Behind the Dark Fist - Conquest of Vodonika

((The following is part of the history pages I'm writing for Behind  
the Dark Fist. This passage covers some origin story, involving the  
settlement of Vodonikaspace. First, by way of contrast, I'm going to  
provide a transcription of all the information that UTDF provides  
regarding Vodonikaspace:))

[Vodonikaspace] is the nearest sphere to the Vodoni sphere and is  
where the Vodoni exodus finally arrived. The former race was totally  
erased and this sphere is now a mirror of the original Vodoni sphere.  
The largest contingent of Vodoni enforcers is found here, and most of  
the ship and enforcer weapons used by Vodoni are built and forged on  
Vodonika (which means "New Vodoni").

Five planets orbit here, all habitable, and all are as diverse and  
populated as either Oerth or Krynn.

((fairly vague, especially regarding Vodonikaspace's former  
inhabitants. For BTDF, what I envisioned for Vodonikaspace was sort  
of the spelljamming equivalent of building over an "Indian burial  
ground" [for want of a term that isn't inherently branded with  
political incorrectness]. The blurb in UTDF glosses over it, but  
hints that when the Vodoni settled Vodonikaspace following the  
cataclysm, they committed mass genocide against the native  
inhabitants of five life-sustaining worlds. While a part of me wanted  
to have some remnant of the native Vodonikans emerge and play a role  
in the campaign setting, I realized later that such a thing would be  
really unbelievably cheesey, and also quite Metzen-like. So instead,  
the natives are going to show up as ghosts and haunts and may play a  
major role as vengeful dead rather than anything involving the  
political or diplomatic dynamic of the setting.
Please do comment if something strikes you, something I could polish  
or change, or something you think is not worded very clearly. Or if  
it sucks, tell me that too.))

In the years following the nova that destroyed their homeworlds, the  
refugees from Kathyk settled a nearby sphere that they called  
Vodonikaspace. That is, of course, mostly the extent of what Vodoni  
history texts record on the subject.

Vodonikaspace was Vulkaran's first conquest as Emperor and entrusted  
Guardian of the Gods. It was done without the aid of Enforcers, and  
without even an entrenched aristocracy of Breeders. And though there  
really is no accurate and impartial written account of it, it was  
most assuredly the bloodiest, most gruesome and horrific conflict  
that the Vodoni people ever engaged in.

Five worlds, populated and teeming with human, demihuman and humanoid  
life, were one by one consumed, conquered and cleansed by Vulkaran  
and his forces. In the beginning, the refugees started small. They  
settled on one of the farthest worlds out, on the sixth orbital of  
the system, in a series of colonies that they called Kathykka (which  
means "New Kathyk" in the Vodoni language). The native kingdoms gave  
them a wide berth, for while they were sympathetic to the newcomers'  
plights, they didn't completely trust this race of refugees with the  
technology to travel beyond the sky.

The train of refugees kept coming. Soon, the Kathykka settlement  
wasn't large enough to support the population. Food was dwindling,  
disease (among a people without priests) was rampant. Rather than  
lend a hand, the native kingdoms increased their defenses and  
attempted to quarantine the spread of the refugees. Vulkaran's hand  
was forced: he moved to attack the natives.

It may seem odd to hear it told that Vulkaran was ever a reluctant  
warrior. But remember, at this point, he was not yet fully corrupted.  
There may have been some sincere part of him that meant to fulfill  
his oath to the Crystal King, and it may well be that he truly did  
not want war with his new neighbors. But then again, perhaps it was  
that Vulkaran waited until he knew he would have his people's full  
support, so that he could cast himself as a hero rather than a tyrant.

Whatever the case, Vulkaran personally lead the assault. By air and  
by land, a starving, disease-ravaged army that had been backed into a  
corner surged toward the pickets of the native kingdoms. Kathykka was  
located in an inland valley, with next to no vegetation and only one  
tiny stream to feed water to a settlement with several worlds' worth  
of refugees. It was bounded on all sides by the borders of three mid- 
sized nations, and the forces of those nations were supported by  
their allies beyond, who all had an interest in keeping the  
troublesome tribe of aliens contained.

Even then, the fury of Vodoni warriors was plainly evident. With  
Vulkaran's red-eyed glare at their head, the Kathykkans drove their  
lines like an iron spike into the quarantine pickets. Backed by air  
support, flying-low to serve in the capacity of makeshift siege  
engines, the droves of Vulkaran's people burst free of their bounds  
and ran rampant across the countrysides. Hungry and desperate just to  
survive, the Kathykkans burned, pillaged, raped and murdered. They  
fought with a bestial lust that shamed their once proud heritage, and  
in the span of five years the native peoples of that first settled  
world were either bred or butchered out of existence.

As quickly as the old towns and villages of the Kathykkan natives  
were burned, new cities were built upon their not-yet-cooled ashes.  
Vulkaran was pragmatic in what he burned, and what he simply took.  
Agriculture and stored grain he tried to spare where possible, to  
feed his starving multitudes, as well as herds of livestock and  
beasts of burden. People, on the other hand, were much more  
expendable; slaves taken here would be superfluous, Vulkaran  
reasoned, since a people desperate to survive will work for said goal  
without asking for payment. This is to say nothing of the resource  
drain a slave population would impose upon him.

Vulkaran hailed from a world where the technology was much more  
advanced than the world upon which his people came to settle: so  
where he saw that the infrastructure was in need of improvement, he  
had it destroyed and rebuilt. More advanced systems like roads,  
irrigation and levies he left in place where he could. His ultimate  
goal was to supplant the native civilizations as expediently as he  
could, with as little discomfort or pain to his own people in the  
process.

Vulkaran processed every move he made in these early days of empire  
with a calculating, detached precision. He heartlessly assigned value  
to lives as he would to cattle, crops and acreage. His people,  
however, took most of their early sins to heart. In the drive to  
survive, many later looked back and regretted what they did in those  
terrible, terrible first months away from home. They were too shamed  
even to keep an accurate record of how they came by their new  
settlements: they consciously and systematically destroyed all  
remnant of the natives' histories, religions and cultures. They  
erased them, as they would erase their guilt over the crimes they  
committed.

But this new Empire had not yet begun to sin. The world of Kathykka  
(as it was now called) grew and developed rapidly after the last of  
its native sons had been put to the torch. Its inhabitants were proud  
of their accomplishments, and assumed that Kathykka would be the seat  
of a new Kathyk Empire.

This was not Vulkaran's plan, however. By this time, he too had been  
overtaken by the pride that the refugees had for their new home and  
way of life. But Vulkaran ultimately wanted to return his people back  
to their home sphere. If there was any rock in that blasted pocket of  
wildspace left suitable to hold even a pitched tent, Vulkaran swore  
that that would be his new seat of Empire. Kathykka was merely a  
cobble on the road there.

Fifteen years following the cataclysm, and nearly all of Kathykka was  
covered with settlements. The world's resources had been pushed to  
the very limits, and still there were refugee camps and semi- 
permanent dwellings that housed a staggering 40% of the population.  
There simply was not enough room on Kathykka to support everyone  
comfortably. And how much longer the current situation could go on  
was anybody's guess. Again, Vulkaran's hand was forced: he had to  
expand or die.

Owing to the time of year and the alignment of the planets along  
their orbitals, the closest planet to Kathykka when Vulkaran finally  
decided to move his ships into the void again was the world on the  
system's third orbital. This world Vulkaran called Vodonika, after  
another of the worlds in his people's home sphere. There were no  
reservations this time, no hesitation or pretense of peace as the  
Kathykkans descended from the sky. They unleashed fire and shot and  
magic and rained it all down from the heavens onto an unsuspecting  
populace below.

On this world, something happened that would change the fate of the  
Twelve Spheres forever. It was a true defining moment in time, the  
point at which a major divergence of history occured. Had this one  
event gone any differently, had segments of time and action not lined  
up with clockwork precision as they did, the next four hundred years  
may have looked very, very different.

It so happens that on this world, which Vulkaran named Vodonika, two  
alliances of seven to twelve nations of varying sizes had been at war  
for control of the planet for over forty years. The exact numbers of  
nations on either side, as well as their sizes and strengths, varied  
over time with the back-and-forth of the momentum of battle. Very  
roughly, it could be said that the war was being fought between, on  
the one side, the forces loyal to the Dark Sorceress, and on the  
other, everyone who didn't like the Dark Sorceress very much. It so  
happened that when Vulkaran invaded, he walked into what looked to  
finally be the very last battle of a forty-year war, as the latter  
side had effectively trapped the Sorceress in one of her strongholds.  
Killing her would have meant the end of her reign, and ensured peace  
on "Vodonika" for generations afterward.

Frankly, nobody quite knew what to think when the ships from the sky  
arrived and started shooting indiscriminately into the firefight.  
Without realizing it, Vulkaran was rescuing the Dark Sorceress: his  
forces broke the siege emplacements that had been hard-fought for,  
broke the lines of the attackers and therein established a beachhead  
of his best warriors. Who then proceeded to rush the lines of the  
siegers, screaming like crazed berserkers and carving a path of  
carnage through everything in sight.

The Dark Sorceress, wisely, opted to withdraw all of her troops into  
the stronghold, and wait. All of her defenses ceased attack, and the  
stronghold fell silent. This inaction was mistaken by the allied  
attackers as a sign that the ships from above were in league with the  
Sorceress, and so they recovered from their confusion and fought back  
with ferocity to match even the most fierce of Vulkaran's warriors  
(they really didn't like the Dark Sorceress). It was only when  
Vulkaran's lines were pressed right up against the stronghold walls  
that the Sorceress ordered her batteries to begin their fire anew,  
strafing off the lines of attackers from above with spell and missile  
fire.

For the moment, Vulkaran accepted the aid. He would sort things out  
later: as he saw it, he had unknowingly stepped into the middle of an  
ongoing fight, and his side was chosen for him, it seems.

Even with the renewed surge, Vulkaran's arrival had crippled the  
allies' advance and broken their momentum. The addition of Vulkaran's  
warriors meant that victory was no longer possible; after taking  
probably more losses than was tactically sound, the enemy army  
withdrew. And this was when Vulkaran, for the first time, met the  
Dark Sorceress Mongrelle.

When two megalomaniacs meet, they will either like each other or hate  
each other, and this will almost always happen immediately, on little  
more than first glance. It might be worth mentioning here that  
Mongrelle has always made a habit of dressing like a complete tramp,  
and this may have had a profound effect on her first meeting with  
Vulkaran.

The two held private court in Mongrelle's stronghold for two weeks.  
No one but servants were permitted in their presence while they  
attended each other. It is not known of what they spoke, or what they  
did, but when they emerged they did so for the first time with the  
titles they would hold thereafter for four centuries: Vulkaran, the  
Silver King (as Mongrelle had given him a gift of ornately-crafted  
silver plate mail [this is not the Mithril suit he would later  
wear]), and Lady Mongrelle, his High Councilor. The couple's forces  
were thereafter merged, and Vulkaran announced to his soldiers the  
integration of Mongrelle's minions into the Kathykkan army.

Mongrelle was truly First among the Breeders of the Vodoni Empire.  
For many years she was a knight and vassal to a king she served  
loyally. So loyally that she willingly carried on an affair with this  
king for years before she realized she was little more than an outlet  
for him. This was forty years prior; in the time since her murder of  
her king, she studied the Black Arts and hid from those that hunted  
her for revenge. With powerful transmutative magics she preserved her  
own youth, and created nearly whole-cloth an army of rat-weres, snake- 
weres and spider-weres -- all from whatever animals she could find  
and draft into her service. This, her first wave fodder, were  
eventually joined by larger breeds (hog-weres, horse-weres and cow- 
weres) before she developed a strain of proper lycanthropy and  
created an elite unit of wererats from volunteer human agents.

Over the next decade, Vodonika became the testing ground for numerous  
attempts at creating the ultimate lycanthropic warrior. Mongrelle had  
steadily been working her way up to creating werewolves, but her  
wererats were working just fine for her purposes and so she didn't  
foresee the need to replace them with a werewolf strain for quite  
some time to come.

Vulkaran, however, forced the issue. In his native culture, the wolf  
was a symbol of strength, nobility and pack-loyalty. It fit well with  
his plan to return home to Kathykka with an army of wolf-warriors  
leading his vanguard. It would enviograte and re-energize his people  
like never before.

So, Mongrelle gave it a try. She unleashed her first brood of  
werewolves, and then another, and then another. Always the weak were  
cut down, leaving the strong. Mongrelle would replicate the traits of  
the strong ones, send out a new brood, and then examine the survivors  
again, and again, and again. Over a hundred trials she forced the  
brutal hand of evolution, refining and refining and refining the  
strain. The actual lycanthropy became so thin that it was eventually  
a one-time transformation: the creature would remain a man-wolf  
following its first full moon and never, ever regain a human-like  
form again. Vulkaran did not care: so long as the result was a  
creature that could fight, and win.

Vodonika was very nearly dead by the time Mongrelle's work was  
through, but by the end of it she had produced a creature that would  
come to be feared across twelve crystal spheres: Vulkaran's Enforcer.