Old Jantara did not collapse in a single night of thunder and revolt. Its demise was a slow-motion disaster, the product of too many years living off stolen fortune and the belief that fate itself was a debtor in the jackal’s ledger. The Jantaran usurpers had ridden luck hard, and when luck failed, there was nothing left to cushion the fall.

In its final generation, the heart of Old Jantara had become a grotesque monument to rot: a hivelike city crowded with the fortresses and dens of a hundred petty kings, each reigning over a fragment of squalor. The once-fabled central city had degenerated into a sprawl of citadels built atop hovels, brothels, and shantytowns, all ringed in the refuse of failed ambition and forgotten law.

It had become a parody of better cities—a place that was openly mocked by the likes of Old Kartong, viewed with contempt and scorn and considered vile by much of the world, not only in its squalor, but in the absence of any redeeming order or pride. Even the jackals who ruled it seemed to know they presided over a sty.

Poverty festered everywhere. Violence was as common as breath; the only constant was the relentless churn of new suffering. Overpopulation strained what little infrastructure survived, and the underworld boiled with cults, rival gangs, and occult societies fighting over every resource, every scrap of power.

Plagues and parasites flourished in the chaos. Scholars of later ages would claim that entire generations of jackals were lost to the introduction of vultureworm parasites—a scourge seeded by conquest and rape in the hyena lands to the east. This blight did not merely decimate the underclass, but struck at the seed-stock of the ruling clans, deepening the city’s spiral into poverty, disease, and madness.

Economically, the collapse was total. Every effort to stabilize the realm after three failed dogfolk rebellions only deepened the crisis. The state’s debts multiplied, markets failed, and the cost of keeping the cities fed and the armies loyal outstripped even the riches looted from a dozen conquered realms. The currency of Old Jantara became hunger, terror, and betrayal.

No dogfolk rebellion, however brave, could have toppled such a regime on its own. The final wounds were self-inflicted. Assassinations, poisonings, occult intrigues, and outright street battles claimed the lives of those few leaders who might have preserved order. The ruling usurpers—each a king in his own crumbling tower—turned on each other, hiring enforcers to hunt rivals, burning out whole districts to cover debts and clean up “loose ends.” Their desperation poisoned the city faster than any foreign invasion could have.

By the time rumors of a new uprising reached the city’s rotten heart, it was already too late. The jackals knew their hour had passed. They lacked the strength, the unity, and the credibility to withstand one more revolt. The debt of old atrocities—the cost of burning northern kingdoms, starving out rebellious towns, and shattering the lives of their own kin—came due all at once.

The uprising that finally ended Jantara was not a surprise. It was a consequence—a violent, inevitable reckoning that swept away the pretense of power and the illusions of a thousand petty tyrants. When the dogfolk rose at last, they did not face a nation, but a carcass picked nearly clean by its own masters.

---

The History of Bantos

• The Bantos Uprising
  • The Border Wars
    • The Townshend Battles
    • The Battle of Northwall Cross
    • The Battle of the Barrier
    • The Ruination of the Jantaran Gates
• The Burning of Old Jantara
• The Rise of Bantos

The Jackalands of Yorozh

• New Jantara