Heartstone

The Velvet Kingdom

1200+ Years Ago

Gus Ghenli

Head Knight of the Order of Hazel

The Velvet Kingdom was made up of a single small city on the edge of the Velveteen Woods. The forest was a blanket of white birch and metallic golden fir trees that began in the impossibly tall mountains to the east and cascaded westward over the foothills, tapering off into grasslands.

Velvet was a young kingdom, only three generations old. The kingdom had come into being because of an alliance between two desperate species: humans and kanins, a rabbit people.

A wave of humans had emerged from the Curtain to Drearia. Like all such population waves to emerge from there, the humans had been driven out of the region by the elves living around the Curtain and had left to fend for themselves. The forest elves are no friends to a species too often violent, short-sighted, and greedy for their tastes.

Wandering northeast, the human wave had crossed a mighty river and found themselves in the grasslands beyond. Here, they had met the kanins. Kanins are about two-thirds the size of humans, and while they usually walk on their hind legs and are vaguely humanoid, they have more in common with rabbits than humans. They have short fur in a variety of colours, puffy tails, tall ears, large front teeth, and thick legs and hindquarters that allow them to move quickly and strike powerfully when cornered.

The kanins had been in a precarious position at the time, hunted nearly to extinction by roving packs of lupus, a predatory wolf people who were far larger and more dangerous. While the rabbit-like kanins were very fast runners and excellent at hiding, they were less well adapted to fighting and had never developed much in the way of weapons or defences because the tribal people had never settled down into cities and industry, only digging themselves underground burrows that could be abandoned if necessary. Unfortunately, no matter how fast you are, you can only run for so long.

The newcomer humans, on the other hand, were well-experienced in matters of industry and warfare. They knew how to handle spears as well as plows and could build with stone so strong that no wolf could blow it down, no matter how much they huffed and puffed.

It had taken a desperate year to fence the first joint human-kanin camp with a wooden palisade made of tree trunks sunk into the soil in a ring, working while fending off lupus raids. It had been another decade for the first stone wall to be completed. And while lupus had attacked in force, both humans and kanins had somehow managed to survive—together.

Today, that first stone wall marked the boundary of the kingdom's Watership Castle and its grounds. The castle was half above ground, with an extensive warren below. A second, much larger wall had been built further out, a ring of iron-rich granite that was so reminiscent of dried blood that the citizens had taken to calling it the Redwall. The project had taken nearly fifty years to construct as the community grew, something it had done rather quickly. It turns out that both humans and kanins are virile and very enthusiastic breeders, both within their species and with each other.

By the time the third generation was producing the fourth, the two species were already becoming quite mixed, the strengths of both humans and kanins found in their offspring. The kingdom's population was exploding.

Gus Ghenli, Head Knight of the Order of Hazel, came from pure kanin stock. Not counting his long, black ears, he was only as tall as a human woman and probably weighed less without his armour. He wore that armour now, a steel breastplate dinged from blows both in training and in real battles against lupus. He casually leaned against the wall, fur that was graying from age now sweaty from drilling. He watched the other knights sparring in the training grounds outside the castle.