Arcél 1690

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Arcél 1510

Arcél 1850

1 The end of Krwŋ
2 Repercussions
3 The Lé
4 Monster invasion
5 Characteristic figure

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The end of Krwŋ

For some time it looked like the saviour of Krwŋ would be the ko bean; it produced much higher yields than millet and pell and grew even in depleted soil, as long as there was plenty of water and animal dung.

Jostling over water became intense and often violent. Desperate peasants would alter the channels during the night to divert water from their neighbors; entire villages would do the same thing on a larger scale. Around 1650 a drought began that halved the water supply, and in 1673 a plague destroyed almost the entire millet crop.

Millions died of starvation, disease, or violence. The country erupted into civil war that caused even more misery, and disrupted the irrigation works.

Within a century the empire of Krwŋ had disappeared from the map. Its territory was largely deforested; its largest cities were virtual deserts. It would never support a high-density agricultural population again.

(This process had not finished by the date of this map, which therefore shows the last pockets of Krwŋese authority.)

To the east, the Sumë herdsmen have expanded at the expense of both Uyram and Kem.

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Repercussions

Krwŋ’s neighbors were subject to streams of refugees; when the limits of charity were reached, border posts were set up to keep them out, and the refugees resorted to violence, sometimes backed by what remained of the Krwŋese army. Uytai was strong enough to push these back, but they did overwhelm Tueʔ and the northern half of Siad βo, establishing post-Krwŋese kingdoms there.

In 1684 the Uytainese emperor Twanwey led a campaign to reconquer Uykhrai, the former capital taken by Krwŋ two centuries before. (The Uytainese took particular pleasure in toppling a statue of Nyanyar erected by Susirn and installing it in a public urinal.)

Twanwey continued north with the intention of conquering the city of Krwŋ; but the scenes of misery he encountered made him reconsider. The country looked like it had already lost a war; there was also the question of what to do with all these people if they became his subjects. “The mad ancestors have punished them, I will do no more,” he explained, in the form of a carved inscription at Twot.

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The Lé

The 1500s were dominated by a three-way war between the three Beic kingdoms. There was an accepted protocol to these wars: after a certain point one party would sue for peace, and get it, at the cost of a few towns. This prevented the destruction from getting out of hand, but also allowed the series of wars to drag on for decades.

In 1556 Jansɛ̀ defeated Pànsàɔ strongly enough to detach the cities of Kêkè and Sîpó; but in 1588 the two cities rebelled and maintained their independence, forming a fourth kingdom. Its royal family was named Lé, so it was known as Lésàɔ. Pànsàɔ attempted to recover its territory, only to be defeated in turn, with the loss of Joní. The Lé capital, befitting a tendency for the center of power in the Beic sphere to move northward over time, was Sîpó.

The Lé queen, Sɔnjɔs, now attempted an unprecendented direct strike on Jansɛ̀ (1595). This started with a diversion: an attack from the west disguised to look like an invasion from Dásnâr. The Jansenes duly sent their army west, only to find that their opponents had melted away. They reappeared at Jansɛ̀ itself with a double-pronged attack, boats overwhelming the docks area from the north and archers and spearmen from the east.

Sɔnjɔs now held the most populous Bé region, and the strategic initiative; it was not difficult to take over Pànsàɔ (by 1601). Dásnâr was more difficult, but the outcome was not in doubt; Sɔnjɔs’s daughter Jolɔ finished the job in 1613. When the Krwŋese collapsed the Lé were able to recover the highlands to the southeast.

The queendom of Hàɔráŋ was organized around 1670.

The expansion of Mɔłɔsɔu has provoked the organization of the first Minče state, Hakesata, along the Kełunu river. The Hake resisted not only Beic colonists but their culture; they insisted on male rule, rather more so in fact than other Minče tribes, as well as on their own monotheistic religion.

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Monster invasion

In 1690 the Lé faced an entirely novel crisis. Thousands of kilometers away, the great ktuvok empire of Munkhâsh had been destroyed by the Cađinorians and Tžuro. Many ktuvoks were killed or stayed under human control; but perhaps a thousand of them looked for a new territory to settle. They chose the wetlands at the mouth of the Lɛn, one of the few regions of Arcél which was suitable as a ktuvok habitat, or could be made so.

The Lé thus faced an invasion by creatures they didn’t even have words for. (Eventually they settled on a new one— łasdrûr ‘sea monster’). Jansɛ̀ was conquered for the second time in a century. The Jansenes expected to be looted and killed; what happened was perhaps worse; they were now the slaves of enormous, malevolent ocean creatures.

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