The Drak were not originally a kingdom at all, but a loose confederation of nomadic tribes clustered around Ozyer Drak, or known elsewhere as Lake Drak, beneath the Plamya Gorahk, or Fire Peaks, whose volcanic mountains remain among the few on this continent that burn almost continuously. The tribes were notoriously warlike, raiding neighboring peoples for livestock, goods, and, most profitably, captives. Slaves became their principal commodity long before they possessed permanent cities.
Kethyrstor II of Ætaine changed that. His conquest of the Drak heartlands in the first century ÆC was brutal, but Ætainese occupation also forced a people accustomed to seasonal camps into permanent settlements around Ozyer Drak. Roads were laid, forts became towns, agriculture expanded, and taxes demanded records where bards once shared history through song and stories. It is one of history’s crueler ironies that Ætaine supplied many of the foundations upon which its future enemy would build.
The Drak, due to their warrior culture, did not remain subdued for long. Within two decades of Kethyrstor’s death in 86 ÆC, repeated uprisings had driven Ætainese authority from most of their homeland. Independence, however, did not bring unity. For more than a century the Drak returned to their old pattern of tribal warfare, temporary alliances, raids, and feuds, even while retaining many of the settlements and roads left behind by their former occupiers.
Only when Ætaine’s broader power began to diminish around 250 ÆC did the balance finally change. From among the competing tribal rulers emerged Vlydrik, remembered as the first King of Drak’nir. He expanded deliberately rather than recklessly, absorbing rivals through marriage, intimidation, tribute, and war. By 305 ÆC, nearly all the Drak peoples acknowledged one leader, one crown, and from that moment the Drak’nir Empire properly begins.
Its borders have expanded and contracted repeatedly since, but one institution has remained depressingly constant in their society: slavery. Even today, perhaps thirty-five percent of those living under Drak’nir rule are slaves, most working the immense agricultural estates or mines of the imperial nobility. Their armies raid for captives, their merchants sell them, and their farms depend upon them. It is difficult to separate Drak’nir’s prosperity from the suffering required to sustain it.
At the time I write this, 1030 ÆC, the empire is the largest on the continent, it no longer commands the greatest extent it once possessed; yet it still controls a vast swath of the interior of the western half of the continent and virtually all of its northwestern coast, where the seas freeze seasonally. Kingdoms have risen and vanished during Drak’nir’s more than seven hundred years of existence, but the empire has survived largely because it learned long ago how to turn conquest into infrastructure, and people into resources.
— from the research notes of Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, “Magi the Blade”, high-aelv scholar, mage, and swordsman
