Ankh Zeri

Ankh circa 1,990 BG

## Overview

Ankh Zeri was male Sorn’Yzri who was known for founding House Zeri and establishing the Kingdom of Sorn’Yzra after great personal torment and rivalry with his siblings, Bitep Velo and Thar. Ankh was infamous for being a devotee of everything aesthetic regarding the religion of Sendan, which shaped the culture, history, architecture and beliefs of Sorn’Yzra, and Zerisorn after it. His early rule saw the influx of a cultural revolution which transformed the culture of the Kingdom of the Seven Sendahs he was born into from the stiff and the uniform into the animated and detailed. By 301 AG, he was a person of extensive study of scholars, whose reign and character was luckily far better documented in a few scrolls as opposed to the sporadic inscriptions that all knowledge of his father consisted in.

## Biography

### Early life

Ankh was born into a very different kingdom to the one in which he died, despite both occupying the same region. The twin brother of Thar, his childhood was full of comfort and was surrounded by wealth and luxury, being the son of Sultan Cheops the Glorious of the Kingdom of the Seven Sandahs. Despite an early innocent and happy relationship with his siblings, Bitep and Ther, they quickly became disenchanted with one another upon their introduction to the religion of Sendan by their theologically obsessive father.

### Growing tension

As Ankh entered his teen years, the then Şhehzad of his father’s kingdom began to feel overshadowed by his brother’s confidence and hunger for power, and his younger sister’s vast knowledge in Sendan and general mature judgment. Wishing to forge his own persona, he looked to Sendan to find meaning. At this time, Ankh did begin to find purpose. The seven Sendan gods increasingly seemed an inadequate account of life, and did not speak to his sense of the world. After a few years attempting to understand what he took from this, he realises that a key theme so intimately connected to flourishing, meaning and purpose throughout Sendan was that of the aesthetic; the artful, the beautiful and the perfect.

With his younger sister enthralled in merely learning all about Sendan as it stood, Ankh wished to redefine or change where its emphasis lay, believing its chief mistake in interpretation being down to the 7 Sendahs, its gods. Ankh increasingly began to believe that ideals existed in a separate realm, which were typified by certain things in the world and life. Beauty, for instance, was the turquoise ocean, the sun setting, the birds chirping and the artful intuition. He supposed that qualities like beauty were real, existent things that ones experiences embodied in varying ways, but were never exhaustively or completely that same quality.

With his theological reading set, his late teens saw furious spats break out with his brother, Bitep, who had himself a very crude understanding of Sendan which was twisted to fit his own ambitions. After a short time, he knew better than to argue with Bitep, who was seen by many scholars by 301 AG to have taken over rule of the kingdom due to his father’s increasing and debilitating frailty. Thar belittled him for going too far with his interpretation, arguing that a full knowledge of Sendan was the only thing sufficient to provide meaning in life.

### Sudden upheaval

Upon the death of his father in 2,001 BG, Bitep had inherited rule over the once proud kingdom, which had fallen into ruin ever since Bitep assumed control over his father’s rule. Under Bitep, Ankh was unsurprised when the realisation that his reckless actions had begun to bring poverty into even their own family hit Bitep, despite his obvious hunger for power. Bitep had all he had desires, yet Ankh and his sister were able to see through to his increasing resentment at everything about what his kingdom represented, wishing to lay the blame on anything but himself. Ankh judged that his position of accountability to his subjects was the shift which made this apparent to his brother, where before he was using their father as a puppet, manipulating him to his desires. Ankh frequently took his brother to task on his abject resentment of their culture, breaking his pledge not to engage in arguments with Bitep anymore.

Ankh expressed his utter shock and disgust at his actions, believing the protection and care of the culture to be vital in fostering prosperity. Bitep, as a bodily anathema to these ideals, was singularly culpable for all the ills facing their kingdom. After the huge argument grew evermore heated, Thar was said to have suddenly entered and ended the relentless fracas between the two brothers. Following this, Bitep banished his two siblings from the huge city of Thebos, however all of his guards had reached their end with Bitep, and refused to remove them. Before they had the chance to, it was written that Ankh and Thar left of their own volition before the guards were necessary. Thar and Ankh agreed to part ways, with Thar travelling east, and Ankh travelling west, leaving their brother.

Later that same night, in 1,999 BG, a ferocious sandstorm, the likes of which had hitherto never been recorded began to devastate the ancient bustling city of Thebos. Details remained sketchy, but Zeri scholars remained convinced by 301 AG that the storm lasted an entire year, supposedly burying the once expansive city under the The Sands of Chamzeq forever. Ankh, upon learning of the fate of the city, was said to be convinced that the storm was a sign, a sign of devastation whose sheer force he judged to only be matched by Bitep’s wrongdoings during his rule. This, he was rumoured to have thought, was fate, but importantly had nothing to do with gods, for he believed in no such thing. Rather, a spectacular manifestation of terror, believing that the horror Bitep had brought to the kingdom to have caused something of an overflow of injustice in the realm of all that is bad, making the storm a direct result of the realm emptying itself of all the pain that Bitep had brought. Those scholars more sympathetic to a god driven story, however, maintained the storm was a divine sign.

### Cultural Revolution

in any case, Ankh’s interpretation of events was known to have confirmed to him what he had to do, along with the news that his brother, Bitep, had not died but fled to the north east and abandoned his heritage and culture to establish his own kingdom. In his view, it was thought that he set out to rally those in the Kingdom who would be inspired through his vision of the aesthetic, to bring forth a culture which would ensure eternal prosperity. With the old kingdom gone with the vanishing of Thebos, Ankh was by thus point aware that he could not hope to establish such a kingdom without confronting his brother’s self declared rule in neighbouring lands. Acting as an inspiration to the people in the region, he began the process of spreading his ideals, with an apparently astonishing degree of success. This was thought to be because although religion was strict in the kingdom of old, it had became antiquated and distanced from the lives of ordinary commoners by Ankh’s time, making Ankh’s radical re interpretation most appealing.

As he began to travel, Ankh even assumed a new identity, now being known as ‘Ankh Zeri’, with ‘Zeri’ roughly translating from ancient inscriptions to ‘gatekeeper of the aesthetic’, or sometimes of the ‘artful’, or less commonly ‘beautiful’. To mark the beginning of a new age, Ankh began the construction of a city, Tiz'Axea, whose architecture would embody this ‘New Sendan’; its grand buildings white for purity and tall to reach as close as they could the realm of beauty and perfection. It was also at some point during this time that the initial usage of the suffix 'sorn' began to be used by a member of House Zeri, with his subjects identifying as Zerisorni. This roughly translated to 'place' or 'region'. Unlike his brother, who had declared his kingdom as Velosorn, Ankh's ambitions were to unite Bitep's eastern reach and the western reach of old into a Sorn'Yzra, which due to the conjunction " ' ", caused the word to translate backward to 'unified place', 'united region' or variations thereupon. By the Unified Retaliation, Ankh's Zeri identity was mimicked to create the kingdom of Zerisorn, matching more closely the usage of Velosorn for the eastern reaches to equalise the kingdoms. After 8 years, Ankh was ready to confront his brother, now with a revivified cultural feeling empowering people to fight by his side.

### War of the Three

In 1,994 BG, now 24 years old, Ankh heard word of Bitep gathering his own forces, intent on founding a kingdom based on the values of the Sendani deity of Enso. Ankh spent time using the trust he had built with his citizens, warning them of the impending threat and need to protect and preserve their new beginning against the threat. Whilst preparing his citizens for war, Ankh came into contact with his sister, Thar, for the first time in years. They planned to work together to repel the threat from Bitep's new House Velo. In 1,993 BG, the war began when Bitep's forces broke through the Oppidan Delta and began to march towards Ankh's new and prized capital, Tiz'Axea. He was able to rouse forces from across the region: to his success, the cultural emphasis around the beautiful and the aesthetic caused the population to feel that the region needed to be fiercely defended.

As a result, Ankh's forces crushed Bitep's attack after a few days of battle in Sands of Chamzeq. It was unknown where the majority of the fighting occurred by 301 AG, owing to the everchanging nature of the desert sands. Angered, Bitep then turned to the Jia archipelago and the clans which Thar had roused. After losing his final push to Thar, Bitep agreed to surrender and begin talks. For the first time in years, the three siblings met once more, this time to reconcile. After meeting in Ensorinu, the kingdom of Sorn'Yzra was officially formed, uniting the two Reaches of the region, with its capital being Tiz'Axea, as had long been Ankh's ambition.

### Later life

Ankh's rule following the war was dominated by prosperity, construction and the culmination of his cultural revolution he had begun. In a time of plentiful trade with his brother's eastern reaches and his sister's newly formed kingdom of C'thardjia, the lives of his citizens were comfortable - an element of his rule that would not go unnoticed. In the remaining years of his rule, his citizens revered him so much that he was widely celebrated by many temples or moments being erected without even his knowing. Places of education and scholarship were also established in the remaining years of his rule, not only marking the establishment of formalised education in the Continent, but with it the first university - Tiz'Axea Theudos, or more commonly known as simply the University of Tiz'Axea by 301 AG. Ankh was known to have died in spring of 1,940 BG, days short of his 78th birthday. This was incredibly well documented due to the level of cultural celebration he enjoyed throughout - and indeed after - his life. His legacy left behind an entirely different kingdom to the one he was born in, being still celebrated as a hallmark and founder of the later kingdom of Zerisorn's culture and values.