Hreotha Star System

Hreotha Star System

Major Holdings – General Information

History

The Hreotha Star System

As Recorded by Witch Lord Bertwin Gisking Bearspear, Keeper of the Old Memory

 

Hreotha was ever among the royal systems of the Star Kingdom of Angul, a place where kings were crowned in glory and laid to rest in solemnity. Here, the crypts of House Umbra Strongborn run deep beneath the earth, each chamber heavy with the scent of centuries-old incense and the weight of ancient oaths. Many of Angul’s kings sleep there still, and one prince, murdered by the very guardian sworn to protect him, lies enshrined as a Feyan Hero.

 

It was one of the first havens claimed when the people of the Ancient Star Kingdom of Angul fled the Glessum Star Cluster for the Drucos Nebula, and its soil has ever been tied to the fate of Clan Umbra Strong. Yet power changes hands even among kin. After the Skane conquest during the Great Savage Crusade, the system was reclaimed by a Wyvernborn king and, in a stroke that history remembers with both praise and bitterness, granted not to Strongborn, but to House Asher Axedawn.

 

In its long life, Hreotha has been as much a seat of faith as of kingship. I recall well the grant made by King Valdis the Betrayed in 27,511 AA, when she bestowed holdsteads and titles upon the Feyan Faith here. The following year, the Pontiff of the Vellaun Star Sector was established with its seat upon the Starhold of Lyccid, a fortress within the system that would become as sacred to the faithful as it was strategic to the crown.

 

Through the later decades of that century, Hreotha’s temples multiplied. Pontiffs Mildgrim Umbra Stormborn, the Herald and Ostflaed Umbra Stormborn ruled from Lyccid, their deaths marked by elaborate entombments that turned their resting places into shrines for pilgrims from across the nebula. A royal consort saw their children entombed upon the barren world of Staith, where great Feyan temples were raised to guard their barrows. Kings Baldwin the Bold and Galswinth the Cursed were both laid to rest within Lyccid, and under King Uhtred the Great, the Starhold became the formal seat of the Vellaun Sector Pontiff. To walk Lyccid’s groves, ancient, twisted grey-wood trees older than the star kingdom itself, is to walk where the breath of saints and kings still lingers.

 

But faith has never been shield enough against the ambitions of conquerors. When the Great Savage Crusade swept into southern Angul, King Ragnar the Raven Blade and warlords like Oughtred the Old, Arthur Vana Starborn, Sigtryggr the Blade, and others took Hreotha with brutal swiftness. I have seen the ledgers from that campaign, and they read like the tally of a butcher. Holdstead after holdstead seized, tribute exacted, and the crown forced into humiliating bargains. Ragnar’s fleets made Hreotha their base, striking at Angul’s other worlds before being bought off, only to return the following year in full force.

 

The Battle of Hreotha in 30,148 AA was the death knell of the Star Kingdom of Angul. King Wiglaf the Exiled was broken, his fleets shattered, and he fled beyond the Drucos Nebula. From that moment, Angul existed only in memory and in the bloodlines of exiles.

 

In the centuries that followed, Hreotha became a prize in the politics of the Star Commonwealth of Drala. King Osmund the Glorious granted its greatholds to Gutflaed the Black. Later, King Oswald the Ill-Advised bestowed an asteroid hold upon Mechthild the She-Wolf of Angul, whose fierce will was matched only by her devotion to the Faith. On the Asteroid of Heantune, Mechthild founded the Crowned Temple of Rakul, a Feyan Temple that became the spiritual heart of her holdings. Ten more holdsteads she granted to the temple, securing its place as both a beacon to pilgrims and a bulwark of her own power.

 

Thus has Hreotha’s story wound itself through the ages — a braid of kingship, faith, betrayal, and conquest. Its vaults hold the bones of monarchs, its temples the prayers of the faithful, and its starholds the banners of whichever hand last seized them. I have stood within Lyccid’s high halls and heard the wind in its grey-wood groves, and I tell you this: so long as those trees stand, the memory of Angul will never wholly fade.