Noctifer: Created page with "{{EventArticle |startyear= 2012 |startyearcirca= |endyear= 2062 |endyearcirca= |continent= Aurea |previous_article= Milosia in the Third Age of Man |following_article= Milosia in the Fourth Age of Man |main_article= Milosia }}{{Article_Reference |article= Milosia in the Dark Times }} The long rise of Milosia ended in catastrophe born at the heart of the Empire. When the Heretic Emperor Lucius of House Zetar..."

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Created page with "<noinclude>{{EventArticle |startyear= 2012 |startyearcirca= |endyear= 2062 |endyearcirca= |continent= Aurea |previous_article= Milosia in the Third Age of Man |following_article= Milosia in the Fourth Age of Man |main_article= Milosia }}</noinclude><includeonly>{{Article_Reference |article= Milosia in the Dark Times }}</includeonly> The long rise of Milosia ended in catastrophe born at the heart of the Empire. When the Heretic Emperor Lucius of House Zetar..."

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The long rise of Milosia ended in catastrophe born at the heart of the Empire. When the Heretic Emperor [[Lucasa|Lucius]] of [[House Zetar]] seized the throne and bore the imperial seat away to the distant [[Sapphire City]] in {{ICYear|1252}}, the old order began to fail; his death the year after opened the [[Fourth Succession War]] and behind that conflict came the [[Crimson Plague]]. It struck Milosia hardest where the people were thickest, in the crowded lanes of Calvenna and the coastal towns, carried (men said then and say still) in [[Aescalapea|Aescalapean]] hulls. The communes did as the cities of a later, warier age would do: they shut their gates, set watch on the roads, turned plague-ships from the harbor to die at anchor, and walled the sick within their houses. Some among them fell to flagellant processions and to the hunting of scapegoats, and more than one Aescalapean factor was murdered on a Calvennan wharf; others, the magistrates and the monks of [[Spelora]] chief among them, kept order and tended the dying as best they could. When the dying was done a third of the realm lay in the ground.

Worse than the plague was the silence that came with it, for in those years the old gods withdrew, and the imperial temples that had answered prayer for a thousand years fell still. The Recession of the Old Gods broke the heart of the Ecclesia; its priests prayed into emptiness, and the people, abandoned, looked elsewhere for comfort. They found it in the old faith of the hills. Out of the Mabean Marches, the wild upland now divided between [[Mabagne]] and Donnagh Saoristat, came the druid known as [[Brannoc the Guide]], who led a company of the Tuatha's servants over the hills and into Milosia to succor a people the imperial gods seemed to have forsaken. The druids tended the plague-stricken, blessed the fields, and kept the rites of grove and spring that the Sabamelii had never wholly forgotten, and in the uplands they won a devotion that has never since been undone. When at last the gods returned, the priests came back to find the druids settled in the hearts of the hill-folk, and the quiet war between temple and grove that troubles the realm to this day had begun.

Through all of it, the plague and the silence and the long anarchy of the Dark Times, the Sixth Legion did not break. With no Emperor to recall it and no orders to obey, it went on garrisoning the cities, holding the passes, and governing in the name of a master who would never return, the one unbroken thread of authority from the imperial age into the broken present. That the Prefecture exists at all is the Legion's doing.
<noinclude>[[Category:Milosia]]</noinclude>

Milosia in the Dark Times - Revision history