DRAGONSKULL reader question

A reader sent a question about the DRAGONSKULL series.

I should mention that this question has some spoilers for the DRAGONTIARNA series, but none for DRAGONSKULL if you haven’t started reading it yet.

Basically, the reader wanted to know why the Heptarchy hasn’t followed up with another attack on Andomhaim since the events of DRAGONTIARNA.

The short answer: building a fleet, equipping an invasion army, and sending it three and a half thousand miles across the ocean is really, really expensive and difficult to do. A seaborne invasion is traditionally one of the hardest maneuvers to successfully execute in the history of warfare.

Longer answer:

The Heptarchy is a large group of city-states, tribes, kingdoms, and nations who are all client states of one of the Seven Temples of the urdmordar, and the purpose of the Seven Temples is to harvest life energy for the urdmordar to consume using enspelled sacrificial altars. That is the ultimate purpose of the Heptarchy, and that guides every decision taken by the ruling priestesses. It’s basically a giant feed farm for the seven urdmordar. The entire system was designed and set up by the Visionary, who by urdmordar standards is insane, and her Quaesitor priestesses act as the secret police who make sure everything runs smoothly. Sometimes the Seven Temples let their client states go to war against one another, sometimes to resolve a dispute between two Temples, sometimes to kill off a troublesome population, sometimes to let tensions resolve themselves, but the priestesses keep things from getting out of hand.

So the Heptarchy is a brutally efficient evil empire, but not even the Heptarchy can escape from the banes of large, centralized states – expenses, logistical difficulty, bureaucratic inertia, and internal unrest.

1.) Expense. Preparing Warlord Agravhask’s fleet and invasion army in DRAGONTIARA was hugely expensive, and in exchange for all that money and effort the Heptarchy got more or less nothing. They still hold the Isle of Kordain, but that is a remote outpost that will be difficult and costly to defend, and they might well lose their grip upon it. The Visionary convinced the other six urdmordar to support the invasion plan, and after the failure of the first invasion, the urdmordar are unlikely to want to try again for some time. For her part, the Visionary knew that Warlord Agravhask would likely betray the Heptarchy, but she didn’t care since she knew it would set in motion of chain of events that might give her a chance to capture the high elven artificer Tarmyntir.

And while the Seven Temples are rich, they don’t have infinite money, and the Heptarchy isn’t a command economy because that would lead to fewer people being born and therefore fewer potential people upon whom the urdmordar could feed. So at some point, the Seven Temples have to stop spending and recover their finances. The seven urdmordar are generally hands-off in the day to day ruling so long as the regular sacrifices continue upon their altars and let the priestesses run most things, but the priestesses can sometimes persuade them to make decisions, and after DRAGONTIARNA, very few priestesses support an invasion of Andomhaim.

For now, anyway.

2.) Logistical difficulty. As mentioned above, seaborne invasion is one of the most difficult maneuvers to perform in warfare, especially across the distance separating the Heptarchy from Andomhaim. For that matter, the Heptarchy is a continent-spanning empire, and while it has good internal roads and canals, moving stuff around is still difficult. Assembling the amount of ships, weapons, and material necessary for another large seaborne invasion would be difficult, which leads directly to the next point.

3.) Bureaucratic inertia. As many a crusading politician fired with reforming zeal has realized, getting the government to change is difficult when most of the people doing the actual work of the governing don’t want things to change. Many of the priestesses of the Seven Temples thought the invasion was a bad idea, and only participated because the urdmordar commanded it, and if Agravhask conquered Andomhaim, they wanted a share of the spoils and the shaping of Andomhaim’s new government. Some of the younger and more ambitious priestesses were enthusiastic about the invasion, but they all got killed. The vast majority of priestesses don’t want to try another invasion at the moment.

4.) Internal unrest. The Heptarchy is a brutally efficient ruler, but things go wrong. Sometimes rebellions get out of hand, and the Heptarchy lost a lot of soldiers in Andomhaim. Too much more strain, and the Heptarchy might have to fight a bloody, decades-long war to get their homeland back under control. To the priestesses’ way of thinking, that is the waste of a lot of valuable assets. And they still haven’t been able to find the hidden city of the Stormblades, who are making trouble and stirring up rebellion.

So with all that in mind, the Heptarchy is unlikely to want to invade Andomhaim again for some time, focusing instead on internal rebuilding.

That said…the priestesses haven’t forgotten about Andomhaim. And the chief priestesses of the Seven Temples are intelligent and capable of carrying out centuries-long plans. Main force failed in Andomhaim. But subversion and corruption might succeed where conquest failed. What if in five or six generations enough humans could be converted to the worship of the urdmordar to cause a civil war within Andomhaim? Or that enough nobles could be subverted, or perhaps even the High King himself. This would save on the expense of a costly invasion, and hand Andomhaim to the Heptarchy upon a silver platter.

Of course, our protagonists will not take that lying down. 🙂

So that is why the Heptarchy hasn’t sent another fleet to Andomhaim after DRAGONTIARNA.

-JM