Izim Bishim War

* Disruption of Izim Bishim's tectonic activity, causing permanent fires worldwide
* Acceleration of Bandish space programs
* Mass evacuation of Izim Bishim
* Colonisation of neighbouring planets
* Ongoing interstellar conflict, the Bandish Feud

### Combatants

Independent Izim Bishimic Bandish Nations, most notably:* The Ashaterai
* The Funer Oldrim
* The Qorai
* The Shingin Imbin
* The Tossokorig

The **Izim Bishim War**, often referred to as "The Five Infernos", was a global war that took place on the planet Izim Bishim, lasting from 96, 7th Age, Bleak Epoch, ME, to 111, 2nd Age, Second Dawn Epoch, NE, lasting a total of 783 years. Much of the conflict centred around land disputes between Izim Bishim's five superpower Bandish nations of the time: the Ashaterai, the Funer Oldrim, the Qorai, the Shingin Imbin, and the Tossokorig. The massive death toll, roughly 7 billion Izim Bishimic Bandish deaths, and geophysical destruction caused by the war made it one of the worst planetary conflicts in the history of the galaxy.

## History

### Prelude

During the Middle Era, the formerly small, generally nomadic communities of Bandish that inhabited Izim Bishim's vast, dry scrublands and forests were forced to settle in permanent, agricultural settlements established by the newly dominant and heavily militaristic powers of the anarchic Bandish city-states. Among these city-states were five nations - the Ashaterai, the Funer Oldrim, the Qorai, the Shingin Imbin, and the Tossokorig - who went on to become the most powerful nations of the planet. This was generally a result of hard militarism, overpowering neighbouring city-states with superior weapons technology, effectuated by a loose style of stratocratic government in which the military held power.

Many traditional Bandish communities remained, maintaining their original custom of nomadism - a way of life consequent to the frequent wildfires of Izim Bishim's dry habitats and hot climate - but these communities became rarer as the super-nations continued to develop and grow unboundedly. Having abandoned the nomadic lifestyle, these Bandish nations prioritised extinguishing Izim Bishim's wildfires as opposed to moving around them. This meant that vast areas became littered with dry, highly flammable organic material due to the prevention of fires, making much of Izim Bishim's habitats increasingly susceptible to sudden, much more devastating wildfires. As a consequence of fire prevention, Izim Bishim's hard, dry soil became evermore infertile, forcing the Bandish nations to utilise enormous tracts of land just to produce enough food for their rapidly growing populations.

The population growth was misleading, however, as much of the growth came as a result of colonial expansion and absorption of other Bandish communities into the homogenising society. With fewer and fewer Bandish populations practising their traditional customs and losing their inherent knowledge of how to cultivate the land, many of the Bandish nations began to suffer terrible losses to widespread starvation. The desperation for better crop yields forced the Bandish nations closer and closer together with their ever-growing agricultural territories. Conflicts sparked up, initially between farmers, and then small border-towns, and then very quickly the Bandish nations began to invade one another's territories.

### The war

The war between the Bandish nations of Izim Bishim, predominantly the five largest and most powerful nations, began with the invasion of the Funer Oldrim territory at Hazhazka by the Qorai. The battle there set the precedent for the many years of fighting to follow, with the Qorai launching a massive-scale invasion using advanced chemical and pyrotechnical mass-destruction weaponry. Hazhazka was virtually incinerated within a matter of days.

The Shingin Imbin responded to the attack on Hazhazka by invading the Qorai territories of Luz, Ureshur, Dridish Garob, Manzlar, and Yurzarim. The attacks on these territories proved to be yet more brutal in force than the Hazhazka attack, with the superior pyrotechnical weaponry of the Shingbin Imbin being used to its full capacity. Each of the five territorial invasions lasted a total of at least a decade, and were reported to have had at least one building burning at any one time throughout the entire duration. The fire of the massive temple at Dridish Garob supposedly never went out, and went on to become a widespread, world-engulfing inferno. Whether this is true or not is not known, but widespread global fires would gradually become commonplace as a result of these initial attacks.

In 203, 7th Age, Bleak Epoch, ME, just over a century after the first attack on Hazhazka, the fighting on the Bandish homeworld had become a global war, having caused such devastation that already the planet was in a state of ecological emergency. The vast areas of land that had been starved of wildfire had become restricted zones of high risk, with one large expanse near the Ashaterai colony of Teririhad being set ablaze by a small Shingin Imbin invasive force. The resulting flames engulfed Teririhad within two days, and went on to become one of the largest fires ever recorded on Izim Bishim. The Tossokorig meanwhile unleashed the first Bandish nuclear warhead with the capacity to set entire continents ablaze. This technology was sold to the temporarily friendly nation of the Funer Oldrim, who used their nuclear weapons unrelentingly on the Qorai, who until this point had remained the most populous of the five major nations. The Qorai seized control of a Tossokorig nuclear warhead and retaliated against the two allied states in a devastating attack on their capitals, Kudhuzu and Izmarkiz.

After the towering infernos that consumed Kudhuzu and Izmarkiz had been quenched, the Ashaterai and the Qorai invaded the two ruinous capitals, instigating a 150 year-long struggle to maintain occupation of the territories. The Shingin Imbin meanwhile invaded the Qorai stronghold of Yudz, while the Funer Oldrim broke off the temporary Tossokorig allegiance by burning four Tossokorig cities to the ground. A massive nuclear attack on the Manzlar territory, now occupied by the Shingin Imbin, came from the Ashaterai. The Manzlar attack was reported to have shaken the ground everywhere within a 100,000 km radius. The ground at the epicentre of the destruction, the city of Manzlar and the surrounding areas, sunk by roughly 75 metres as a result of the nuclear impact. This level of mass destruction set the precedent for further attacks, inspiring many massively destructive nuclear attacks worldwide.

### Aftermath

By the 1st Age of the Second Dawn Epoch, NE, the Bandish population on Izim Bishim had more than quartered as a result of the war. Many of the worst hit areas were the civilian-occupied agricultural regions that sprawled across the planet's scrublands, usually due to chemical and nuclear overspill, relentless wildfires, military misconduct, misaimed missiles, and perhaps worst of all, lack of food. Starvation was the main enemy of the regular Bandish people, who suffered ceaselessly to produce a harvest while overhead the skies were marked by the streams of missiles and military aircraft.

With each nation's population failing, and with the military now outnumbering the planetary civilian populace, the economic stability of Izim Bishim's warring peoples had all but dissolved. The war slowly ground to a halt over the course of the 1st Age, incapacitated by a severe lack of resources, but the fires of war continued to ravage Izim Bishim's surface. The fires would never burn out, and with untold traces of chemical and nuclear waste pervading the planet's charred topsoil, masses of radioactive emissions were released into the atmosphere, choking what little was left of Izim Bishim's biospheres. A handful of small communities held on however, having returned to their traditional nomadic ways.

For the five major nations, however, who were solely to blame for the wanton destruction of their homeworld, the solution was not to restore historical customs but to advance beyond the confines of Izim Bishim itself. Amidst hasty campaigning, the eagerness to outdo one another became exceedingly obvious as the intention behind the space missions, while the necessity to save people's lives appeared to come second. This was the Izim Bishim cold war, in which each of the five nations fiercely threatened one another with reinitiating nuclear warfare - a move that none of the five could actually afford to enact. Aside from the threats, the Qorai were the first of the five to invest their waning resources into a successful space mission, eventually colonising a nearby planet of the same star system, naming it Qorazim. They began evacuating their people from the planet in 350, 1st Age, Second Dawn Epoch. The Shingin Imbin quickly followed them, inhabiting a dwarf planet on the periphery of the Ishiki star system, and also began to remove their people from Izim Bishim.

By 111, 2nd Age, all of Izim Bishim's Bandish inhabitants had been evacuated. Many Bandish stayed behind either as a result of not being able to reach the inaccessible spaceports in time due to the rushed evacuation missions, or because they stayed as result of their own choosing. The fires of Izim Bishim continued to burn, and with the planet's tectonic activity having been severely disrupted by the incessant bombing, earthquakes, droughts, wildfires and other destructive natural disasters dictated the lives of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the Izim Bishim War had ended. It left with the evacuation missions of the Bandish States, who continued to battle one another in an ongoing series of interstellar conflicts known as the Bandish Feud.