How did the Siege of the Capital happen?
It is time for
worldbuilding with Nare
or: Nare wrote a thing and then realized they’d forgotten to share the explanation for 90% of the things they’ve written.
So: What you need to know is that Eret takes the throne in a very chaotic time. After Eret’s father dies, multiple problems in the kingdom that were already brewing come to a head.
The Church, who has spent the last few centuries slowly attempting to grab more political power, sees their chance with a young, inexperienced ruler. Supported gets their power grab by many of the smaller villages on the borders who are trying to survive amidst an also long-running famine that’s ravaging the Esempee and steadily getting worse.
On the other side, there’s the hybrids, angry at their lack of protection by the law and – the farther out you go – the discrimination they experience. The whole thing is basically a powder keg waiting to explode. Enter: Dream.
Dream is immortal, a powerful necromancer, and very, very bored. So of course the logical thing is to start a rebellion against the king.
The metaphorical powder keg explodes. The hybrids rally around Dream as one of their own. The people of the borderlands don’t really care who leads them, they just want a way to get additional resources. The Church…well, the Church mostly wants the pesky current king gone. Eret is smart, politically oriented and keeps countering their plans to grab power either in the state or on a social level and they’re sick of it. If it takes enduring a practitioner of the highly loathed necromancy magic on the throne to be rid of Eret, they’re ready to take that deal.
Dream has the people.
Eret has an army.
So Dream, who is very old and has been bored for a long time, calls upon some of his old contacts. Namely, mercenaries.
Now there are a great many mercenaries in the Esempee and they’re very different from each other.
There’s the “classic” mercenaries, selling their fighting power to the hightest bidder with more or less questions asked depending on who you hire.
There’s the bounty hunters, hunting down escaped criminals, magic users who abuse their power and the like.
There’s the assassins, similar to the bounty hunters but different enough to count as their own class.
And then, there are the Speedrunners.
If you ask them themselves, they’d say they’re barely mercenaries. They’re adventurers, collectors, not selling their skills to anyone with money.
If you ask other mercenaries, they’ll say speedrunners are insane.
Both groups can agree on that they’re the most skilled people you’ll find in this country. They’re fast, deadly, courageous and able to both find rare artefacts and break into the guarded and highly dangerous dimension of the “Nether” and live to tell the tale. And all of that without many of the things normal people need to even survive the normal world itself.
They’re also barely ever visible in the public eye and whenever somebody manages to catch a glimpse of one of them, masks and helmets cover their faces. Considering speedrunning is the only mercenary branch that is officially banned by the law, it’s an understandable precaution.
All the more confusing it got for the residents of the Esempee when the speedrunners suddenly showed up in Dream’s army, managing to take down the remaining army and the Capital in only a few days.
After Dream’s ascension to the throne, many Speedrunners faded into the background again, though Dream’s new general is Illumina, the legendary speedrunner himself. Other groups that have helped Dream also seem dissatisfied with his rule with the exception of the Church who gladly takes the power Dream doesn’t seem to care for.
The seeds for former king Eret - who managed to escape the carnage of the Fall of the Capital with help from remaining members of their army – to take back the throne are already sown.