The Reign of Fourteen - Power
King Antum Martis Septikus XIV
"Power is not inheritance. It is the spoils." — attributed to Septikus XIV
In the alleys of Aurileum, they did not speak his full name.
They whispered Fourteen, as if saying more might summon him.
He was born into a dynasty of conquerors, but he perfected the art.
The Galzenes fell last – their banners torn down, their cities ground into the red dust. Their men – to the last – lay dead, bodies mangled; their women in chains, enslaved.
When this last rival kingdom burned, Mars entered an age of prosperity so radiant that even the long‑lived elves dared to believe it could last.
But what prosperity ever thrived in tyranny, what snowflake ever settled in fire?
Fragment from Durvost's Ledger – Volume 71:
“He smiled when he killed. Not for the cruelty in it — for the certainty.”
The Reign of Fourteen - Purge
King Antum Martis Septikus XIV
The Purge of the Magi
Fourteen’s decree was simple, and catastrophic:
“Opposition is treason. Treason is death.”
He executed soldiers, scholars, ministers, and magistrates.
But the worst wound he dealt was to magic itself.
The great magicians — the ones whose names were spoken with reverence or fear — were dragged into the streets and cut down. Their towers burned. Their libraries cracked open like bones.
Elves lived long enough to watch the consequences unfold in slow, horrifying detail.
From the Trial Records of the Last Galzene Archmage:
“You think you have won. But you have only killed the hands that held up the sky.”
Fourteen laughed when he heard that.
It wasn't as funny six centuries later.
The Reign of Fourteen - Heretics
The Druidic Lattice
The Forgotten Work Beneath the World
Long before the Ten Kingdoms, before Aurileum’s silks and wines, before Fourteen’s line even existed, the druids and alchemists tended a quiet miracle.
A planetary lattice of Bright magic — a dome woven over millions of years — held back the sun’s fury and kept the dying core of Mars from surrendering to the void.
They did not call it a magnetic field.
They called it the Breath of the World.
And Fourteen, in his paranoia, slaughtered nearly all who knew how to sustain it.
Recovered from the Druidic Codex, Leaf 7 (charred):
“The world is a beast with a wounded heart. Ours are the hands that keep it beating.”
When the sky dimmed and the first Bright storms flickered across the horizon, the surviving druids crawled from their hermitages to warn him.
Some were executed as heretics.
Some were ignored.
A few were heard — far too late.