Ameiliee's Stories:When the Stone of Peace Was Stolen
by Luvirini
Copyright© 2011 by Luvirini
Fantasy Story: This story tells about the time the Stone of Peace was stolen from Norek.. for an hour. Ameiliee's Stories are short stories about places and people told by the true elven sorceress Ameiliee Liamyn. They are mostly meant to give color to places and people in the world Myaasia and support the main stories.
Tags: Fiction
Timeline: Starts about 80 years before beginning of "Luvirini's Journey"
Norek has in it's main cathedral an artifact known as "The Stone of Peace" that causes peaceful and friendly thoughts to dominate in a large area around it. It will not really stop someone from doing violence, theft or similar actions, but it dampens the feelings of anger, jealousy and hate, making such much less likely.
The stone has caused Norek to be one of the most peaceful cities anywhere with very little strife and similar. That has in turn helped make it major transshipping port despite slightly higher than average customs fees.
Once the stone was stolen.
There is another coastal city on the lost coast, Magnimar. Both were founded about the same time and allways had a competition going on about influence and trade on the coast. The rivalry has softened a bit now that both have joined the central kingdom, but is still present.
Back I those days Magnimar was defacto led by the shipping magnate Gresirian. He was really as much a owner of a pirate fleet as he was owner of a shipping company. Out of his fleet of about fifty ships, only a few were not at least dual purpose ships capable of piracy. Magnimar was also the base of numerous smaller pirate fleets.
After some time other people shipping things near the lost coast started to get enough of the piracy and began to look for ways to combat it. Norek was at the head of these efforts and the leaders there worked hard to gather a coalition to fight the pirates.
After a few years of coalition building Norek had gotten Lethys, a huge trade city at the was eastern end of the inner sea involved and their patrols started to score a lot of kills of pirate ships. Not much after that, the raising Empire of Rakata also got involved. The combination of Noreks fleet of light combat ships superbly suited for scouting, the few heavy ships of line from Lethys and the numerous Rakatan galleys filled with grimaced marines for boarding actions and to lay waste to pirate bases, was the turning point and the pirates started to lose.
After about a year the combined fleets and had enough mastery of the seas to be able to land large forces close by to lay siege to Magnimar. While the bulk of the actual troops on the ground were from the empire, the whole operation was still identified as primarily Norekian.
After only a few days of siege, with more and more of the Rakatan troops being landed near the city
Gresirian understood that there was no way that the ragged pirates could stand up to a proper army that was both bigger, better equiped and professionally led. The Rakatan morning drill where they would line up their troops in perfect lines, march them in step towards the city, stopping just out of effective arrow range shouting as one "Few days from now we will just march over you", while the morning sun glistered from their steel breastplates and drawn steel weapons, was likely a big contributing factor.
He then decided that fleeing the city was the only option to survive. One dark, cloudy night, his 14 remaining ships broke out from the harbor, past the defenders. Only five ships made it out and scattered in all directions. The ship Gresirian was on was among the ships that got away.
The next day the armies just marched into the city without any resistance.
Gresirian fled all the way south to the fragments. He still had a immense fortune with him, so he could have just retired and lived his life in luxury, but he wanted revenge.
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