Weekly Lore 2: Azem

[Mislav]

Without further ado, here is some more elaboration on the lore behind Istaria. I'm sorry its been such a long time since the last one, there are only a few of us, so the individual workload is huge.

Following the collapse of the Karskan nation around the turn of the second century, another power was building its presence in the south - and had been for a decade or so, by our best guesses. These were the Azi, or Azemi, coming from 'Az’, their word for the sun. Of course, you're familiar with the Azemi Empire of now, but you may be wondering: were they always this crazy?

The answer is no. They were worse.

Central to the Azemi culture is the belief that they, ultimately, are the people of the sun. We don't know much about their origins, for reasons that will be made clear in due time, but we know that they landed on Istaria from somewhere to the south around 170. When they arrived they were already an advanced culture - though nowhere near the level of the ancient Ibitari - and they were united under the leadership of a single figure: Darridh the Great, who called himself the son of Az and Hanno, the Azemi god of the moon, and from whom the emperors of today are descended. As far as we can tell, Darridh and his advisors commanded the supreme trust of the early Azemi people, because they controlled all the movements of their people. From their landing point at the modern city of Azir, the armies of the Azemi were sent out to various places across what we now know as the Azemi heartlands to set up military colonies, places where the soldiers of Azem could expect to live and hold land and live well with their families, provided they policed their community in accordance with divine law and responded to the imperial call to arms. The martial culture, and religious devotion, of the early Azemi is hard to under-represent. These were a people who believed their civilisation depended on them. Perhaps it did.

Their armies’ obligation to serve the state helped the fledgling nation form especially quickly. The soldiers built the roads, villages and defences of their nation under the watchful eyes of their Satips, who were joint secular and divine governors - receiving power from Darridh and from Az himself. Their society was built on the backs of their martial culture; their neighbours, in what we call Sondhara, couldn't have been more their opposite.

Over the Red Mountains from Azem was the land of Sondhara, which had been inhabited by the Sondharans since long before the nation of Azem. Unlike the Azemi, to the Sondharans, the concept of war was entirely foreign. When these two culture, who couldn't have been more different, first met, the results were deadly.