Bloodsword: War of the Leaf

Chapter 1: Dawn of the Dead

Cos, the great Solavar philosopher, once pondered:

 ‘The universe itself, that great sea of stars, is such a vast place that each world that brings forth life becomes as a grain of sand on the very edge of that great sea!   As such, how can we command the Maker’s attention as we plead for aide in our troubles and travails?  Does He not have greater concerns? Yet, I attest to you that he   knows every heartbeat of a singing tace (a beautiful songbird found in the forests of A’Chura, a southern continent.  It was prized almost as much for its plumage as for  its song, which is beautiful and hauntingly pure) in the trees, every rustle of a blade of grass in the wind, and every waking thought of every thinking being in the   universe.

 Thus, each grain of sand becomes of import, worthy of the Maker’s attention. For, is it not written that, if every grain of sand were to be removed, a beach would not  exist, nor would it be as whole even with the loss of a single grain?!?’   

If Cos had been able to see this particular grain of sand, this world called  Quelaezaun from space, he would have seen a beautiful, cloud-wreathed planet with topaz blue oceans and lushly green continents.  The largest of the northern continents, a wedge-shaped mass dominated by a massive inland sea with the broadest part laying near to Quelaezaun’s equator, was named Lasis’Nar by its inhabitants and is home to most of Quelaezaun’s civilized nations.

‘Ah, the green shores of Lasis’Nar!’  Wrote Dagdelan, a Mardish general returning from the land of Brodbe’Gan after winning a great battle against the Solavar in the Sun Path War.  ‘How have I yearned for the plains and hills of my home!’   

As Cae’Suran, that great Giver of Light and Life and the domain of the First Dragon, rises in the east, his golden light races across the Sea of Promise towards those self-same green shores that Dagdelan wrote so lovingly of.  Then, in a golden explosion of light, Cae’Suran breaches the eastern peaks of the Na’Esa’En, the Silver Cloud Mountains, to splash across the rolling hills and grassy plains of eastern Lodremoor.

Sprinting hard like a springbuck running from the hunt, the light springs over Caistilan’s forests and, like a declaration of the purest joy, announces itself on the shores of the Meridian Sea, it’s sapphire blue waters set a glimmer by Cae’Suran’s morning kiss.   

And thus did the soft gray walls of Gan Tarol begin to glow, touched by that early morning caress, this morning.  A morning seemingly like every other that had dawned out of a cloudless sky on this, the first day of spring over the greatest free port on the southeastern shores of the Meridian.  

But, unknown to the inhabitants of that glowing city, nor to the myriad citizens of the Sun Empire of the Solavar, or the citizens of the Mardish Empire of Emerald, and to all inhabitants of Quelaezaun for that matter, this morning was like no other!  For it was a beginning, a dawn of sorts, prophesied since the Beginning of Time; the start of a journey that would see thousands, yea, millions ripped from their lives and sent unprepared to the halls of the Seventh Dragon to meet their Maker.

For it was the beginning of the End, the beginning of the T’sar, the Great War, the War of the Leaf.

It was the Dawn of the Dead!                                  

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Rigging creaking and canvas sails cracked as the Cloudwalker heeled to starboard and made hard for Tarol Harbor and the port of Gan Tarol.  She was a four-masted schooner inbound from Los Siban to the north, bearing Jardan ores and smelted metals for the Solavar refinery north of Gan Tarol at Dakker’s Mirk.  She was to off- load at Gan Tarol, take on a cargo of precious metals, furs and leathers, then make smartly to Mar Dinas, a Mardish city on the Meridian’s southern shores, taken by the Solavar 150 years ago in the Sun Path War.