From Meleus Travner, Urban Tactical Confrontation Throughout History: Case Studies, vol. 2: Seleucar
Following is a summary of the strategic progression of the First War of Succession, with accompanying figures. The subsequent twelve chapters will describe the tactical considerations of the war in exhaustive detail.
The First War of Succession can be divided into four major phases, typically referred to as "Weeks," as each phase lasted between six and eight days. For this section, I have followed that inexact convention; the later chapters will provide a more accurate chronology. The basic street map of Seleucar is Fig. 2.1.
In the first Week of confrontation, the Catarines and Mycalians (as supporters of the warring heirs were called) controlled roughly similar portions of Imperial Seleucar (Fig. 2.2). This was to change abruptly, as each side chose a different offensive focus. Naturally, both armies placed an emphasis on capturing the Palace itself, and as a result, the Palace was never fully occupied. Whenever one side overran the Palace, they built makeshift fortifications that the other side promptly destroyed in the next sortie. Aside from the attacks on the Palace, though, there were three other offensives of note in the first week (Fig 2.3). In the western portion of the city, the Guild of Serpentlords, long masked by a row of nondescript shops, finally made itself known, declaring loyalty to Mycale and immediately deploying in force to clear the surrounding streets. Catarine soldiers, experienced in field maneuvers but inept at urban combat, were rapidly forced into retreat by the unconventional tactics of the Serpentlords, resulting in the loss of the entire western district. The Serpentlords, however, were unable to occupy further territory, due to their relatively small numbers, and so they satisfied themselves with patrolling their immediate surroundings, to an extent of three major city blocks.
Catarin and her military advisor, Orin Grandier, chose to concentrate their forces on the capture of the Castle of Twelve, stronghold of the Guild of Knights. They did not at that time fully appreciate that the Castle of Twelve was not carefully designed for war, and the Knights among them, untrained in urban combat, were equally unaware of the Castle's weakness. Catarin sent a large strike force against the Royal Palace, but had half that strike force split off to attack the Castle of Twelve in a surprise maneuver, while another force proceeded along the Avenue of Swords to attack the Castle from the west. As Mycalian forces were fully committed to their attack on the Royal Palace and on the Marcella Library, the garrison at the Castle of Twelve was reinforced only by a returning group led by Damen Kephry. Quickly, the Mycalians were routed.
Mycale, meanwhile, had committed the majority of his forces to an assault on the Marcella Library. (Be advised that when I say "Mycale" or "Catarin" in any sense referring to military command, I am in fact referring to the entire high command of that faction: Errikale and Castomira on one side, and Catarin and Grandier on the other. It is unlikely that Mycale had a personal hand in any of the stratagems used during the war.) Already in possession of the Selicande Lycaeum and the Castle of Twelve, Mycale sought to take control of yet another major building, to use it as a command post and mustering point. Since the Catarine forces were concentrated in and around the Amphitheatre Kelanium, Mycale anticipated an easy victory; it was necessary simply to break through the defenses at South Riverwalk and then march down White Owl Street and Red Stag Street, destroying any patrols encountered. To turn the assault into a political coup as well, Mycale personally led the strike force. This was certainly the idea of Castomira Brangwin, as Lord Errikale would have overruled anyone else who suggested endangering the prince.
After airborn Druidic spotters reported Mycale's offensive, Catarin sent heavy reinforcements to defend the library. The Catarine force engaged the Mycalians at the intersection of White Owl Street and Eastgate Road, fighting them to a standstill and preserving control of the Library. During this battle, Mycale was wounded by a stray arrow. History shows that this was part of Castomira's hideous plan, for she secluded herself with him for the next two days nursing him to health, and when he emerged, he was horribly changed.
Before, Mycale had been a cretin, physically and mentally unsound, and a pedophile, visitor of the city's most hidden and illegal pleasure-dens; now, he was perceptibly twisted, indulging desires even darker than before. Whether Castomira had unlocked his personal demons, or had implanted sinister suggestions of her own, Mycale began to exhibit a taste for pleasures that should not be indulged, and his closest supporters turned a blind eye as the young boys who habitually "visited" Mycale in his chambers began to disappear. They had refused to believe in Mycale's broken-minded pedarasty; now, they refused to believe that his crippled evil might have deepened much further, to include torture and murder. That such voluntary blindness could exist in people who were otherwise honorable and good is unwelcome testament to the inflexibility of the human mind and spirit. Lord Errikale, Maxim Everhardt, and others all believed in the goodness and propriety of their prince, and so they put themselves under tremendous pressure by continuing in their belief. In the case of Maxim Everhardt, that pressure was to relieve itself in a nightmarish fashion. Some have suggested that the greatest tragedy of the war is that Mycale was never treated with the love and kindness that might have kept him innocent and good. Although this author would never lay claim to moral authority, pragmatism suggests that the greatest tragedy is that Mycale was not drowned as an infant, preventing the succession issue from arising at all.
It is clear, moreover, that Castomira was not simply corrupting Mycale for personal entertainment, but as part of her scheme for total domination of Seleucar. As youths disappeared within the depths of Mycale's rooms at Selicande Lycaeum, Mycale himself began to take on a powerful aura of majesty, such that wherever he took the field, the morale of his soldiers increased a hundredfold. And when he spoke, though he often broke into a form of half-witted glossolalia, the very sound of his voice filled his men with the strength of ten, and he invariably led his soldiers to resounding victory. Mycale's speeches were never transcribed, so it is impossible to perform a comparison, but given what later emerged regarding Castomira, it is well within the realm of possibility that she seeded Mycale's speech with a weakened version of the Tsol'teth Litany of Obedience, its arcane powers fueled by the lives of innocents.
At the beginning of Week Two, Catarin's control of the Castle of Twelve had cut off the Serpentlord territory from Mycale's main zone of control (see Fig. 2.4). Although they could still communicate through Tell magic, which was widespread in Achaea even then, the Catarine patrols along the Avenue of Heroes and their random sorties into Heroes' Park ensured that the Serpentlords could not receive tactical backup from their allies. And the Catarine tactical initiatives during this week (Fig 2.5) sealed the fate of the Serpentlords in Seleucar. Catarin sent a strong force against the Serpentlord-controlled neighborhoods, armed with hastily-prepared plans of urban combat and led by rangers with experience fighting Serpents. Although they did not directly defeat all the Serpentlords in the area, they killed many, and ransacked the hidden guildhouse, throwing the Serpentlords into disarray. As the Catarine forces advanced along rooftops and alleys in tandem, the Serpentlords were forced to evacuate their hiding places, although they left behind traps that claimed many a life. Finally, Catarine wizards destroyed the hidden wormhole located in the center of the neighborhood, just after the last Serpentlords fled through it. With the wormhole closed, the Serpentlords were unable to stage a counterattack to regain their control of the area.
Catarin's forces were not as successful elsewhere on the map. The Serpentlords, unused to battling large numbers of opponents, retreated in the face of a well-organized force of soldiers, and so they lived on, as they always have, despite adversity. Mycale's men, however, coming straight from the invigorating presence of their newly-charismatic ruler, were without fear, and eager to do battle. A large force made directly for the Royal Palace, and was met there by Catarin's men as they sallied from the Castle of Twelve and from the Amphitheatre Kelanium. A second force, composed of three hundred men, paralleled the Mnemosyne before splitting into two groups, one to attack the Castle of Twelve, and one to rush the Royal Palace from the north. The Castle assault group succeeded, capturing the Castle of Twelve after a brief but bloody fight.
The force from the north would have decided the Palace battle in Mycale's favor as well, but for the intervention of Lucaine Pyramides. As if launched from an arrow, Pyramides hurtled through the Palace and directly into the opposing force, intercepting them just as they passed through the main gate into the northern courtyard. Using this choke-point to his advantage, Lucaine killed the entire vanguard (drawing his sword and resheathing it for each kill, according to legend), then advanced northward, cutting down the entire invading group like a field of wheat, including several powerful commanders, masters of their respective fighting professions.
This was the first time Pyramides had revealed the full extent of his incredible powers, and it led to much speculation in both camps as to his true origin, be it demonic, divine, or simply alien. Pyramides never deviated from his story of being an escaped slave from a far-off land, student of a secret fighting art; however, dozens of very plausible theories give him a more arcane background. Only the monks seriously consider the possibility that Pyramides' powers were thoroughly explained by physical discipline alone, and even they consider him to have been a supreme master of the suspiciously magic-like Kaido. At any rate, it is clear that the abilities of Lucaine Pyramides were supernatural in the sense of having no counterpart in nature or the works of man.
During the havoc surrounding the Castle of Twelve and the Royal Palace, Lord Errikale sent a small group of rangers and Serpentlords to the Marcella Library, infiltrating the enemy line. Once in position, the infiltrators launched blinding fireworks along the main streets, diverting the Catarine lines long enough for Duke Errikale to lead an infantry charge down the side streets between White Owl Street and Red Stag Street. While Catarin's men had heavily guarded the larger intersections, these side streets held only token resistance, and Errikale was able to sweep through to the Library, occupying it completely. From there, he was able to solidify his control over the entire city sector.
Although the Catarines took control of the Royal Palace for the majority of the week, they realized that their position was untenable now that the Castle of Twelve and the Marcella Library had been captured. At the end of the week, they began an ordered withdrawal to the Halls of Justice, there to launch an assault on the Marcella Library, using the friendly Smiths' Guild as a staging point. So as not to prompt a rapid assault on the Amphitheatre, they chose to split their forces between the Amphitheatre and the Halls of Justice, with both attacking the Library only at the last possible hour. This way, the troops stationed in the Amphitheatre would move directly from there to the Library, hopefully just as Mycale committed his forces to an attack on the Amphitheatre.
In Week Three, after four days of tense waiting and occasional skirmishes, they executed that plan (Fig. 2.6), and it succeeded perfectly. Just as Mycale mounted an attack from the Castle of Twelve and the Royal Palace, both units of Catarines began to move. Orin Grandier led the defense of the Amphitheatre, fighting alongside his men, waiting to be the very last person to exit the building before supervising the rear-guard action. Further battle consolidated each group's territory as Fig. 2.7: a considerable loss for Catarin's side.
Week Four saw little combat, but what did occur was highly significant. Hoping to lure the enemy into a bad tactical decision, Orin Grandier intentionally relaxed patrols along South Riverwalk near the Beggars' Arch while increasing the guards at the bridges, hinting that he did not expect an amphibious attack. Lord Errikale, who had been winning many battles so far by using unexpected tactics, assumed that Grandier's weakness was real, and immediately drew up plans for a simultaneous feint from all corners, masking an amphibious movement across the river between the Red Stag Street and Green Snake Way bridges (Fig. 2.8). This played directly into Grandier's plans. For days previous, under cover of night, divers had taken kegs of fuel oil weighted with heavy iron and left them at the bottom of the river, fashioned so that they could be ripped asunder by pulling on a chain leading up to shore. Upon hearing the first splash of soldiers diving into the Mnemosyne, Grandier's men pulled on their chains and emptied the contents of the barrels into the river. By the time Mycale's men had swum halfway across the river, the oil had risen to the surface, and a single hurled torch transformed the Mnemosyne into the Phlegeton, the mythical River of Fire. This was the beginning and the end of the so-called Battle of Beggars' Arch; the other Mycalian attacks proved toothless, as Errikale had committed his main forces to the water-borne attack, and now one-third were dead and two-thirds stared helplessly at the river of fire.
Such events are dramatic, but for the most part, the specifics of warfare interest only historians and military buffs. During this abortive "battle," however, an event occurred that would resound on the harp-strings of a hundred thousand bards. Trenton Deis attempted to kill Lucaine Pyramides, and was defeated, then spared.
This event occurred only slightly before the Church proclamation that would inspire Lucaine and Catarin's legendary cross-city dash (Fig 2.9)....
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