The Shining Wyrm

9.ii

I’ve long thought about the great failures of the Solar Dynasty of Cantor.

So often we do not even find a word, ballad or song made on the deeds which did not win the day.

We are blessed in this for the Armies of Old Cantor with an abundance of records from their legions, both general and officer alike, give us not just accounts of the excellent triumphs (and oh the victory parades were spectacular if even half of their written accounts are true) but the terrible failures.

The last campaign of General Aurelia is by many accounts believed to have found failure due to his arrogance and poor character among his peers. Expressed by a terrible laxness of managing his supplies and a terrible short-sightedness deemed sinful by his peers. Lacking in the virtues that were the providence of any good general of the Solar Dynasty.

However in reading his logs and memoirs, I think it more likely he suffered a fundamental misunderstanding of the depths of desperation his opponent had been driven to.

What it must have been like to face the insurmountable legions of the Solar Dynasty of Cantor at its zenith?

A force not seen in match to its reach over the known world even to this day so many centuries since.

Although as is their tradition (even now amongst the strange hill people) no written accounting is to be found for his foe Volta the Stricken or even if that was indeed the moniker used by his own people it can be assumed that since he hailed from the lands of the present county of Viznove there was a character in similar to those that yet dwell here now.

And I take comfort that I might share some of the vigor that had felled the mighty armies of old Cantor.

The highest Knights and Lords of the Realm of New Cantor will proudly show their lineage to the conquering might of its armies. I myself by my father carry such blood in kind.

But it is also the tenacity of the people that fought and won against it that I admire and feel has further strengthened my line.

So in light of this insight to its character I feel it is worth defending the Generalship of Aurelia of Cantor.

The Sorcerer known as Volta the Stricken was not even conceived capable of taking the action that defeated the general. To raze every field of what would one day be Viznove in order to drive him to starvation and in doing so take his own armies with them in this doom.

To make a pyre of both forces to secure victory.

Nevermind the cost that wracked all who lived there and by some legends fed the rise of the Tyrant Wyrm itself and its centuries of terror and dominance in the region.

It was a stroke that brought victory to one against the mightiest foe the world could have set against him.

I think it important for those of us entrusted to govern our lessers to study the defeated and ridiculed of history just as we do the triumphant victors.

- Excerpt from the Personal Memoirs of Georg Thurzó of Árva