Few human rulers have altered the history of this continent as thoroughly as Kethyrstor II of Ætaine, remembered more commonly as Kethyrst the Great. He inherited the crown in 34 ÆC, at only fifteen years of age, after his father, Krethyr IV, was killed campaigning against the bloodthirsty Drak tribes of the west, the ancestors of those who would eventually found the Drak’nir Empire.
Youth, unsurprisingly, did remarkably little to moderate him.
Kethyrstor immediately continued his father’s war and, by 40 ÆC, had broken the organized resistance of the Drak tribes through methods even sympathetic Ætainese chroniclers describe with uncomfortable brevity. Their settlements were burned, populations displaced and centralized, and surviving rulers forced into submission or burnt alive. Having secured the western heartlands, he turned his armies eastward and spent most of the next four decades conquering, annexing, or intimidating nearly every kingdom between Ætaine and the eastern reaches of the continent, finally ending at the Ocean of Storms before he turned back west.
His name followed his armies. New fortresses, colonies, and conquered cities were renamed in his honor in much the same manner earlier rulers had named monuments after gods. Surviving charters and decrees preserve older forms such as Kethyrstoria, Kethyrstir, Kethyrstirion, Kethyrstine, Kethyrstale, and Kethyrstoriv. A thousand years of dialect and language shift have reduced these respectively to the modern Kethyr, Kethir, Kethrir, Krystin, Krystal, and Krystyriv. Most inhabitants scarcely remember whom their cities were named for; their human rulers surely do, as many still wish to emulate him.
His empire was never peaceful. Drak rebellions erupted repeatedly in the west, while conquered eastern kingdoms rose whenever Ætaine’s armies marched elsewhere. Kethyrstor suppressed each with characteristic severity and continued campaigning until age and declining health finally accomplished what enemy armies could not while on campaign near the Pale Ocean at what is now called Grey Harbor. He died in 86 ÆC, after fifty-two years upon the throne.
Within two decades, much of the Drak territory had successfully broken away. Yet the eastern conquests endured, and with them Ætaine’s language, laws, roads, calendar, and political influence. Kethyrstor did not create the Ætainese world alone, as later poets would have us believe, but he came disturbingly close.
His grandson, Kethyrstor III, inherited a realm already beginning to strain beneath the wars of his grandfather. Though he surrendered most of the western Drak territories, realizing he could no longer keep their savage people under control, he reorganized the remaining empire so effectively that history remembers him not as another conqueror, but as Kethyrst the Wise.
There is an important distinction between greatness and goodness that historians too often neglect. Kethyrstor II was unquestionably great. Whether those who lived in fear of his armies would have considered that a compliment is another matter entirely.
— from the research notes of Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, “Magi the Blade”, high-aelv scholar, mage, and swordsman
