#pentarchy

[kradogsrats]

Okay, so new day; new insane lore history theory.

Looking at the tapestry from ToX again more closely, after my very quick scan this morning, there are actually five distinct types of soldiers shown:

Based on careful examination of the contemporary armor/uniforms used by the Pentarchy armies, I landed on this breakdown:

I could explain in great detail how I made those distinctions, but honestly it doesn't matter and people don't care. Just trust me, I thought hard about it.

Originally I misidentified there as only being three types of soldiers, because the Katolis/Evenere and Neolandia/Del Bar designs are very similar. Also because the tapestry shows three cities:

Katolis is obvious, and I still think the other two are Berylgarten and Neolandia. The map helpfully tells us there are five known cities in the human kingdoms, complete with little pictures:

I've left out Hinterpeak because it's very obvious none of the tapestry cities is Hinterpeak, Hinterpeak is literally inside a mountain. Del Bar's secondary city, Serpentongue, looks like a candidate based on its map drawing, but ToX tells us that Serpentongue actually looks like this, which is... less representative of what the tapestry shows:

We see Berylgarten briefly in s2 during Viren's flashback sections, where it's a sort of tiered city with towers around a central dome:

I think that's closer to the top tapestry city than Serpentongue is, though it's still fairly abstracted. It also makes more sense for the "capital" city of a kingdom to be represented.

Finally, we have Eboreus, which is a bit of a problem child because we have no long-distance views of Eboreus that I can recall... there are depictions of the inside of the city, but nothing that would characterize its silhouette for us. However, ToX does have another piece of "old" artwork, meant to be probably some kind of fresco, depicting the founding of Neolandia and Eboreus:

(This is the latter, Eboreus half, the right half just shows the people migrating from the east and going through a nomadic tent-based civilization period.)

It doesn't help a ton, except that construction of the city wall is given a pretty dramatic place in the visual narrative. I would definitely assume, from this, that Eboreus is a walled city similar to the bottom tapestry city. Combined with the many-spired depiction on the map, I feel okay about that identification.

It's interesting that they geographically represent only three of the five kingdoms, but if the tapestry pre-dates parts of the kingdoms' formations... well, the kingdom that's a swamp infested with magical megagators and the kingdom where they still choose the next monarch by having a literal melee free-for-all are honestly the ones I'd say probably took the longest to establish like... actual government.

However, something to keep in mind is that while I've been talking about this tapestry like it's a super-old historical document within the setting, it may actually not be from all that far in the past. All we really know is that it shows a conflict between humans and elves, divided by the Border, and that's not exactly a historically unique scenario. The main things that suggest it's showing an earlier time than "now" are that it includes only three cities, and that it clearly depicts mages being heavily involved in warfare. If that was something that was expected at series time, a lot of things would be very different. I could, however, see it being a thing as late as, say, the time of the Orphan Queen. I mention all of this because the tapestry is one of several "old"-looking art pieces in Tales of Xadia, but we have to keep in mind that one of those literally depicts Harrow killing Avizandum, so. It could be very old, it could be not-very old. (I mean, 300 years is still pretty old, in the scope of known human history.)

Really, though, what I wanted to talk about is this:

We have our "Katolian" soldier, but the heraldry on their shield is not the Katolis uneven towers, even though that's already a distinguishing feature of the kingdom (as seen in the city depictions). Instead, it's a layered uh... thing. But it's a thing we've seen before:

The guards at Allhaven Hill have their own heraldry, presumably because they're supposed to be neutral regardless of their kingdom of origin... but it's almost exactly the same overlapping geometric design as we see in the tapestry.

We also have Blondie McKatolis, in the flashback scenes during Zubeia's account of Aaravos's imprisonment, strongly implying that we are seeing representatives of the human kingdoms at the time of the Orphan Queen:

We pretty clearly also have Neolandia, Del Bar, and Evenere at this table. Also Duren, I just always get confused by her since they gave her those purple-y pink accents instead of blue. Why? No idea. What is this, Sleeping Beauty?

Anyway, Blondie up there also does not use the modern Katolian uneven-towers heraldry, nor the crown that matches it. Depending on how long the Aaravos bullshit had been going on, it's not surprising that the Orphan Queen would try for a clean slate when taking the throne. Having just averted devastation on both sides of the Border by working together with Xadia, "finding strength in our differences" is a pretty good choice for new logo inspiration. (I don't actually know how you adopt/change heraldry. But I do know logo design and branding strategy!)

Given that all five kingdoms technically appear in the tapestry, the "Pentarchy" heraldry could already be a united human kingdoms symbol... except then why isn't it on any of the other soldiers? Some of them have shields almost exactly the same as the Katolian soldiers, but no heraldry.

So here's a thought: what if it actually is the Katolian heraldry of the time, or a symbol of the kingdoms united under Katolis?

Katolis is one of the older and larger kingdoms, it's implied to have had a larger and more organized military for a long time (holding most of the Border), and Blondie is the one with Aaravos whispering in his ear. It wouldn't be super weird if Katolis at one point held a higher position than the other kingdoms, whether as "first among equals" or an actual system of vassals with a "high king" or whatever. The center, frontmost piece of the overlapping geometry, so to speak.

We have occasionally gotten weird little hints/implications that the current era of peace between the human kingdoms, even the entire concept of the Pentarchy, is fairly recent. What if that's not because they were all squabbling amongst themselves even after the mage wars wound down, but that prior to the Orphan Queen, they were all varying degrees of vassal states to Katolis? If part of what the Orphan Queen did was reset the human kingdoms as equals, doing a "this symbol now belongs to all of us, not just Katolis, and Katolis will adopt new heraldry" could be a nice gesture.

But yeah, that's how my brain has been spinning today.

[beautifulterriblequeen]

Hello!! This is kind of a stupid question but do you understand who the Moonshadow assassins kill and why? At first I assumed it was just human rulers/generals from all kingdoms but when Viren was talking about how they were a threat in season 2 the other rulers didn’t seem to think it was as big of an emergency and I was a little confused. I hope you have a great day!!

I actually love questions like this! There's some nuance in the answer, and also some uncertainty, but I'll share my take for ya:

The Moonshadow assassins don't seem to pick their own targets, they accept assignments from the Dragon Throne. The full nature of that relationship hasn't been explained in any detail, so it's a tricky, complicated area of lore for the moment.

Basically, we don't have any information on how the Dragon Throne chooses the targets it passes on to the Moonshadow assassins for taking, aside from the one that happened just before the show's plot began, with Zubeia sending Runaan and his team to kill Harrow and Ezran. All we know is that these targets are supposed to be so threatening to Xadia that the world would be better off if they were no longer in it.

It's not impossible to imagine Avizandum telling his assassins to take out someone who didn't actually deserve it. It's relatively easy actually, knowing how he liked to stomp on humans, and how long he lived. It's probably happened. The only question is: how often? (angst)

I would guess - because again, we don't really know this for sure yet - that Avizandum generally chose actual threats, or people who could easily become threats in a war. But when you're a long-lived dragon, maybe you see different patterns in the mortal lives and cultures of humans. And Runaan and all the assassins before him wouldn't live long enough to recognize those patterns themselves, so they probably had to accept their targets out of either trust or duty. (more angst)

Some of them would definitely be military type targets: generals; shining young hero types with a chip on their shoulder; stealthy human assassins; dark mages if they dared risk it; and etc.

But a dragon might see strange harmless patterns beginning to form and decide to nip them in the bud before they led to anything truly threatening: a craftsman who just had a design breakthrough with a prototype ballista; a baker who just invented hardtack that could keep an army on the move for weeks; an armorer who just made a much safer design; a clever miner who found a rare and valuable source of iron.

People like that aren't dangerous on their own. But the knowledge they might share among the humans during a long drawn-out war with Xadia could be devastating in a decade or five. A dragon who already doesn't like humans would probably have no trouble sending his best assassin to snipe unsuspecting ordinary people like that.

We're still not sure if assassins must take an assignment, or if it's just dishonorable or something not to take it. But Runaan's a pretty regimented guy, and he's not fond of humans either. Between his trust issues and his protective instincts, I don't think he'd look too hard at his assignments these days even if he had a choice - he'd believe he was doing the right thing for his people, and then he'd stop thinking and go shoot someone.

I think sometimes Runaan definitely was doing the right thing by killing someone. But it's impossible to say which missions were and which weren't the right thing. Life is way too complicated for clear-cut answers like that.

Okay, onward!

The other part of this answer is about the Pentarchy itself. I think their hesitance to commit right away, and the reason Aanya got so much time to smack Viren with her sass, happened partly because Viren lives in a border realm like she does, and the other three rulers have a nice safe buffer between them and the brunt of the war efforts.

Basically, Del Bar, Neolandia, and Evenere don't have any skin in the border game.

They don't have big standing armies, and the only threats they deal with are small incursions - either assassins from other human realms or occasionally Moonshadow assassins.

Which is the topic at hand! But when Viren tries to convince Harrow to do the switching spell in S1, he claims that Moonshadow elves are an unstoppable force. Almost a force of nature, kind of vibe. If they come for you, you're just gonna die about it. Harrow even agrees with him! It's common knowledge how deadly the Moonshadow assassins are. And that's what happened despite all of Viren's plans - he still lost his king because Moonshadow assassins are scary good at their job.

So it's plausible that the other rulers didn't see any point in committing resources to an unsolvable issue - if Moonshadow assassins were coming for them, then they'd die. Why risk anyone else? Anyone in the assassins' way would die too. (Which they did in Katolis)

Another option is that Viren has been wrong before, and the other royals did commit resources to deal with the threat he claimed was coming, only to have time and money and forces wasted. If Viren had brought them costly mistakes, they could've been hedging their bets this time around.

There's a funnier possibility though: maybe they just didn't like Viren. People in power sometimes say polite things to an underling or a petitioner, and then have no intention of ever following through with it. They might've all been blowing smoke here, telling Viren "oh yeah sure if we're all in, let's totally do war, bro" and absolutely never meaning it even a little bit because they simply did not like the messenger.

Which is mean. But: royals.

tldr:

there's a few things affecting the Pentarchy scene all at once. We don't know all the factors involved yet, and the Pentarchy probably doesn't either. But at the end of the day the Pentarchy chose to hesitate, and that left Viren on his own.

[tales-and-creatures-of-xadia]

Queens of Duren, Queen Aanya concept art

[deadpopes]

How Egypt's historic Christian church survived and thrived

This is a fascinating and extremely well-done feature on the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, one of the five main episcopal sees of Justinian’s pentarchy and the only ecclesiastical jurisdiction other than Rome that is led by a Pope rather than a Patriarch.  

[somestorythoughts]

Queen Aanya-the only one with a brain cell

You know that thing you do when you know this person’s a bad guy but the other characters don’t and the bad guy is trying to get them to do something and you’re like “don’t do it!!!” and they do? And then you’re annoyed cause you know they’re bad but the others don’t? That thing.

I forget what I read that made me want to revisit the scene with the Pentarchy as if the audience didn’t know that Viren was a bad guy/hugely misguided antihero, but I rewatched that episode and Aanya still has ALL the braincells.

Viren never actually says what he wants. He talks about pushing back the Xadian threat, but he doesn’t say whether he’s looking for help invading Xadia or help reinforcing the borders or something different. Hell this is the guy who MARCHES INTO XADIA WITH NO PLAN WHAT THE FUCK VIREN I THOUGHT YOU WERE SMARTER. The point is, the other rulers don’t actually know what he’s asking for because he never bothers to elaborate. It is as she says only a “2 minute speech.” She has every right to want more information before she contributes her armies.

On top of that there’s this:

Viren goes as far as to make these shadows strike at 2 of the rulers, that’s on top of having shadowy foes invade the room and scenes of armies. It’s an over the top fear tactic, and they should all be cautious of commiting to a man who doesn’t actually say what he wants and tries to scare them into agreeing with him.

On top of that, all of the rulers say something along the lines of “if everyone else agrees we will help you.” Not exactly a firm stance. It’s like they’re too afraid of being accused of refusing to stand with their fellow humans to outright disagree (he does appeal to their “shared humanity”) or possibly scared of Viren. That’s a lot of peer pressure coming from 1 man when the others are clearly uncertain.

Aanya doesn’t outright say no at first. She wants time to consider the situation, perhaps assess her own border with Xadia, before she makes up her mind. She doesn’t say no until Viren tells her the story of her parents and Harrow, something that might be his attempt at a guilt trip in which case she probably doesn’t want to stand with a man who tries to use her mothers’ sacrifice against her.

Duren borders Xadia. If she helps invade, both her kingdom and Katallos will be the most open to retaliation from Xadia. Even if Viren was a good guy, or at least a less problematic figure, Aanya would still be perfectly justified in not making an immediate decision when Viren a) isn’t clear about what he wants and b) uses scare tactics to convince the other rulers, and even if he was clear and less magically scary, it would still be reasonable for her to want some time to consider things.

In short Aanya possess more snark than all of them combined and 3 times as much common sense.

[huntress-of-stories-and-dreams]

Headcanon #56

Not having been killed by the shady assassins, Ezran and Aanya take over the Pentarchy and coordinate the union between humans and elves.

[tales-and-creatures-of-xadia]

Human Kingdom Flags/Emblems

[tales-and-creatures-of-xadia]

King Florian, King Ahling concept art