Chapter One - The Paledragon Amendment

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In the 19th, 20th, or 21st year of King Donahue’s reign—depending on which calendar one used—an estrangement in the Western Fortunes, now ten years old, had escalated to civil war. 

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A warlord had risen to power by the name of Kuinkazner, and it was to that cold and pitiless name that many strange rumors had come to be nailed. The fast-moving and well-financed Kuinkazner had humbled many of the ancient cities and shrines of northern Sanzakarth. Desert kingdoms seem to breed tyrants—one kind of desolation begetting another—and this Kuinkazner was as cruel as any other. He made an open show of those who denied his ancient claims: burning whole towns, crucifying entire families, seizing whatever assets pleased him, executing peaceful priests, burying scholars alive, throwing disabled children into pits of starving hyenas, desecrating temples erected to those better spirits who refused to hear his bloody vows, and enslaving tens of thousands for their unwilling part in his coming kingship. 

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Withstanding him, sequestered in the ancient fortress of Anzioch, was a young girl by the name of Silayujon. However, the current Queen of Anzioch, the 22nd in her line, the scheming Guinsiratu, ignored the claims of Silayujon, intending instead to promote her daughter, Shin Shadane, and come to a treaty with Kuinkazner through marriage. And so, Anzioch was a city with two queens: one backed by the lawful Sabler Order and another by murder, malice, and intrigue.

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Invoking a forgotten covenant, the Sablers captured Anzioch with only five thousand men, holding it under the authority of an old but celebrated Vambrasian name:

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P A L E D R A G O N

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The Sabler Commander, the prestigious General Saxallen Duralamayre, a man who had walked the world for eighty-five years and killed for seventy of them, held the city in obedience to King Donahue’s primary wish that Sanzakarth not lapse into heathenry.

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The very image of that heathenry was Kuinkazner, commanding a two-hundred-thousand-man army, whose hateful gaze now lay fixed on Anzioch, the great seaside fortress that guarded the southern Sea of Hooks.

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Fortunately for the Sablers, their best allies included the legendary Blackthorns of the Eastern Fortunes and the House of Yale, which had recently immigrated from the distant skies of Royos. The breadth of the Sabler Commonwealth, with its fair practices, devotion to law, free markets, and broad moral and economic benevolence, was too philosophically precious and commercially prosperous to risk the advance of a rapacious desert-dwelling despot. Investing themselves into the matter, the Blackthorns and the Yales came to Anzioch offering aid, insight, money, and (as the Sablers had hoped) the use of their many strange artifacts. 

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Tristanué Azhora Yale was one such ally.

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She was living on Arbonshire at the time, a small islet off the eastern side of Arbonhale, the island capital of the Sabler Commonwealth. It was purchased twenty years prior when two of her aunts, Allessia and Devon, barely older than her, were gallivanting around the Southern Rhone. It was open to anyone from the Houses of Blackthorn and Yale or their many political allies and personal friends. As for Tristanué, she loved to travel. Whether it was to the far Eastern Fortunes to see her relatives, those benevolent rulers of Nymiria, the Blackthorns, or west to San Sabé to visit her cousins there, she loved the breadth and diversity of the civilized world. Nonetheless, whenever Tristanué went home, she went to Arbonshire. 

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After spending almost five months in Anzioch—in no small way irritating General Saxallen Duralamayre with her many daring but unsanctioned midnight raids against Kuinkazner’s flanks and less-defended fortifications, which, when timed right, included the old religious capital of Anzukar—she was delighted to be over one hundred-and-thirty leagues away from even one grain of sand and the general’s scowls. 

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In those weeks, she and her younger sisters Tristana and Tristal returned to their favorite pastime, pearl-diving nude into the clear blue warm waters around Arbonshire. When the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and Strange Auspices learned that Tristanué planned to return to Anzioch, their senior officer, Lord Hoel, proposed a co-venture. That is, allowing a small number of Sabler explorers and spies to travel with her. 

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Hoel would have petitioned Tristanué’s successful cousin, Orland, but she could not be found. Or to her other cousin, the devout, rational, and beaming Kazandria, but a proposal of marriage—from a king no less—had seized her political and romantic sails like a gale-force crosswind. Even Hoel, whose fiercest detractors knew he possessed an utterly fearless soul and a mind for diabolically clever subterfuge, dared not come between a young girl and her royal vows. Still, he tried. Kazandria’s response, always in her pretty cursive, contained one name— 

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Tristanué.