After a thousand years of trying and failing to stop our raiders, the Rhexians brought the fight to us. While many tried, The Restorer was the first Rhexian king successfully land an army on our islands. This was the only thing he succeeded at. He may have conquered a continent but Caedmyr XIII couldn't conquer Kurkmen. We crippled his son and sent him limping back to Rhexia.
Despite its failure, The Restorer's invasion started a tradition. For three centuries, Rhexians invaded us at least once every generation.
Justifications varied from king to king. Pharas The Builder wanted to punish us for crippling his father. Then he wanted to punish us even more after we killed his son Pharas The Physician. Baenar the Beheader and many others wanted to punish us for raiding Rhexian settlements, Pharas The Pious wanted to convert us to Aeduianism, and Aevard The Vengeful wanted to avenge his father's failure to convert us.
The more the Rhexians invaded us, the more we raided them, and for 300 years we fought. Our lands are hard and they produce hard men. We aren't as soft as those cowardly Salandrians in the south who bend the knee to every conqueror that sails close to their shores.
When The Beheader took Wolf's Head Island, massacred everyone, and resettled it with Rhexians, our resolve wavered but we remained strong. I was raised on tales of the triumphs of my ancestors over countless Rhexian lords, princes, and kings.
Then in my lifetime, The Navigator invaded us. It was my time to shine. He fought us for three years and achieved nothing. He withdrew to fight a rebellion in Salandria and we took back all the land he had seized from us. All except Wolf's Head Island.
No one had ever taken Wolf's Head Island after we lost it to The Beheader. Rhexians had fortified the entire island with double-walled towns and castles every couple of miles. Kurkmen and sieges don't mix.
Two years after The Navigator left, the Rhexians returned. The Navigator had died and we all cheered. The Rhexians were led by a teenager, Caedmyr One-Ear, the 19-year-old bastard of King Daegan and an apprentice of The Navigator. You may have heard of him. Men call him The Thunderbolt these days. But he was just a skinny boy back then. "The Rhexians have run out of men and now they send us boys," we joked and laughed.
When we heard that Caedmyr One-Ear had brought only 5,000 Baenarites instead of the 30,000 minimum we had grown to expect of Rhexian armies, we laughed even harder. Caedmyr One-Ear took his position as Subrhex of Khwefia on Wolf's Head Island like all other Rhexian "rulers" before him. The Rhexians had always treated us like one of their conquered territories, appointing a governor to rule the Nine Islands when Wolf's Head was the only one they controlled.
While we were stockpiling supplies in our caves and forest shrines in preparation for the war that was sure to come, Caedmyr One-Ear surprised us all. He declared war… on sparrows.
After 300 years of fighting us, the Rhexians realized they couldn't break us. So they bribed us. Or so we thought. We suspected a trap but when some boys took a dead sparrow to a Rhexian garrison, they were paid the promised bounty.
I was and still am a farmer. I hated those filthy birds, always munching on my wheat. Pests, we called them. And here were the Rhexians offering us gold to kill them. We took it. In two years, we had exterminated all sparrows on the Nine Islands. The Rhexians always paid the bounty. Caedmyr One-Ear fed his Baenarites so much sparrow meat that they mutinied and demanded beans.
I became a rich man. I made a killing from sparrow bounties. Caedmyr One-Ear was also paying double the normal price for grain and I made a second killing from that. Farming became so lucrative that our warriors stopped going out on summer raids.
But of course, there was a catch: Rhexian gifts are cursed. Sparrows also ate insects and when we killed them, the insect population boomed and they ate everything. Aphids and armyworms proved a lot harder to kill than sparrows. Our crops started failing in the fields.
We might have known about this if there ever was a Kurkman who read one of those boring books on birds and plants written by creepy old Rhexian queers. But we were Kurkmen. Real Kurkan men warred and farmed and fished. Women hunted, did housework, cooked, and reared children. We left crafts to cripples and menial labor like mining and pulling oars to losers and slaves. We reserved reading for the lowest of the low: eunuchs, cocksuckers, and Rhexians.
Nevertheless, we could have survived a bad harvest or two if only we hadn't sold all of our grain to Caedmyr One-Ear. His prices had been so irresistible. Our purses were full of gold but our granaries were empty. We were in for a harsh lesson: men cannot eat gold.
While our situation was bad enough, Caedmyr One-Ear was far from done. He summoned the entire Rhexian fleet. Hundreds of warships blockaded The Nine Islands, ramming and burning every Kurkan vessel they saw.
We Kurkmen have always been skilled sailors. It was we who had taught the Rhexians how to build ships in the first place. But our longships were no match for towering Rhexian war galleys and fire-breathing dragon ships. The student had surpassed the master.
Some fishing boats still managed to run the blockade but there wasn't enough fish for everyone. With no other source of food, fish became worth its weight in gold. I spent all my gold on fish and was soon poorer than I had been before. Once I ran out of gold, I had to resort to hunting and scavenging for roots in the forests but everyone was doing the same thing so there still wasn't enough to go around.
Even as we starved, Caedmyr One-Ear landed another blow. While we had been massacring our sparrows, Caedmyr One-Ear had been secretly breeding locusts. Swarms and swarms of them. When he released them, they blotted out the sun for an hour.
The locusts ate everything. The crops we had been trying to regrow, grass, flowers, and even the leaves from the trees in forests and sacred groves. Our land went from green to gray-brown and our verdant hills became dustbowls. Men and animals alike, domestic and wild, starved.
We prayed and prayed. We sacrificed our slaves, then our children, and finally started sacrificing ourselves. None of that helped. The pestilences kept coming. Caedmyr One-Ear had one last blow for us.
I still remember that day like it was yesterday. It was late summer. The day was hot and it was about to get hotter but I had no idea. the weather in The Nine Islands is wet, cold, gloomy, and outright murderous come winter but summers could get so hot you would be forgiven for thinking you were in Salandria.
This was one of those summer days. Usually, I would be bringing in the harvest while munching on a juicy fruit but there was nothing to bring in that summer. The locusts had eaten everything and now were the only things left to eat. Catching them was a different story, however.
It had been easy before everyone went out nets to catch locusts for the dinner pot. Now we were all emaciated and surviving on five locusts a day. I saw smoke in the distance but didn't think much of it. Then I saw animals running. We had hunted many of them to extinction but a few had avoided us. Those few were bolting out of the woods. Then I felt the heat.
Caedmyr One-Ear had set our forests aflame. The forests that had hidden us from 100 vengeful Rhexian armies. The forests that provided the timber for our world-famous longships. The forests that fed us when the farms failed. The forests that were home to our gods of the wood: Hmyeke, Hmyty, Hmtaw, and M'beka. Those forests were all on fire.
Rhexian warships launched barrels of oil from catapults to feed the flames and soldiers seized anyone who escaped into the water.
The locusts had already stripped the trees of their leaves. Coupled with the summer heat, the desiccated trunks and branches were just so much firewood. Common trees and sacred groves alike burned. I nearly got burned too. The wind spread the flames nearly as fast as I could run. Men, animals, and locusts all sought safety. Many didn't make it.
The fires burned for nearly a month, consuming everything. We prayed for rain but only a little of it fell and it wasn't enough to put out the fires. Our lands were all turned to ash as everything got scorched.
The Nine Islands are huge. Individually, each of them is as large as Salandria and some are larger. Put together, they are twice the size of a Rhexian province. And Caedmyr One-Ear had burned them all.
With their horses, blocky formations, inhuman coordination, and endless numbers, Rhexian armies were unbeatable on the open field. But we never faced them in pitched battles. We harassed them, ambushed small groups of soldiers, and led them on bullheaded pursuits deep into our forests where we could pick them off one by one.
Our forests were more important to our military strategy than spears and swords. We always wore down Rhexian armies with hit-and-run tactics until they gave up and retreated. Now, those forests were gone. There was nowhere to hide. Our lands had become balder than the cunts of Rhexian sluts.
The swamps of Bogland became the only safe havens on the Nine Islands. Thank the gods fire can't burn swamps. Thousands of us gathered on that marshy island that we had long derided as worthless. We were the last of our people. Anyone who could afford to buy, build, or hitch a ride on a boat sailed to Bogland. Those who couldn't sail swam or died.
The voyage was short but harrowing. Overloaded boats and longships capsized all the time. We also had to hug the shores because Rhexian war galleys couldn't sail into the shallow waters. If you were unlucky enough to get captured, it was the end of your life. Rhexians have never been merciful towards Kurkmen.
They killed all the men, binding their hands and feet and tossing them into the sea. The women and children they enslaved. Such was the fate of my daughter. I still don't know where she is. May Hchambas give you strength Ingridha.
The marshes were no better. We had escaped the flames only to put ourselves at the mercy of mosquitoes and other bugs. There were too many of us with neither food nor clean water. Disease ran rampant and hundreds died daily.
By the time the fires finally died out, summer was about to end. I hadn't eaten in days and was practically blind from hunger. My eyes only saw bright spots. Death was certain. Either from hunger, disease, or cold come autumn. It didn't matter. Many of my friends decided to plunge swords into their bellies rather than wait. I was on the verge of doing the same until Theovald Priestbane suggested the unthinkable.
He suggested surrender. At any other time, we would have ripped him apart for even thinking that but what other option was there? Eating mud and ash?
Of the eight kings of the Islands, Theovald Priestbane was the most influential. And the most hated by Rhexians. He had made a name for himself by drowning Rhexian priests in the sea as an offering to Hchambas. If any other man had suggested it, we would never have listened. But Theovald Priestbane was the one man we were all certain would never lead us into a Rhexian trap. They hated him more than they hated all of us combined.
So we listened. Theovald Priestbane advised surrendering on the last day of summer. Aeduisia, the Rhexians called it. It was the day they freed their slaves, pardoned their criminals, and licked the cunts of their wives. By Rhexian religious law, if you beg a man for mercy on Aeduisia, he has to grant it. We all swallowed our pride and agreed to beg. It was the only thing we had left.
We set out for Wolf's Head Island at the crack of dawn on Aeduisia to surrender to Caedmyr One-Ear. Every vessel flew a white banner or a similarly-colored rag. If the Rhexian armada were to attack our ragtag fleet at sea, we would all have drowned with our longships, fishing skiffs, canoes, and crude rafts. So we flew the banner of surrender and knelt on the decks of our vessels with our hands in the air whenever one of those monstrous galleys got close.
There were 150,000 of us when the Rhexians counted us upon arrival at Wolf's Head. Before the war we were numberless. We didn't count our people like the Rhexians do theirs but three out of every four people I knew had died from starvation, fire, disease, and suicide. The experience was the same for everyone I talked to.
In just over a year, Caedmyr One-Ear had killed hundreds of thousands of Kurkmen with hunger and fire. He won the war without fighting a single battle. For millennia, Rhexians had tried and failed to exterminate us with swords. Then gold, locusts, and a bastard came by.
- This first-hand account of the Conquest of Khwhefia was sourced from The Extermination of My Nation. The book was penned by an unknown Khwefian writer. It is the only extant work documenting the ending of The Eternal War (15 RE - 303 RE) and the Conquest of Khwhefia (300 RE - 303 RE) from a Khwhefian perspective. The Extermination Of My Nation was proscribed upon publication but its subject, Prince Caedmyr Rhexbhurg, had the book unbanned for unknown reasons. Copies remain rare, however. No Bhaandini scribe wants to transcribe its text. Booksellers refuse to stock it as well.