History, as shared in the Nahuac Coalition

The territory of Nahuac has the most ancient history of Valerna, having been inhabited long before human records began.

The Scaled League
In early times, the Low Westerlands were home to an ancestral alliance of Saurian peoples, known as the Scaled League. The members of this alliance all claimed descent from dragonkin, being variations of draconic beings - the feathered Buunkun, the reptilian Bendavee, and the slithering Boaab. As they evolved from saurids that predated elves and humans, they also thought they were the first civilized peoples of the world, and thus they behaved as superior to any other lifeform.

Perhaps saurians predated other peoples and perhaps not, but when the first elven realms rose on the North, and humans were building their first homes and crafting their first tools, the League’s domain already encompassed the other half of Valerna, from what is now known as the Snaking Sea to the far northern edge of the Southorn. Since there were no written words at that time, we may never know just how large the Scaled League was, or how long it lasted. But we do know it fell, and how.

The Saurian Split
For unknown millennia, the League was a rule of equals, with all three peoples having the same power, authority and voice. But the Buunkun and Bendavee did not have the hungry focus on authority of their Boaab brethren, and bit by bit, century by century, they gradually delegated the rule of the League to the Snakefolk. As the other realms of the world learned to build and write, the League transformed; the Buunkun settled as priests and scholars, and the Bendavee retreated to their swamps and forests, content to serve as the League’s armed force. Meanwhile, the Boaab grew ever prouder, wiser - and stronger.

As other peoples thrived across Valerna, the Boaab conquered them; the Snakefolk easily took over the budding settlements and small communities, building a growing network of thralls and subjects. At first, the Buunkun and Bendavee saw it as natural to rule over these other, lesser lifeforms, but in time they clashed with the Boaab’s ambition, and realized the Snakefolk had grown too power-hungry, as only enthralling the entire world would satisfy them.

Thus, the Bendavee betrayed the Boaab, and approached the humans, the Iko’ob gnomes, and other peoples who had known no other world than Snakefolk rule, to stir them against their masters. The ensuing revolt, with the Buunkun and Bendavee taking the side of the oppressed, was an unprecedented blow against the millennia-old, uncontested rule of the Snakefolk, who had never encountered a rival to their might. The Boaab had no way to fight both a civil war and the betrayal of their allies, and they were toppled after a short uprising. The Buunkun and Bendavee, content with letting each people rule themselves, banished the Boaab from the Westerlands, and taught the humans to build their own Empires.

The Altanesi Empire
What came after the fall of the League is known to all historians, for it is in fact the beginning of recorded history; the Altanesi Empire, the longest and greatest human dominion in memory, rose from the ashes of slavery to dominate the whole continent.

The humans were different to the Boaab, as they were more daring, even reckless, in their use of magic. They evolved, changed themselves in the span of a few generations, becoming greater than the Buunkun and Bendavee, greater even than the Boaab, in a paltry fraction of the time the League had lasted. The Altanesi Empire declared itself sovereign of Buunkun and Bendavee territories, and decimated the Boaab in revenge for the League’s treatment of humans.

At its height, the Altanesi Empire even crossed over the Primalian Mountains and grew Eastward, taking over all unclaimed land all the way to the Greater Unsailed, and only the Great Ellari Kingdoms of the High Westerlands resisted its expansion. The Buunkun sages of this time did not resist the Altanesi, and were considered subject allies of the Empire, but they questioned the wisdom of their ancestors, who had so readily given power to the slaves and allowed them to become tyrants overnight. This time, however, the Buunkun could not stop these tyrants like their forebears had stopped the Boaab, for the Altanesi were not their peers, but many times stronger. Thus, both Buunkun and Bendavee retreated into their realms and waited for the Altanesi Empire to crumble under its own weight.

As the Saurians retreated, many human tribes from the southwestern Altanesi lands followed them into the deep forests, worried at the growing ambition of the Altanesi. These humans sought the Buunkun and Bendavee to rebuild a new, more peaceful nation; when the saurians refused, they contented themselves with asking for advice and refuge. The Buunkun kept a close watch on these humans, letting them form their own independent tribes, and even battle each other, but never allowing any single of them to rise above the others in power.

The Age of Warlords
Eventually the wisdom of the Buunkun and Bendavee paid off, as the Altanesi brazenly challenged the Ellari Kingdoms, and Emperor Altan himself fell by the weapon of the ellari sorceress Inyse, one of the first dragonbonded. This shattered the Empire, and the entire human world fell into disarray.

Many Altanesi lords and generals went to the Buunkun for advice and to the Bendavee for military support, but the Saurians refused to help. Legend tells that the king of the Iko’ob jade gnomes, the closest allies of Altan, begged the Buunkun to save him from a force of vengeful rebels, and the Buunkun denied him entrance, saying the historic words ‘you built a house that would crumble around you’. Altanesi annals record this event as The Iko’ob Imploration, and it was long believed to mark the extinction of the jade gnomes.

Then the Dreambleed hit, leaving all regions and all peoples vulnerabe, and the Buunkun lords relented, taking in the humans that had settled in their forests, teaching them Makaab arts to live in harmony with nature, and letting them develop their own magic schools. Thus, the first source-gifted clans began to appear in the Westerlands, and humans were divided according to the animal spirit that blessed their communities. And while they encouraged this development, both the Buunkun and Bendavee still made sure not to allow any single human tribe to grow stronger than the rest.

This led to a period of fierce competition between source-gifted warlords, who constantly struggled for land, power and subjects. The Buunkun and Bendavee took no sides, having learned the hard way to stay off the affairs of would-be conquerors. Thus it was for many decades, with source-gifted ápalid steadily rising and falling, growing and diminishing, but gradually spreading all across the Low Westerlands, between the Great Ellari Kingdoms of the North and the Southern wastelands. This was known as the Age of Warlords, during which the territory that would become Nahuac was a constantly shifting map of warring states.

The Shadow of the Null
As the Dragonbonded grew in power in the Northeast, sightings of non-hostile dragons with mortal riders became more and more common in the Westerlands. And then, some Ocelinn warlords, Buunkun sages and Bendavee chieftains established their own dragonbonds, which shifted the face of local politics as it had done all across Valerna. Bit by bit, dragonbonded champions rose to protect the land; this stabilized most of the source-gifted domains, which gradually grew into larger, longer-lived ápal states. Thus the Ocelinn began their ascent as the strongest of Kaabal breeds, and thus such states as Nahuacáinn, Ángdain and Itzána came to be. But this relative peace also allowed the appearance of the first organized xibac-worshipping magocracies in the Northern Coast. The dragonbonded Ocelinn lords fought against these necromancer states, in the brief conflict recorded as the Xibac wars, which confined death worshippers to the very edge of the Westerlands.

And then came the Null, which made everyone forget their enmities and rally against a common enemy. The Null Wars put paid to all petty rivalries among the human warlords, and led them to battle alongside Buunkun and Bendavee allies, as they hadn’t done since the times of the Scaled League.

And in the end, it was the Ocelinn Dragonbonded warlord, Tálan Maac Tál, who ended the Null threat by giving his life to defeat the last of the Nullborn in Nahuacáinn, during the final battle of the Null Wars. After the battle, Tálan’s sacrifice fueled the Three Seals of Nahuacáinn, which would keep the Nullborn trapped for a thousand years. After the war, there were no more dragonbonded and no more Null, and the Westerland peoples had learned to fight together.

The Coalition
After Tálan’s sacrifice and the end of the war, which cemented Nahuacáinn as the custodian of the Null threat for the foreseeable future, humans and saurians saw the benefits of cooperation, and agreed to strengthen the link between all the states that had fought against the Null. Still, to prevent the power lust and self-destruction that comes with a supreme ruling caste, the Buunkun insisted they formed a Coalition; a league of peers, where every city had its own hierarchy, and no lord was above any other.

The Buunkun named the new Coalition Nahuac, meaning At the Four Paths, in reference to the four peoples that entered the treaty - humans, kaabal humans, Bendavee and Buunkun. Each of the Coalition members was given a quarter of the territory to expand their own states there, and each state was granted full autonomy within the Coalition, requiring only that everyone observed the same set of laws.

Adamant about retaining an equal status for all members, the Buunkun insisted that xibac worshippers were admitted as full members of the Coalition, with the same status as the highly-regarded Ocelinn heroes. This was a hard test for the Coalition’s tolerance from the beginning, but it held, and it helped maintain a sense of fairness. Regardless, and Inevitably, the higher prestige and rank of Ocelinn peoples shifted the balance of the Realm’s hierarchy somewhat, but Ocelinn speakers, mindful of the treaty, remained humble and respectful of their peers.

The Cycle of Betrayal
The Coalition didn’t have an easy time of establishing itself as one of Valerna’s major realms. It was constantly beset by the ambition of its young, newly stable neighbors, which sought to expand and use any natural resources they could find. And now, after the Null War and the Dreambleed, the Low Westerlands were richer than all other realms in wood, quarries, minerals and lifeforms, thanks to the generations of Makaab practices between the land and its dwellers.

And the Three-way Pledge of the Seals, which bound the rulers of Allaria, Tyveria and Nahuac to come to each other’s aid if any of them requested so, did not require the Coalition to share its wealth; but the other two realms acted as if it did.

From the beginning, Nahuac had to contend with Allarian settlers seeking to log its forests, Nwoda explorers sniffing for its mineral veins, and poachers and plunderers from a dozen other directions. The Coalition stopped it all by presenting a united, unbreakable front, and a doctrine of not allowing any outside force to make any use of its resources; but it was not easy, and even led to armed conflict, such as the four, well-documented Allaria-Nahuac wars. And the challenge continues to this day, as Nahuac’s neighbors have never actually stopped trying to gain control of its natural riches.

But the most painful blow to Nahuac diplomacy came from a group of ellari, which arrived as refugees from Allarian discrimination, asking to become part of the Coalition. Welcomed as citizens of Nahuac, these ellari encountered source slabs - natural, k’aab-grown stone formations, which contained flowing source magic and were held as sacred by various Náhuinn peoples. Unaware of the sacred nature of source slabs, the ellari refugees sought as many of them as they could, and experimented on them, draining and twisting their magic power, and using them to mutate themselves, to regain their capacity to dream. To Náhuinn eyes, this act violated the natural balance, and they immediately banished the Ellari community, which left to become the Sikarians, or Blue Elves, and establish their Arkane Dominion. Hungry for more source slabs to fuel their alchemical research, Sikarians became yet another of Nahuac’s greedy neighbors, conducting several poaching wars against the Coalition, which definitely closed its borders to all unauthorized transit.

The Second Null War
Faced with Nahuac’s stricter border stance, Allaria was forced to reach a compromise, and it agreed to stop harassing Nahuac’s borders in exchange for a permanent truce. King Yin of Allaria invoked the Ancient Pledge of the Seals, asking Nahuac to provide asylum for the Dragon Kingdom’s royal family every Red Moon, during dragon raids. The deal was bound with powerful magic, making sure neither side would break it, and the decades of conflict between Nahuac and Allaria ended. Or so it seemed.

During the Last Red Moon, when the royal family of Allaria sought asylum in Nahuac as per the Pledge, a group of Ocelinn radicals murdered King Yin, ending the pact ritual and triggering bloody retaliation from Allaria - a massive military raid that reached all the way to Nahuacáinn, slaughtered half the city’s population, and led to the breaking of the Three Seals that had kept the Null at bay for a millennium. This act started the Second Null War and irreparably broke all goodwill in an already tense relationship.

As the seals broke, however, dragonbonds returned. A group of dragonbonded warriors from various realms banded together and stopped the Second Null War, defeating the cultists that had instigated it from the start.

After the war, the same dragonbonded who stopped the war forced Allaria to make reparations to Nahuac, leading the region back to a grudging truce. The Coalition was still wary, of course, particularly the Ocelinn, and the Míg tainn necromancers, who had lost several high-ranking members to a botched dragonbond tactic during the war; but the truce was agreed, at least officially.

Afterwards, Dragonbonded have slowly returned to Náhuinn politics, gaining particular prominence in the North and South Quarters. Yet, for Nahuac, this is not peace, but only the calm before the next storm.

Dark Portents
Today, Nahuac is a Realm at a tense ceasefire with its neighbors, permanently on guard against the next Nwoda smuggler, a new betrayal from Allaria, or a sudden attack from the Sikarians, the Altanesi or the Sabaar Triumvirate - or even a surprise from their Tyverian ‘friends’. Their Míg tainn speakers all but quit the Council after the war, after the catastrophic battle during which dozens of their elders died by the actions of the Ocelinn and dragonbonded. They haven’t officially seceded from the Coalition, but something will break, and soon. The Buunkun sages of the West Quarter have predicted it: this century will define whether the Coalition survives, or crumbles, forever.