Ma’tallon Part One: Geography

by Ulff Lehmann · June 27, 2024

Ma’tallon

The last province to slip from Gathran’s dominion was the first one ever to submit to the Gathrani: Kalduuhn. This happened after being part of the domain over tens of thousands of years. For all intents and purposes, the Kalduuhni considered themselves as Gathrani, yet they had never followed Honas Graigh’s nobility in creating a new social class. Whereas the Mages of the Capital caused the Empire’s contraction and eventual demise, the rest of the realm didn’t follow suit. Mages and nobles remained separate in the rest of Taogh, and the tribes were better for it.

Of all the noble houses of the Kalduuhni, House Kassor was the most influential. They had been one of the first to embrace Gathrani customs, and had been rewarded with titles and lands. Such privilege had bred resentment, but through clever maneuvering, House Kassor had turned many of her rivals into allies who, in turn, also embraced the new allies’ customs. Others fared less well. Despite their obvious open-mindedness, the Kassor matriarchs were just as ruthless as their peers. The difference? They did not suffer violent opposition, at all. (To be fair, most elves do not, but House Kassor were, and still are, particularly ruthless. ~P)

Those noble families who actively opposed Kassor were dealt with in a manner which impressed even the Gathrani leadership. (Said leadership eventually coalesced into royalty, but that took another few centuries. ~P) Open and honest debates have never been a problem for any Kassor matriarch – nighttime murders, however, were. When such happened, and the hired killers identified their employers before a Lawspeaker, House Kassor retaliated. Not in the way that would have resulted in a long term feud, but by wiping out the entire offending bloodline and all its offshoots.

Honas Graigh’s nobility was impressed, and they adopted a similar method when dealing with future rebellions. The Chanassi, Targhanti, and Yrenni who had occupied the lands now known as Chanastardh serve as example what the Gathran of old would do to tribes challenging their authority. (Which is the reason humans gladly settled in these lands, because they were, effectively unoccupied after the uprising. ~P) House Kassor gained even more support, wealth, and lands, but they wisely declined much of it, spreading the spoils amongst her supporters.

Ma’tallon began, like so many Imperial colony cities, as supply depot, granary, way station, and stronghold for the equivalent of one Codhan, whose soldiers would police the province. Old Honthal’s population shrank with families drifting closer to the fortress at the banks of the River Tallon. As more and more people profited from both the access to the one river that pours into the ocean thousands of miles to the south and the newly build Road, even the nobles moved to where the wealth is.

Lathir Kassor became the first official ruler of this new colony city, Maghane Tallon. (Gathran’s Emperors founded many Maghanes, colonies, but most ditched the prefix as the Empire shrank. Many of these Maghanes incorporated the regional tribe’s names instead of rivers or mountains. Maghane Tallon was the first, and the system was still in its infancy. Over the millennia, consonant shifts and omission of vowels turned the name into Ma’tallon. ~P)

Even as the Contraction happened, House Kassor began to prepare for the worst. With the aid of Ma’tallon’s Librarians, they began to gather chronicles and histories from the fallen provinces. Many of the tribes reverted to something resembling their old traditions, ridding themselves of Gathran’s institutions. Libraries were abandoned as Traghnalach’s priests became Lorekeepers once more, relying on oral traditions instead of written chronicles. Lyrnaela Kassor, a distant grandchild of Lathir, was the first to see value in the gathering of other provinces’ histories. Traghnalach’s Librarians agreed.

As more and more provincial governments and Leghans abandoned their postings, lawlessness and not-quite-forgotten feuds became prominent once again, with warbands striking ever closer to the Gathrani heartlands. Lyrnaela didn’t wait for orders from Honas Graigh. Instead she ordered the city be enveloped by a curtain wall so massive that carphaens would need decades to chip away at the stone, and so deep that miners would have to get far past the ground water level to undermine these defenses. Much of it, especially those deep foundations were molded from liquid stone, an effort that took years. The nearby harbor was expanded and incorporated into the massive fortification – with an additional walled enclave on the river’s other side. As the wall was completed, much of House Kassor’s dwarf-forged armory was melted down to be formed into two massive chains which could be raised to stop ships from entering the harbor area. (Not necessarily relevant to the history of Ma’tallon. Interesting tidbit, however. ~P)

The war against the sunarghs in 600 to 598 B.K.C. brought a momentary halt to both Empires’ collapse – in fact, some tribes sought to submit to Gathran’s protection once more. Sadly, this pause lasted less than a generation, and by 400 B.K.C, the collapse galloped ahead, until Honas Graigh released Kalduuhn Province from its oath of fealty. That year is the starting point of the Kalduuhnean Calendar, which is the commonly accepted means of determining the passage of time on the continent of Taogh. (Official Imperial documents and trade agreements feature two or three calendars, depending on the parties involved: Breiamhbéan, for obvious reasons, and the other party’s calendar, if there are only two parties involved and it only involves the Empire and another party, or Breiamhbéan, Kalduuhnean, and the third party’s calendar. The Empire functions as co-signer in trade agreements between any party involved with transporting goods through the Empire, and receives her share of the profits. ~P)

But I digress.

Ma’tallon became the capital of the new Queendom of Kalduuhn, ruled by an aging Lyrnaela the First of House Kassor. The Queen, the Librarians, and the Upholders had studied the demise of Gathran for years already before the advent of the Kalduuhnean Calendar, and what they had anticipated finally became reality. Gathran, the empire that had conquered all of Taogh, was no more. They delved into the history that had brought the realm so low, determined the key points where laws had failed, and began to develop revision after revision of the original Code of Laws that had ruled their society for generations. Unlike many other tribal regions, the Kalduuhni had become Gathrani in all but in name, they had embraced the laws, had forgotten their tribe’s traditions and rules, and thus had no other choice than to use what they knew and improve on it.

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