Bodunn Star System

Bodunn Star System

Major Holdings – General Information

History

Bodunn Star System
as set down for Beorn “The Stalwart” Gisking Bearborn by Witch Lord Bertwin Gisking Bearspear, who has walked those halls more than once and remembers too much

The first Galan settlers of the Drucos Nebula cast anchor at Bodunn when the stars were quieter and the worlds had not yet learned the shame and pride of crowns. From the first, the system’s bones were sound, Bodunn itself a stout world with deep harbors for ships and for faith, Hurst a dutiful moon, and so when the Feyan Conquest rolled through Drala, the Dominion chose Bodunn for the work of war. Hearthbound folk were shipped in to feed the garrisons and keep the furnaces lit. Belasknap, the great starhold, rose like a knuckled fist at the system’s throat, and at the place where an elder Galan keep had withered, the Feyans planted a new fortress whose name would come to weigh on every tongue, Coraun.

They raised Coraun in 25,366 AA, two years after the first great garrison took Bodunn. By 25,400 AA the a Great‑Legion mustered on the world, and in 25,404 AA the system became the hammer‑head of a Feyan Star Dominion invasion into the Combrogi Star Cluster. Coraun was widened in 25,408 AA, so that not only legions but families and priesthoods could live within its plates. The invasion’s next phase was loosed in 25,416 AA, and by 25,422 AA the Combrogi campaign was finished, on ledgers, if not in hearts. The Feyans thinned their banners thereafter but kept Bodunn as a watchpost, one bronze eye fixed on Combrogi space, the other turned inward to keep Galan fealty from curdling.

When the Feyan Withdrawal came, the Dominion’s captive realms shattered into a thousand clever shards. Bodunn fell into the hands of several Feyan‑Galan houses, who used the system as a springboard for their own little empires. That state of affairs endured long enough for those houses to believe it would last forever, then King Guthred the Conqueror of Gewiss swept in with the old, clean answer of battle.

It was 27,354 AA, and the Battle of Dyrha was fought in the Bodunn System. Guthred and Prince Aldhelm the Steadfast brought down four crowns at once, the kings of Scir, Iniswitrin, Bodunn, and Morigena. Three died among the stars, though the Morigena king fled. In the tally’s wake the Scir, Iniswitrin, Bodunn, and Morigena Systems bent to Gewiss.

Gewiss’ grasp, like all grasps, loosened. Gewiss lost Bodunn and Morigena but continued to expand. Guthred and Freya the Wergh-Slayer fought the Battle of Beretun 27,368 AA within the Skneh Star System against a swollen Feyan‑Galan host. They won the field, but Freya fell, and what Gewiss held after that victory was measured in smaller, sharper pieces. Out of that flux rose the Star Kingdom of Hywych, with the Jordayne Smokeborn ruling from Hywych and Bodunn. These Jordayne kings swore loyalty to Gewiss for a short time, oaths said before witnesses and broken before scars had time to cool.

Bodunn, like the Hywych star system bent the knee to King Cwenhild the Warlord of the Old Ways.

Bodunn remained a restless anvil. Even before Cwenhild’s triumph, the Battle of Coraun had proved the system’s starholds were more than ceremonial. King Wulfgar the Great of Umber marched with King Cwenhild of Angul against King Gunnhild the Grey Wyvern and King Gunnfrith the Warrior of Gewiss, and beat them at Coraun’s throat. The treaty that followed gave Cwenhild Morigena, and if the quills of Gewiss chroniclers insist she merely “received” what was already her due, the metal scars on Coraun’s plates say otherwise.

Faith followed steel. Under‑King Sigelm of Hywych founded the Great Feyan Temple of the Harvest Shield on Bodunn in 27,558 AA, and the Pontiff of Bodunn was created in 27,561 AA. Ecga Umbra Strongborn died in that same year, his barrow lies on Medeswael in the Grauth System, in the Great Temple of the Wanderer’s Promise, Bodunn’s priests often mention him in litanies as if distance could be tricked by devotion. In 27,566 AA King Wulfrun the Resolute of Angul granted Sigelm three hundred holdsteads in the Bodunn System, and the same gift to Under‑King Hjormund of Hywych. Hjormund founded the Sunlit Temple of Prophecy on Haum in 27,578 AA, that same year Under‑King Leofheah granted twenty‑one holdsteads to a Temple Pontiff on Pell station in Hywych. The faith binds these systems together in ways war never quite manages. In 27,658 AA, Sigelm died and was entombed in the Great Temple of the Nurturing Hand on Bodunn, some say the year is wrong, I say grief is often bad at numbers, and the Jordayne crown passed to Brithreth, with Leofheah beside her.

When Uhtred the Great of Angul turned his gaze toward the Combrogi frontier, he thought in lines, not dots. In 27,756 AA he began the long palisade of Uhtred’s Boundary, slinging outposts and sensors across the void from Bodunn to Wreoca, brushing past Kerweg and Medubrix. If Bardas’s Shield is a mountain range, Uhtred’s Boundary is a forest of old stumps, less high, more many. And yes, many of those outposts were unmanned more often than not, yes, patrols slept where they ought to have watched, but a line, even an imperfect one, has a way of teaching enemies to count.

Then came the Great Savage Crusade, the Skanes in a dozen banners, and worse than banners, hunger. Angul broke in 30,148 AA. King Wiglaf the Exiled fled for Fey in the Talus Nebula with his wife Frida Umbra Wyvernborn. The Skane lords put a puppet on Angul’s throne, Wulfhere the Foolish King’s Thane, and called that order. They miscounted Bodunn. System‑lord Wulfrun the Lord of Angul stayed and resisted, and in 30,157 AA she gathered with King Osgar the Great of Gewiss, Viggo Medgar Dreadborn, Sigebehrt Undolfen Cliffborn, and others at the Battle of Leohtmona which took place over the moon of Leohtmona in the Scir System. They broke Oughtred the Old’s fleets there, over three thousand Skane star‑fleets destroyed, and Ermingard Asher Axewolf, Ermingard the Loyal, took System‑lord Alfhildr Asher Axewolf of Scir alive for King Osgar the Great to judge. Osgar and his captains pursued and besieged Oughtred afterward, and when the Peace of Osgar & Oughtred was inked, Wulfrun of Bodunn was among the first outside the Durot Sector to swear fealty to the Gewiss crown. Call it prudence, call it duty, either way, it saved ships.

The blood does not cool at once. In 30,162 AA, Wulfrun led an invasion of the Combrogi. The children of High King Arwyn the Great, King Terrell Kintosh Cragmane, System‑lord Gwenith Kintosh Cragmane of Ceredig, King Uther Kintosh Cragmane of Teyrnllwg, and Jenevieve the Lame, defeated her. Jenevieve earned her epithet in those fights, wounded hard and made harder by it. Two years later, in 30,164 AA, Wulfrun wed Bjorn the Lord of Angul, Osgar’s son, steel married to steel. Bjorn restored the Harvest Shield in 30,180 AA, Wulfrun and Bjorn granted further holdsteads to the faith in Hywych in 30,206 AA, their son Hallig signed those charters as witness and learned how ink can be a quieter form of war. That same year, they met with High King Wulfrun the Elder of the Dralan Star Kingdoms, and if you think three Wulfruns in one room did not strain the air, you have never sat through a council of kin.

In 30,218 AA, when Skane raids quickened again, the relics and remains of King Oslac the Storm Blade were moved from Linna’s Great Temple of Barakel’s Light to Bodunn’s Harvest Shield, old bones in a newer reliquary, safer by our reckoning. The next five years ran out in the old way, blood and ink. Wulfrun took wounds at Teottan and died in 30,223 AA, entombed in the Harvest Shield, Bjorn was elected Sector‑lord of Vellaun and Dodunn thereafter, Hallig taking Bodunn as his system. In 30,230 AA, Hallig and the Magon Ghostborn of Bataritus and Kerweg beat a Skane raid, one of the warlords died for it. In that same season High King Wulfrun the Elder built a second starhold at Caemb ,Aemethyll, while Bjorn raised Rumcofan in Wreoca and began rebuilding Genuin. Bjorn died in 30,236 AA and was laid beside her husband Wulfrun. Hallig became Sector‑lord, then stepped aside in 30,237 AA for his aunt the High King, he kept Belasknap and Bodunn, lost Varan. Whispers speak of plots to reclaim Angul, or of a king’s need to tighten loyalties across the old Angul worlds. I find that both whispers can be true at once.

All the while, Coraun remained Bodunn’s other heart. The fortress has a Feyan World Shield, an old skin the world can pull tight when star‑fire burns too hot. The Feyan Star Dominion first built Coraun as a front line against the Galan during the Conquest, greatly expanded it forty years later, and used it as a staging ground for Combrogi invasions, maintaining a presence until the Combrogi would feel an eye on the back of their necks. In later centuries Coraun served as a staging point for the defense and reconquest of Drala against the Skanes of the Crusade, and a Mint and Hoard was founded there before the Star Commonwealth was sworn, then kept in operation throughout. A scribe once told me Coraun “at its height” held 10,000,000,000 Billion souls. I told him his zeroes outnumbered his wits, still, the point stands, Coraun has held multitudes.

Avalon, sometimes treated as a world apart, sometimes listed under Bodunn by those who prefer their ledgers neat, grew into a major trading port after the Glessum Furse came to Drala, and also hosts a Star Commonwealth Mint and Hoard of its own. A Feyan Temple rose on Avalon in 29,006 AA, King Edwyn the Magnificent died there in 30,292 AA, stabbed by an outlaw in a royal holdstead brawl, which is a vulgar way for a king to end and therefore believable. Avalon is also one of the Star Commonwealth’s Thrall Markets, and if you ask three priests and two traders whether that defiles the sanctity of nearby temples, you will get six answers.

Belasknap still bristles with folk and guns, nearly a million souls in garrison and service, while the Dyrha Shipyards turn out hull after hungry hull with half a million hands to feed the slips. Bodunn counts ~750 million folk on the world, Hurst, six million. Those are the numbers the clerks give you. The numbers the system gives you are the thickness of its walls and the length of the repair queues.

Tragedy, too, marks the ledgers. King Osmund the Glorious died on Bodunn in 30,278 AA, but was entombed at Malmes in Scir and not among the Wyvernborn at Belgar with his mother, High King Wulfrun the Elder, King Oswald the Noble Counsel, and others, a political choice told as a pious one, which is the neatest sort of lie. Crown Prince Edwyn the Magnificent took the Star Commonwealth next. In 30,288 AA he expelled Kings Sweyn Sandal and Ansgar Umbra Ravenreach from Brigh, with the help of Brigh’s Sector Pontiff and Hallig of Bodunn. The Ravenreach submitted, Ansgar kept his titles as Highlord of Halhgefeaxe and of the Moon of Sheaf in Parig, but Sweyn withdrew to Athcliath in the Tewteh Nebula. Four years later, Edwyn died, murdered on Bodunn, and Ekkebert the Weak‑In‑The‑Feet took the crown in 30,292 AA. Hallig received minor holdsteads in 30,296 AA, for service and for keeping still when he might have moved.

Do not fancy the raiders were finished. In 30,395 AA, King Harwyn Forkbeard of Skold struck Bodunn with a gathered pack. Warlord Sigfast Ulric Geat Moonborn, Sector‑lord Ecgwynn Umbra Oathborn the Fast of Skatha, Egil Umbra Runeborn the Iron Rune, Meredith Umbra Runeborn, Edith Umbra Ravensight the Raventail, and Prince Lathgertha Umbra Ravensight of Skold, King Arthfael and Ardghal of Kynancear, Tun‑lord Braden of Dunketh and Shieldbearer Boudia of Dunketh, and many more besides. They raided Bodunn, Morigena, Scir, and other systems. Some loot was taken, more blood was spent. Coraun’s shield held.

Through all of this, Bodunn kept trade. Avalon’s Thrall Market stands in bad company with other such markets across the Star Commonwealth, and there are years when the coin is thicker than the sermons. Bodunn’s Mint and Hoard, Coraun’s on one ledger, Avalon’s on another, keeps the Star Commonwealth coin trusted, which is better than keeping it loved. And the faith, Harvest Shield and Sunlit Prophecy, still draws pilgrims whose grandparents were born under different flags than their grandchildren will be buried beneath.

If you insist on a measure, Bodunn is a fortress‑system that survived being a forward base, a conquered crown, a sub‑kingdom, a march‑lord’s bastion, a crusade’s anvil, and a Commonwealth hub. Its story is told in starholds, Belasknap, Coraun, in temples, Harvest Shield, Nurturing Hand, Sunlit Prophecy, and in names that return like comets, Wulfrun the Resolute, Wulfrun the Elder, Wulfrun the Confessor, Bjorn, Hallig, Guthred, Cwenhild, Osgar, Edwyn. Some of those names were writ in glory, some in ink, some in ash. All of them, in the end, are written on Bodunn.

And if a scribe tells you that Coraun once held ten‑thousand million billion souls, smile and let him have his boast. I have felt that fortress breathe under bombardment, and for a moment I, too, believed it housed everyone I had ever known.