Valore.
The great continent. Bounty of the earth, free with the wind, vast oceans and rivers; Fields of snow, plains of fire. So large the furthest-flung adventurers could not see its reaches in a hundred years. Where life blossomed and civilization thrived. People and animals alike in abundance.
Valore.
Wounded and scarred. Rent in twain by both a great gash in the earth and two warring kingdoms.
Nohr. Hoshido.
For near a hundred years the western and eastern kingdoms fought, made peace, and fought yet more.
Nohr, founded under faint sunlight that broke the dark skies but a third of the day. Under authority of the Dusk Dragon and its progeny, the people settled in the land to make it thrive in spite of the hardships that awaited them. These people: proud, determined and dour. They tilled the bleak fields, fished from rivers and oceans, hunted the great native beasts, and cultivated the mushrooms needed to feed its people. The rich stores of ore, common and precious, served to enforce a strong, hardy culture clad in dark metals and colorful stones.
Hoshido, where bright sun brought light mood. From the Dawn Dragon they descended, and they would bring its light to world's end. Its people, cheerful, full of life and laughter. Central and open, Hoshido made itself peacemaker in the region and forged strong bonds and alliances with its neighbors. With its bountiful foods managed by calm heads, Hoshido thrived on trade and the riches it brought.
Separated by an enormous bottomless canyon splitting Valore in half, Nohr and Hoshido flourished across the gap. They were not unknown to hostilities, to each other or the smaller nations around them. But for generations even temperaments and mutual benefits kept the demons of war from rising.
Yet war broke. As it always did. With the oldest cause of all: Those who had, and those who had not.
The usual disasters of famine and scarcity were as familiar to Nohr as breathing, but a great calamity saw its food sources cut at once. Famine struck that even the hardiest crops could not endure, water turned foul, game grew scarce, and fishing nets were pulled empty. Only trade remained, and Nohr looked to its eastern neighbor, Hoshido, to feed its starving people They obliged.
But not without cost.
Desperation would make a man do anything and death was the most desperate cause of all. While at first, the convoys of grains, rice and preserved fruits were sold at fair cost, the scent of greed wafted in the air. As Nohr's attempts to combat its famine found little success, the demand for food only grew, and prices with it. Hoshidan merchants traded their goods at exorbitant costs — costs that Nohr was all-too-willing to pay. But when the gems had been stripped from every statue, nobles garbed themselves like peasants and even the royal family's treasury weighed no more than an infant… Hoshido wanted even more.
Western Hoshido had taken in Nohr immigrants for generations, even before the food shortages in Nohr. When the famine struck, those immigrants became refugees and, when Nohr could no longer pay for grain, the problem only worsened. The Nohrian populace in western Hoshido soon began to outnumber the Hoshidian natives. Work, high to low, was filled; thievery and violence became the most commonplace trade and crime spiked.
The King of Hoshido, Jimmu, though more a man of might than mind, and action than procedure, did his best to sway the hearts of his people towards peace. But, in defiance of his royal edict, the western daimyos rounded up the Nohrian refugees and forced them back across the border. Even those who'd lived in Hoshido for years were not spared this exile. There were those who resisted. They became the first direct casualties of the hundred years' war. Barely a quarter of the hundred thousand people displaced from their homes returned alive to Nohr. Bodies hurled into the canyon, never to be reclaimed.
The enduring populace of Nohr was galvanized by the actions of Hoshido. Attempts at peace were swept aside in the fervor of revenge and the kingdom in the dark set out to conquer its neighbor in the light. The great veins of ore were turned from farming implements and cooking utensils into weapons of war. The army swelled in size with one simple decree: "those who fight, eat."
The laws of Nohr melded well with the conventions of army life, and the harsh climates of Nohr bred its people strong. Nohr marched for war, crossing the precarious few natrual landbridges over the canon and taking the Hoshidan border garrisons by surprise. Fat and arrogant, the border guards never imagined Nohr would strike and their little experience in fighting bandits availed them little against a proper army. They were slaughtered like the refugees they'd once driven away. Nohr relished in their easily-gained vengeance.
Under shroud of night and personal command of King Harald, Nohr's army took the western reaches of Hoshido in less than a week. They plundered the cities, towns and fields. Gorged on foods they could not pronounce in the native tongue and enjoyed feasts that would make them the envy of Nohr nobility. Returning tenfold the horrors Hoshido had inflicted on them prior.
It took a week for the news to reach Hoshido's king, and in the month that followed, he gathered the full strength of Hoshido, its allies, and numerous unaffiliated tribes. Two months after Nohr's invasion, the two great armies clashed. The first of many such battles.
The professional men-at-arms of Hoshido were not the overpaid watch along the border. While not a match to a soldier of Nohr in a duel, two were, and Hoshido's alliance outnumbered Nohr ten-to-one.
Hoshido leveraged its advantages well. It knew the terrain, where to place ambushes; it knew the weather, when the rains might come and bog down its enemies. Hoshido was even willing to trade lives in inordinate values because it could afford to replace its ranks. But most importantly, Hoshido could eat.
The conquered border regions were stripped bare of food to feed the invading army and Hoshido's staunch defense prevented a deeper incursion. Nohrian raiders could not recoup their cost, as Hoshido concentrated its food supplies into heavily defended supply depots that Nohr could never claim. Local game and foraging could not feed the army, and what little food spared from Nohr risked spoilage on travel. Nohr retreated from its various fronts and adopted a defensive strategy concentrated around key areas of control. The former farmers that made up a significant portion of Nohr's armies were ordered back to their usual trade and resettled the taken land.
During this time, battles lessened in scope and size. In response to Nohr's defensive posture, the Hoshidan farmers also returned home to aid in the harvests. For a time there was a shaky peace. Overtures were made between both kings, misdirection and lies that did little but make a few headless messengers. Arrogance, pride and hate buried their roots deep into the minds of every man at war.
When Nohr's first foreign harvest was to be reaped, Hoshido struck. There was no grand stratagem, just a simple application of force. Hoshido threw its whole might into displacing Nohr's expedition. Nohr was pressed on every front and the attack came at the moment the farmers were exhausted from harvesting their foodstuffs. When Hoshido broke the outer defenses the tired farmers could offer little in the way of resistance. Nohr retreated, it's formation in tatters.
Near half the soldiers on campaign did not see their homeland again. The king included. The first, but certainly not the last.
Hoshido pursued the fleeing Nohrians to the border canyon and no further. Hoshido's large army would be vulnerable if it attempted to cross any of the limited pathwayss over the Bottomless Canyon. The King of Hoshido held his people in check, and focused instead on healing the war-ravaged lands and repaying debts to foreign nations.
Nohr did much the same. Farmers returned to their steads, and laborers constructed large forts near, but not quite on, the Bottomless Canyon border. The law grew strict, and punishment for criminals grew stricter still. A martial mentality began to reform the whole country, all at the behest of the newly coronated queen, Asa.
Talk of peace and friendship went on in twisted lies as both sides prepared for the war to come. The Queen of Nohr launched carefully selected raids across the border to ascertain Hoshido's positions and goad them into crossing. "This war will not end 'til one nation stands!" Rebuffed at every opportunity, Hoshido's king made ready to invade.
King Jimmu sent elite troops to secure vital chokepoints and insure the pathways into Nohr were clear before following in with the bulk of his army. And only his army, as the nations he allied himself with saw nothing to gain from an invasion into Nohr.
Hoshido's invasion proved itself even more effortless than Nohr's. What little resistance the Hosdian border guard offered was still more than the unpopulated eastern reaches of Nohr. The king set up his supply lines and advanced deeper into Nohr at a cautious pace.
Despite the lack of resistance, Hoshido's intrusion did not boast the ease of Nohr's invasion. The Nohrian army was aided considerably by accurate maps drafted by the angry and displaced refugees, as well as old, common trade routes. Hoshido could not count this among their boons, as it was rare for a man of the east to settle in the west.
The craggy and unsuitable terrain of the kingdom of dark slowed progress even further. The samurai of Hoshido thought themselves stalwart and brave, but the cold and darkness of Nohr was something they had no familiarity with. Before even crossing blades with Nohr's army, illness took lives. Morale suffered, which only worsened as winter set in, and the supply lines were impeded by heavy snow and unsuited Hoshidan construction. Hoshido's winters were mild, and snow was naught but a fancy Nohrian tale to them. Only the heaviest of rainfalls could measure in impairment as the knee-high snowfall did.
A tenth of the king's soldiers were infirm before they even reached the first fortress of Nohr. A massive bulwark of stone and metal, a far cry from the wooden strongholds of Hoshido. Reports came in from other fronts of the same bulwarks impeding the Hoshidan army. King Jimmu weighed his options and settled in for a siege to test the defenses. He dare not risk leaving any fortresses free to strike his flank, should he penetrate deeper into Nohr's blackened heartlands.
The sieges went poorly. The snow made it difficult to even bring the weaponry to bear and the engines of war Hoshido had brought proved ill-equipped to shatter the stonework defenses of Nohr. Attempts to scale the walls, infiltrate ninjas, or perform aerial insertions found no purchase either. The invasion had ground to a halt on most fronts and King Jimmu began reconsidering his options. A few small victories eked in from other fronts, but the deeper into Nohr his scouts went, the more such forts that awaited.
The very land of Nohr would not brook intrusion. With a heavy heart, King Jimmu ordered his forces into retreat even in the midst of winter's icy talons. Whence he returned to the throne of Hoshido, he intended to attone for his mistake with his life.
He would never get that chance.
Nohr saw its opportunity, as Hoshido once did, and struck. The weakened armies of Hoshido were no match for the healthy Nohrians; it was a massacre that put the battles of prior to shame. No matter the course, no matter the time, Nohr pursued the retreating Hoshidans. The King died at some unknown time during the retreat, just one more body on the road of corpses that led back to Hoshido.
The vicious counterattack saw no end, not even when Hoshido retreated to the ruins of the supply depots King Jimmu had constructed in Nohr. Nohr's aerial forces had flanked the retreating Hoshidans and taken the depots. They pillaged what food they could and burned the rest. The Hoshidan army had thrown away its supplies to expedite its retreat and, for the first time in many of their lives, Hoshidans knew hunger the way Nohr did.
Harassed and starved, the Hoshidan army made a desperate break for freedom through the enemy's ranks. Harassed every step of the way from Nohr to Hoshido; less than a hundred thousand of the half a million soldiers who marched into Nohr returned home. And even half among that number succumbed to death by disease (or by other means) within the year.
Through the century the conflagration of conflict would spark and burn in a mighty inferno. A dozen times did Nohr or Hoshido come within a dagger stab of claiming victory, only to have it snatched away. Death and revengeance became the due and righteousness course as both nations deluded and obscured their past faults to focus on the evils of their rival nation.
These wars were not always fought with fire and steel but sometimes with words and intrigue. Each side sought to claim any advantage, no matter how slight, over the other. Coercion and bribery became common currency as alliances with lesser powers were made and broken, and lesser nations were made and broken.
Valore. The great continent! Valore! The home of Hoshido — of Nohr! Valore. A continent at war.
And through it all, waited eyes shrouded in twilight…
The end of Nohr's era of conquest would begin in the waning years of the rule of King Garon. Long had he reigned, the first Nohrian king to boast of white hairs since King Harald's father. He succeeded even in surviving his contemporary in Hoshido, King Sumeragi. Once a frontline king renowned for his prowess in battle, Garon retired to the capital of Nohr, Windmire, leaving military command in the hands of his firstborn son, Crown Prince Xander.
Across the great gulf between the nations, Queen Mitoko ruled her lands from Shirasagi, capital of Hoshido. Her ascent to the throne a bloody affair, as King Garon slew her husband King Sumeragi during peace talks. In spite of a hundred thousand voices screaming for vengeance, Queen Mitoko sought a path of peace, even after Nohr's treachery. For the first time in generations, food flowed freely from Hoshido to Nohr. Her grace and benevolence soon calmed voices of dissent in the court. Hostilities subsided, even if they did not quench completely.
But passion still burned hot in Hoshido, and High Prince Ryoma did not sit quiet. While overtures of peace were made, he fortified the border to ensure no invasion from Nohr could ever succeed. And, if need be, any invasion into Nohr would triumph where his forefathers failed.
From atop the somber throne of Nohr, the aged, but still mighty, King Garon issued a decree. His four children at his side are all-too-eager to carry it out.
From atop the golden throne of Hoshido, the wise Queen Mikoto sent a trusted few on a secret mission deep into the dark heart of Nohr. Her five children ignorant of what is to come.
To the northeast of Windmire, in the mighty fortification of Northfort, the king's fifth child thrashed in slumber…
AN: Hey, look, another sweeping epic of 'let's fix' Fates. Step One: Worldbuild the shit out of this thing. Let's actually name the continent to start. If even the original Fire Emblem can name it why couldn't they do it here?