The Quaznian Empire was already an ancient order when the Cassads made first contact during the latter’s expansionist sweep across the galaxy. Long in decline, the Quaznians experienced a period of resurgence under the rule of Emperor Pjrul. During his more than 500 year reign, Pjrul revitalized the military, crushed peripheral tendencies in his quest to increase the power of the throne, and sent the dreaded Gray Fleets to add new worlds to his domain.

The Quaznians’ Galactic Northwest thrust was met by an equally dynamic Cassad push from the opposite direction and both sides came to blows. The Cassads suffered heavy initial losses in the ensuing war. The capitol ships of the Gray Fleet with their trans-phase batteries proved superior to any vessels the Cassads could bring to bear. It was only when the Cassads were able to outfit their ships with tran-phase weapons supplied to them by traitorous Quaznians that they managed to fight the empire to a stand still.

Both sides eventually agreed to a cease fire that would last until the turbulent period following the death of Pjrul.

The Time of Chaos. That was the name given to the orgy of violence that consumed the empire. Pjrul’s strong leadership had merely fastened the lid on the bubbling unrest wracking the Quaznian domain. With his death, the lid was thrown open and all the attendant instability of a declining empire reemerged with a vengeance. Factions of all political and religious stripes fought for control of the empire. Some factions struggled to wrest the Imperial throne away from Pjrul’s rightful heirs. Others  sought to extinguish Imperial rule altogether and replace it with radically different forms of governance.  Thus were formed three overarching factions: the Imperialists, led by Pjrul’s heirs, the Anti-Imperialists, led by a council called the Second Order, and the Revisionists. The Second Order comprised a motley assortment of organizations that agreed to put aside their differences and unite in a quest to end the institution of Imperial rule. The Revisionists were warlords who had aspirations of sitting on the Imperial throne. Eliminating Imperial rule was definitely not in their interests.

Civil war ravaged the empire for the next one hundred years. The Imperialists, after a number of setbacks, gradually gained the upper hand. Imperialist forces retook planets seized by Second Order and Revisionist foes. The one overriding element aiding the imperialist’s successful campaigns was unity. Ptrul’s heirs, Utorik, Limja, and Wrodat presented a united front to their enemies while the Second Order and the Revisionists were plagued by lack of cohesion. The Second Order was the first to fall to the Imperialist onslaught. Factions within the Second Order put aside all pretense of cooperation as internecine warfare disrupted its ranks. The Imperialists capitalized on the Secord Order’s discord to crush its constituent parts.

The Revisionist warlords were also prone to infighting and the Imperialist successfully exploited those divisions. But unlike the Second Order, whose members were ruthlessly exterminated by Imperialists, most Revisionist warlords were co-opted after being militarily defeated. Surviving warlords were given the option of swearing allegiance to one of the three Imperial heirs or face execution. Not a single warlord chose the latter option.     

Victory for the Imperialists was decisive.  Having dealt with their enemies, Pjrul’s heirs, once united now stared at each other across a yawning, simmering divide of jealousy and ambition. Only one could ascend the Quaznian throne. Only one had the right to adopt the title of Emperor. But which one?

Each heir thought himself to be the rightful successor. As the heirs rallied their respective forces in preparation for a resumption of more bloodshed, the Vaunted Prelates intervened. The Prelates, a clerical order, were the keepers of Tradition, advocates for the cultural values and practices that endemic war, strife, corruption and indifference had eroded.

Appalled by the prospect of the empire being plunged into a new war that could claim billions more lives, the Prelates invoked the Rite of the Blade. It should be noted that the Vaunted Prelates possessed no authority other than moral. Their role in the empire was purely ceremonial. However, as word of the Rite spread throughout the domain, the heirs’ respective supporters clamored for the Rite to be enacted. The heirs, in the name of tradition, but more to appease their supporters, acceded to the Prelates’ wishes.

The Rite of the Blade, essentially, was a means of resolving succession disputes. But since the Quaznian Empire had experienced a long string of bloodless transitions to the throne, the Rite had not been performed in 6,000 years. This is what the Rite of the Blade entailed:

The forces of the opposing heirs would assemble on a planet. Each force would number no more than one hundred thousand soldiers. The soldiers were to be armed with edged weapons only. No powered weapons. Projectile weapons were to be muscle powered only. Armor was to be similarly unpowered and unaugmented by energy based protective fields. No powered vehicles of any kind were allowed which effectively eliminated or drastically reduced the significance of an aerial aspect to this war. To guarantee that the participants complied with the Rite’s strict low tech requirements, platforms, emitting electromagnetic based damping fields were deployed above the planet.

Once the armies were assembled and the damping field activated, the Rite would begin. The rules were simple: Opposing sides fought to the death. No quarter was given. None taken. There was no time limit to the contest. Total victory for an army ended the Rite. The penalty for defeat was extermination.

Unknown to the Vaunted Prelates was the correspondence between the Alecia Cassad, Minister of External Affairs and the Quaznian Imperial heir, Utorik.

Secretary Cassad was a distant cousin to the weak Emperor Antonius Cassad. Antonius had been notoriously self absorbed long before his ascension to Emperor. The deeper into his reign the more his dissoluteness distracted him from his responsibilities as a leader. Soon, Antonius’ ministers were running the day to day affairs of the empire. Without the emperor’s oversight, the various ministers began accumulating power, turning the bureaucracies over which they presided into their own private fiefdoms. While Alecia was every bit as venal and ruthless as her peers, she did have one small, redeeming trait—she was a patriot. She was also uncannily astute at spotting an opportunity. In this case, a patch of space rich in Hawking Radiation Cassad scientists designated the Singular Expanse. The scientists had long theorized that radiation from the Expanse could be harnessed to create trans-spatial Gates.

The problem was, there was no way for the Cassad Empire to test that theory because the Expanse was located in Quaznian space. It was Alecia’s ambition to improve relations between the Cassads and the Quaznians so that the latter could be granted access to the possible riches of the Expanse.  If gates could be formed from Hawking radiation, Alecia envisioned, there would be a proliferation of Cassad controlled wormholes leading to uncharted parts of the galaxy. The strategic advantage gained from the ability to manufacture and seed space with gates would revive the lapsing Cassad Empire, making it the most powerful entity in known space.

Such a dream, however, could only gain substance with Quaznian cooperation. Alecia had kept a close eye on developments within the Quaznian Empire. Through her spies, humans and others, she learned of the Rite of the Blade. Already a supporter of Utorik due to the latter’s desire for trade links between the Quaznian and Cassad domains, Alecia made diplomatic overtures to the heir in Antonius’ name. She offered to send troops to the planet Iaid, where the Rite was to be held, to assist Utoriks’ soldiers.

As decreed by tradition, no outsiders were allowed to participate in the Rite of the Blade. Utorik callously disregarded that rule when he agreed to Alecia’s offer. One week before the Rite was scheduled to begin, before the eyes of the galaxy were set upon planet where the fate of the Quaznian Empire was to be determined, fifty thousand Cassad troops were secretly dropped on Iaid. All of them were hand picked from highly elite combat formations and superbly trained in the use of edged weaponry.

On the day the Rite was to begin, Utorik infiltrated monitor specialists onto an orbital station tasked with observing the combat on Iaid.

The first week of combat went poorly for Utorik’s forces. At the Battle of Tulir Point, Utorik loyalists were ambushed by soldiers loyal to the heir, Limja.

Limja loyalists fell upon the Utoriks in a plain flanked with high ridges.  Making skilled use of high ground in conjunction with crossbows, the Limjas rained death upon their adversaries, killing 9,000.

A battle fought between Wrodat and Utorik loyalists on the opposite side of Iaid was contrastingly drawn out. The confrontation was a set piece affair. Both sides were armed with swords, pikes, axes, bows, and spears. After a vicious melee lasting seven hours, the Utoriks were routed. More Utoriks died in the retreat, cut down by pursuing Wrodats, than in the actual battle.

The Limjas won a land battle against the Wrodats, then went on to hand the Utoriks another defeat in a naval encounter on Iaid’s largest sea.

Limja and Wrodats were about to meet in a second battle when 3,000 Limja soldiers dropped dead in their camp, the victims of a biological weapon. The combat deployment of a bio-agent was a flagrant violation of the rule forbidding the use of non-bladed, non-muscle powered weaponry.

The Prelates, observing the contest from the orbital station, were aghast. They rightly accused Wrodat of introducing an unauthorized weapon into the Rite and tried to end the contest. Wrodat countered that no one could prove the use of a biological and that the Limja soldiers very likely perished from a natural disease. The Prelates had no incontrovertible proof to the contrary. Besides, the Prelates were too weak. Had they called a halt to the Rite, no one would have paid heed.

Utorik, in the meantime, made his move. He sent an army of 10, 000 to meet Limja’s slightly larger force of11,500 on vast plain leading to a forest. As the two sides engaged, all 50,000 Cassads attacked from the forest, slashing into the Limjas’ ranks with swift, murderous precision. Hemmed in by Utoriks in  front and Cassads at the rear and flanks, the Limjas had nowhere to run. Even more dangerous to the Limja soldiers was that the heir, Limja himself, was on the battlefield. The Cassad’s role was to keep the Limja loyalists occupied while Utorik death squads went after the enemy heir.

The Utorik squad was yards away from the embattled Limja when 40,000 Limja soldiers swept onto the battlefield. The Limja reinforcements hit the Utoriks from the rear causing much disarray that reverberated to the front of their line. The Limjas exploited the distraction, formed a wedge and sliced their way through the Utoriks’ disrupted formations. Limja managed to break out, surrounded by his bodyguards. The Utoriks panicked and tried to flee. The Cassad soldiers witnessed the disintegration of their ally and decided that they had no reason to remain engaged. They withdrew in a manner far more orderly than that of the Utoriks. The Limjas were too busy slaughtering Utoriks to commit soldiers to pursuing the Cassads. The Cassads extricated themselves from the battle unmolested.

Despite Utorik spies on board the orbital station blacking out live feeds of this latest Limja-Utorik clash, word had already reached the Prelates of a human presence below. In addition to assassinating Limja, Utorik conspired with the Cassads to kill every Limja soldier who witnessed humans on the battlefield. The failure of the plot and the survival and subsequent victory of the Limjas sealed Utorik’s fate. An alien presence in the Rite ranked as a worse violation than the use of a biological. And with dead human soldiers to present to the Prelates, there was no denying the proof of Utorik’s duplicity. Interestingly, Utorik’s violation was just the shot in the arm the Prelates needed to regenerate their long diminished authority.  The Prelates rallied fanatically traditionalist generals to oppose Utorik. The generals responded and formed an army to be sent to Iaid with the express purpose of removing Utorik from the Rite, and therefore out of contention for the throne.

Meanwhile, Utorik’s army had rebounded from previous misfortune to a string of victories over Limja and Wrodat forces on three of Iaid’s four continents. Newly confident from his victories, Utorik rebuffed the Prelates’ demands that he withdraw from the Rite. The Prelates then granted permission for the generals to deploy armies to Iaid to remove Utorik. The Prelates ordered a halt to all hostilities until Utorik was arrested and his army disbanded. But the Prelate’s power only extended so far. Wrodat and Limja ignored the edict. While they avoided battle with Utorik’s army, the remaining two heirs continued to battle each other.

The Prelates sanctioned the formation of another army to eliminate the Cassad force on the planet. Alecia Cassad fell under severe criticism for advising the emperor to intervene in the Ouaznian succession dispute. Although, the idea of her advising the emperor and the emperor deciding whether or not to follow her advice was a well staged fiction suitable for mass consumption. It was no secret to insiders that Alecia had grown into a veritable power behind the throne. What she wanted, she gained. And  even if the emperor, in a rare episode of coherence, expressed uncertainty on whatever issue the minister broached, it mattered very little. What Alecia wanted she gained.  What she wanted was to extract the five divisions of Cassad soldiers on Iaid.

Most of her peers vehemently opposed the idea. From their perspective, it was bad enough that Cassad soldiers had interfered in the internal affairs of another power, but they were complicit in the attempt to assassinate a Quaznian heir. Worse yet, the heir the Cassads supported was heading toward an ignominious downfall. Either one of the Quaznian heirs was sure to seek revenge against the Cassads for the latter’s interference.

More than a few Cassad ministers advocated leaving those Cassad troops stranded on Iaid. Any attempt to retrieve them would only further enflame Quaznian sentiment against humans, they argued. The ministers even rejected the idea of paying a ransom for the soldiers. It was better to leave the soldiers to their inevitably savage fate at the hands of the Quaznians and hope their blood sacrifice would be enough to avert war when the Rite was concluded.

Alecia refused to turn her back on the soldiers she sent to Iaid. Having the ear of Antonius as always, she ‘advised’ the emperor to send a strike force to Iaid to evacuate the stranded soldiers.

As a Cassad rescue force was being assembled, a Prelate-sanctioned army of 600,000 landed on Iaid. The Prelates initially contemplated the temporary deactivation of the EM dampers just long enough for powered units to subdue Utorik’s army and destroy the Cassads. After a period of debate, the Prelates agreed that the forces committed to this mission would be armed the same as the Rite participants. Besides, the Prelates and the generals tasked with leading the mission craved the opportunity to butcher the hated human interlopers up come and personal.

The Cassad force was lead by Commander Tyrel Hastings, a member of SOIE (Special Operations Insertion Extraction). Hastings entertained very little hope that his soldiers would ever see the light of their home suns. The mission that landed them here had turned into an unmitigated disaster.  Cassad scouts had brought word of an enemy planetfall less than 500 miles from their position. Hastings knew his people were being hunted. Confronting the hunters in pitch battle was out of the question. An individual Quaznian warrior was a formidable foe to contend with. Hastings had no intention of pitting his 48,000 troops in a toe to toe encounter against over a half million of them.

Hastings separated his forces, a measure preindustrial army commanders over the ages were advised never to do. But Hastings was not leading a conventional force. The Cassad army’s special operations background did not lend itself to acting in a conventional manner.

Over the next fifteen days, Cassad detachments inflicted heavy losses on the Prelate forces through ambushes, booby traps, night raids and predawn raids. They disrupted Prelate supply lines and destroyed enemy provisions wherever and whenever possible. Cassad bowmen targeted and killed Quaznian officers from afar. Other individual Cassads conducted close quarter knife work when the opportunity arose, sneaking into Prelate encampments and silently dispatching as many of the enemy as they could. The Cassads engaged in occasional skirmishes with Prelate forces when local advantage shifted heavily in the latter’s favor. Mostly however, they stayed mobile, frustrating the Prelates’ attempts to bring them to battle.

The Utroik soldiers were equally successful in avoiding a head on clash with the Prelate forces. They remained on the move, striking the Prelates in damaging hit and run attacks. All the while, Utorik continued to defy Prelate demands to surrender. An emissary, sent to Utorik to convey the Prelate’s latest surrender demand, was seized by order of the heir, dismembered and his body parts dumped into a canyon.

Enraged, the Prelates revised their arrest order to a kill on sight directive and sent an additional 200,000 soldiers to the surface… 100,000 to bolster the 400,000 tasked with defeating Utorik’s army. 100,000 reinforced the Prelates’ efforts against the humans.

Limja perceived the presence of Prelate sanctioned forces on the planet with a high degree of trepidation. By all rights, he should have been satisfied that one of his opponents was being eliminated from the Rites. But Limja was a jittery, paranoid Quaznian. He started to suspect that the Prelates had an agenda, one that they were going to implement the second they dealt with Utorik…an agenda that did not include him as the future emperor. Compounding his concern was Limja’s fears of another biological attack against his forces. Indeed, Wrodat had challenged Limja to decisive battle, but the former refused to commit his entire army to a final confrontation that would have settled this bloody affair. Limja feared that assembling his entire force in one place made them an easy target for a biological attack. The situation looked grim from Limja’s perspective. Prelate forces kept landing on Iaid in seemingly endless waves, and he was locked in a brutal stalemate with Wrodat. It was only a matter of time before one or the other force utilized the advantages of superior weapons or numbers to crush Limja’s soldiers.

Limja decided to be preemptive. Before the Rite began, Limja deployed a signal squad on one of the highest mountains peaks on the planet. Limja only participated in the Rite as a formality. He never planned to allow a clash of blades to hinge on whether or not he became emperor. Limja sent a messenger to the signal squad. The signalers flashed mirrors to convey the message they were given to a Quaznian warship hidden on the fringe of the system. Since the EM dampers prevented powered transmissions, the mirrors’ visual signal were picked up by the warships’ enhanced optics.

The signal received by the Limja supporters crewing the ship was an order to attack any and all forces on the planet not under the Limja banner.

By this action, Limja had ended the Rite of the Blade. The Limja loyalist warship advanced on Iaid, its guns targeting concentrations of Wrodat soldiers and firing on them.  Thousands of Wrodats, including the heir, were incinerated in searing salvos of orbital bombardment.

Minutes after the warship’s devastating intervention, two Cassad deep space cruisers emerged from jump close to Iaid. Immediately, the Cassad vessels and the Quaznian warship exchange battery fire. The cruisers dispatched fighters to destroy the EM damper platforms before sending troop transports to pick up Cassad forces on the ground.

It was a flawless operation. All of the Cassad soldiers were successfully evacuated. This was a moment of celebration for Alecia Cassad and those of her backers who supported the rescue operation. There would be no more celebrations after that. The Cassad Empire was now saddled with a war it neither expected, asked for, nor wanted. Limja, however illegitimately, was the Quanzian emperor.  He remained locked in a bitter struggle with Utorik, who was ferried off Iaid by his supporters in the military. And he had to contend with the Prelates who, due to his violation of the Rite, declared Limja unfit to rule the empire. Of course, Limja had nothing to worry about in regard to the Prelates. He had greatly reduced their power and authority back to its pre-Rite level. The Prelates yelled vociferously about Limja’s flouting of Tradition, but they no longer had the enforcement capability to rectify matters.

Utorik posed a far greater threat. He commanded enough supporters and resources to oppose Limja for years to come. But Utorik was not powerful enough to overthrow the new emperor. This being the case, Limja felt that he could afford to turn much of his attention to the Cassads. What Limja possessed as he planned his attack against the humans did not at all represent the totality of Quaznian assets. Yet, even a partially mobilized Quaznian Empire was a power to be reckoned with. It was that large, fiercely determined remnant under Limja’s control that smashed into the crumbling bulwark of Cassad defenses.

The war would last twenty years, drawing other powers into its seething vortex of slaughter, greatly weakening the Cassads from the inside and out.

Historians would call this conflict the War of the Blade, despite it being fought with an array of energy based weapons. However, it was the use of blades that sparked this war.  The hatred that sustained it was bitingly sharp and cut as deep as any well honed knife.