
Over four hundred volunteers were chosen; young men and women, those least ravaged by famine and disease. Thousands more were turned away, and crowded the gates of the imperial palace for days after.
Record of the exact process used to create the first thralls were lost during the later Sack of Savos. What is known is that massive aurum exposure was used in combination with magic; the volunteers reportedly threw up blood, and seeped grey fluid from their pores for weeks after the procedure. Their transformation was painful, and unexpectedly dangerous. More than a quarter died, and the rest bore little resemblance to the current, relatively stable thrall-form. They were more deformed, and much, much bigger.
The court poet Tanis May described many in The Volunteers, for example the former farmer Aabwe;
Home-form was almost non-existent for the first thralls; at best they could reach an uncomfortable, shivering bipedal shape. Their human lives were over.
Yet the two-hundred odd thrall soldiers who were fit enough for war did unspeakable carnage on the Brairi ranks. The Brairi had no defense – their mundane weapons barely pierced thrall skin. They were not prepared to see men eaten alive, they had few vehicles and horses, many were starving themselves. After just two months of this the two empires declared a cease-fire for the first time in a decade. Brair ceded four major cities and sixty thousand square miles of arable land.
The Retaliation
After four years of cease-fire, crops were growing again in the fringes of the poison wastes. In the uneasy peace the worst of the famines had ended. The Volunteers slept most of the day in the gardens of the imperial palaces, where they were confined as one of the conditions of the treaty. Some struggled to remember human language, while others wrote the first long, convoluted thrall songs. Others still were chained to walls, having turned on their own once the war ended.
So the southern border was defenseless, when over a thousand new thralls erupted from the frozen Arals.
Unknown even to Savic intelligence, the Brair-Ysandi Pact had cooperated to steal the formulas used to transform the Volunteers. In the cold southern reaches they had been producing their own thralls, which now numbered in the thousands.
What followed was a twenty-year arms race between the two powers, with each resorting to drafts, aggressive colonisation of border territories and increasingly desperate arcane experiments. By the end of this period the children of the first thralls had come of age, and it was clear that the ‘race’ not only bred true but were more stable, more predictable than the first thralls. With chronic aurum shortages on both sides, both started breeding thralls by the thousands.
The Long War
The Long War is the name given to the on-off conflict of more than three hundred years that followed the Retaliation. Occasional periods of peace arise – more stalemates than anything else – as both sides struggled to pour more resources into the fronts. The longest breaks have lasted almost thirty years, but few would dispute that the war is a singular, ever-present entity. It may hibernate, but it never dies.
After so long, humans have almost completely abandoned the South and East fronts, the hotspots of the worst fighting. A few human officers struggle through short postings there. These are mostly fourth-sons and political outcasts from the mage classes, who spend their service sheltered in lavish bunkers surrounded by thrall and homunculus servants. In every practical sense the fighting is left to the thralls themselves, who operate more like anarchist geurilla bands than any organised force. With inconsistent supplies and no real command structure they spend much of their time hunting for food, writing songs and caring for children.
Bearing children is one of many supposedly-banned practices in the Corps that have not been enforced for decades. Thrall platoons are meant to be single-sex, but platoon splits rarely survive contact with the front. It’s common for females to bear infants while serving, which are called ‘field babes’. The children are doted on by the whole platoon. By tacit understanding, even enemy combatants never harm them – the standard practice is to pretend you don’t see a child if you do stumble on one in combat.
Official Corps policy is that children are to be removed from the front once a year by landcar, but in reality they are often hidden by desperate mothers until they are several years old or even reach adulthood. So, there are now generations of thralls that have never seen the cities they fight to defend, and barely speak standard Savosi.
Within those cities, humans have come to see the war as an abstraction – a kind of permanent tax on their resources and a distant source of entertainment. War novels and plays are popular, starring young mage heroes who defeat hundreds of the enemy single-handed. As the Front cities are now abandoned ruins, actual human casualties are rare.