Centuries before the Urapi had been flushed out of Urapital, their home in exile. Caught in a cycle of civil strife in which so-called Khanite and Alesian followers fought for religious supremacy, they had been too weak and too ignorant to fight off the Lydians who managed the conquest in a single drawn out campaign.

The consensus among the Urapi was that it was a conquest that needed to happen. The Urapi needed to be handed a defeat that showed them their ignorance, how far they had strayed from the light. They had been caught in a theological debate in which neither side held more than the smallest fragment of the truth, and their defeat had allowed the Sharites to steward the Urapi to theological truth. The strongest had joined the Urapi first in their mountain-based raids, then in their voyage to the lands of Okran's gift, and in so doing embraced Shar.

Those that were left behind, though, submitted to the Lydian yoke. Most viewed the conquest as a relief. To the farmers and the shepherds, it finally brought peace after endless generations of strife and war. To the miners, the craftsmen, the scholars and the merchants it brought them into a market the size and strength of which they had never before encountered, awash with wisdom and with coin.

Over time Urapital saw migration from the rest of what had been, for the majority of their yoke, the Lydian empire. People of all sorts made their way there to hawk their wares or to seek some sort of opportunity. As a result the population of the region had become distinctly weird, even if it was still Varic.

Weird because... well. They weren't Sharite, Khanite or even Alesians, but instead practiced a bastardised mishmash of all three in addition to the pagan gods of Lydia. They had totally forgotten about The Black Sun in favour of a cosmic plurality that presented the Varic perspective as one among many.

Moreover, the so called 'Talites' did not even maintain a doctrine of Varic supremacy. Though they still claimed descent from Vari, they said that other 'First Humans' were born across the Earth at the same time and had their own progeny, that other people were independently born of the Sun. It was an aggressive blasphemy, one that would almost have been wholly unforgiveable... had the locals not kept Eternal Flames in the temples, and had they not at least had the werewithal to declare independence following the collapse of the Immortal Empire.

They were weird bastards, but their deepest core was still pure. Could still be salvaged.

There was an extra problem, though, at least so far as the Erdai were concerned: the Varican of Urapivarta, the independence of which was assured with Urapi troops, resisted annexation. Though the men and women of the Varicarn were grateful to their Urapi kin, they had also grown mistrustful of them in the years since they had been conquered by the Immortal Empire.

Where had their brothers been, they asked, when they needed them? They had fled across the mountains even whilst other stayed to fight, to die, for their homeland. What right had they to govern those who they had left behind? They had offered aid, yes, but that was the bare minimum expected of them in the Yuddsvarga. It did not entitle them to overlordship.

So it was that when Urapi armies marched west to recover Urapital, it was under the direction of the new Varicarni, not the Erda Tupar.

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