War of the Two Bloods

The War of the Two Bloods, also known as the Thousand-Year War, was a long series of military campaigns in the northern Mír valley region during the early Bronze Age. The two belligerent tribal confederations, the Shadowborn and the Black-bloods , were the two major military powers of the region but their enmity stretched far deeper than being a mere territorial dispute.
The war lasted for such a long time it defined the culture of the entire northern Mír region; almost all tribes of the region were eventually involved and forced into either camp, and fueled by endless campaigns of relentless hate against the other side. Despite the low population of the Mír region at the time and the primitive obsidian-based weapons used, the war saw near-endless bloodshed of unimaginable brutality.
==Background==
The hatred between Vht'shjenjé and the Mósharenja actually preceded the two confederative powers, with the former being the descendants of the Eshárenja who were massacred in the late Primordial age. The reborn Vht'shjenjé civilisation defined itself in its defiance against its eternal enemy and an eventual final conflict was inevitable.
After the rise of the Shjevtyrín , the Shadowborn had grown from being a small obscure tribe into a powerful federation spanning over more than a dozen nomadic and cave-dwelling clans. The Azure Army had aleady been established at the time with a strength of more than a thousand men, 10% of the entire tribe's population. Several attempts of the Shadowborn to travel south on the Mír river had been foiled by the black-bloods controlling a choke-point in the river, and any attempts of the black-bloods to move further north were also prevented with violent force. However, the enmity between the two had not yet blown into full-scale war. 
==The early centuries==
It is not known when and how the Thousand-Year War finally came into existence, but it is generally accepted by Vht'shjenjé historians that it began with a proper assault upon a black-blooded village in the south, the invading troops flying the all-blue banner to signify the united front of all Shadowborn. The black-blooded responded in due by creating their own army and attacking southern caravans. The war that would carry on for more than a thousand years had thus begun.
For most of the war, the two sides mounted assaults on border settlements, capturing it only to see the enemy recapturing it soon after. Casualties were low, mostly from pitched battles surrounding the settlements, but already at this time the black-bloods relied on terror tactics and brutally tortured captives to death, mutilating and displaying their corpses in the open. 
There is little else known about the first half of the Thousand-Year War; being a conflict between two illiterate tribal confederations, there are no recorded battles and the only source of information is from ancient epic poetry. There are, however, large amounts of living relics from this era in the shape of flutes. These flutes were carved from the femurs of slain black-blooded warriors and are said to have been played in the thousands at the dawn of a battle. Hundreds of these flutes have survived as heirlooms, especially within the Azure Army, many of them still singing their haunting tunes hundreds of years after the war.
==The late war==
Despite the constantly ongoing war and the drain of resources that it meant, the two confederations grew immensely in wealth, culture and power. The vast majority of the great architecture of Varvardnársh and the ruins of Shtvakhír were built in this area, both sides developing metallurgy and literacy, and created complex class-based societies. As the two sides grew more powerful and had greater resources at their disposal, so also grew the intensity of the war. The late Thousand-Year War era was thus remarkably different from the earlier years; armies grew larger, the campaigns stretched over longer time and distance, and above all the death toll was higher.
One of the earliest recorded battles was the battle of Ash'jekala, where a host of 3000 Azure warriors led by the legendary commander Vanjatsíren utterly destroyed a black-blooded host of superior size and enslaved 4000 black-blooded civilians. These slaves contributed greatly to the expansion of the city of Varvardnársh and facilitated the rise of said settlement into a full city-state. It is worth noting that the entire population of the Mósharenja at the time is believed to be no more than 50.000, showing the scale of the defeat at Ash'jekala.
However, the period was also one of enormous instability in Vht'shjenjé, the state being at the brink of complete civil war following the Ikhjenirenite conspiracy and a growing antagonism between the Azure Army and the poet class. The tribal theocracy under the Shjevtyrín collapsed for a time and was replaced by Káshtjenjír's military dictatorship which granted supreme power to the army. The Mósharenja hosts, on the other hand, saw a series of victories by the brilliant commander Arthyrín Skheveshtjé. She famously captured two major eastern settlements using less than 100 men for each,  ritually sacrificing their kings to her insect deities. The crushing defeats the inflicted upon the Azure Army, along with the threat of civil war, left the Vht'shjenjé crippled at the time. Bolstered by her victories and a desire to end the war that no-one thought could end, she mounted an army of more than 10.000 men - the largest ever seen in the Iron Desert - and marched for the Vht'shjenjé capital itself; the city of Varvardnársh.
==The Battle of Varvardnársh==
Belligerents	
Vht'shjenjé	
Mósharenja
Commanders	
Nashenirén	
Arthyrín✝
Strength	3000 	10.000+
Losses 	
Military: 2000
Civilian: 8000+	10.000+
Outcome 	Victory	Defeat
Arthyrín's siege of the sacred city of Varvardnársh was the beginning of the end of the great war. A host of Shadowborn allies tried to prevent her army from reaching the city; of the 4000 soldiers less than 500 survived the doomed attempt to stall the black-blooded legion. In two months, her army had encircled the entire territory of Vht'shjenjé and approached the city from the north.
In Varvardnársh itself, a city whose magnificient stone avenues already were stained with cauterised blood, a state of emergency was declared and desperature measures were taken to raise an army to defend against the invaders. The army, no more than 3000 in number, were far outnumbered by their enemy, and as most of the experienced generals had been slain during the disastrous campaigns and civil wars, the defence of the city was handed to the young warrior-ascetic Nashenirén Nen-Krshtynas'a.
Arthyrín's forces were pressed to finish off the siege as she wanted the victory to coincide with the festival of the full moon, and began her advance from below. The lower stratas of the city, which had degenerated into a lawless underworld at the time, were caught helpless by the full might of her army and faced near-total annihilation. Not only warriors but civilians and children were slain in the thousands and the dead piled up in the narrow corridors of the damp underground, the stench of putrid flesh allegedly leaking up all the way into the heart of the city where Nashenirén and his rag-tag forces were determined to make a last stand.
Given the youth and inexperience of the Shadowborn commander, he was regarded as little of a threat to Arthyrín's advance. However, she had underestimated him. As she began to advance upon the proper city itself, she found that the young general had managed to predict almost all of her strategies, and the remaining Shadowborn took up a stalwart defence of their sacred city. Everywhere they went they encountered dug-in enemy troops who bombarded them with arrows and fire. The black-bloods had to fight their way into the heart of the city meter by meter, the Shadowborn troops refusing to give up their position. Eventually, however, her decimated hosts broke into the city and her troops charged down the great avenues of the city, murdering all in their way. There, upon the great avenue and below the steps leading to the Shjevtyrín's palace, the final battle was fought. The remaining elite Ihtsikhá warriors held their ground and Nashenirén was locked in personal combat with Arthyrín herself upon the steps of Shjevtyrín's temple, where she was eventually killed by her own blade wielded by the Shadowborn general.Dismayed by the death of their general, the black-blooded ranks broke and were destroyed.
The city of Varvardnársh were in ruins and the battle saw the death of almost a third of the entire Shadowborn population, as well as the complete destruction of Arthyrín's force.
Category:Battles
==The End of the Thousand-Year War==
With the defeat at Varvardnársh, the tables turned and the black-bloods found themselves at disadvantage. More and more neighbouring neutral clans declared war against them and rallied behind the blue flag of the Shadowborn. Nashenirén managed to purge the remaining rebel factions within the Shadowborn government and mounted a unified counter-offensive against his enemy. In the course of a few months, most of the black-blooded caves and nomad camps were assaulted from all sides, most of them being completely annihilated in the subsequent battles. It is said that more than 30.000 men and women lost their lives in the last few months before Nashenirén's army finally arrived at the gates of Ch'kth'chír, the black-blooded capital.
4000 Shadowborn troops, assisted by 10.000 allies, fell upon the enemy capital and another bloody battle commenced, almost as brutal as the one in Varvardnársh only months before. Before even breaching into the main city, half of the invasion force had already been killed, and the most brutal battle followed within the city itself, where the final ruling dynasty of the black-bloods committed suicide. 
The remaining black-bloods destroyed several floodgates within their city and flooded large portions of it rather than seeing it fall into the hands of the enemy.
==Legacy==
The black-blooded capital was renamed to Shtvakhír and became a Shadowborn settlement, famous for its vast hospital created by the chiurgeon Vshtjrtsír. The black-blooded civilisation effectively ceased to exist, the surviving population assimilated into the Shadowborn and their entire territory annexed. The war also saw the end of the ancient insect-worshipping cult as a major religious doctrine in the area, replaced by the rise of the Ancestral veneration cult as propagated by the Vht'shjenjé.
The war, however, had devastated the region for such a long time the politial landscape had completely changed. The clan-based societies that once dominated the area had been decimated and so many bloodlines had been severed most of them had no choice but to be assimilated into the state of Vht'shjenjé, turning the confederation into a proper state with a unified bureaucracy and code of law.
It is impossible to overlook the importance of the Thousand-Year War when trying to comprehend the culture of the northern Iron Desert; almost all culture considered indigenous to the region came into being during this time and marked by its antagonism to the worship of insects and other lesser deities. 
In the late Bronze Age, the remains of the black-blooded civilisation has been assimilated into the Vht'shjenjé to the point where it is almost impossible to separate them, despite the fact that they defined their very existences as polar opposites of one another only centuries before.
Category:Wars
Category:History