Note to self: don't ever create an image with five characters and and a fiddly battlescene in the background, and spend eight hours trying to erase all the stupid greebles and artifacts, because it will just come out looking crappy in the end 😅

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After four hundred years of peace, the Usurper Wars and the Cleavage of the Empire that followed marked a period of violent dissolution, triggered when two individuals, a man and a woman, each declared themselves to be the one true Emperor.

The fable of a nobleman transformed by an envious maidservant is, of course, a tale as old as time, and her claims were initially dismissed as mere hysteria. Yet the Girl-Emperor possessed political and military acumen far beyond her years, along with an uncanny ability to convince allies of the truth of her claim.

The war split the Empire down its centre, with the military and the Scholae divided over where their loyalties lay. As the conflict dragged on, the outlying provinces, so brutally conquered and now sensing weakness, began tearing the Empire apart from within. Entire cities were conscripted and converted into living weapons of war.

The Man-Emperor was eventually driven from the capital and fled to the eastern half of the Empire. Hopes that the war might finally be over proved terribly premature when the Eastern Empire offered full citizenship to all slaves and non-humans who fought on their side. Many veterans, transfigured into creatures considered little more than beasts, swiftly changed allegiance. The Western Empire soon found itself beset by slave revolts.

Today, the war still wages on. The Eastern Empire has, comparatively, become radically egalitarian, believing in equality for all - in that an orc or catperson might hold a human as a slave, which is considered woke for the time. The Western Empire, meanwhile, has sunk ever deeper into a rigid human-first ideology.

Most Scholae, headquartered in the capital and loyal to the institutions rather than the Emperor himself, remain stubbornly aligned with the West, creating a concerning magepower shortage for the East.

To counter this deficiency of wizards, the East has turned instead to sorcerers, individuals whose arcane power lies within their blood. To produce sorcerers at scale, defectors from the Schola Arcanthra have established several Breeding Houses, intended to selectively imbue and propogate sorcerous blood into human test subjects, as one might breed a pedigree of dog.