Thousand Spears
"What is your name?" "THOUSAND SPEARS! THOUSAND SPEARS!"
"What is your purpose?" "SLAY THE FOE! SLAY THE FOE!"
"Why do we fight?" "GLORY! GLORY! GLORY!"
- A Thousand Spears marshal to his Lancers, before leading them on the attack.
"Then they were gone. Like they'd never been there. Thousand Spears. Thousand Spears for a thousand years, he thinks incoherently."
- Excerpt from an account of Mervis Castling, Iron Sun Admiral
Thrall
Outrider
Lancers
Chariot
Cataphracts
Warsail
THOUSAND SPEARS
No tribe is more proud. No tribe more martial in their outlook, nor utterly obsessed with honour.
Thousand Spears are best perhaps best understood as an experiment in conditioning: how could a tribe - its culture, its values, its day-to-day structures and focuses - be tuned just so over generations to produce, with regularity, the finest possible warriors?
One would need to brutalise its people, of course - crush the fear of death within them, replacing it with a far great fear of failure, and dishonour. Inure them to bloodshed, teach them from a young age to savour the burst and crunch of a speartip puncturing a body.
And individuality would need to be harshly curtailed - every commander of warriors understands the need for strict cohesion, maintaining formation and discipline long enough to see those same traits in your enemy crumble (and then to begin the bloody work of overrun).
Finally, they would need to believe without a doubt in their own unfailing supremacy. Of course, it is a common pastime of most tribes to sneer merrily at the foleys and backward ways of the others - but that would not be enough. Their arrogance would need to smoulder like embers ready to reignite: not quite hate, as they must make slaves of the conquered (who else will perform the tasks too lowly for a proud warrior to stoop to?). More like disdain; a casual despising of the cowards, the soft, the wasted - all who are not them.
To mark this tribe, each adult member wears a mask of tsaltalloy metal. It is smooth, and featureless save for the vision slits cut at the eyes. To a practical end, it has tsaltalloy's miraculous property of dispersing heat out and away from its curved inner surface, cooling the face of its wearer. And when one sees them worn by a deathly-still rank of Thousand Spears lancers, their other purpose becomes clear - as a declaration of cold-hearted invulnerability. The face that is not a face. Total stillness, impassive calm before the battle, or in the midst of carnage. The mirrored visage of a warrior people perfected.
And you will know then, in those faces, all the inadequacies of your own soft humanity.
Factions (the tribes)
"What is your purpose?" "SLAY THE FOE! SLAY THE FOE!"
"Why do we fight?" "GLORY! GLORY! GLORY!"
- A Thousand Spears marshal to his Lancers, before leading them on the attack.
"Then they were gone. Like they'd never been there. Thousand Spears. Thousand Spears for a thousand years, he thinks incoherently."
- Excerpt from an account of Mervis Castling, Iron Sun Admiral
Thrall
Outrider
Lancers
Chariot
Cataphracts
Warsail
THOUSAND SPEARS
No tribe is more proud. No tribe more martial in their outlook, nor utterly obsessed with honour.
Thousand Spears are best perhaps best understood as an experiment in conditioning: how could a tribe - its culture, its values, its day-to-day structures and focuses - be tuned just so over generations to produce, with regularity, the finest possible warriors?
One would need to brutalise its people, of course - crush the fear of death within them, replacing it with a far great fear of failure, and dishonour. Inure them to bloodshed, teach them from a young age to savour the burst and crunch of a speartip puncturing a body.
And individuality would need to be harshly curtailed - every commander of warriors understands the need for strict cohesion, maintaining formation and discipline long enough to see those same traits in your enemy crumble (and then to begin the bloody work of overrun).
Finally, they would need to believe without a doubt in their own unfailing supremacy. Of course, it is a common pastime of most tribes to sneer merrily at the foleys and backward ways of the others - but that would not be enough. Their arrogance would need to smoulder like embers ready to reignite: not quite hate, as they must make slaves of the conquered (who else will perform the tasks too lowly for a proud warrior to stoop to?). More like disdain; a casual despising of the cowards, the soft, the wasted - all who are not them.
To mark this tribe, each adult member wears a mask of tsaltalloy metal. It is smooth, and featureless save for the vision slits cut at the eyes. To a practical end, it has tsaltalloy's miraculous property of dispersing heat out and away from its curved inner surface, cooling the face of its wearer. And when one sees them worn by a deathly-still rank of Thousand Spears lancers, their other purpose becomes clear - as a declaration of cold-hearted invulnerability. The face that is not a face. Total stillness, impassive calm before the battle, or in the midst of carnage. The mirrored visage of a warrior people perfected.
And you will know then, in those faces, all the inadequacies of your own soft humanity.
Factions (the tribes)
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