The Voltrumites

The Voltrumites are the people of the south-west of Farrone and the founders of the Third Imperium: a confederation of tribes, long-lived, disciplined, and organised around strength as the only thing they have ever agreed is real, who came out of their own country at the exact moment the rest of the world had finished tearing itself apart.

They had been there the whole time. Every chancery in Farrone had a file on them and every file said the same thing, which is that the south-west was a poor country of quarrelsome tribes with nothing worth taking, and every file was correct on each point and wrong in the aggregate.

They ended the War of the Princes, took the princely states one at a time, and raised an empire that came, within a lifetime of its founding, to frighten Chima — and then to end it.

Their first Emperor was Argus, and he was not the strongest man among them, and they chose him anyway.

Overview

The Country

The south-west of Farrone is high, dry, and hard, and produces very little that anybody else has ever wanted.

This is the whole of why the Voltrumites survived the ages that swallowed everybody else. Kyrus the Overlord took all Farrone and did not trouble with the south-west, there being no harbour in it and nothing to manufacture men for. The First Imperium ran a frontier along the eastern edge of it and taxed the passes and did not go in. The Second Imperium, which admits only provinces and requires alignment, treated the south-west as a march and left it to itself, and the Imperial Ministry of Lore's entry for the region is four lines long and was last revised in the early reign.

The Reckoning

They value strength above everything, and every foreign account of them that stops there has misunderstood the whole people.

Voltrumite strength is not the ability to defeat a man. It is the capacity to bear — to carry a burden, hold a line, keep a thing standing, and go on after the point at which a person would ordinarily stop. Their own word for it is not translated in any chancery to anybody's satisfaction; the nearest the gulf's linguists have come is a term from stonework meaning the load a member will take before it fails.

So a Voltrumite reckoning of strength counts a smith who has kept a forge for two hundred years, a mother of nine, and a man who held a pass with eleven others, and does not much care which of them could beat the others in a fight. The tribes test it constantly and by means foreigners find alarming and pointless, and the testing is the whole of their politics.

It has one consequence that mattered enormously. A people who reckon strength as endurance do not produce a warlord who wins and then rules. They produce a confederation in which authority is continuously earned and continuously reviewed, and which can therefore be assembled, and disassembled, and assembled again, without breaking — and which waited.

The Waiting

They watched Farrone eat itself twice and came out for neither.

The Voltrumites took no part in the Second Realm War and no part in the Third, and the reason given in their own accounts is not caution and is not moral. It is that a confederation which comes out at the wrong moment is a confederation that has spent itself, and that a war between great powers leaves both of them standing and angry, and there is no profit in a fight where the loser can still reach you.

A single empire cannot be beaten by tribes. A single empire that has fractured into a dozen princely states, each of them strong, each of them the enemy of all the others, each of them unable to combine because combining means acknowledging a superior — that is a different proposition entirely, and the Voltrumite accounts say plainly that their elders had been describing the conditions for it for generations before it arrived.

Then the Emperor's sons received their appanages, and it arrived.

The War of the Princes

The total defeat of the gulf ended the Third Realm War and gave the Second Imperium a problem it had never had, which was too much.

The Emperor granted an appanage to each of his sons. The arrangement was orderly, was entered in the ordinary form, and was the most reasonable thing anybody could have done with a continent and a family; and within a generation of its making the princes were at war with one another for the position of Prince Imperial, which is the one dignity the arrangement did not divide and could not.

The War of the Princes is the ugliest period in the recorded history of Farrone and is not a Voltrumite subject. What matters here is its shape: a dozen princely states, all of them fragments of the greatest empire the world had seen, all of them commanding its armies, its engineers, its arcana, and its doctrine, and every one of them absolutely unable to accept the primacy of any other, because the whole quarrel was about primacy.

It ran for a long time. It did not resolve, because it could not: a prince who won a campaign acquired a province and eleven enemies, and the coalitions re-formed against whoever was winning as reliably as water finding a level.

The Voltrumites came out in the middle of it, and every princely state in Farrone read the news as an opportunity to acquire a border, and by the time any of them understood otherwise there were four fewer princely states.

The Conquest

They took the princely states one at a time, and this is the entirety of the military history and is the reason it worked.

The Voltrumite method was not brilliant and its own accounts do not claim it was. They concentrated everything against one state, took it, held it, and moved; they never fought two at once; and they were assisted, in every single campaign, by the fact that the remaining princes regarded the elimination of a rival as a benefit until the arithmetic became obvious, which it did four states too late.

Against any one of the princely states the Voltrumites were probably the weaker force. Against all of them in succession they were unbeatable, because a confederation that reckons strength as endurance does not lose heart in the fifth year of a campaign and a princely state at war with eleven neighbours does not have a fifth year to give.

The last states combined at the end, and it is recorded on both sides that the combination was competent, and late, and that it held for two seasons.

The Third Imperium

They raised an empire and did not call it a new thing.

The Third Imperium takes its number in the ordinary sequence, and the Voltrumites' claim is not that they have founded something but that they have restored something — that Farrone has been one polity three times and is now one again, and that the interval was a failure of the second and not a virtue of the first.

It came, within a lifetime, to hold most of Farrone: the gulf, the princely states, the old imperial heartlands, the north to the line the holds keep. And it became, within a generation more, a power of a kind Midrealm had not previously contained.

Chima feared it, which no polity of Farrone had managed since Dominus, and Chima was right to.

The Emperorship

The Third Imperium has an emperor when it has one and a Grand Regent when it does not, and this is the strangest institution the Voltrumites have given the world.

An emperor is not elected, is not hereditary, and is not chosen by any procedure anybody outside the confederation has ever been able to describe. An emperor appears, and is recognised, and the recognition is the act — and there have been long ages of the Third Imperium with no emperor at all, governed entirely by a Grand Regent, in which the throne stood empty and the seal was kept and nobody in the empire regarded the arrangement as a crisis.

The Grand Regent governs with the whole executive power, under the Imperium's own constitution, and lays it down when an emperor is recognised, and every one of them has. The office is held by the confederation's own reckoning of strength — which is to say by whoever can bear it — and is reviewed, and has been taken away.

The regalia is two objects: the Seal, and the Starfinder.

Trivia

• Every chancery in Farrone had a file on them, and every file said the south-west was poor, quarrelsome, and not worth taking, and every file was correct on each point and wrong in the aggregate.
• They were never conquered because nobody ever tried properly, and they have never once mistaken this for invincibility.
• Their word for strength is not translatable. The nearest the gulf's linguists have come is a term from stonework meaning the load a member will take before it fails.
• By their reckoning a smith who has kept a forge for two hundred years and a man who held a pass are both strong, and which of them would win a fight is not an interesting question.
• They took no part in the Second or Third Realm Wars, on the reasoning that a war between great powers leaves both of them standing and angry.
• They were not waiting for weakness. They were waiting for multiplicity, and their elders had been describing the conditions for generations before they arrived.
• The appanages were orderly, reasonable, and entered in the ordinary form, and within a generation the princes were at war over the one dignity that could not be divided.
• They took the princely states one at a time and never fought two at once, assisted in every campaign by rivals who regarded each elimination as a benefit until the arithmetic became obvious, four states too late.
• Against any one princely state they were probably the weaker force. Against all of them in succession they were unbeatable.
• The Third Imperium takes its number in the ordinary sequence and claims restoration rather than founding.
• An emperor is not elected and not hereditary. An emperor appears, and there have been long ages with none, governed by a Grand Regent, which nobody in the empire regards as a crisis.
• Every Grand Regent has laid the power down when an emperor was recognised.