The Story of Otto the Peaceful

[Derthalen]

The Younger Uddomar

This is the tale of Otto the Peaceful, or as he was known at the time, Uddomar. The God Emperor who crushed the skulls of his enemies, and created great bonds of kinship and friendship with those that were willing to hear him. Hear these words and bask in his light, for without Him our world and people would have sunk into the waves of our enemies. Long before he had unified our peoples and created our great empire he was a young princeling, full of wanderlust and thirst for conquest.

'Uddomar! Stay near!' The sound of swords and the crash of axes rang out through the valley. Uddomar's raiders continued to pile into the ambushed host, forming an encirclement and pushing the defenders into the valley's river. The young princeling the ever growing glory hound had insisted on leading the centre, for where else would one prove their mettle? His eagerness had placed him in imminent danger though. Despite the warnings of his more experienced comrades, he had urged his men to keep on pushing, and he had found himself in an unstable salient which could collapse at any moment. Seeing the danger, his second in command, a Goth named Wendel, had ordered the men from the reserves into the centre to replace those that had fallen due to this folly. With the influx of fresh warriors, the centre line began to stabilise again and the men pushed forward as a uniform force. Within three hours the last of the ambushed host lay dead on the ground, or had drowned trying to escape across the river. No slaves were to be taken today, as even those that had laid down their arms had been killed afterwards; the raiding host could not afford to take prisoners with them. 

'Bring the bodies into the woods, we can not afford for anyone to notice what has happened here.' Despite the tiredness of the warriors, they all had to help collect the fallen and hide them out of sight. It was crucial that no one should discover that they had won a battle here. 'My lord, Hrothkar sends his praise, and wishes for me to inform you of a meeting that is to take place and of his wishes that you attend.' The Princeling was ecstatic; despite being told months ago that he would have his father's favoured retainer with him, he still could not get over the fact that his idol was calling for him to join in a meeting after battle. The Princeling had spent many a winter's night gathered with his siblings hearing tales of Hrothkar's exploits, and his bravery in leading the defence of the Kingdom thirteen years ago when the Plattengotts had tried to claim our rich mines while the King and his army were busy elsewhere fighting in a far-off war. The man was now quite venerable, being aged around forty-three years. 'I will go to him immediately then, thank you for bringing me this news.' The Uddomar barked a few orders to his men and began running off to the forest camp to join the meeting. When he got there, the mood was rather sombre though. His second in command and Blood Brother, Wendel was nervously sitting at one end of a table looking like he had seen a fish jump out of water and talk to him, while Hrothkar looked absolutely furious. You could practically see his beard curling up in anger as the Princeling entered the tent. 'What were you thinking by pushing that far you cretin! Our encirclement was nearly broken thanks to your stupidity, and we lost over thirty men in the centre alone because of it!' Taken aback, Uddomar started stammering excuses about taking the initiative and pushing the advantage before realising that he was the leader and starting to shout back. He was cowed nearly in an instant. 'I do not want to hear it milksop! Of the ninety men who followed you, only forty-eight are still in fighting condition. Ten men are viciously injured, and the rest are dead. That is not counting the men from the reserve Wendel here had to send for you.' The Prince sat down quietly and did not try to defend his actions further; with that the meeting began in earnest. 'All right then, now that you have hopefully learnt your lesson we can start. Despite losing fifty-three men, we still have three-hundred and seven men left. That should be enough for our purposes, and then some.' Wendel followed it up with good news 'The men we fought here appear to have been mostly peasant levies, but a good portion were from the garrison of the castle we are after. Your plan of harassing the local villages has worked. Judging by how many we fought here, the castle should have some fifty or so men left defending.' 'I would advise that we march immediately for the castle once we are done looting and hiding the dead. If we move quickly, we will be able to attack it tomorrow night and take it before news of our location spreads!'

After two hours of debate, a plan was decided upon. They were going to march on the castle right away while having a thirty-man warband break off and harass villages. Reports of the warband's continued attacks and harassment would filter back to the castle within a day and would give the defenders the false idea of their enemies being far off, and with luck would draw more of them out to go get request help.

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OOC: Sorry for the short post, but I lost most of what I was writing and decided to just do this.

[Derthalen]

The garrison was tired. Villagers from all over the place had come begging for help against raiders, and the Amtmann had already left with most of the men to try and fight this encroaching force. Now there were reports of another band attacking further north with impunity, and they simply did not have the men to spare. Instead they were having to maintain a full time watch of the pass to keep anymore raiders from getting through. It was nearing midnight when the alarm was raised. One of the houses in the small village had caught alight and the fire had spread to one of the fields. The castle's guard started rushing out with buckets of water and dirt to keep the rest of the fields and houses from catching fire. Thankfully it was but a small one, so it would not hurt the harvest much. Thirty-two of the men worked tirelessly to get the blaze under control, and managed to save the field. Feeling quite proud of themselves, they were completely dumbfounded when they saw some of them with arrows sticking out of their chests and shoulders. While they had been tiring themselves out with the fire, an army had snuck through the fields; they were under attack! 

Before the gates could be closed, Uddomar charged his men through the first gate and began their attack. They were met bravely by fifteen men carrying pikes and who managed to form a cohesive line at the second gate. Despite the overwhelming numbers advantage that the attackers had, they could not simply push through a bottleneck when they did not have the reach to get at the defenders. Nor could they pepper them with arrows, as all the archers with with Wendel slaughtering those that had gone outside. Instead the attackers formed a phalanx with their shields and made to advance on the pikemen while those behind them lobbed stones and the occasional francisca. The pikes jabbed at the legs of the advancing men trying to provoke one of them to break formation and create an opening. Each jab came with risk though, as the second rank would try to grab the weapon and pull the wielder towards their axes. The two lines squared off with three yards between. The pikemen held fast as their allies organised behind them. They continued to stand up to being pelted with stones as even a slight opening would be all it would take for the attackers to rush them. Uddomar looked upon this and grew frustrated. In his irritation, he ordered the whole of the second line to throw their axes at once to try and break the defenders. The axes felled five of the pikemen, and made the rest flinch. This was all that was needed, as the first line crashed into them and hacked them to pieces in short order. While this did work, it had taken too long. The third gate had been shut by those further in, and anyone who went onto the bridge was killed by archers.

Meanwhile, the slaughter in the village continued without a hitch. Wendel's archers continued to attack the thirty men who had come out to stop the fire. Most of them had left their weapons and shields behind, and posed little to no threat, but they attempted a charge anyway. Some of the villagers seeing this, rushed out of their homes carry poles and tools as weapons to try and help the soldiers. Outnumbering them three to one, Wendel simply had his men come out of the field and stand their ground.The villagers and desperate soldiers were met by the bite of steel and iron weapons and shattered once they realised how outnumbered they were. The defenders started to run, and so were chased down. Those that surrendered were herded into a large storehouse, and were kept there to be sold off as slaves later. The rest were shown no mercy. None escaped.

[Derthalen]

The northern pass had been secured. With the fall of the castle guarding it, the road into Östragrel was open for the army of Derthalen now; thirty-three years before, the Eastern Goths had invaded the Kingdom of Derthalen and had taken most of the Kingdom's farmland and access to the Got-See in the east. They had even dared to march into the mountains and try to take the silver mines that had formed the basis of power for Derthalen. Thankfully, they had never experienced winter in the mountains before. Their armies were allowed to march unopposed through the passes and deep into the territory of the Derthaler, the castles that stood in their way had been stripped of supplies and their defenders long gone. It was during the winter solstice that the counterattack finally came. The Goths were only four leagues from Jomsberg (what would become Heinrichstadt), and were preparing to lay siege to the city. Their massive army of fifteen-thousand had slowly made their way through the valleys stripping them of food in order to deal this final blow and take the capital of the mountain men. The day they were to march on the city, disaster struck them. Teams of men had climbed the mountains and played their horns and drums as loudly as they could, bringing down white death upon the invaders. Avalanches struck the Gothic foemen trapping them where they were. They could not advance, nor could they retreat. Of the fifteen-thousand, only three-thousand made it out of this disaster. They were without supplies and with only a few of their leaders. In their flight from the mountains, they were harassed ceaselessly by the Alemanns whom they had sought to subjugate. They brought back with them stories of powerful magics being  wrought by the folk of the mountains, and of how in the dark of the night, snow-wraiths would appear in their camps to take them never to be seen or heard from again.

Despite this, the war did not end. The mountain men were few in numbers and without much food to get them by, and with enemies rousing in the flatlands as well. Seeing the failure of his vassals, the King of Östragrel sent forth his own army to seize the passes and make sure that their work was not undone. Over the next five years, skirmishes and battles saw them gain a foothold in the mountains, but never getting the silver that they so wanted. An unsteady peace was created, as neither kingdom could sustain the war any longer without their other neighbours taking notice and invading. Although there were minor raids and skirmishes, between the nobles living along the border for the next twenty years, Östragrel turned its eyes towards the south and into Rukonen. They trusted in their sense of superiority and waged war to their south while leaving their western frontier largely unguarded. All that was left were a few minor lords and their levies to protect them from incursions from the mountains. It was this opportunity that started us off on this path to unification. The young Prince Uddomar was tasked by his father to set forth with some men to test the strength of the Gothic presence and clear the way for the army to advance undetected. Having succeeded in his mission, an army of six-thousand men were now to follow his raiders and burn the countryside to bring about a famine. Even while Östragrel was busy fighting Rukonen, the chances for a victory were slim. Their only hope for the future was cripple the enemy's ability to feed their armies so that they would not face a renewed campaign against them in the coming years.

For the first two months of their campaign they had moved relatively unopposed. While the lords and stewards of the fiefdoms they moved through organised defences, they could not stand up to the sheer numbers of the Derthaler forces. After coming out of the mountains, they had swept through countryside like a plague locusts. The summer of that year was an especially hot one, with the crops sowed in the spring growing strong already. As such, it was truly devastating for the peasants in western Östragrel to see what was promising to be a great bumper harvest turned to ashes before their very eyes while many of their sons and fathers were gone to the south to war. The dispossessed were driven from their villages and to the towns, creating great strains on the food reserves and farmland that the marauding army had left untouched so that they could move on to softer targets. While all this transpired though, riders had gone to the king's host in the south to call for aid; while it was slow, it was surely coming and the first of the Eastern Gothic army would be back to challenge the raiders soon.

Edited November 4, 2018 by Derthalen (see edit history)