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| title = Abridged Information
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| content = The Empire is a vast, ancient nation where resources are scarce, history is forgotten and technology breaks down more often than it is repaired. The Emperor rules with divine authority, however dozens of great houses – each a semi-independent feudal barony in its own right – each vie for power in the federalised empire. With the death of the previous Emperor and the suspicious death of His heir, the grandson – the ten year old Clovis IV – has ascended to the throne amidst rising political tensions threatening to tear the Empire apart.
| content = The Empire is a vast, ancient nation where resources are scarce, history is forgotten and technology breaks down more often than it is repaired. The Emperor rules with divine authority, but the Imperial House has long been absent from galactic politics, and dozens of Great Houses – each a semi-independent feudal barony in its own right – each vie for power in the federalised, feudal Empire. With the decline of the Empire finally reaching the capital in a series of catastrophes devastating the city-planet, Emperor Clovis IV ascends to the throne and plans to rebuild the Empire - but the Great Houses, used to the power they had, threaten to tear the nation apart to keep hold of it...
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The Empire, sometimes referred to as the Argentium Empire, Orion-Cygni Empire, the Grand Empire, Eliir-Tugezh Shikak, and dozens of of other monikers utilized across its hundreds of star systems, but most commonly and simply referred to as the Empire due to its singular and unquestionable claim to the word, is a vast and unspeakably ancient nation. Its history spans so far back that only its most recent history is truly known, with what, if anything, predated it now lost to time.


The Empire dominates hundreds of star systems in federalised feudal states. Star systems, instead of being controlled by a central government, are ruled by a barony - a semi-independent fief ruled by a baron belonging to a great house, who in turn rules over dozens to hundreds of minor houses. While each barony is bound to the will of the Empire and the Imperial house, House Valeorin, they each maintain a significant degree of independence to rule as they see fit and to maintain military forces.
The Empire, sometimes referred to as the Argentium Empire, Orion-Cygni Empire, and dozens of of other monikers utilised across its hundreds of star systems, but most commonly and simply referred to as the Empire due to its singular and unquestionable claim to the word, is a vast and unspeakably ancient nation. Its history spans so far back that only its most recent history is truly known, with what, if anything, predated it now lost to time.


In recent times, the hegemony of House Valeorin has been challenged by dissatisfied great houses, who support the traitor Lady Lorenza Lucien’s false claim to throne, though have yet to turn upon House Valeorin itself.  
The Empire dominates hundreds of star systems in federalised feudal states. Star systems, instead of being controlled by a central government, are ruled by a barony - a semi-independent fief ruled by a baron belonging to a Great House, who in turn rules over dozens to hundreds of minor houses. While each barony is bound to the will of the Empire and the Imperial house, House Valeorin, they each maintain a significant degree of independence to rule as they see fit and to maintain military forces.
 
For the entire known history of the Empire, once believed to have been transcendent in its power, with technology to rival miracles, has been in a state of decline. Complacency across the Empire has blinded its people to the loss of technology once mundane, to knowledge and science forgotten forever, and to the depletion of whole sectors of space of usable resources. One by one, star systems have ran out of the essentials of survival, blinked out of existence and swiftly forgotten. To those who rule on the capital, the planet Argentium, this was irrelevant — until the decline finally hit their world, with catastrophes born of ignorance and decay rendering chunks of the planet uninhabitable.




== Politics of the Empire ==
== Politics of the Empire ==
The Empire is ruled by the Emperor and His great house, referred to as the Imperial house, who for the past two years has been the fourteen year old Emperor Clovis IV Valeorin. Despite this, the empire is too large of a state for a single person, even one as great as the Emperor, to run by Themself. Due to this, the empire is split up into baronies - semi-autonomous states ruled by a baron and their household, called a great house. Each baron, while beneath the Emperor, is effectively a monarch in their own right, with the lords of minor houses owing fealty to their baron.
The Empire is ruled by the Emperor and His great house, referred to as the Imperial house, who for the past two years has been Emperor Clovis IV Valeorin. Despite this, the empire is too large of a state for a single person, even one as great as the Emperor, to run by Themself. Due to this, the empire is split up into baronies - semi-autonomous states ruled by a baron and their household, called a Great House. Each baron, while beneath the Emperor, is effectively a monarch in their own right, with each ruling their own territory, militaries, laws, and commanding the fealty of numerous lesser lords and houses, and billions of serfs and petty labourers.
 
The nature of what a Great House can and cannot do is contentious. Technically there are numerous limitations upon what a Great House is and what its baron can do. Legally, a Great House does not own its territory, but rather is permitted by the Empire to govern the region on its behalf. Great Houses may not engage in feudal wars between themselves, and must pay tribute to the Imperial House on Argentium. In practice, only the last of these points is enforced, with the current Imperial House, and its predecessors, taking a hands-off approach to governing that has allowed the Great Houses to grow and act without oversight, so long as their taxes were paid.


While great houses control and own territory within the empire, all territory is also the property of the empire, and a tax must be paid to the imperial treasury. This imperial tax funds the empire, while barony taxes are determined by the great house itself and is imposed upon any peoples, property, or activities they see fit.  
In recent years, a shift has taken place within the capital of the Empire. Having suffered catastrophic destruction across the capital itself, many of the Argentian elite are no longer content to remain isolated from galactic politics — including the Emperor and the Imperial House itself. The era when it let the Great Houses rule without oversight is over, and the Emperor once again asserts Himself as the master of the Great Houses — a fact for which he has drawn much resentment for. After all the centuries of near complete autonomy, the barons are loathe to once more kneel before the Emperor’s will, even if they were supposed to have done so all along.


All the great houses must follow and enforce the Imperial laws and permit Imperial agencies and guilds - organisations set up to both regulate and act as unions for various occupations ranging from farming guilds to warpgate guilds. However, the empire permits a great level of self-governance amongst the great houses, allowing each one to determine and enforce their own laws in addition to — and occasionally in spite of — Imperial laws. Each great house also maintains its own military forces, albeit with a maximal limit to the size of the forces, with which they can wage feudal wars against other houses and be called upon by the Imperial house in times of conflict in the form of a levy.


=== Economy and Class ===
=== Economy and Class ===
Within the Empire, people are divided between three categories that determine the rights and lives one may live: the nobility, those who bare titles either inherited or given; the plebeians, the lower classes and the majority of the population, who lack such titles and thus lack the full rights granted to those who have; and the indentured, who for any variety of reasons lack freedom and possess minimal, if any, rights. Political and social power is the domain of the nobility and the wealthy - the elites of society most likely born into their status. For the plebeians and indentured, despite making up the majority of the population, power, wealth, and the benefits of the Empire will be scarce.
Within the Empire, people are divided between three categories that determine the rights and lives one may live: the nobility, those who bare titles either inherited or given; the plebeians, the lower classes and the majority of the population, who lack such titles and thus lack the full rights granted to those who have; and the indentured, who for any variety of reasons lack freedom and possess minimal, if any, rights. Political and social power is the domain of the nobility and the wealthy - the elites of society most likely born into their status. For the plebeians and indentured, despite making up the majority of the population, power, wealth, and the benefits of the Empire will be scarce.


Across the empire, feudalism is common practice, with serfs who are bound to the land they live on via gene-oath and who live and work according to the decisions of their lords. While considered to be plebeians, the strict decrees of their gene-oath gives them little freedom beyond that of an true indentured, with the cost of breaking such an oath extreme so as to be virtually impossible. Most common in rural regions, feudalism is also seen within cities, especially as part of a self-contained district or arcology. Slavery, while less common and oftentimes illegal, is nonetheless abundant in certain regions of the empire, and indentured service is often used as part of a contract, loan, or as a judicial punishment.
Across the empire, feudalism is common practice, with serfs who are bound to the land they live on via gene-oath and who live and work according to the decisions of their lords. While considered to be plebeians, the strict decrees of their gene-oath gives them little freedom beyond that of an true indentured, with the cost of breaking such an oath extreme so as to be virtually impossible. Most common in rural regions, feudalism is also seen within cities, especially as part of a self-contained district or arcology. Slavery, while less common and technically illegal across the entire Empire, is nonetheless abundant across the Empire, and indentured service is often used as part of a contract, loan, or as a judicial punishment.
 
The Empire, reliant as it is on ancient technology and vast resource depletion, a consequence from the ancient past, being widespread, rarely manufactures anything of technological sophistication from raw materials. While the few Atfabs still functioning can produce intricate technology with reasonable reliability, the scarcity of these machines paired with their crippling energy usage ensures they are insufficient to sustain the Empire. Instead, entire sectors of industry are dedicated to the salvaging, recycling, and repairing of pre-existing ancient machines to keep the technology fundamental to modern society working or to provide parts to fix or replace the technology. Even so, the value of these devices mean that the average plebeian experiences a quality of life lacking the amenities expected of an advanced society.


The Empire, reliant as it is on ancient technology and vast resource depletion, a consequence from the ancient past, being widespread, rarely manufactures anything of technological sophistication from raw materials. While the few Atfabs still functioning can produce intricate technology with reasonable reliability, the scarcity of these machines paired with their crippling energy usage ensures they are insufficient to sustain the Empire. Instead, entire sectors of industry are dedicated to the salvaging, recycling, and repairing of pre-existing ancient machines to keep the technology fundamental to modern society working or to provide parts to fix or replace the technology. Even so, the value of these devices mean that the average plebeian only experiences a quality of life significantly worse than the elites.


=== Religion ===
=== Religion ===
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The purest soul lives within the Emperor, guided by the All-Spirit directly. The Emperor is thus infallible and divine, and to question them is to question the All-Spirit. To this end, to believe anything but the divine good of the Faith is itself an act of dissent. Despite this, some other religions are sanctioned to be believed, however all sanctioned sects and cults must acknowledge the truth of the Emperor’s divinity.
The purest soul lives within the Emperor, guided by the All-Spirit directly. The Emperor is thus infallible and divine, and to question them is to question the All-Spirit. To this end, to believe anything but the divine good of the Faith is itself an act of dissent. Despite this, some other religions are sanctioned to be believed, however all sanctioned sects and cults must acknowledge the truth of the Emperor’s divinity.


== Rising Tensions ==
At the young age of 122, Emperor Clovis III of the house Valeorin died. Despite of life-extension that should have let Him live a further sixty years, it was determined He died of natural causes. Four days before His death, His daughter, the heir Princess Elis Valeorin died under suspicious circumstances when, while returning from a hunting trip, her shuttle experienced a catastrophic system failure and crashed into the orbital city-station Silverspire, causing significant damage to the station and obliterating the shuttle entirely.
The ten year old Prince Clovis IV Valeorin, son of the Princess Elis Valeorin, ascended to the throne as the final Valeorin the same day.
The Young Emperor, as He quickly became known as, is too young to rule directly, even despite of His divinity. To aid His rule, the regent takes the majority of the responsibility for the running of the Empire and decision making, with guidance by the All-Spirit and its cardinals. The regent’s desire for power has long been rumoured, and increasingly there is dissatisfaction amongst the great houses. Already an assassination attempt has been made upon the Emperor, and although it failed, precautions for His safety were strengthened, and the Emperor has not been seen by anyone in over a year.
With tensions palpable in the artificially-purified atmosphere of Argentium, quiet murmurs screeching within the Great Counsil, and a weakened House Valeorin, the potential for a war, nearly a century since the last devastating war for succession that cemented Emperor Clovis III’s rule, seems an increasing possibility.
==Great Houses==
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===House Artea===
'''Homeworld:''' Ecitor, a desert planet. 
'''House Head:''' Baron Johnathon Artea 
'''Iconography:''' A brown rose with a white centre.
House Artea was recently formed when the Artean Nomads, a roaming fleet of nomadic people who lived aboard generation ships and travelled the border of the Empire variously trading, threatening, and stealing from worlds and ships in its path to survive, was forcefully civilised into the Empire by an Imperial armada. During their annexation, all of their generation ships — originally colony ships — were forced to ground on the planet of Ecitor and set up colony there, thus ending their nomadic lifestyle and introducing them to the Imperial way of life. One ship, the Artea, was converted into a space station in orbit and acts as the capital of the Baron, overseeing the assimilation of the Arteans into the Empire.
Despite the resistance to civilisation displayed by many Arteans, the house has found prosperity in utilising their ancestral knowledge of voidfaring and voidships to become one of the Empire’s most reliable couriers of cargo across especially risky space. Despite initial concerns by many, incidents of theft and loss of cargo due to the Artean crews have been minimal. The same cannot be said on Ecitor, however, where the majority of the population have chosen to reject Imperial aid and methodology and live in squalid, impoverished conditions. It is hoped that education will improve the quality of living in time.
===House Valeorin===
'''Homeworld:''' Argentium, an ecumnopolis.
'''House Head:''' Emperor Clovis IV Valeorin
'''Iconography:''' A golden sphere, with a hole to a smaller, purple circle in the middle.
House Valeorin is the current imperial house, ruling over the entire Empire from the ancient capital - the planetwide metropolis - of Argentium. Believing itself to be both the most cultured and civilised of all the Houses, it considers it a divine mandate to reunify the galaxy under the Empire. To this end, it has some of the best preserved technology of antiquity at its disposal, from fleets to population centres. Foremost of all of these is the Aurum, a dyson sphere located a little more than a parsec away from Argentium. The megalithic machine was only ever half-completed in the ancient past, and much of it was damaged or destroyed since then, but even in its reduced state the Aurum is the single greatest source of power within the Empire, responsible for keeping the Atfabs, fleets, and planetary environmental controls functioning.
Having been in power for two and a half centuries, the unexpected death of the Emperor’s daughter, the crown-princess, followed death of Emperor Clovis III himself led to the child Prince Clovis IV Valeorin to take to the throne. With his young age, he has been assisted by a regent in ruling the Empire, though rumours of the regent truly controlling the Empire has driven tensions within the Imperial Council. The risk of being cut off from the Aurum is too great for the houses to risk with open dissent, however, and so dissatisfaction is expressed in more nuanced ways.
===House Ryoshi===
'''Homeworld:''' Chrysos, a tidally locked world with a dense metropolis covering the entire habitable twilight ring.
'''House Head:''' Duke Amin Ryoshi
'''Iconography:''' A cyan diamond, one half etched with geometric shapes and the other organic curves.
House Ryoshi was integrated into the empire early on, however all warpgates leading to Chrysos and its territory abruptly failed soon after, completely severing House Ryoshi from the empire. During the centuries of isolation from the empire it was presumed that civilisation must have collapsed, inevitably taking all life with it. Despite all expectations, it managed to not only survive, but thrive, colonising several local systems. Within the past century, the house managed to restore contact with the Empire, and was welcomed back to civilisation.
The Chrysos that reintegrated into the empire was a technologically advanced world with an abundance of technology that is rare in the wider empire, a position it exploited to the fullest, becoming the empire’s leading producer of long forgotten advanced technology. Its exports include quantum relays and, controversially, Syntheteks - advanced machines of near lifelike canniness to real, sapient beings. Despite its apparent openness to the rest of the Empire, much of the internal workings of the house remain shrouded in mystery, a fact that has many outside of the house uneasy. The exception to this is House Artea, whose primitive peoples appear to have made contact with the lost house prior to its reintegration to the Empire.
===House Sveldr===
'''Homeworld''': Hvitheimr, a frozen, barren planet.
'''House Head:''' High Jarl Lozbrok
'''Iconography:''' A red serpent reaching upwards, surrounded by flames.


Hvitheimr is the historical homeworld of the Jornskyr species. Although once a warm world, an erratic orbit caused an ice age to befall it, scattering the Jornskyr people to survive in darkspace by raiding other worlds, colonies, and voidships for resources using their raiding voidships called Drakkar.  
=== A Shift On Argentium ===
Once, the elites and nobility of Argentium, reaping the splendor of a bygone age in their kilometres-tall silver spires, were content to leave the wider Empire to run itself. So long as they received tribute from the Great Houses, they did not care how they ruled — they had all they truly needed in their silver world-city, supported by the steady flow of resources that had remained unbroken for millennia untold. When an issue arose, the Imperial Navy, along with the envoys of the Emperor, could resolve an issue with words and trivial concessions, or else destroy it without so much as a disturbance to the post-scarcity life on the capital.


These clans raided the Empire, leading to a long conflict along the border until an agreement was made with Clan Sveldr and several other clans - the clans’ allegiance to the empire in return for territory, resources, and peace between them. The clans agreed, becoming House Sveldr and controlling the worlds they once raided and destroying many rival clans in wars to both expand their borders and to protect the Empire
It was only when this tribute slowed and a famine spread across the city, only when their palaces began to fall apart, and only once a series of devastating reactor failures, caused by a lack of understanding of their inner workings and inability to repair them, ripped deep scars across vast swathes of the surface of the silver planet, did they finally begin to pay attention to the state of the Empire once more. The Imperial House, at long last realising its Empire has fallen from its golden age, decided to once again take an active role in the politics of the Empire again.


House Sveldr is divided into numerous, largely independent clans who bowed before the house to avoid destruction. Each clan is ruled by its own jarl. The jarls engage in an annual moot, in which a high jarl is voted on and policy determined. Beyond the clans are Drakkars, voidships and their crews who are themselves almost entirely independent of oversight and merely pay a tribute and pledge defence to their chosen clan in return for their jarl’s blessing. Many Drakkars offer their services as mercenaries to the great houses.
Finding the Great Houses to be out of control and disobeying the oaths they swore to the Empire, Emperor Lorenza Valeorin began to assert Her authority, making demands of the barons. The Great Houses, who were functionally independent for so long, were displeased with Her once more reminding them of their servitude to the Imperial House and relinquish them of much of their power. For this, the Emperor was assassinated only five years later, and her son, Clovis IV, ascended to the throne. He continues Her efforts to regain control over the Great Houses and to restore ancient Empire to its former glory — an initiative many Great Houses would prefer to put an end to.




Latest revision as of 00:55, 27 May 2024

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Abridged Information

The Empire is a vast, ancient nation where resources are scarce, history is forgotten and technology breaks down more often than it is repaired. The Emperor rules with divine authority, but the Imperial House has long been absent from galactic politics, and dozens of Great Houses – each a semi-independent feudal barony in its own right – each vie for power in the federalised, feudal Empire. With the decline of the Empire finally reaching the capital in a series of catastrophes devastating the city-planet, Emperor Clovis IV ascends to the throne and plans to rebuild the Empire - but the Great Houses, used to the power they had, threaten to tear the nation apart to keep hold of it...


The Empire, sometimes referred to as the Argentium Empire, Orion-Cygni Empire, and dozens of of other monikers utilised across its hundreds of star systems, but most commonly and simply referred to as the Empire due to its singular and unquestionable claim to the word, is a vast and unspeakably ancient nation. Its history spans so far back that only its most recent history is truly known, with what, if anything, predated it now lost to time.

The Empire dominates hundreds of star systems in federalised feudal states. Star systems, instead of being controlled by a central government, are ruled by a barony - a semi-independent fief ruled by a baron belonging to a Great House, who in turn rules over dozens to hundreds of minor houses. While each barony is bound to the will of the Empire and the Imperial house, House Valeorin, they each maintain a significant degree of independence to rule as they see fit and to maintain military forces.

For the entire known history of the Empire, once believed to have been transcendent in its power, with technology to rival miracles, has been in a state of decline. Complacency across the Empire has blinded its people to the loss of technology once mundane, to knowledge and science forgotten forever, and to the depletion of whole sectors of space of usable resources. One by one, star systems have ran out of the essentials of survival, blinked out of existence and swiftly forgotten. To those who rule on the capital, the planet Argentium, this was irrelevant — until the decline finally hit their world, with catastrophes born of ignorance and decay rendering chunks of the planet uninhabitable.


Politics of the Empire

The Empire is ruled by the Emperor and His great house, referred to as the Imperial house, who for the past two years has been Emperor Clovis IV Valeorin. Despite this, the empire is too large of a state for a single person, even one as great as the Emperor, to run by Themself. Due to this, the empire is split up into baronies - semi-autonomous states ruled by a baron and their household, called a Great House. Each baron, while beneath the Emperor, is effectively a monarch in their own right, with each ruling their own territory, militaries, laws, and commanding the fealty of numerous lesser lords and houses, and billions of serfs and petty labourers.

The nature of what a Great House can and cannot do is contentious. Technically there are numerous limitations upon what a Great House is and what its baron can do. Legally, a Great House does not own its territory, but rather is permitted by the Empire to govern the region on its behalf. Great Houses may not engage in feudal wars between themselves, and must pay tribute to the Imperial House on Argentium. In practice, only the last of these points is enforced, with the current Imperial House, and its predecessors, taking a hands-off approach to governing that has allowed the Great Houses to grow and act without oversight, so long as their taxes were paid.

In recent years, a shift has taken place within the capital of the Empire. Having suffered catastrophic destruction across the capital itself, many of the Argentian elite are no longer content to remain isolated from galactic politics — including the Emperor and the Imperial House itself. The era when it let the Great Houses rule without oversight is over, and the Emperor once again asserts Himself as the master of the Great Houses — a fact for which he has drawn much resentment for. After all the centuries of near complete autonomy, the barons are loathe to once more kneel before the Emperor’s will, even if they were supposed to have done so all along.


Economy and Class

Within the Empire, people are divided between three categories that determine the rights and lives one may live: the nobility, those who bare titles either inherited or given; the plebeians, the lower classes and the majority of the population, who lack such titles and thus lack the full rights granted to those who have; and the indentured, who for any variety of reasons lack freedom and possess minimal, if any, rights. Political and social power is the domain of the nobility and the wealthy - the elites of society most likely born into their status. For the plebeians and indentured, despite making up the majority of the population, power, wealth, and the benefits of the Empire will be scarce.

Across the empire, feudalism is common practice, with serfs who are bound to the land they live on via gene-oath and who live and work according to the decisions of their lords. While considered to be plebeians, the strict decrees of their gene-oath gives them little freedom beyond that of an true indentured, with the cost of breaking such an oath extreme so as to be virtually impossible. Most common in rural regions, feudalism is also seen within cities, especially as part of a self-contained district or arcology. Slavery, while less common and technically illegal across the entire Empire, is nonetheless abundant across the Empire, and indentured service is often used as part of a contract, loan, or as a judicial punishment.

The Empire, reliant as it is on ancient technology and vast resource depletion, a consequence from the ancient past, being widespread, rarely manufactures anything of technological sophistication from raw materials. While the few Atfabs still functioning can produce intricate technology with reasonable reliability, the scarcity of these machines paired with their crippling energy usage ensures they are insufficient to sustain the Empire. Instead, entire sectors of industry are dedicated to the salvaging, recycling, and repairing of pre-existing ancient machines to keep the technology fundamental to modern society working or to provide parts to fix or replace the technology. Even so, the value of these devices mean that the average plebeian experiences a quality of life lacking the amenities expected of an advanced society.


Religion

The Empire’s state religion is simply referred to as ‘the Faith.’ According to the Faith, the universe was created by the All-Spirit, a divine, all-powerful and all-benevolent being beyond the comprehension of mortals. Despite its omniscience, however, it was not all-knowing, as it had never experienced mortality or life. It shattered itself into a quintillion fragments and fell across the universe, each fragment a tainted part of its spirit – a soul. This is believed by scholars to be the beginning of true life, as all living beings possess a soul.

Despite the divine goodness of the All-Spirit, living beings are inherently flawed. Throughout the mortal life of a living, soul-possessed being, one does actions and deeds good and bad. At the end of a life, these deeds weigh upon the soul. A light, pure soul will rise, reincarnating into a better existence in its next life, while a heavy soul sinks, becoming a social dredge or lesser creature in the next life. When a soul becomes pure, it ascends to rejoin the All-Spirit, bringing its experience of mortality with it.

The purest soul lives within the Emperor, guided by the All-Spirit directly. The Emperor is thus infallible and divine, and to question them is to question the All-Spirit. To this end, to believe anything but the divine good of the Faith is itself an act of dissent. Despite this, some other religions are sanctioned to be believed, however all sanctioned sects and cults must acknowledge the truth of the Emperor’s divinity.


A Shift On Argentium

Once, the elites and nobility of Argentium, reaping the splendor of a bygone age in their kilometres-tall silver spires, were content to leave the wider Empire to run itself. So long as they received tribute from the Great Houses, they did not care how they ruled — they had all they truly needed in their silver world-city, supported by the steady flow of resources that had remained unbroken for millennia untold. When an issue arose, the Imperial Navy, along with the envoys of the Emperor, could resolve an issue with words and trivial concessions, or else destroy it without so much as a disturbance to the post-scarcity life on the capital.

It was only when this tribute slowed and a famine spread across the city, only when their palaces began to fall apart, and only once a series of devastating reactor failures, caused by a lack of understanding of their inner workings and inability to repair them, ripped deep scars across vast swathes of the surface of the silver planet, did they finally begin to pay attention to the state of the Empire once more. The Imperial House, at long last realising its Empire has fallen from its golden age, decided to once again take an active role in the politics of the Empire again.

Finding the Great Houses to be out of control and disobeying the oaths they swore to the Empire, Emperor Lorenza Valeorin began to assert Her authority, making demands of the barons. The Great Houses, who were functionally independent for so long, were displeased with Her once more reminding them of their servitude to the Imperial House and relinquish them of much of their power. For this, the Emperor was assassinated only five years later, and her son, Clovis IV, ascended to the throne. He continues Her efforts to regain control over the Great Houses and to restore ancient Empire to its former glory — an initiative many Great Houses would prefer to put an end to.


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