Many centuries before the founding of Equestria, Grogar, the concubine-born, half-sheep son of Emperor Melkarth of Gith, was crowned the last Emperor of Gith and the first Emperor of Tambelon in the same stroke. In his hoof, the Gollule Staff of Ruin, which he renamed ‘The Sonorous Sceptre’. Anointed in Bromine and crowned with the Three Bezoars (The Emperor’s Stone, the Moon’s Stone and the Warrior’s Stone), all goats in the vast capital city of Gongros bowed to him.
Though it is worth pointing out that he did not officially go by the title of ‘First’ Emperor of Tambelon. Because to call him ‘the first’ of anything would imply he would one day be replaced. And he pursued immortality and had, in some form, gained it. For a position he held for life, calling him ‘the First’ indirectly implied he could and would be killed somehow which was tantamount to treason and punished by death.
In fact, there were not a lot of things in Tambelon that were not punished by death. To say Grogar was authoritarian would be somewhat inaccurate as, as he’d demonstrated in his studies, law itself took second priority over simply having the power of life and death over his subjects. One’s fate was entirely dependent on the whims of Grogar. To be fair, it was so in the case of every ruler of Gith before him but only with Emperor Grogar in his new state of Tambelon were reason and responsibility completely cast to the winds. Previous emperors had no doubt varied in their sense of judgement but none could really tell whether Grogar had bad nor good judgement. For him, judgement came second to his own personal wishes.
This is not, however, to say he was incapable of rule. He was a highly intelligent monarch just not one who really cared about any individual under him and as far as research can tell, all of his reforms were done to satisfy his own needs rather than the state’s.
And while, in common history, these reforms are often glossed over in the face of his atrocities, his reforms can properly paint a picture of what sort of world he hoped to create, or at least experience.

One of his first reforms was the introduction of a vigorous new military policy.
The Grim-Hosts were assembled in a new and very precise order of rank and formation.
See here for details.
This, however, was unprecedented. To modern Equestria, this rank and file system is fair, if comparatively more callous, but to ancient Gith, it upset the centuries old balance of power.
When an Emperor of Gith called to arms, every patrician in his domain was called to bring their own armies. These patricians were known as Eyans and without them, the Emperor was nothing.
The Emperor of Gith had no permanent standing army at his disposal, he had the royal guard in Gongros but it was impractical to move them from their position. The ruler of goatkind’s army came from the thousands of noble Eyan families, many as old as the royal line itself, who possessed knowledge of arms and armour.
When war was declared, the Emperor would send out messages to every Eyan house to marshal on his command. Receiving their Emperor’s summons for war, these Eyans, together with their children and grandchildren and any kinbeast, bodyguard or servant who could arm themselves, strode out of their castles, or Dakla as they were called, and marshalled the peasants, the Grullas, under their individual domains and called them to arm themselves with whatever they used to defend their own families at home.
Some trained commoners, town guards or bounty-hunters, would be called to train and lead small missions as goats-at-arms, known as Sbikas. Many lords of wealth would also hire Yim’Kads- essentially mercenaries (Although in the more rural areas, this would amount to little more than putting up a stand at a crossroads and giving a silver piece to every well-armed volunteer, most of these would be bandits who preyed on the peasants in peacetime)
In these battle-herds, the armed Grullas would be kept in line by the Sbikas and Yim’Kads and headed by their Eyans and their retinues with detachments commanded by Blaans (Noble-born warriors under the Eyans domain, usually his sons, grandsons or other family members although they could also be the equivalent of squires and students) Every Grulla, Sbika and Yim’Kad to his Blaan and every Blaan to his Eyan and every Eyan to his Emperor whenever Gith went to war. So it had been since before Gith was founded and so many always expected it to be.
Grogar ended this feudal society.

Grogar had, of course, used an army of the dead to seize the city itself but he came to realise this was not a suitable means to seize an entire empire. Even the dead had their limits. He’d done enough research to know that an undead host cannot move further from their necromancer than his power would allow. He was training and equipping more necromancers but these, in themselves, could prove a threat. For if he sent an adept necromancer to raise an army of undeath and take a city for him, what was to stop that necromancer going rogue? Grogar needed to hold Gongros and spread his influence out to Gith’s furthest reaches, something even he, with his immense power, could not accomplish with walking corpses.
Living and loyal soldiers were required.
Marshalling a small force of loyal followers, he set about conscripting the city-folk of Gongros, ordering each of his followers to round up at least ten healthy-looking goats between them. By the middle of the day, a gathering of just over two-thousand commoners stood in the city square. They were then paired with one weapon laid on the floor between them.
And the order came for every goat was ordered to kill the one he’d been paired with.
So it was accomplished. With a few mutual kills or victors dying of their wounds, at least a thousand freshly-bloodied goats stood and bowed before their Emperor as he beheld the first of his ‘Enclosures’, a gathering of a thousand armed and experienced war-goats.
This enclosure was then split into groups of a hundred, sent to each Dakla and informed each Eyan to come with his entire family to Gongros to witness their new Emperor’s grand assembly. While the Eyan and his kin were gone, each hundred goats-of-war, or Assemblies, renovated the masterless castle into a barracks, killing any who resisted, while also drafting every able-bodied Grullas to immediately serve in the armed force.
While that was going on, the Eyan and his family would pay genuflection unto their Emperor and here, Grogar would look at them and determine, purely by whim alone, if they were worthy to serve in his new empire. At times, this would entail forcing the father, or one of his kin, to kill some or all of the rest. Other times, he simply judged the whole lot of them to be worthless and had them all killed there and then. On rare occasions, he accepted the clan and granted them special privilege, explaining what had happened to their castle but instead granting them lucrative holdings in or around the capital and a spot in the leadership of the barracks that was once their home. It is not known how exactly he determined who or who was not worthy or even what those judged worthy thought of this.
A few clans rose to prominence this way such as the Ga’Zunt, the Apoth, the Damodek, the Jak’Tah, the Fidak and the Dranzul. Whatever power they possessed before, Grogar increased tenfold for their leal and willing submission to his authority, swiftly to be used against their political rivals who they slandered in court and whom Grogar authorised free reign to carry out appropriate retribution.
Naturally, this came under heavy opposition. But to Grogar, this only simplified the matter of consolidating his authority. Open defiance was punished by the extermination of the entire household.
Of course, he waited until the petition opposing his reform had arrived at his throne before telling anyone this.
Each name on the petition, eighty-seven Eyan household masters and around a hundred minor nobles and landed Blaans in all, were ordered to present themselves to the Imperial court with their entire household in tow. Only about a third dared show themselves whereupon they summarily and publicly tortured to death, one by one, youngest to oldest. The other two thirds fled the reach of Gongros although around a quarter were seized and met the same fate but those who reached the safety of cities outside of Grogar’s current influence became part of his first greatest obstacle in his path to domination.
Prince Anzar lived and did not intend to let his younger brother defile his father’s realm any longer.

The immediate family of the late Emperor Melkarth consisted of his intellectually-disabled half-brother Drandarth, his mother Grand-Dowager Geloth, his sister Mezutha, his two twin half-sisters Yaudra and Shamudra (Both widows), six remaining sons and three daughters as well as an illegitimate son and an unborn child.
His surviving children, by order of age were Prince Anzar, Princess Murzhana, Grogar himself, Prince Bokri, Princess Yergha, Princess Zarlet, Prince Hindan, Prince Qedri, Prince Yedjan and Princess Phardith. Melkarth's illegitimate son, Shkerish, was half-Oryx and just slightly younger than Grogar whilst Melkarth's unborn child was still carried by his favourite wife, Lady Ysoloa of Aradim, a prize of war with the mountain-sheep of Argalmon to the south, and could be considered the heir to the empire by right of filial favour. In truth, it mattered little. Melkarth had died too early to name an heir and Grogar had seized the capital by force.
Right would have to make way for might.
As soon as Prince Anzar left Gongros he and his family convened at Urmok, the easternmost metropolitan city which had served as a capital in the days when Gith fought to seize the western domains from the Priest Kings, and there discussed how to rid his father’s empire from the usurper, Grogar.
Immediately, the concentration of powerful figureheads clashed with itself.
The twenty-two-year-old Prince Anzar had the most support but some claimed that he had failed his father by fleeing the capital and leaving the throne to the usurper.
General Homboth, one of Gith’s most experienced officers who had served Melkarth and his father Olkarth before him, supported Drandarth’s claim while Lord Omandon ul Bolq, who was known as the High Charger, proposed waiting for Lady Ysoloa to bear child, stating that the child from the most favoured wife should inherit the throne.
Admiral Bulgalah supported Shkerish who was considered the most capable in combat.
However, Chief Minister Masydryn declared that no child from non-Gith mother should be called retake a stolen throne as it would displease the gods to have the empire restored by one of only half-Imperial blood.
Ubosk, the Grand Commander of the Royal Bodyguard who was with Melkarth when he was poisoned and had commanded the defence of Prince Anzar as they were smuggled out of the city, was asked for his opinion and he declared that the eldest son, indeed the eldest child, was a good enough cause at all.
Those at Gongros had been perfectly ready to crown him before Grogar usurped the throne and as far as he could judge the matter, any who sought to impede the process now, when things were at their most dire, was no better than Grogar.
It was agreed, not entirely unanimously, that Anzar would inherit the throne, would go by the title of Emperor of Gith, and lead the general war proceedings, guided by key advisors and some of his family members. However, the eighteen-year-old Prince Hindan alienated some of his allies by announcing his decision to marry Queen Bazantha, Emperor Melkarth’s most recent wife, a nann (Official Goatish term for female with ‘bil’ the official term for male) twice his age.
Bazantha had given the late Melkarth no kids but she was a full-blooded Gith noblenann and thus would gain support from the noble families in territories that Grogar had not yet gained control of. A major flaw in Hindan’s plan however was that Bazantha was still in Gongros and thus a hostage of Grogar.
When Hindan sent a messenger to Gongros demanding that Bazantha be given to him, the Emperor Grogar apparently found the whole situation highly amusing and thanked Hindan for the good laugh he’d given him in the form of zombifying the messenger, sending him back to Hindan and speaking through him before disintegration. Hindan was at a loss, unable to take Gongros with his own force, even less so with his family and allies suspicious of him, and to keep him loyal, Anzar arranged for his niece Emdural, daughter of his wife’s sister, to marry Hindan instead.
Meanwhile, Grand-Dowager Geloth arranged to marry her daughter Princess Mezutha to Lord Omandon ul Bolq, apparently trying to build up an independent power for herself and her daughter, while the elder of the two Imperial half-sisters, Yaudra (A fiery nann-of-war who had previously been married to Melkarth’s brother-in-law and killed him when he plotted to betray the empire), married her daughter Wemzal to Homboth and her sister Shamudra to Ubosk.
It seemed treachery was in the making and so Anzar called upon his master, one of the wisest goats anycreature knew; the Archdruid Duthan Grufel.
The druids were a community devoted to Zei the World Mother and her wisest daughter Dru, queen of the forest. They lived outside of the capital and pursued a traditional, primitive lifestyle in the Great Amber Forests to the west of Gith.
Duthan Grufel, son of Sagemaster Valthan Grufel, had been a personal friend of Melkarth who, like many Emperors, took a pilgrimage to the Great Amber Forests, learning how the goat had begun its small, humble origins in the forests, and met with the druids. Duthan was one of few druids who had ever seen the city, never really at home in it but nonetheless tutoring the Crown Prince most ably.
Anzar called upon him and Duthan spoke to the collective council of goatish figureheads opposed to Grogar and shamed them for letting their ambitions take their minds. He reminded them of what sort of creature Grogar was, how there was no negotiating with him and how he was gleefully taking apart the Gith way of life. He declared that if they did not unite and remain united then whoever ended up claiming the throne would find it not worth claiming for Grogar was sought to unmake the land they hoped to govern and had already gotten started in their capital.
He bought forth the Pact of Aixid (Meaning 'First/Old Goats') that established their goal in not only fighting for succession but Gith itself, asserting that Grogar was no ruler of Gith and that those who signed the pact would not turn their blades on any but Grogar until the usurper fell. Whatever happened afterwards would be a political matter which he and the druids would not interfere with.

The reason the Druids opposed Grogar so readily was rooted (Pun not intended) in a profane matter.
Grogar had begun stamping out the other schools of magic. The Schools of Abjuration (Protection), Alteration (Transformation), Conjuration (Creation and Transportation), Divination (Mindreading), Enchantment (Manipulation), Evocation (Magical Energy) and Illusion (Image) were restricted, only those in government service allowed to practice and perform spells of such craft while Divination, magic considered religious in aspect which both the priests and paladins of the city and druids and shamans of the wilderness regarded as their sacred prayer, was outlawed entirely.
This was considered sacrilege and, unlike the disestablishment of the Eyans whose detractors plotted in private, was met with instant and open rebellion in and around the city. But this was nothing Grogar was not expecting, having been waiting for the opportunity to give his troops their first blooding as well as show just where his favour had gone and why.
In place of the priests and mages, Grogar had selectively begun favouring the school he himself had started out and, arguably, revolutionised- Necromancy.
Necromancers were no longer mere spiritualists or undertakers but instruments of Grogar’s influence, made commanders of soldiers and slaves by right of profession alone. This was an instant to the ambitious or desperate, particularly among the noble families who required a means to reclaim what their Emperor had taken from them (Better still if it met with his approval).
On top of this, Grogar had also reformed the judicial system in the most gruesome manner; to whit, giving power to the Inquisitorial Branch.
Up until that point, an inquisitor served a very minor and mundane role, assisting in the questioning of prisoners deemed threats to the realm, having already been tried and found guilty.
Grogar, to his mind, simplified the process. There was no longer any trial and judge and, depending on the subject in question, no official apprehension needed to determine guilt.
The authority to apprehend, try, sentence and convict (Not always necessarily in that order) now went entirely to the Inquisitors who had free reign to seize citizens off the street or out of their very homes, at the merest suspicion of treachery or criminal intent. They were told to look for guilt, not innocence, and if a subject was not found guilty of the crime he or she had been arrested for, the Inquisitors then pursued investigations into any other crime the subject may or may not have committed, oft times simply enhancing the torture until the prisoner told them something useful. The Inquisition became a cold and callous advancement-ladder where acolytes were promoted based on who they discovered to be guilty and only that.
Innocence proved nothing and gained nothing for an ambitious junior inquisitor and those who entered the Chambers of Truth and Justice, rarely if ever left.
Statistics from the recent times suggest that roughly 18% of all goats seized and tortured by the Inquisition were guilty of any crime at all against the state and some goatish scholars have claimed that the percentage is even less than that.
Convict Conscription was the only swift way to avoid dying under the Inquisitor’s tools but even this would not keep them out of the eye of the Inquisitors who themselves held military authority and the brutal training process and low survival rate undercut any potential benefit. For many unfortunate enough to go through the procedure, the army was just another form of prison, one with about equal living conditions and chances of survival.
At Grogar’s behest, the Necromancers and the Inquisitors patrolled the streets, slowly building up the great army that their Emperor would carry across the realm while the Brominian Palace was renovated to fit the Emperor’s new alchemical and magical devices with which he pursued his dark obsession- Eternal life.
Monuments and sacred grounds were destroyed to make way for workshops, foundries and testing zones for his experiments. With the priests and deeply-rooted nobility subjugated or wiped out, nogoat complained.
Over a period of mere months, Gongros had lost nearly all it had once been.

Predictably, the collective power struggle that had just ended began anew between the necromancers and the inquisitors.
There was violence in the streets as they fought over areas of influence, resources and even the lives of civilians for prisoners and/or test-subjects. Grogar’s home guard would be pushed to put down this unrest and the leaders of the unrest would be disembowelled. However, it became clear to him that a proper policing judiciary body was required, one not connected to any semi-independent power. But the city guard had been wiped out during Grogar’s initial takeover. He would have to start from scratch and with a chief-subordinate who he could rely on.
But Grogar had very particular standards when it came to what was reliable. Too honourable an officer and they could turn against him; too loyal and they couldn’t be counted to act on their own; too docile and they could break or bend to other threats; too influential and they could themselves become a threat
And most of all, to combat rogue inquisitors, necromancers and Paz knew what else, and intimidate them at that, Grogar could not rely on goats impeded by such arbitraries as morals and ethics. If anything, he needed a goat who was more like a criminal than those he’d be sent to punish yet one who would be utterly loyal and yet enthusiastic, obeying yet wayward, and above all, a goat who could terrify everycreature he came across.
And, fortunately for Grogar and unfortunately for all of Gongros, he found such a goat. In the Bukkanlox, the lowest levels of Gongros, there was gossip that a criminal had surfaced shortly before Emperor Melkarth’s death, feared throughout all the fetid pit of slums, workhouses and vice that made up the area. A goat guilty of every heinous act and fond of public demonstration with seemingly no fear of justice, always able to escape unbound even when it seemed impossible and with a body-count of up to two-hundred goats indiscriminate of age or gender. By this time, the citizenry had started calling him ‘The Bukkanlox Butcher’.
Grogar sought out this Butcher in person, it is said. Locating the resting places of some of his victims and looking through their memories with necromancy, he rooted out their killer where he resided under, of all places, the local dungeon. The Butcher, mad as he was, knew better than to cross blades with the Emperor and Grogar instead offered him the chance to put his skills, and urges, to public service.
So it was that the city guard of Gongros, the Brine Guard, founded and at its head was the Bukkanlox Butcher, now going by his birth name; Molvengol. Out in the open, he appeared a towering creature, near as tall as Grogar, with a shaggy frost-white fur pitted with black, matted incisions from his countless scrapes (Some possibly made himself) and with bizzare eyes, ghostly purple discs in ink-black pools. His horns were chalk-white flushed red as blood where they met his head as if fluctuating his bloodlust. Goats said he wasn't born a goat, at least within, some suggesting he was, quite literally, a 'wolf-in-goat's-clothing', wild, cruel and carnivorous. Put simply, Molvengol was an intimidating creature to even glance upon and as chief of Grogar’s city guard and as a personal bodyguard to Grogar himself, he was the stuff of nightmares.

A record collected from a local city merchant relates to what effect he had on the city.
“The stonemason was told that the work he’d done on the well was shoddy and he had to go and see Molvengol who was waiting for him at his home.
So the stonemason did not go home and instead went to the canal with one one of his own stone-blocks tied to his neck and drowned himself.
I was not surprised when I heard. Many goats did this when they heard Molvengol wanted to see them.
When a goat was told that Molvengol was paying a visit to their home, they would set it, and themselves and all their families, on fire before he arrived. They didn’t want him to catch them alive. They didn’t want him to catch them whole.
I was terrified of Molvengol. Everygoat in Gongros was. Everygoat who’d ever heard of Molvengol was terrified of him.
Even Grogar was frightened of Molvengol!”

How true this is remains uncertain but the idea that even Grogar found Molvengol’s ways at least disturbing is sobering. It should not however be supposed that Molvengol was disloyal, far from it. Molvengol was and forever remained one of Grogar’s most fanatical lieutenants. Most debate why and one of the most likely explanations, judging by what sort of creature Molvengol was, was that he simply wasn’t an ambitious goat.
He was sadistic, insatiable and more than a little mad but he had no dreams of power or conquest. Such things were above him entirely. All he’d ever wanted; i.e. free reign to do as he pleased to any creature who caught his eye, had been given to him by the Emperor and paid for. He was satisfied and he did exactly as Grogar hoped he would. Violence in the street died down...that is to say unauthorised violence.
To be sure, the streets were more violent than ever but those committing it were doing so with Grogar’s consent and this suited him fine.
And outside the capital, things progressed as planned.

The first aggressive defiance outside of Grogar’s own regime came in a fairly mundane manner and one that can’t quite be linked to Grogar’s reforms. A group of mountain goat tribes north-east of Gongros were coming down from the mountain.
These tribes, known by the Gith as the Dgar-Thubaa, had been enemies of the empire long before Grogar’s time. Assembling in a vast congregation, tens of thousands strong, they galloped over the northern borders and began raiding the settlements. With the death of an Emperor and conflicts over succession, Tambelon must have seemed like easy meat.
Grogar saw this as an opportunity to test his fighting force.
He sent his most fervent subordinate, Xurbys the Undue himself, with a trained force from Gongros along with a force of fresh recruits led by Mur-Darig ul Hemreneph, one of the Eyans who’d willingly surrendered his authority to him. The assembled force of four-thousand headed to Mzust in the north of Gith. There, Xurbys set two chief officers, Vrengor and Su’Kaargi, to set themselves up the mountainside in two long lines of long sabres and shields angled just so that the oncoming charge the Dgar-Thubaa would surely bring down would not drastically damage their number but would instead pack them tighter and tighter, bottlenecking them mid-charge. Beforehoof, Xurbys had his own troops lay traps all along the slope; magic mines, caltrops, iron brambles and other agonies while his own collective force and that of Hemreneph’s reinforcements assembled in force at the bottom of the mountain in a semi-circle. Together, Xurbys’s armies had formed a vase-shaped formation on the mountainside.
And when the twenty-thousand Dgar-Thubaa warriors thundered down the mountain, it is said, the vase was filled with their blood.

The charge, meant to spread out from the peaks into the valley, was instead packed tighter between the two lines, slowing the advance. Those close to the Tambel lines were knocked aside by the inward-facing shields and their fetlocks slashed by the long, low sabres while those in the centre bore the brunt of Xurby’s traps, slipping and sliding down rock and moss, their momentum gone and collapsing in a mad, scrambling pile before the Tambel formation.
The mountain warriors couldn’t move, many were trapped beneath each other, the mines had left pits or sinking gravel in the slope and the completely debilitated horde had been reduced to a struggling mass of meat.
And with a satisfied yell from Xurbys, the Tambelon armies became the butchers.
The Dgar-Thubaa horde was cut to pieces while they struggled to find their hooves, the few who dragged themselves out of the pile were shot down by bolts or magic as Vrengor and Su’Kaargi’s lines boxed them in.
Records from Druid spies tell of the event.
‘The strategy was faultless and the manoeuvre was highly efficient. But it was not warfare worth of praise. There was no honour, no valour, no restraint nor respect. It was savagery. When on their raids, the Dgar-Thubaa would never stay long when our troops mobilised. The battle was over before it had begun. Their charge had been broken, their rush spent, they were defeated. And yet Tambelon’s legions ruined them with violent glee.
The soldiers cut off the mountain warrior’s limbs one by one. And then, with these limbless, screaming prisoners, they played their sick follies. They tossed them to one another, hit one prisoner with the other, stacked them in piles to climb or tossed them in the air to land on their spears. There was no mercy, no shred of animal fellowship, no sense of what was right and decent in these new ‘goats-of-war’ that our new Emperor was so very proud of.
The Dgar-Thubaa had long plagued the northern borders, killing and reaping indiscriminately, stealing from our temples and burning our sacred groves. They were no friends of mine nor of any goat I knew.
But they did not deserve this. No creature could.’
After the slaughter on the slope, Xurbys ordered the troops to regroup and advance up the mountain to attack the Dgar-Thubaa villages now that the warriors weren’t coming home. Splitting into detachments they struck at each settlement they found, all of them populated almost entirely by non-combatants, the mothers, the children, the elders, the sick or the lame.
Those who were not killed were enslaved.
Of the four-thousand troops who Xurbys brought to the northern border, less than a hundred were killed, although Eyan Mur-Darig ul Hemreneph was reported slain, likely by Xurbys himself and possibly on Grogar’s orders.
This new anti-charge manoeuvre, a vital form of warfare when one would fight fellow goats and other hill-dwelling beasts of hoof, was named the ‘Mortar and Pestle Formation’ by Xurbys who returned with pomp and ceremony.
Despite the savagery that had been displayed, the goats of Tambelon at last found something to admire, however bizarrely, in their new regime. Cynical though it was, whichever way one looked at it, a persistent enemy of the empire had been utterly destroyed, never to return, all thanks to Tambelon’s new military system.
Grogar was a monster, that was clear, but he was a smart monster and highly capable of inspiring loyalty. And as the reforms turned the goat’s attention to all the problems that Old Gith had left unsolved, Grogar achieved, if not popularity, then at least security as Emperor.
Inquisitors were brought information on many bodies of unsatisfied civilian influence by the odd cold-hoofed sideliner. Not that cold-hoofed sideliners were exempt from the punishment dealt to every potential rebel but it is assumed it was somewhat less painful, though not confirmed.
Nonetheless, the bloody and heartless efficiency that would turn the wheels of Grogar’s regime was already in play.
And on the other side of Gith, the polar opposite would be displayed from his enemies.

Prince Hindan had not given up his ambitions to hold the better claim to his father’s throne. His marriage to Emdural was not a happy one and he asked every traveller he passed of Queen Bazantha. Crown Prince Anzar had stationed him in Falemba, a fortress close to the borders of Grogar’s domain, a decision that Hindan believed was done to ensure his own demise.
Soon after the fall of the Dgar-Thubaa, Hindan received a letter from Queen Bazantha, stating that she had been transferred to the fortress of Salemba, directly opposite where he was at Falemba, with only the Meb River separating them.
The letter spoke of how she was enthralled by Hindan’s heroism and display of love for her, how Grogar had mistreated and abused her and how she had seen him destroying a will written by his father leaving the throne to Hindan rather than Anzar and how she still held a copy which she was keeping for when she was free and married to him.
Though it wouldn’t require a genius to see that all was not as it seemed, Hindan jumped at this far too convenient chance.
At eighteen years old, he had been a viceroy and military leader, commanding two-thousand goats-of-war, for a period of a month and nineteen days. And at the Meb river, he would make his first and last great military blunder.
Hindan knew from the get-go that the forces he had weren’t enough to mount a full-scale invasion and so he called upon two potential allies. His brother, Prince Bokri the Bold, older than him by two-years but unable to take the throne due to his mother’s father having been executed for treason, who brought with him three-thousand goats-of-war and half as many foreign mercenaries; and his cousin, Kengar-Drez the Sentinel, son of Princess Shamudra from her first marriage, an inspiring young bil skilled with the spear whose father had been popular and influential, bringing with him a force of five-thousand from the eastern hills of Washk, his father’s old territory, fast, hardy fighters who needed not to charge but simply race through enemy lines, cutting into them bit by bit.
Hindan proposed his plan and told them that if they could help him marry Bazantha, gain a hold in the area and reach Gongros before Anzar could, then then soon-to-be-Emperor Hindan would have his brother Bokri named Viceroy of Urmok, the eastern capital, and his cousin Kengar-Drez would be made Minister of War.
[Note: It was not considered conventional for the Emperor of Gith’s family members to hold senior positions in government, certainly not at the beginning of their reign as it is thought that this encouraged nepotism in a monarch and treachery in a subordinate, understandable considering how many Emperors of Gith were threatened at one time or another by a member of their family. What Hindan was proposing was not only counter-intuitive to his alliance with Anzar but to his right to the throne in general.]

With the heady bravado of youth, they agreed to march westward to Gongros and with an assembled force of eight-thousand fighters, they approached the river and found themselves face to face with Grogar himself with a force of around four-thousand. Hindan, Bokri and Kengar-Drez could not believe their luck.
Apparently Grogar had not yet established his capability for deception. But perhaps it is the most capable of deceivers that are cunning enough to hide said capability. Or perhaps Hindan was just that reckless.
Bringing forth the makeshift rafts, Hindan demanded that Bazantha be given over to him and that Grogar relinquish the throne to him. It is mentioned that Grogar actually laughed, not in the sense of an evil cackle but sincerely, as if he had truly heard a very good joke.
Grogar explained that Bazantha was not in the area. In fact, she’d already been married to one of his newest and most promising subordinates, Zunthar Ga’Zunt, who had put together this little stratagem for Hindan himself. Hindan then made his demands again and Grogar laughed, claiming they had nothing to fight him with and that if they left now, he might forget this ever happened, purely because of what a pathetic display Hindan was making.
Hindan, enraged, set his rafts on the waters, drove them forward and crossed over half the river. He then yelled to his hated brother once more to surrender, declaring that his troops outnumbered him two to one.
Grogar then cast his eye across the field, then the waters, and then stated matter-of-factly that he had quite a bit more than four-thousand troops with him.
Hindan asked where Grogar’s reinforcements were to which Grogar answered ‘Oh, they’re already here. You’re floating on top of them.”
As he said this, the rafts started to topple and throw themselves over each other, capsized by a shoal of bloated, rotten corpses, long-dead goats submerging to the surface with grotesque, bubbling hollers. These were warriors who’d fought on the Meb River hundreds of years ago, generation after generation. A collective ensemble of over ten-thousand, pulling the rafts apart and, once they were in the water, doing the same to the occupants.
Kengar-Drez and Bokri, who were closer to the western bank managed to swim to safety but Hindan was caught almost immediately and dragged screaming to Grogar’s camp. There Grogar thanked him for the demonstration of just how much power he and Crown Prince Anzar actually had and informed him that he planned to make a demonstration of his own very soon.
And that it was a mercy that Hindan would not live to see it.
Hindan, the Emperor That Never Was, the eighteen-year old prince without patience, given an army by one brother and lost it to another...died under the tools of the Inquisitors in the very tower he hoped would house his bride and with her the right to his father’s throne.
Such ignoble deaths were common under Grogar. In the early stages of his reign, he rarely made the executions of his prominent enemies public, preferring to simply have them killed as soon as possible, slow and painfully if possible but quickly if necessary, often simply having the corpse displayed over the streets of Gongros. Some theorise this was to make defying him seem less remarkable, a dismal fate without fanfare or lasting impact, but others look at it slightly differently and suggest Grogar simply didn’t consider these enemies significant enough to be made a spectacle.
Soon afterward, Kengar-Drez was murdered by three of his chief lieutenants; his maternal uncle; Gihar ul’ Veshlar; the chief of his bodyguard, Jhul’Kavaad; and the Seneschal of Washk, Surgan-Suul. All three of them brought Kengar-Drez’s head to Grogar who granted them titles and estates but did little to elevate their standing. In the case of Emperors before Grogar, this would have been cause for defiance or dissent but as the three beheld this new Emperor, his blood red eyes fixed on them as a housekeeper would fix their eyes on a cockroach, they knew what the mere thought of arguing would bring them.

Prince Bokri alone escaped but fled Falemba, allowing Grogar free reign to cross the Meb River and turn Crown Prince Anzar’s plans for an offensive campaign completely on their head. Anzar had gone from leading a rebellion to repelling an invasion.
Many goats in his domain began to doubt their Crown Prince’s ability to hold back such a terrifying foe. Far less often did one hear toasts of ‘Our Crown Prince and Rightful Ruler’ in the taverns of Urmok, replaced by mutters of ‘That fool kid, Anzar’ and even hushed reverences of ‘Our Eternal Emperor’. Small cults began building in economically-depressed areas devoted to Grogar. Pundits and propagandists spread Tambelon rhetoric in favour of ‘A New Gith, Stronger, Wiser and Greater.’
All over Gith, goats began to look closer at the problems Gith had and perhaps always had and chose to look to this new eternal Emperor who did things so very differently, didn’t care about nobility, bloodline or titles, determined his own hierarchy and could perhaps listen to them and make them more than mere slaves.
Suffice to say, this was the sentiment in Tambelon.
Most of the time, all anygoat actually living under Grogar thought was ‘Can he hear what I’m thinking?’

7538175
Impressive as always! I mean it, doing such a deep lore, Real Impressive

Love good lore storys. Really expands the universe.

7538350
7538831
Thanks.
The succession crisis is partially based off the Diadochi, Alexander the Great's Generals who split up his empire and warred incessantly over who got to take his place after he was dead.
And while I tried to make the Gith'c language sound like a bit of a cross between Persian and Polish but more guttural, some of it's imperial customs are based off those of Ancient China. The anti-charge tactic is based off some strategies that the Chinese used against the Mongols.
But in terms in architecture Gith would be kind of like Mesopotamia or something.
Most of what goes on in Tambelon, however, is based partially off Stalin's Russia.

7540240
Good idea