“After the war against the Valusians, still thirsting for blood
‘the bitch queen of the ancient empire’ went rogue to pursue the hunt,
on grounds neither enemy nor ally, and these entirely unsuspecting
of their role as nothing but prey, to the goddess of war.”
“After the war against the Valusians, still thirsting for blood
‘the bitch queen of the ancient empire’ went rogue to pursue the hunt,
on grounds neither enemy nor ally, and these entirely unsuspecting
of their role as nothing but prey, to the goddess of war.”
Introduction
“The Vandyrian mythos, that version which is held within the Imperial Archives under seal and long scrutiny, is itself the residual form of countless earlier traditions. What survives is the core that successive ages of archival labor refused to surrender, preserved even after the worlds upon which these events occurred had ceased to answer any call.
The records speak of places unknown to the present age: Traphedus, Garavalpi, Aremendjia, Nolphimeus, and its ancient enemy Krida. Their locations, peoples, and histories have otherwise turned to sand. Of some, history preserves little more than the oldest surviving attestations: here the Vandyrians reigned; here the hosts of Canis snatched victory from the flames of defeat.
What follows is therefore no simple reconstruction, but the latest surviving link in an immeasurably older chain of reconstructions. These stories had already passed through forgotten languages, archives, empires, and traditions before the oldest records now available were themselves compiled.
This edition draws principally upon forms preserved during the Elder Empire, while recognizing that even those accounts were inherited from sources already ancient and incomplete. Names shift between strata; realms migrate across surviving charts; territories remembered as contiguous in one age appear divided by seas or voids in another. The translation is imperfect because continuity itself is imperfect, and no surviving authority can determine where preservation ends and alteration begins.
Most of these accounts unfold upon worlds whose identities can no longer be established.
The geography of the Primal Empire is almost entirely lost, and later charts preserve few of the names found within these oldest traditions. The reader therefore encounters something akin to the history of a vanished continent whose coastlines, rivers, and mountains can no longer be compared against any surviving map.
The account may preserve the name of a battlefield, a kingdom, a pass through which an army marched, or a city before whose walls an ancient host was broken, yet nothing remains against which these claims may be independently measured.
Only the stories remain.”
