- Influence
- 13,483.00
Imperial history is rife with famous vendettas - those between Vladimir Ulyanov and Nuori Sken Freemont, which culminated in a beachside duel and the coronation of an Emperor, and between Tanya Rainblade-Ryalor and Jeshal the Ironclaw, which ended in both their deaths and explosions in their respective ministry offices, both considered among the most notable. Still, the most violently explosive, and perhaps the one responsible for the most lives lost, was that between Anithias Freedom and Armina Rogue. This animosity between an adoptive godfather and his ward bloomed into a confrontation for which the death toll has been estimated at fifty-two beasts, most of whom were innocents caught in the crossfire.
Anithias Freedom began his career as a minor officer on The Golden Hide circa 1727, serving under Captain Tanya Rainblade-Ryalor, wife of Falun Ryalor. The admiration of the pair was sufficient that, following Falun Ryalor's assassination in 1728, Anithias and his wife chose to name their firstborn Falun in honor of the captain's husband, a distinction that would prove ironic given that, a mere five years later, Anithias would be the most vocal anti-Ryalor advocate in the Imperium. During this period of service, Anithias was present for a trip to Summerdock in the Fyadorian province of Eastisle, during which a gray-furred Fyadorian orphan vixen of the age of 15 attempted to sneak onboard the Hide to steal food. She was caught by the crew and, in a show of compassion by Captain Rainblade-Ryalor, was permitted to enlist, despite technically being underage. To facilitate the legal workaround, Anithias Freedom and his wife Julia were listed as Armina's godparents and legal guardians, a role which produced much consternation in the dogmatically rule-abiding Anithias.
The next two years aboard the Hide were marked by near-constant conflict between Anithias and Armina. Anithias viewed Armina as an incorrigible troublemaker, one who was only protected by the captain's indulgence. Armina, in turn, viewed Anithias as an overambitious stick-in-the-mud who used blind obedience to even ridiculous rules in place of a moral compass. The conflict between the two escalated from the mundane to the mortal when Anithias discovered proof that Armina had been doing work for the Furotazzi Crime Family. He immediately moved to have her expelled from the navy and referred to the Fogey Police for arrest, a move that was only blocked by the intervention of Captain Rainblade-Ryalor, who nonetheless recognized that the relationship between Anithias and Armina was irrepably damaged and opted to assume guardianship of the youth herself.
Following this incident and Anithias's ascent to first mate, things calmed somewhat, though tensions never fully eased between him and Armina. As disturbing signs of psychosis began to manifest in the youth, it was largely the intervention of Captain Rainblade-Ryalor and Julia Freedom, who served as surgeon's assistant onboard the ship, which kept the youth and her psychoses both in check and out of a court martial. Anithias's eventual ascent to captaincy following the promotion of Tanya Rainblade-Ryalor first to admiral, and then to Minister of War in residence aboard her flagship The Golden Hide, brought new tensions to the relationship, though it was largely Captain Freedom's self-image as a magnanimous and forgiving captain which kept his most punitive instincts in check. Nonetheless, tensions continued to simmer beneath the surface as Anithias openly expressed his disapproval of Armina's choices in clothes, occupation in port, in todds, and in practically every aspect of her life. Armina, in turn, seemed to relish her former godfather's opprobrium, going to great lengths to express her contempt for his opinion.
Eventually, following an incident in which the Hide was temporarily captured by slavers, Captain Freedom was relieved of his command and retired to a position as a judge of the Bully Harbor Court, putting his memory and command of legal codes to good use. Armina Rogue, in the meantime, ascended to the position of first mate and, after proving herself equal to the responsibility, eventually became captain of The Golden Hide itself, later following Tanya Rainblade-Ryalor's example in assuming the dual mantle of captain and minister of war. Unlike her predecessors, however, Armina Rogue struggled with the responsibilities of her role, engaging in frequent alcoholic binges. Later medical reviews of her case would note that the medicines prescribed to treat her psychoses were incompatible with high alcohol consumption, a combination which would, in time, be blamed for the events to come.
Over the course of her year or so of captaincy, Armina Rogue began to display increasing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Members of her crew describe her as suffering from sudden mood swings, changes of affect, and fixation on the possibility of a conspiracy against the crown. Numerous unsolved murders in Bully Harbor during this time have been posthumously attributed to Armina Rogue, who, in retrospect, was accused of hunting down beasts she believed were involved in this imaginary conspiracy and torturing them for information. Eventually her symptoms manifested in a full psychotic break, the murder of one of her own crew, and the sabotaging of her ship followed by her flight mid-voyage to the mainland. By the time that the crew of the Hide had repaired the damage and reached the Vulpinsula, the former captain had already vanished without a trace.
During the following year, Armina Rogue remained Bully Harbor's most wanted criminal, with a standing bounty of 100,000 gilders for information leading to her arrest. As many as three dozen murders during this year were attributed to her by the Fogey Police, though her involvement in any of these killings has never been fully substantiated. Eventually she was found in the Harbor washed out of a sewer drainage pipe, dead from several stab wounds and a severe blow to the head. The beast responsible for her death has never been confirmed, though numerous unsubstantiated claims have been made by various glory seekers over the years. But for the events that followed, this may well have been chalked up as a tragic tale of a bright young mind brought low by madness. Alas, it was not to be.
A few months after Armina Rogue's death, rumors began to swirl of a white-furred vixen amidst the recently arrived Ryalor delegation, one who, but for her fur color, was said to be the spitting image of the late minister. This only drew further attention at the vixen's first public appearance, where she was seen openly enamoring herself to the Minister of Commerce Bridger Vorsky, the late Armina Rogue's former lover. Swiftly rumors about the origins of this new vixen, Vaelora Ryalor, began to abound, with many suspecting that she might well be a lost sibling or cousin to the disgraced, deceased minister.
Despite her unconventional first appearance, Vaelora Ryalor quickly established herself as a different kind of Ryalor princess. She adopted three kits born to a servant of the House, raising them as her own kits, and fought in the Winter War, albeit with the House Ryalor delegation seeking to secure food and supplies for the government in exile. She received permission to join the Stoatorian Guard on an emergency basis, and in that role she fought to liberate Bully Harbor from the occupying Coalition forces. Between both Vulpinsulan and Fyadorian forces, she swiftly gained popular appeal for her compassion and dedication to both her family and the Imperium.
The Princess's most vocal detractor, it turned out, would be none other than Anithias Freedom, newly appointed mayor following the death of most of the previous ruling government. He immediately recognized the resemblance between the Fyadorian princess and his late goddaughter, and he caused a brief diplomatic incident in the refugee camps by ordering her arrest. Though he backed down at the time following a Ryalor threat to defect to the Coalition if their princess were apprehended, Anithias remained fixated on the idea that Vaelora Ryalor was somehow the deceased Armina Rogue returned to life, and, when the Harbor was retaken, he moved immediately on that theory. He arrested Vaelora Ryalor on charges of murder and treason, prompting a near riot by Fyadorian troops who had just participated in the Harbor's liberation. During a show trial, evidence was presented suggesting that similarities between Vaelora Ryalor's injuries and those of the late Armina Rogue could indicate they were the same beast. It was only the testimony of Mayor Freedom's own wife, Dr. Julia Freedom, asserting that Vaelora Ryalor was definitively not Armina Rogue that led to his recusal and the dismissal of all charges.
This, nonetheless, would not be the end of the feud. His attempt to wield the legal system against the Ryalors stymied, Mayor Freedom turned to weaponizing popular opinion against them instead. Gathering support from reactionary Vulpinist street gangs and monetary backing from aligned nobles (including, it is rumored, the Vermillion Nobles, a family with deep and longstanding ties to extremist political movements), Anithias mounted a campaign of mass defamation against the Ryalors, covering the streets of Bully Harbor in an anonymously-authored pamphlet labeled "The Ryalor Threat", in which he laid out incendiary charges against House Ryalor and against Vaelora Ryalor in particular. In addition to reiterating his accusation that Vaelora Ryalor was the serial killer Armina Rogue, Mayor Freedom also accused the Fyadorians of being behind a wartime blast that had destroyed most of Bully Harbor, one that had taken the name "the Raulish Flame" due to speculations of it being a new Raulish bomb of some sort. These twin accusations, plus the heat of high summer, turned the Harbor into a tinderbox, just waiting for a match.
Vaelora Ryalor, in what has been panned by historians as a moment of ill-considered retribution, offered a bounty of 10,000 gilders for any information related to the writers and publishers of the defamatory pamphlet. This move was seen by House Ryalor's detractors as tantamount to an admission of guilt, one which prompted the Minister of War Nadia Darkon herself to intervene. The Minister personally visited Vaelora Ryalor at the Fyadorian compound, where she offered a deal to the embattled princess: surrender her title and Fyadorian citizenship, and she and her kits would receive official Imperial citizenship and all the rights and protections that came with it. Reluctantly, Vaelora Ryalor signed the deal, leaving the Minister to protect her family.
During an anti-Ryalor gathering in Mayoral Park that night, an unknown beast secreted a barrel of highly explosive Red Stuff beneath the stands set up for the event. Just before Mayor Freedom took the stand, the barrel detonated, killing thirty-one beasts in an initial spray of flame and shrapnel, injuring dozens more, and deafening everybeast in a half mile radius for several minutes. In the aftermath, Mayor Freedom lit two effigies of Vaelora Ryalor and her cousin Talinn on fire, goading the mob into a frenzy before they marched on the Fyadorian compound in the city. There they were confronted by Minister Darkon, who promptly arrested Mayor Freedom, imposed a curfew, and set the Stoatorian Guard to clearing the street. Still, the damage was done. In the midst of the chaos, an unknown assassin slipped inside the Fyadorian Embassy and assassinated Vaelora Ryalor.
The aftermath of the incident was swift and vehement. House Ryalor immediately withdrew all its members from the Imperium, retreating back to Eastisle, and severed diplomatic ties. Despite being under house arrest, Mayor Freedom continued to quietly whip up anti-Ryalor sentiment through his connections, leading to a spree of anti-Fyadorian acts of vandalism and assault. This would eventually be met with retaliation in turn. During a memorial to the fallen of the Winter War, a brief riot broke out, during which the Mayor's estranged wife, Julia Freedom, was murdered by an unknown assassin, a note planted on her body attributing the killing to an act of revenge by Talinn Ryalor. While this was never fully substantiated, and rumors persist that this note was a false flag for any of a dozen other perpetrators favored by Bully Harbor conspiracy theorists, the popular opinion among historians is to accept this claim of responsibility by Talinn Ryalor as genuine.
In the year following, popular opinion turned sharply against Mayor Freedom. Mismanagement of the economy of the Harbor, while not strictly the Mayor's responsibility, led to anti-incumbent sentiment that gave root to revisionist sentiment arguing that the Ryalors had been unfairly villainized by the Mayor. The popularization of a folk song "The Death of the White Dove" only catalyzed this sentiment further, eventually leading to a mass uprising that stormed the Mayoral Mansion, dragged the Mayor from his confines after his guards were found to have mysteriously vanished, and hung him from a tree in Mayoral Park - ironically, it is said, the same tree from which he once burned Vaelora Ryalor in effigy. Later on, an anonymous author, likely an Eastisler grieving the losses suffered incurred by Anithias, penned the "The Winds of Bouillabaiise", hinting quite strongly that Talinn did indeed order or facilitate the deaths of both Julia and Anithias in justified revenge.
In the decades since the death of Mayor Freedom, history has considered the conflict from many angles. Though many interpretations abound, the popular consensus is that Mayor Freedom, already stressed from a waning marriage to the vixen who had been his childhood sweetheart, fixated on the specter of Armina Rogue, intent upon delivering the justice that, in his view, she had eluded in death. In that regard, the figure of Vaelora Ryalor provided a scapegoat for the sins of Armina Rogue, and the former paid the price for the crimes of the latter. Mayor Freedom is now generally regarded as an ineffective and vindictive mayor, while Vaelora Ryalor has largely been sainted in her native Eastisle (now renamed Westisle), even being anointed as a Sainted Messenger of the Great Kitsune by followers of that faith. While popular opinion in Bully Harbor remains divided, a concerted campaign by House Ryalor to rehabilitate the princess's image has seen a marked upswing in positive sentiment toward the princess, who is swiftly approaching the status of a cultural icon.
Anithias Freedom began his career as a minor officer on The Golden Hide circa 1727, serving under Captain Tanya Rainblade-Ryalor, wife of Falun Ryalor. The admiration of the pair was sufficient that, following Falun Ryalor's assassination in 1728, Anithias and his wife chose to name their firstborn Falun in honor of the captain's husband, a distinction that would prove ironic given that, a mere five years later, Anithias would be the most vocal anti-Ryalor advocate in the Imperium. During this period of service, Anithias was present for a trip to Summerdock in the Fyadorian province of Eastisle, during which a gray-furred Fyadorian orphan vixen of the age of 15 attempted to sneak onboard the Hide to steal food. She was caught by the crew and, in a show of compassion by Captain Rainblade-Ryalor, was permitted to enlist, despite technically being underage. To facilitate the legal workaround, Anithias Freedom and his wife Julia were listed as Armina's godparents and legal guardians, a role which produced much consternation in the dogmatically rule-abiding Anithias.
The next two years aboard the Hide were marked by near-constant conflict between Anithias and Armina. Anithias viewed Armina as an incorrigible troublemaker, one who was only protected by the captain's indulgence. Armina, in turn, viewed Anithias as an overambitious stick-in-the-mud who used blind obedience to even ridiculous rules in place of a moral compass. The conflict between the two escalated from the mundane to the mortal when Anithias discovered proof that Armina had been doing work for the Furotazzi Crime Family. He immediately moved to have her expelled from the navy and referred to the Fogey Police for arrest, a move that was only blocked by the intervention of Captain Rainblade-Ryalor, who nonetheless recognized that the relationship between Anithias and Armina was irrepably damaged and opted to assume guardianship of the youth herself.
Following this incident and Anithias's ascent to first mate, things calmed somewhat, though tensions never fully eased between him and Armina. As disturbing signs of psychosis began to manifest in the youth, it was largely the intervention of Captain Rainblade-Ryalor and Julia Freedom, who served as surgeon's assistant onboard the ship, which kept the youth and her psychoses both in check and out of a court martial. Anithias's eventual ascent to captaincy following the promotion of Tanya Rainblade-Ryalor first to admiral, and then to Minister of War in residence aboard her flagship The Golden Hide, brought new tensions to the relationship, though it was largely Captain Freedom's self-image as a magnanimous and forgiving captain which kept his most punitive instincts in check. Nonetheless, tensions continued to simmer beneath the surface as Anithias openly expressed his disapproval of Armina's choices in clothes, occupation in port, in todds, and in practically every aspect of her life. Armina, in turn, seemed to relish her former godfather's opprobrium, going to great lengths to express her contempt for his opinion.
Eventually, following an incident in which the Hide was temporarily captured by slavers, Captain Freedom was relieved of his command and retired to a position as a judge of the Bully Harbor Court, putting his memory and command of legal codes to good use. Armina Rogue, in the meantime, ascended to the position of first mate and, after proving herself equal to the responsibility, eventually became captain of The Golden Hide itself, later following Tanya Rainblade-Ryalor's example in assuming the dual mantle of captain and minister of war. Unlike her predecessors, however, Armina Rogue struggled with the responsibilities of her role, engaging in frequent alcoholic binges. Later medical reviews of her case would note that the medicines prescribed to treat her psychoses were incompatible with high alcohol consumption, a combination which would, in time, be blamed for the events to come.
Over the course of her year or so of captaincy, Armina Rogue began to display increasing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Members of her crew describe her as suffering from sudden mood swings, changes of affect, and fixation on the possibility of a conspiracy against the crown. Numerous unsolved murders in Bully Harbor during this time have been posthumously attributed to Armina Rogue, who, in retrospect, was accused of hunting down beasts she believed were involved in this imaginary conspiracy and torturing them for information. Eventually her symptoms manifested in a full psychotic break, the murder of one of her own crew, and the sabotaging of her ship followed by her flight mid-voyage to the mainland. By the time that the crew of the Hide had repaired the damage and reached the Vulpinsula, the former captain had already vanished without a trace.
During the following year, Armina Rogue remained Bully Harbor's most wanted criminal, with a standing bounty of 100,000 gilders for information leading to her arrest. As many as three dozen murders during this year were attributed to her by the Fogey Police, though her involvement in any of these killings has never been fully substantiated. Eventually she was found in the Harbor washed out of a sewer drainage pipe, dead from several stab wounds and a severe blow to the head. The beast responsible for her death has never been confirmed, though numerous unsubstantiated claims have been made by various glory seekers over the years. But for the events that followed, this may well have been chalked up as a tragic tale of a bright young mind brought low by madness. Alas, it was not to be.
A few months after Armina Rogue's death, rumors began to swirl of a white-furred vixen amidst the recently arrived Ryalor delegation, one who, but for her fur color, was said to be the spitting image of the late minister. This only drew further attention at the vixen's first public appearance, where she was seen openly enamoring herself to the Minister of Commerce Bridger Vorsky, the late Armina Rogue's former lover. Swiftly rumors about the origins of this new vixen, Vaelora Ryalor, began to abound, with many suspecting that she might well be a lost sibling or cousin to the disgraced, deceased minister.
Despite her unconventional first appearance, Vaelora Ryalor quickly established herself as a different kind of Ryalor princess. She adopted three kits born to a servant of the House, raising them as her own kits, and fought in the Winter War, albeit with the House Ryalor delegation seeking to secure food and supplies for the government in exile. She received permission to join the Stoatorian Guard on an emergency basis, and in that role she fought to liberate Bully Harbor from the occupying Coalition forces. Between both Vulpinsulan and Fyadorian forces, she swiftly gained popular appeal for her compassion and dedication to both her family and the Imperium.
The Princess's most vocal detractor, it turned out, would be none other than Anithias Freedom, newly appointed mayor following the death of most of the previous ruling government. He immediately recognized the resemblance between the Fyadorian princess and his late goddaughter, and he caused a brief diplomatic incident in the refugee camps by ordering her arrest. Though he backed down at the time following a Ryalor threat to defect to the Coalition if their princess were apprehended, Anithias remained fixated on the idea that Vaelora Ryalor was somehow the deceased Armina Rogue returned to life, and, when the Harbor was retaken, he moved immediately on that theory. He arrested Vaelora Ryalor on charges of murder and treason, prompting a near riot by Fyadorian troops who had just participated in the Harbor's liberation. During a show trial, evidence was presented suggesting that similarities between Vaelora Ryalor's injuries and those of the late Armina Rogue could indicate they were the same beast. It was only the testimony of Mayor Freedom's own wife, Dr. Julia Freedom, asserting that Vaelora Ryalor was definitively not Armina Rogue that led to his recusal and the dismissal of all charges.
This, nonetheless, would not be the end of the feud. His attempt to wield the legal system against the Ryalors stymied, Mayor Freedom turned to weaponizing popular opinion against them instead. Gathering support from reactionary Vulpinist street gangs and monetary backing from aligned nobles (including, it is rumored, the Vermillion Nobles, a family with deep and longstanding ties to extremist political movements), Anithias mounted a campaign of mass defamation against the Ryalors, covering the streets of Bully Harbor in an anonymously-authored pamphlet labeled "The Ryalor Threat", in which he laid out incendiary charges against House Ryalor and against Vaelora Ryalor in particular. In addition to reiterating his accusation that Vaelora Ryalor was the serial killer Armina Rogue, Mayor Freedom also accused the Fyadorians of being behind a wartime blast that had destroyed most of Bully Harbor, one that had taken the name "the Raulish Flame" due to speculations of it being a new Raulish bomb of some sort. These twin accusations, plus the heat of high summer, turned the Harbor into a tinderbox, just waiting for a match.
Vaelora Ryalor, in what has been panned by historians as a moment of ill-considered retribution, offered a bounty of 10,000 gilders for any information related to the writers and publishers of the defamatory pamphlet. This move was seen by House Ryalor's detractors as tantamount to an admission of guilt, one which prompted the Minister of War Nadia Darkon herself to intervene. The Minister personally visited Vaelora Ryalor at the Fyadorian compound, where she offered a deal to the embattled princess: surrender her title and Fyadorian citizenship, and she and her kits would receive official Imperial citizenship and all the rights and protections that came with it. Reluctantly, Vaelora Ryalor signed the deal, leaving the Minister to protect her family.
During an anti-Ryalor gathering in Mayoral Park that night, an unknown beast secreted a barrel of highly explosive Red Stuff beneath the stands set up for the event. Just before Mayor Freedom took the stand, the barrel detonated, killing thirty-one beasts in an initial spray of flame and shrapnel, injuring dozens more, and deafening everybeast in a half mile radius for several minutes. In the aftermath, Mayor Freedom lit two effigies of Vaelora Ryalor and her cousin Talinn on fire, goading the mob into a frenzy before they marched on the Fyadorian compound in the city. There they were confronted by Minister Darkon, who promptly arrested Mayor Freedom, imposed a curfew, and set the Stoatorian Guard to clearing the street. Still, the damage was done. In the midst of the chaos, an unknown assassin slipped inside the Fyadorian Embassy and assassinated Vaelora Ryalor.
The aftermath of the incident was swift and vehement. House Ryalor immediately withdrew all its members from the Imperium, retreating back to Eastisle, and severed diplomatic ties. Despite being under house arrest, Mayor Freedom continued to quietly whip up anti-Ryalor sentiment through his connections, leading to a spree of anti-Fyadorian acts of vandalism and assault. This would eventually be met with retaliation in turn. During a memorial to the fallen of the Winter War, a brief riot broke out, during which the Mayor's estranged wife, Julia Freedom, was murdered by an unknown assassin, a note planted on her body attributing the killing to an act of revenge by Talinn Ryalor. While this was never fully substantiated, and rumors persist that this note was a false flag for any of a dozen other perpetrators favored by Bully Harbor conspiracy theorists, the popular opinion among historians is to accept this claim of responsibility by Talinn Ryalor as genuine.
In the year following, popular opinion turned sharply against Mayor Freedom. Mismanagement of the economy of the Harbor, while not strictly the Mayor's responsibility, led to anti-incumbent sentiment that gave root to revisionist sentiment arguing that the Ryalors had been unfairly villainized by the Mayor. The popularization of a folk song "The Death of the White Dove" only catalyzed this sentiment further, eventually leading to a mass uprising that stormed the Mayoral Mansion, dragged the Mayor from his confines after his guards were found to have mysteriously vanished, and hung him from a tree in Mayoral Park - ironically, it is said, the same tree from which he once burned Vaelora Ryalor in effigy. Later on, an anonymous author, likely an Eastisler grieving the losses suffered incurred by Anithias, penned the "The Winds of Bouillabaiise", hinting quite strongly that Talinn did indeed order or facilitate the deaths of both Julia and Anithias in justified revenge.
In the decades since the death of Mayor Freedom, history has considered the conflict from many angles. Though many interpretations abound, the popular consensus is that Mayor Freedom, already stressed from a waning marriage to the vixen who had been his childhood sweetheart, fixated on the specter of Armina Rogue, intent upon delivering the justice that, in his view, she had eluded in death. In that regard, the figure of Vaelora Ryalor provided a scapegoat for the sins of Armina Rogue, and the former paid the price for the crimes of the latter. Mayor Freedom is now generally regarded as an ineffective and vindictive mayor, while Vaelora Ryalor has largely been sainted in her native Eastisle (now renamed Westisle), even being anointed as a Sainted Messenger of the Great Kitsune by followers of that faith. While popular opinion in Bully Harbor remains divided, a concerted campaign by House Ryalor to rehabilitate the princess's image has seen a marked upswing in positive sentiment toward the princess, who is swiftly approaching the status of a cultural icon.
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