Three summers. Three great harvests. Three Samvastatn celebrations. Three years.

That was how long the bloodshed had lasted on the Luzum. In ancient times the Luzum had been marred by conflict. The great wars of the God-Kings, of Bartallamr and Belisam. Of the great droughts and the Kallizan hordes of Anug that lay waste to the Srerr. Of the creation of life itself with Niovollin and Samvastatn and its near-downfall by Dezmedetem and Kloponin. Only in his youth, in the stories told by his parents and his friends, had Rituxim ever known the Luzum to be something other than the connection of cities and goods he had come to know. Never had he nor anyone around him known the cities to war with one another, to fight and kill and murder and pillage, to raze and rape and salt and devastate.

This world had become like the stories and it was his own fault. A drop of water plopped onto his hair, his nose, then his shoulder. He looked up. A dark storm of a cloud had billowed above him, wind whipping it forward along with his hair and his robes. Beneath him his horse stirred, shaking its neck as the raindrops fell with greater intensity. He stared down at the burning city below him. Clouds of thick, black smoke swelled from the blazing hearth of houses and homes below him. The rain would stamp it out eventually, but at this pace not in time. A steady stream of people left the town in a line coming up the hill toward him.

Slaves. Prisoners. The conquered. The line was thronged by some on horseback, the men of Kinakals guiding the human loot of war back up to their temporary camp. The rain was coming on thick now and Rituxim pulled his horse to go back to their camp, a shoddy block of buildings built just for this attack. The Ibandr settlement, Shuntl they called it, burned brightly behind him.

The Luzum was a different world indeed, and as the rain pouring onto Rituxim, it showed no signs of changing.

When the Anug horsemen attacked the two Ibandr outposts ringing Kinakals, the world turned on its head. There was a time when no one knew the treachery of Kinakals, of Rituxim and his friends, in the Flames of the outposts Shuhul and Triapr, when confusion was king. But that did not last long.

The Anug were confronted and defeated by a group of Ibandr, they were questioned and their true purpose and benefactors were found. But in the coming seasons, as other cities got word of what Kinakals had done, other outposts came under attack. Amiodarna supported Rituxim, sending gifts to the man and envoys asking only to be informed of the next time they planned on striking at what Ibandr stole from them. Kefakl was bloodier. They called upon their city-Paroxl, Ayubil, the Paroxl of divine success and order, and razed three separate outposts near and far to them, and even came upon Ibandr itself with the aid of the smaller settlement of Zola. Rituxim had even heard word of other cities who spoke strange and foreign tongues, of the Keshkavak in the north and the Kanga in the west doing the same.

But this unity against Ibandr was not to last. As Ibandr readied itself for total conflict, Amiodarna and Kinakals fell against one another over one dispute or another. Ibandr destroyed and razed Zola a year after and the great city of the Luzum and Kefakl fought each other bloody to the west. Dotl fell upon Kinakals, the Anug grew restless in the east and came to Amiodarna, Vankin and Kipr united against an Ibandr outpost in the far east but disagreed over the splitting of the new routes.

Chaos. Absolute chaos. With no sign of stopping. There was no telling who would join next.

______________________

Context: Ibandr outposts angered many people and cities along the Luzum and beyond, but no one dared to question the might of Ibandr until a band of foolhardy priests from Kinakals did just that. Now, old feuds and new and pouring into the light as cities turn on one another in a never ending frenzy. The Ibandr outposts are in chaos and already some Hortens settlements are being destroyed. The question is, how will other cultures react?