#house chaliel

[lightdancer1]

Been fiddling a bit with the Omniverse Tales:

In particular with expanding on the family and siblings of the protagonist, Xaderavcal H'vat H'vorxixnon. Her people, the Hatari, rely on patronymics (though the full name, like Hispanic peoples, includes names from both lineages and is essentially a family genealogy from three or four generations back, which is why the full name is almost never used).

Her father, King-Bishop H'vorxixnon H'ven Soroundon, is the Bishop of Chalae and the ruler of House Chaliel, the second-most powerful dynasty in the Bizjarran Empire. The Chaliels were, in the past, also essential bulwarks of Underlan power and when that foundation cracks, so does a fundamental part of the Underlan system. Fordin VI didn't give a shit, his son and grandson do but by then the rift is too deep to repair. He is also a radical firebrand in a context of both a civil war and its aftermath, with speeches modeled before the war on William H. Seward but after the war he's essentially Thaddeus Stevens as a royal.

Anzaea Roes, her mother, is the daughter of Alavan and Kalmi Roes, who are essentially a pair of Caligulas leading the fourth-most powerful dynasty (the third are the Vintrons) whose tyranny is sufficient to be its own worst enemy, as is the program of Utawalization they put into effect. Ironically, by virtue of Xaderavcal's own rise Anzaea achieves the very aims her family seeks....on behalf of a more powerful, richer dynasty. She is also the wealthiest woman in the Empire and modeled on a blend of J. Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Alfred Nobel. She would essentially be a 'Robber Baron' archetype in a very literal sense, and as a rich, powerful woman is subject to a long list of libels and smears in what's deliberately modeled on real life here.

They have four children old enough to play roles in politics. Xaderavcal herself is the Unifier, the victor of the forty-year Restoration War, a revolutionary in the very pattern of her ancestor, the previous unifier, Chaliel I. She is Junior Diarch of the Empire and a survivor of a super-soldier program created by the super-science cult called the Architects of Fear. As Xaderavcal takes more than a few leafs from Paul Atreides and Superman (with Anzaea accordingly taking a few from Lady Jessica and H'vorxixnon from Leto I, if ending somewhat happier than the other guy) the Architects of Fear are essentially the Bene Gesserit as an alien science-cult with sufficiently advanced technology to be a cosmic force in their own right.

Her younger sister Xaderavcar is a professor of theology and a writer, the person who briefly could have been selected as the dynasty's future but elected not to press the issue when her sister returned, escaping the Architects of Fear. For all of the rumors surrounding Queen Anzaea's family life the rumors are entirely true with Xaderavcar, who is basically a rolling stone, wherever she lays her hat is her home. She also has more power, in a very literal sense, than her sister for very literal reasons and a small demonstration of it is that she can blatantly indulge in things that repeatedly violate the codes of her caste and challenge reality to notice it when she uses her powers to prevent them doing so.

The middle child of the ones old enough to be involved, Suvaono, is both the Bobby Kennedy and the Andrei Zhdanov to Xaderavcal's JFK/Stalin (she's the Junior Diarch of a space empire, you're a son of a bitch by definition if you reach that position). She is a political hatchetman who takes a great glee in doing what she does, and has more direct knowledge and experience in greater detail.

And then there's Maxidren, who's a speedster to Flash proportions with access to something modeled on the Speed Force within copyright guidelines to avoid all the problems that otherwise come with this particular power (if also a fair bit tougher than any Flash to withstand the inertia and friction and capable at the most extreme speeds of being her own FTL engine and thus on an inhabited world of shattering it and killing all life if she does that on an inhabited world, that's the most unsporting way in the Empire to Blaze a world and more thorough than dropping an asteroid of dino-killer size on it). Maxidren is the guide to the more veiled extralegal aspect and here works with Lord Agati Heshatani, master of the Directorate of Intelligence Consortia, modeled on the KGB, as the Empire is presented as a de facto totalitarian state with all the trimmings and this is hardly soft-selled.

#omniverse tales #house chaliel #h'vorxixnon #anzaea #xaderavcal the unifier #xaderavcar #suvaono #maxidren #my ocs

[lightdancer1]

Since so many sci-fi settings take the existence of slavery in space for granted, I did make one concession to the United States in my Bizjarran Empire setting

Specifically in the presence and function of House Chaliel, who fit both the self-perception and the reality of antebellum New England. Chaliel the Liberator was a freedman who self-emancipated and led a vicious dogfight of a war that overthrew the old Xhonoi Dynasty that founded what was consistently the second-largest realm in the Empire and one of the Throneworld dynasties that runs a mini-empire in its own right.

As a self-liberated man he showed zero kindness to the old slaveowners and gallows were very, very busy in his conquest, as were lampposts and palace spires. Chaliel the Liberator also ensures that in the domains of House Chaliel, which are again the second-largest domain within the Empire and amounting to about 40% of its territory in real terms, slavery is 100% forbidden and active encouragement of abolition on the whole is supported.

This is New England in self-perception. In reality his victorious armies won the War of Succession for the House of Underlan at the Jehexaderavcal Moon and did so and did so completely by first winning the battle and then a massacre on such a gargantuan scale that the sheer horror of it wrote the Underlans' reputation for them even when Hondon I was a military moron who at least recognized this.

And in reality as with New England it is the commercial beating heart of the Empire's realms and the center of its technological progress, but.....it did so fully reliant on the system of slavery around it and in truth for all the rhetoric it didn't exactly object to this. And the dissonance here comes home with a vengeance in the time of the Servile Wars that see the Manumission Decree, the aftermath of which is the setting's main aspect.

Slavery did exist in the Empire and existed for most of its history....but it was abolished by its most powerful tyrant in its most recent history after not one but three increasingly large-scale wars that the Imperial Army found harder and harder times to face. The slaves were not given freedom from above, they seized it themselves from below and built the path to freedom over a bridge of corpses.

#omniverse tales #chaliel the liberator #house chaliel #slavery and the bizjarran empire #it originated because of the complexities of a multi-species empire and being the dog that caught the car #but it swiftly changed into straight up real life but a far more horrifying scale #slavery in space was unsustainable #so it blew up in the face of the Underlans as it did with the House of Xhonoi

[lightdancer1]

This is also something I use in my original fiction:

The Bizjarran Empire at the time the stories are set is in the reign of Syian III, who is based on a blend of aspects of Tsar Alexander I, Tsar Nicholas II, and Mikhail Gorbachev. As with Tsar Alexander I he's most famous in certain aspects for orchestrating the murder of his father (unlike Tsar Sasha Syian III personally strangles the old man with his own hands purely to see him die and score the point).

This is in a society that about 40,000 years ago fully redeveloped a variant of Life Extension technology to make earlier-model FTL a viable means for use by anything but AIs (in no small part to avoid a crippling reliance on AIs and something like 40K's Cybernetic Revolt scenario).

For most of its history it was ruled by the House of Gor, who started with two planets and extended to the conquest of most of a Galactic arm, fighting a major war with a society near the Pleiades, which is a star sector associated with being troublesome and quarrelsome in each and every era. Over 30K years with lifespans extended to 1,000 years (so in rough terms about in between 300 to 600 years depending on how you'd look at it for a dynasty) the Gorken era is everything from autocracies to diarchies to constitutional parliamentary monarchies.

It survives because of a Chinese style bureaucracy though the duo of Hondon I Underlan and Chaliel I the Liberator, who overtakes the House of Xhonoi, conquer the Throneworld and break the armies of the Gorken loyalists in a savage bloodbath in the Battle of the Jehexaderavcal Moon that admittedly owes a wee bit of inspiration to the Battle of Corrin in the six Dune books (I said what I said).

Under Underlanken it sees a period of monarchy, an interregnum war, then a diarchy that culminates in an attempt to re-assert monarchy and then this blows up in the face of Fordin VI and his successors, which is where the setting proper starts.

The society of the later Underlan era with its vast armies and military parade fever is both a recognizable successor to the Empire established by Trarh-akh-Gor I and a distinct civilization in its own right that vastly outpaces its ancestor and plays on a whole different wavelength.

#omniverse tales #bizjarran empire #fictional history diverges just as much as real life history #house of underlan #house of chaliel #house of gor

[lightdancer1]

Next few chapters of Hammer of the Stars gets into the War of Liberation:

Due to both elements of the setting and the character Xaderavcar's interest in history books (a nice means to do stealth worldbuilding in a logical in-universe fashion). This war is one of the central elements in determining the history of the Kingdom of Hataria. Chaliel the Liberator, who self-emancipated, orchestrated a slave rebellion that turned into a civil war that overthew the House of Xhonoi.

He was a fairly brutal warlord entirely happy to have entire cities burned and everyone in them killed and the ground sowed with salt to make a point. He *also* won the Battle of the Jehexaderavcal Moon, which is this universe's equivalent of the Battle of Gaixia that sealed the rise of the Underlans.

For the generations of Chaliels 10,000 years later the deeds of the Liberator are famous, he overthrew one dynasty and orchestrated the mass hanging of it in exchange for the death of his first family, and he built another by his fanatical brutality that endures even 10,000 years later. His descendant Xaderavcal the not-yet-unifier survived a fairly unstable upbringing including abduction by the Architects of Fear on a couple of occasions and drawing the eye of the Urhalzantrani, for whom the stars are right.

The fear that a lapse of ten thousand years has brought history full circle and those raised to be weapons might in the end become solely so is one of the arcs that gives Xaderavcal's take on that past a different note entirely to that of her sister, for whom it's more academic.

The Kingdom of Hataria, which is the second-largest dynastic system in the Empire and the one with landholdings just shy of the Imperial Family, is meant to be the only nod to a part of the USA. Specifically the North/New England, which abolished slavery but its wealth relied heavily on the profits of it.

Slavery was abolished for about 40 years by the time of the story across the entire Empire, so that legacy is also intertwined around the ways that the legacy of the Liberator and his war against the House of Xhonoi affects and afflicts his descendants.

#hammer of the stars #house of chaliel #xaderavcal the unifier #xaderavcar the scholar #bizjarran empire #house of xhonoi

[lightdancer1]

One of the Omniverse Tales laying out some of the most important backstory. Specifically how Syian III the Regicide gained the name.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31117466

#Omniverse Tales #the house of underlan #the house of Chaliel #space opera

[lightdancer1]

Given the Dune influence, the House of Chaliel are very loosely expies of the Atreides:

Though there is no real Harkonnen equivalent faction.

The House of Chaliel also has elements of the US North, in that in a societty that up until the tail end of the Fordin VI years spent about 6,000 years glorying in the full trappings of a slave society, and even before then the concept of slavery was taken as both a given and to be enforced by draconian means.

A slave named Chaliel H’ven Shazanu (aka Freedom in the Hata tongue, the main Xeltrigan language that shows up in the setting) leads a gigantic Spartacus-like revolt at first against the House of Xhonoi, the founders of the Kingdom of Hataria, and then it turns into a bid for the throne. He wins, orchestrates means brutal enough even Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and Oskar Dirlewanger would go “Hol’ on there, hoss, that’s a mite far now.” An then compounds it by his brutal and destructive genocidal legions winning the Battle of the Jehexaderavcal Moon, the setting’s equivalent of the Battle of Gaixia (I did say that this is Space China, after all).

Being founded by Space Touissant L’Overture gives the Chaliels and their more mercantile-capitalist system (as I said, basically US North in the Antebellum years) major advantages over the more spartan and military parade fever obsessed Underlans.

Xaderavcal’s life has more than a few parallels with her illustrious ancestor Chaliel the Liberator, and those parallels are more than slightly alarming to the rest of the Empire less for ‘slavery bad’ and more for ‘not wanting ninety in a hundred of a specific square mile radius executed in reprisal for a soldier stubbing his toe and blaming it on a civilian who was just standing there as the SOP to instill a pucker factor that lasts for ten thousand years’ as a thing.

Most of the Chaliels are merchant princes, but when they go to war, they have the same bloodthirsty instinct as the founder of the dynasty, and are meant to. Chailel the Liberator was not a very nice example of his species or his culture, and he’s meant to come across as essentially the anti-slavery leader who becomes King

#house chaliel #chaliel the liberator #xaderavcal the unifier

[lightdancer1]

I do use slavery in a space society as an element of my Bizjarran Empire stories

But it's a case of deliberately subverting the trope as much as upholding it. Slavery in the Bizjarran Empire originated from 'well we conquer these worlds of sapient species and some of them are just plain bizarre so what do we do now'. It was, as in the Ancient World, a category for prisoners of war and the conquered in the beginning and later evolved/devolved into a more 'classical' standard as half the population sought to mark down the other half.

The second-largest dynastic setting within the Empire besides the then-Imperial Families of Gor and Underlan (the latter promoted to power by Chaliel I) is based on a figure, Chaliel I the Liberator, who outright overthrows a system that enslaved him and wages the most viciously cruel war in the setting for 10,000 years on the basis of 'I am the Scourge of God. If you didn't want to die horribly you shouldn't have enslaved me and people like me'.

He conquers the entire expanse of what is the second most powerful family from the Throneworld after the ruling family and takes his victorious armies fresh from the overthrow and massacre of the Xhonoi-era ruling elite to the bloodbath on the Jehexaderavcal Moon that makes the House of Underlan's rule possible.

Hataria and the House of Chaliel, however, are deliberately the one major element of US history in a setting mostly blending Chinese dynastic/cultural understandings of power with Romanov-style military parade fever addicts and Austro-Hungarian bureaucratic incompetence. Until the era of Fordin VI the Empire spent about 6,000 years with half its population enslaved by the other half (even with 90% of its territory the uninhabited planets strip-mined for resources and where the real wealth and basis of the Empire actually is, but not the one that makes for the glorious ideological narratives).

Then in Fordin VI's era three major servile wars erupt and the enslaved half frees itself and that half provides the bulk of the armies wielded by Xaderavcal the Unifier to win the Restoration War.

Slavery did exist in the relatively recent past (due to the Empire's Life Extension technology in the lifetime of all the characters) but it is abolished and the inconsistencies in its abolition are part of how the Paul Atreides equivalent got to power by exploiting a vast reservoir of soldiers and firepower that nobody else in the elite even realized existed.

The difficulties of moving from a slave society to a free society and the selective hypocrisy of a mercantile dynasty that was happy to make money hand over fist with the slaveowners while not owning slaves directly IMO make a better approach to the topic than randomly including it for no real reasons, especially given the main reasons authors choose to use it whether or not it would make sense for an FTL society to even have it to begin with.

#omniverse tales #bizjarran empire

[lightdancer1]

The next eldest of the five, Xaderavcal the Butcher:

Was born in an alternate version of the Bizjarran Empire's throneworld as an alternate universe version of the protagonist Xaderavcal the Unifier. In her case the consequences of her birth were an attack by the armies of Pandaemonium under the direct personal command of one of their main generals, one Lucifer Morningstar. Then Turugamvirakil personally opted to handle this one, bandied them all back in a demonstration that he's only matched by entities that directly command such forces, not their lieutenants, he saves her, and in the process the House of Chaliel, the mercantile beating heart of the Empire died without a trace caught between two incomprehensible fires that operated for reasons of which the local culture had no knowledge.

The result is an Empire on the edge of a fiscal collapse and a setting that owes as heavily to Warhammer 40K as a loose expy as the God on the Gilded Throne's home universe has its elements of the Silmarillion and Warhammer Fantasy. A vast technologically superior empire is in its death throes, assailed by a vast number of foes that gather around its ruins.

Against the ever-present foes of nature and supernature it has vast teeming armies and the suicidal death cult mentality cultivated by the House of Underlan and its brutish ruler Fordin VII the Fell-Handed, who slew the Regicide and re-established himself upon the throne.

The Bizjarran Empire of this alternate universe may be dying the slow death of a state so vast that it would take it tens of thousands of years to full and truly die, but it intends to take everything and everyone it hates with it.

#xaderavcal the butcher #Bizjarra N-X-331 #omniverse tales multiverse

[lightdancer1]

The Sisters Four of the Urhalzantrani and House Chaliel:

Are both instances of the motif of the four sages in the garden, which is one of the most frequent recurring motifs in a variety of ways across my different stories and different genres. The four who enter the garden of mysticisim, one who dies, one who becomes a heretic, one who goes mad....and the one who enters the garden in peace and departs in peace.

Not all four will be equally literal in each manifestation, in particular the one who dies seldom literally dies, and the concept of heresy is quite flexible in a cosmic horror setting where all is dreams within dreams within dreams and even the great and the grim cosmic entities are as meaningless as the lowliest bacterium on a given world.

#the four sages in the garden

[lightdancer1]

The actual protagonist of the series, though

Is Xaderavcal the Unifier, a 600+ year old warlord and supreme commander of victorious armies who ascends from freedman to Junior Diarch of the Third Diarchy, first of her lineage. She owes elements to both Paul and Siona Atreides, and is heavily influenced by the Dune mythos....and to Wilbur Whateley, to a degree.

She, of House Chaliel, is the heir to the *first* unifier in the dynasty, also a Freedman-King who burned and reaved his way through the first founding dynasty of Hataria, the House of Xhonoi, and it was his armies that win the bloodbath on the Jehexaderavcal Moon that sanctifies the Underlans that his descendant challenges by merely existing.

The Battle of the Jehexaderavcal Moon is elements of the Battle of Gaixia, the Battle of Corrin, and the Battle of Berlin all in one. A thirty-thousand year old dynasty is destroyed in blood and fire and horror by Chaliel I, and Xaderavcal the Unifier, his new successor, in a mostly mercantile dynasty is his true heir in spirit, arisen in blood and fire and bestriding a multi-galactic empire uncertain to the nature of her gifts and all that follow from them......

And of the lurking monsters that hide beyond the Veil of time and space and all that is or will ever be.

#omniverse tales #xaderavcal the unifier