Battle of the Three Titans

House Knox

48 Airship Crew

Est. 100 Knox soldiers
Est. 40 Airship Crew
est. 200 Pirates

The **Battle of the Three Titans** was a famous setpiece of the Pirate War & a historic victory for the Blackthorne Monarchy.

The inciting incident for the battle came in the Lover's Moon of 1050AE. House Knox's ancestral seat, the Three Titans, was under low guard as their armies were aiding the Ludlow Accord in the Pirate War. Seeing his chance, the opportunistic but lowly-regarded Pirate captain known as Man the Moggy attacked the castle with his capital ship, the *Prowler*, managing to co-operate with several treasonous members of the remaining Knox guards to gain access to the castle. Man the Moggy ordered the Knox family to be brought before him; there was Lord Oedipus, his two trueborn children (both variably disabled by the family's inbreeding) and his bastard son Glenn East. Oedipus Knox refused to surrender, despite the risk to his children. In response, the Moggy blasted the Lord's face off with his blunderbuss. He was prepared to do the same to the junior Knoxes until one of them stepped forward. 8-year-old Odysseus, cutting a strange figure with his masked appearance and slurred speech, negotiated with the pirate captain, his crying sister Cassandra hiding behind him all the while. He offered himself and his siblings as hostages that could be used to humiliate the crown for high ransoms; his mother was, after all, married to Prince Gordon. Moggy was savage and cunning but not politically savvy--he did not know that Lady Knox was disgusted by her Knox children, and believed what Odysseus claimed. He ordered the children and their loyalists to be confined under guard, and fortified the Titans for attack, daring the Monarchy to come for him.

The Crown's response was halting and uncertain. The Queen refused to take overt action against in the Pirate War, maintaining policies of peace and neutrality. However, she turned a blind eye to her daughter Princess Valoria's warring against the Pirates, which was viewed as an earnest compromise. The prevailing mood in the Royal Council was that they could not allow the insult to stand & that they needed the castle back, but they could not agree on how to do so. Without co-operation from inside sources, the Three Titans were thought to be impregnable. it ended, inevitably, in a shouting-match between Gordon and Valoria, with the latter storming from the chambers claiming she'd *"handle it my-fucking-self."* The Prince-Consort threw his hands up in silent dismay and the Queen worriedly urged her Warmaster Ser Arianne Wildthorne to make sure the Princess did not get herself killed; Arianne's only recorded response was to remind Talia that *"there isn't a soul in the realm that can stop your daughter once she's made up her mind."*

Meanwhile at the Titans, the Moggy was growing restless. He had failed to pique Requiem's interest in sending reinforcements as he was not part of the Pirate's inner circle, and it was widely doubted that he would be able to hold the castle. The Feline was considering a new course of action when word came that Princess Valoria was coming to lay siege. The Captain laughed at the news and ordered his men to their defenses; the Three Titans was inaccessible by land and had never been taken by sea, he said, and so unless the Princess had a whole roost of Griffins hatched then he would like to see her try to take back his new prize. He ordered the Knox child hostages not to be killed yet; his ransom would only grow sweeter when he captured the Queens own daughter and added her to the pile.

In the early hours of the 22nd day of Lover's Moon, the pirates lined the walls, their cannons and guns aimed down at the grey waters below in preparation for the incoming fleet. Man the Moggy himself stood on the highest battlement, studying the horizon through a telescope, looking for signs of Valoria's griffin. To his shock however, he saw something more vast than any griffin emerging from the cloud cover above; the Airship, *Wings of Liberty*. This was the first military application of an airship in Aradian history and most of the populace had no idea that such a thing could even exist, let alone be capable of functioning this way. Most of the heavy artillery he had was pointed *down* for potential attackers, and angling it up would take time they did not have; plus, the snipers positioned to fire upon an attacking griffin had only rifles that proved ineffective against the oncoming Airship. The *Wings of Liberty* swept low over the battlements and bombarded the pirates with a punishing payload of Ravenkraft munitions; incendiary missiles and toxic gas that shredded the pirate's frontlines, killing dozens. However, this put the ship within firing range of some of the wall-mounted artillery, and the Pirates were able to blast through the ballasts, causing the ship to burst into flames and begin a slow-motion crash into the top of the castle.

Atop the highest battlements, the Moggy saw the ships' hatch break open, and the stormtroopers inside line up to attack. The captain scoffed once again, certain that the soldiers would fall to their deaths, and ordered his men to cluster round him to watch this feat of suicide that only a lunatic would attempt. However, the crashing Airship came close enough that he could make eye contact with their leader. it is said that he saw the glint in the Princess' eyes beneath her visor and came to a terrifying understanding. He threw aside his weapons and fled, crying all the while--"RUN! RUN! SHE'S INSANE!"

The Princess and her men made the jump onto the upper parapets. The pirate snipers cut the front ranks down in seconds, but by then, Valoria was on them. She drew her blue blade Drakalibür and set upon the Pirates, butchering them into bloody pieces. Frenzied with the bloodshed amidst the crashing airship, the Stormtroopers pushed into the palace and freed the prisoners, many of whom took up arms to help their liberators. The castle was cleaned of pirates within hours, many surrendering. The Moggy was found hiding in a privy shaft. Dragged before the Princess, he begged for leniency & tried to claim that he was a valued friend to Reqiuem and could hold value as a hostage; but before he could finish his sentence, Valoria forcibly castrated him with her Starforged blade, "neutering the cat." She then proceded to cut his belly open from groin to nape, spilling his guts, before having him sewn into a sack and thrown into the sea. Man the Moggy plunged to a grisly death and troubled the realm no longer. A bloodied Crowned Griffin flag was raised over the Titan's parapets, and the hostages were declared safe.

The Queen was furious with her daughter's handling of the situation; not for the brutality shown to the captured Pirates, for they had forsaken the Crown's protection as Outlaws, but instead at the loss of the airship's pilots--nearly 40 engineers had died in the crash, the remaining eight so badly injured that they would never recover, all due to Val's cavalier treatment of their service. All that, plus she had badly damaged the ancient walls of the Three Titans with her bombing. Talia ordered the scrapping of any further production of the Airships but met surprising public backlash, no doubt engineered by Caradoc Rookwood's media. The Princess' victory was publically interpreted as an inspiring victory and the *Wings of Liberty* had become a symbol of Crown propaganda despite its destruction. Eventually, Caradoc persuaded the Queen to produce further Airships--under the condition that her daughter was not allowed to captain them. The resulting manufacturing contracts enriched him greatly.