and Kallath soon became a welcome guest at the Imperial palace.
The Emperor Molvan was an elderly man with but one surviving
child, a daughter named Danera, who, as luck would have it, was
perhaps a year younger than Kallath. Matters between the two
young people progressed in a not uncommon fashion until Kallath,
at the age of eighteen, was recalled to Mal zeth to begin his military
career. Kallath, obviously a young man of genius, rose meteorically
through the ranks, reaching the position of Governor General of the
District of Rakuth. He was by then twenty-eight, becoming thereby
the youngest man ever to be elevated to the General Staff. A year
later Kallath journeyed to Melcene, where he and Danera were
married.
Kallath, in the years that followed, divided his time between
Melcene and Mal Zeth, carefully building a power-base in each
capital, and when Emperor Molvan died in 3829, Kallath was ready.
There had been, of course, others in line for the Imperial throne, but
during the years immediately preceding the old Emperor’s death,
most of these potential heirs had died – frequently under mysterious
circumstances. It was, nonetheless, over the violent objections of
many of the noble families of Melcena that Kallath was declared
Emperor of Melcena in 3830. These objections however, were
quieted with a certain brutal efficiency by Kallath’s cohorts.
Journeying the following year to Mal Zeth, Kallath brought the
Imperial Melcene army with him as far as the border of Delchin,
where they stood poised. At Mal Zeth, Kallath delivered his
ultimatum to the General Staff. His forces at that time were comprised of
the army of his own district, Rakuth, as well as those of the eastern
principalities in Karanda, where the Angarak military governors
had already sworn allegiances to him. These forces, coupled with
the Melcene Army on the Delchin border, gave Kallath absolute
military supremacy on the continent. His demand to the General Staff
was simple: he was to be appointed
Overgeneral-Commander-inChief of the Armies of Angarak. There were precedents, certainly. In
the past, an occasional brilliant general had been appointed to that
office, though it was far more common for the General Staff to rule
jointly. Kallath’s demand, however, brought something new into the
picture. His position as Emperor of Melcena was hereditary, and he
insisted that the office of Commander-in-Chief of Angarak also be
inheritable. Helplessly, faced with Kallath’s overpowering military
forces, the Angarak generals acceded to his demands. Kallath stood
supreme on the continent. He was Emperor of Melcena and
Commander-in-Chief of Angarak.
The integration of Melcena and Angarak which was to form
modern Mallorea was turbulent, but in the end it can be said that
Melcene patience won out over Angarak brutality’ Over the years
it became increasingly evident that the Melcene bureaucracy was
infinitely more efficient than Angarak military administration. The
first moves by the bureaucracy had to do with such mundane
matters as standards and currency. From there it was but a short step
to establishment of a continental Bureau of Roads. Within a few
hundred years, the bureaucracy had expanded until it ran virtually
every aspect of the life of the continent. As always, the bureaucracy
gathered up every talented man in every corner of Mallorea,
regardless of his race, and it soon became not at all uncommon for
administrative units to be comprised of Melcenes, Karands, Dalasians and
Angaraks. By 4400 the ascendancy of the bureaucrats was complete.
In the interim, the title’Commander-in-Chief-of-Angarak’had begun
to gradually fall into disuse, in some measure perhaps because
the bureaucracy customarily addressed all communications to ‘The
Emperor’. Peculiarly, there appears not to have been a specific point
at which ‘The Emperor of Melcene’ became the ‘Emperor of
Mallorea’, and such usage was never formally approved until after
the disastrous adventure in the west which culminated in the Battle
of Vo Mimbre.
The conversion of the Melcenes to the worship of Torak was at
best superficial. The sophisticated Melcenes pragmatically accepted
the forms of Angarak worship out of a sense of political expediency
but the Grolims were unable to command the kind of abject
submission to the Dragon God which had always characterized the
Angarak.
In 4850, however, Torak himself suddenly emerged from his eons
of seclusion. A vast shock ran through all of Mallorea as the living
God of Angarak, his maimed face concealed behind the polished
steel mask, appeared at the gates of Mal Zeth. The Emperor was
disdainfully set aside and Torak once again assumed his full
authority as ‘Kal’ – King and God. Messengers were immediately sent to
Cthol Murgos, Mishrak ac Thull and Car og Nadrak, and a council
of war was held at Mal Zeth in 4852. The Dalasians, the Karands
and the Melcenes were stunned by the sudden appearance of a
figure they had always thought was purely mythical, and their
shock was compounded by the presence of Torak’s Disciples, Zedar,
Ctuchik and Urvon. Torak was a God, and did not speak except to
issue commands. Ctuchik, Zedar and Urvon, however, were men,
and they questioned and probed and saw everything with a kind
of cold disdain. They saw immediately what Torak himself was
strangely incapable of seeing – that Mallorean society had become
almost totally secular – and they took steps to rectify that situation.
A sudden reign of terror descended upon Mallorea. The Grolims
were quite suddenly everywhere, and secularism was, in their eyes, a
form of heresy. The sacrifices, which had become virtually unknown,
were renewed with fanatic enthusiasm, and soon -not a village in all
of Mallorea did not have its altar and its reeking bonfire. In one
stroke the Disciples of Torak overturned eons of rule by the military
and the bureaucracy and returned the absolute domination of the
Grolim. When they had finished, there was not one facet of
Mallorean life that did not bow abjectly to the will of Torak.
The mobilization of Mallorea in preparation for the war with the
west virtually depopulated the continent. The Angaraks and the
Karands were eventually marched north to the land bridge crossing
to northern most Gar og Nadrak, and the Dalasians and Melcenes
moved to Dal Zerba, where fleets were constructed to ferry them
across the Sea of the East to southern Cthol Murgos. Torak’s overall
strategy was profoundly simple. The northern Malloreans were to
join with the Nadraks, the Thulls and the northern Murgos for the
strike into Drasnia and Algaria; the southern Malloreans to join
forces with the southern Murgos, await Torak’s command, and then
march northwesterly. The goal was to crush the west between these
two huge armies. The disaster which overtook the northern column
at Vo Mimbre was in large measure set off by the lesser-known
disaster which befell the southern forces in the Great Desert of
Araga in central Cthol Murgos. The freak storm which swept in off
the Great Western Sea in the early spring of 4875 caught the
southern Murgos, the Melcenes and the Dalasians in that vast wasteland
and literally buried them alive in the worst blizzard in recorded
history. When the storm finally abated after about a week, the
southern column was mired down in fourteen-foot snowdrifts
which persisted until early summer. And then, with a sudden rise in
temperature, the snow-melt turned the desert into a huge quagmire.
It is now quite evident that the storm and the conditions which
followed were not of natural origin. None of the various theories put
forth to explain it, however, is quite satisfactory. Whatever the cause,
the results were one of the great tragedies in human history. The
southern army, trapped in that wasteland first by snow and cold and
then by an ocean of mud, perished. The few survivors who came
straggling back at the end of the summer told tales of horror so
ghastly that they do not bear repeating.
The two-fold catastrophe which had occurred in the west,
coupled with the apparent death of Torak at the hands of the Rivan
Warder, utterly demoralized the societies of Mallorea and of the
western Angarak Kingdoms. Expecting a counter-invasion, the
Murgos retreated into fortified positions in the mountains. Thullish
society disintegrated entirely, reverting to crude village life. The
somewhat more resilient Nadraks took to the woods, and much of
the independence of the modern-day Nadrak derives from that
period of enforced self-reliance. In Mallorea, however, events took a
different course. The doddering old Emperor emerged from
retirement to reassume authority and to try to rebuild the shattered
bureaucracy. Grolim efforts to maintain their control were met with
universal hatred. Without Torak, the Grolims had no real power.
Though most of his sons had perished at Vo Mimbre, one gifted
child remained to the old Emperor, the son of his old age, a boy of
about seven. The Emperor spent the few years remaining to him
instructing, schooling and preparing his son, Korzeth, for the task of
ruling his far-flung Empire. When advanced years finally rendered
the old Emperor incompetent, Korzeth, then aged about fourteen,