The Known History of Kell
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By Janus Ilvarus
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The Dragon Age, one of the earliest recorded eras of history, is known to us only in fragments and myth.  The earliest mention of this battle comes from the great poet Helius, whose epic "Dragonsday" tells us of the cataclysmic battle that ended the reign of the elder dragons and the sorceror-kings.
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After that, it is agreed, comes darkness: a period of hundreds of years, perhaps a thousand, that represent a profound gap in the world's histories.  Elven oral histories tell only of "wolf men", a fragmentation of the human people that represented, in their view, little more than tribalism.  The so-called Wolf Age comes to an end when Kell begins.
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The Kell Empire, as it is now called, likely sprang from the Kellurian people that inhabited a crescent string of islands south of the equator.  The empire started out as trading missions; once the Kellurians realized their relative advantages, the trading missions took on military bent.
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For the Kellurians had real advantages.  First, the crescent was densely populated with huge, tall forests, and fertile soil.  This gave them a massive supply of timber, and with proper management, the ability to regrow trees quickly and efficiently.  The advantage in timber meant large and numerous ships, which could quickly transport an army from island to island.
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The second advantage was one keenly exploited by their armies: iron.  In stark constrast to the other tribes, whose spears and swords were made of bronze, the Kellurians made use of iron, which they again, due to an accident of geography, had in large quantities.  Unlike bronze, which required both copper and tin, iron could be used directly to create large number of spears and javelins, which the Kellurians exploited ruthlessly.  Rather than waste a large amount of iron on a single sword or even axe-head, they realized that the most efficient use was in the creation of spears and javelins, which are also easy to make and easy to teach.  The Kellurians were noted for their spears, which featured long, triangular heads.  Every able-bodied man became a potential soldier.
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Finally, the third advantage was conflict.  Early on in their isolation, they had been set upon by other armies.  In the bloody and hard-fought victories they learned about the proper use of tactics.  When going up against relatively untrained tribal peoples, volleys of missiles to start a battle proved devastating against peoples who sometimes did not even have shields.  And when those people inevitably charged, the Kellurians dropped into shield-wall formations that bristled with spears, inflicting terrible casualties on infantry and cavalry alike.
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But the Kellurians were not just warriors.  They were deeply religious, and established the basis for the modern church of Celeste.  Though many scholars have speculated as to why such an empire would not worship, for example, Aurelion, the Kellurians believed themselves to be the natural rulers on earth in the same way that Celeste is the empress of the heavens.  They erected a great many churches in her honour, many of which still stand, grown-over, on remote islands.  They wrote early texts in the Kellurian language, which itself forms the basis for the common tongue.  And they created beautiful, red-gold pots, inscribed with poems, benedictions, and devotional symbols.
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But though the Kell Empire at once point spread over a quarter of the world, its fall was swift and irreversible.  The eruption of Riaku, a supermassive volcano, spread ash over much of the world.  The air was choked.  Fertile farmland became barren, and a terrible hunger gripped the world's peoples.  As its people starved, the Empire demanded the same levels of food as tribute, amounts that could not be produced, let alone provided.  Tributes dropped.  Ships were sent to collect tribute by the sword, but they met with terrible resistance.  The tributaries, as they were known, banded together, pooled their meagre resources, and exacted a terrible cost.  At first they met with the Empire's ships at sea, but later, they sent raiding parties to the central city of Kell itself.  With the sacking of Kell, the Empire's remaining cities turned on each other.
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The fall was complete.  Kell was no more, sacked time after time; a few foundations still stand, and parts of its walls, vestiges of one of the great empires.  Kell had fallen: long live Kell.
