An Appeal to Hyades, Chapter I: The Ashen Times

My Most Heroic and Wise Emperor,

It is with the utmost joy I write from Boston to tell you that the savage King Paul has agreed to your offer and has allowed me to stay here and study the history of these primitives. It appears that their...heathenous faith was founded soon after God's wrath. Their faith shattered, the people of Atlantica began worshipping devils and demons, seeking solace in the knowledge that their gods were uncaring, and thus could allow the End to happen.

Yet the Folk of the Fall (as they call themselves) were isolated, and their gods do not protect them (unlike our own Almighty). Then into this world came Vincent Mahonic, first king of New England.

Vincent I, long did he reign.

According to a saga one of the Yankee shamen read me, (Oh He of the Rotting Branches) Vincent Mahonic was born the son of a human woman and "a devil in man's flesh". Considered illegitimate by his adopted father, the inhumanly strong lad was sent to die on his first raid (despite their shared faith and culture, the Yankee savages still raid each other) at the age of 12. He returned alive, killed his father and half-brother, and proclaimed himself Chief of Burlington. As the Americanist Horselord Ned Pitchstone worked to create his homeland of Lakotah in the West, Vincent undertook his Vision Quest, meeting his "true father" (I saw a young warrior undergo one the other day. Simply disgusting.). Vincent's troops marched with him from Buffalo to New Brunswick, proudly proclaiming him King in "the year of the Elders 240". [AD 2306]

Vincent reigned for thirty-five years until he was assassinated "by his enemies" (The saga claims it was a disloyal shield-brother, but these are Yankees; disloyalty is in their very nature.). He was succeeded by his only son, Keziah the Cruel, a scant year before the foundation of our own Holy Columbian Confederacy in "the Southlands". Yet where Vincent fought only disorganized petty lords and tribes, Keziah found himself faced with Elias Rodham, an Anabaptist rebel who fought off Keziah and established the Kingdom of Hudsonia in 2381.

Hudsonia at its greatest extent.

Rodham's humiliation of the Mahonics would be the only one of its kind in the 24th century, as the Celestial Empire of California was founded on the Western coast. 2459 saw the duchies of New Brunswick and Miramichi break away from New England and form the Kingdom of the Maritimes. When King Zadok the Mad learned of the secession, he raised a great host and marched west to take land from Hudsonia. In the Battle of Saratoga Springs, Hudsonian troops devastated the New English warriors, and Zadok himself was killed in the fighting. This broke New England, and though the kingdom limped through the next four decades with a series of weak kings (one, Jacob I, being Mahonic), the Kingdom ultimately collapsed in early 2500. For the next century and a half, New England would be ruled by squabbling High Chiefs, all seeking the glory of a reunited New England, all failing in the process.

All, of course, until Paul the Loreseeker.

A portrait I found of King Paul as a young man.

These Mahonics have shown a tendency to survive, as their dynasty had survived at the edge of extinction. Paul's father, a commander in the army of the High Chief of Nogad, found a supply of treasure during a battle between Nogad and a minor clan known as the Marbleheads (I swear, what names will these Yankees think of next?). He used this treasure to leverage the support of his troops and the other commanders, requesting that he be given land of his own. The High Chief, Elias the Old (He was a young man at the time), granted Paul's father the Chiefdom of Boston. This land was considered near-worthless by the savages, as the Old American ruins made the land poor for farming, but the new Chief leveraged those ruins for his castle.

Paul himself became Chief at age 25, his lust for women matched only by his lust for his ancestral title. With his ancestor's strength in his veins and an exemplary (for a Yankee) knowledge of military matters, Paul began his campaign.

The Battle of Plymouth, the first of Paul's many subjugations.

This is to be the first of many letters, but I assumed you would become impatient rather rapidly, my Lord. My succeeding letters and whatever these savages have that passes for documents shall be delivered as swiftly as possible.

Your loyal scribe,

Leonidas