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The Battle of Broken Suns
In the Celestian histories, Sir Alymer de Mericorde is still remembered as one of the Bright Lady's greatest champions in Meditra. Three hundred years ago, Sir Alymer crusaded throughout Delverness, Calantyr, and the northern Twelve Kingdoms on behalf of his faith. He led campaigns against the demons of Pafund Mal and the reavers of Ang'arta, and alone he drove the great white dragon Caellorrath Frostlash back from her depredations on Northmarch. When age and weariness finally forced the great knight to lay down his sword, the king of Langmyr offered him the dukedom of Ravens' River, as the last duke had died childless. Sir Alymer gratefully accepted, and the old knight served out his twilight years with the same wisdom and courage that he had shown all his life.
Sir Alymer's sons strove to preserve his ideals when they came of age to rule. House Mericorde adopted a variant of the Celestian sunburst as its heraldic symbol: a double golden ring with four long, straight rays at its compass points and four shorter, wavy rays connecting the two circles in between. Its men-at-arms wore boots with the Mericorde sun as their spurs, and its knight wore the house sun blazed on their shields.
By the time the sons of Sir Alymer's grandsons held the Sunring Throne, however, the dukes of House Mericorde had fallen far from their ancestor's example. They no longer served humbly as squires at the Dome of the Sun, and they frequently "forgot" to pay their full tithe to the temple. Langmyrne loyalists point out that the Dome of the Sun was dominated by Oakharne priests during this time, and House Mericorde's estrangement from the Celestian faith might as easily have been attributed to the temple politics of that period. It is true that Langmyrne acolytes in general, and scions of noble houses in particular, were poorly received at the Dome of the Sun in these years, but the Oakharne maintain that the Mericorde dukes were too proud for reason or reconciliation regardless. For example, the fifth Duke of Ravens' River replaced the simple, lightly-gilt wooden chair of his great-grandfather with a Sunring Throne plated in solid gold -- an extravagance that Sir Alymer would never have allowed.
Regardless of whether one side was more at fault than the other, and which one deserved the blame if either, the tension between House Mericorde and the Oakharne-dominated Dome of the Sun reached a breaking point at the coronation of Perrenot the Bloody-Crowned, sixth and last Duke of Ravens' River. Rather than grit his teeth and invite the high priest from the Dome of the Sun to preside over his coronation, Duke Perrenot asked the castle chaplain -- a political appointee who spent more time in the alehouse than the chapel -- to perform the ceremony.
While the coronation proceeded smoothly enough, many in the border towns grumbled that Duke Perrenot had been crowned by a puppet-priest because no true Celestian would have anointed such a cruel and unworthy ruler. The border holds of Ravens' River, like many landholdings in the Tangled Kingdoms, had switched sides repeatedly from Langmyr to Oakharn, and Oakharne loyalists were hardly rare in their towns. The iron-fisted Duke Perrenot had never been a popular ruler even among the tried-and-true Langmyrne, and so these rumors gained greater currency than they might have otherwise.
Within two weeks of Duke Perrenot's coronation, a drunk acolyte from the Dome of the Sun was heard loudly denigrating the "puppet crowning" in an alehouse on the Oakharn border. One of the local knight's men-at-arms happened to be drinking in the same tavern, overheard the comment, and took inebriated offense. The resulting brawl left dozens injured and several dead, among them the priest whose grumblings had sparked the whole incident. It also inflamed the rest of the town. Mobs of Langmyrne loyalists took to the streets, torching the homes of suspected Oakharne agents and murdering all they could find. It is said that the mobs demanded that people of questionable loyalty should swear an oath to the Duke and proclaim his legitimacy, and anyone who hesitated was torn apart on the spot.
The Coronation Massacre, as it came to be called, spurred an armed response from Oakharn and the Dome of the Sun -- evidence, depending on whom one asks, of the extent to which the Dome of the Sun was in thrall to political manipulations or to which Duke Perrenot had strayed from Celestian values.
In the Battle of Broken Suns, an armed force of thousands of knights took the field against the Duke of Ravens' River. The army of House Mericorde was swiftly subdued -- rumors of treachery and disillusionment among the Mericorde ranks run rife to this day -- and the victorious Oakharne stripped away all the golden suns of House Mericorde as trophies. The broken spurs and sundered shields were melted down, ostensibly to purify them through the Lady's fiery light and restore their wholeness. The golden Sunring Throne, too, was stripped of its plating and melted as part of war's bounty. The last Duke of House Mericorde was captured and taken in disgrace to the king's castle in Oakharn, where he was publicly denounced for the atrocities that had occurred during his rule and executed like a common criminal in the market square. The king of Oakharn reclaimed Ravens' River as one of his domains and installed Sir Adelvard Tirant as the first of the Tirant dukes to hold it in Oakharn's name.
So ended the Battle of Broken Suns, which to this day remains a poisoned name and a source of resentment on both sides of the Tangled Kingdoms.
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