The House of Bone

by kiben007

The Lord of the Locusts has been mankind's greatest enemy since time immemorial. But what if he wasn't the ultimate evil the Disciples of Venu thought he was. What if he was a mere tool. A weapon, more accurately, designed to destroy a Goddess. If such a thing were true, two questions are left open: Who was it that could have forged such a weapon? And who could have wielded it?

1. Prologue: An Understanding

In the ten years since the "Glaian Usurpation", as many have taken to calling the drastic series of events that struck the Bone people in the year 2526 AD, countless reports and analyses and summations of the event and its aftermath have been compiled. This book will not number among those countless. This book is a recording of sorts that will attempt to maintain the truth behind the events so fresh in our collective memory. It is an attempt to chronicle our people's long, secret history with the humans of the Valley, and an attempt to put into words the mystery that still surrounds the events of the final hours of the crisis our planet suffered. But in order to accomplish that task, we must first establish context. A baseline, if you will, for our understanding of our people's history.

Two thousand five hundred and thirty six years ago, the race of small, white desert dwelling creatures known as the bones stepped out of the Great Wastes and into the lands in which we now live for the first time. Up until this point, the bones had lived in small, close-knit tribes united under a myriad of clan banners for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years. Upon discovering the existence of the lush, fertile lands to their west, the clans of Nagratek and Deyavara, the two oldest and most powerful clans, rushed out to stake their claims on the vast territory. Closely behind them followed the clans such as Fudrasil, Trenya, and Laz'bethed. These clans spread far and wide to the west, across thousands of miles on unsettled territory, and created a vast sea of kingdoms in an event known as the Diaspora. This patchwork of territories stretched from the eastern desert to the southern plains, the western shores, and to the northern mountains. These small kingdoms, bound together by loose clan heritage, gradually lost their humble desert roots, and created a vibrant, corrupt, and constantly shifting political landscape that lasted for over fifteen hundred years. Then, in the year 1549 After Diaspora, the bone kingdoms were brutally invaded by a race of entirely alien conquerors from across the sea: the humans.

Coming from the Western sea, the Wadralian Thalassocracy, a vast sea empire of many island peoples from the oceans that separate the human and bone continents, waged war on these splintered and unorganized bone kingdoms. The humans carved a bloody path of destruction eastward, forcing the bones almost all the way back to the desert from which they came. On the verge of the bone's defeat, the leader of and last of the Nagratek Clan, Argus Nagratek, stood fast, claiming that their weak and old fashioned traditions had led to their defeat. He cast off his clan name, and took the name of Bone, becoming Argus Bone and forming the House of Bone. Under his leadership, the Bones pushed back, used the human's resources against them, and retook some of their lands. But more humans arrived, and the bones dug in, more casting off their old heritage and joining the new House of Bone. These new humans were relentless, and the bone line of defense was near collapsing when a major shift in the war took place. The humans started dying unprovoked.

They could not breathe the air of the continent for more than a few years before suffering extremely severe convulsions followed by a painful death. With this knowledge, the bones waged a renewed war of attrition against the humans, outlasting them. Eventually the humans abandoned their efforts and the Wadralians descended into a long, bloody civil war that collapsed the Thalassocracy and formed the Wadralain Democracy. After the fires of war were put out at home, Argus Bone and his new House of Bone conquered all of the former bone kingdoms, forming the continent spanning Republic of Bone Territories. This new republic was a shining bastion of progress, and when peaceful relations were established with the newly formed Wadralian Democracy, they adopted much of the culture, policy, politics, and even language of their new ally over the next few centuries.

As old wounds healed and the past rewrote itself, many of the old clan ways died off. Some people kept their traditional clan names, mostly in the northern resource colonies and eastern farm belt, but these acts of cultural defiance could not stop the tidal wave that was the House of Bone. Bones abandoned their roots, took the last name Bone, and joined this forward thinking "clan for the modern ages" as it was called over the next millennium. It celebrated democracy, capitalism, and individualism above all else. These ideals took the central and southern provinces by storm, and very soon Bone became the most popular surname in the entire republic. Life moved on, and left the old traditions of the clan system behind. Many left the eastern heartlands for the other, more prosperous territories, and it wasn't until Big Johnson Bone founded Boneville almost nine hundred years after the end of the Wadralian War that it began to recover. When it did, it too was flooded with the products and cultures of the peoples from across the sea, and the old ways were, for the most part, quickly forgotten.

But in the north there still existed those who hated the humans for destroying their way of life, and hated even more the House of Bone for letting these poisonous ideals corrupt their people. As a result, for centuries they were treated as second class citizens by the "ruling elite" of the House of Bone, and only in the last hundred years have substantial steps been taken to establish equality for those who retained their heritage. But despite the promises of change, the clans still felt marginalized. And drawing on a sense of hatred they had fostered for almost a thousand years, they vowed revenge, and began hatching a plan. In the late 2470's and early 2480's, powerful members of dozens of clans pooled their resources into terrorist organizations in an attempt to overthrow or overtake the government. The resulting clash between government forces and terrorist networks lasted until 2501, when a government black ops team managed to drive the terrorist networks underground.

The situation seemed placated for over two decades, until Senator Phoncible P. Bone was elected President of the Republic in 2525. The Senator, who had served two consecutive terms after his and his cousin's return from the Valley in 2521, was entirely unfamiliar with the clan situation. As a result, the underground terrorist networks chose his presidency to resurface and attempt to overthrow the government once again, this time under the leadership of Glaian Nagratek, self-titled "All-Consuming" and self-proclaimed "Last of the Nagrateks". It was this situation that led to the "Glaian Usurpation", as well as the events chronicled here in this book: the Third Valley War and the Crisis of the Black Eye.

- Excerpt from the intro to "The Valley Wars: The History of the House of Bone and the Valley Peoples." By Archibald Bone.