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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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They had secretly contacted each other through desperate, night riding messengers, agreeing to a parley. For the first time in generations, no weapons were drawn in the meeting tent, though every hand rested tightly upon a hilt.
"We are ghosts walking in the snow," a senior Xiongnu elder rasped, his voice sounding like two stones grinding together. He looked around the circle, his eyes reflecting the dying embers of the fire pit in the center of the tent. "My sons are dead. Our horses are deaf from the thunder tubes of the southerners. If we ride against them alone, we will be erased from the world. We will not even be a memory."
A Xianbei warlord, missing an eye from a piece of Han shrapnel, spat into the fire. "It burns my tongue to say it, but the old wolf speaks the truth. The Emperor of the Han is not a man. He is a demon who commands fire and iron. Our blood feud... our wars for the grazing lands... it all means nothing if their big banners fly over the frozen plains."
The Wuhuan leader nodded slowly, rubbing his frostbitten hands together. "We must put up a desperate, unified front against the Han invaders. We must combine every rider, every arrow, every spear we have left. We must strike as one horde, or we will die as three."
The agreement was struck in the dark, forged not in brotherhood, but in the freezing crucible of absolute, shared terror. The three great tribes, historical enemies who had spent centuries slaughtering each other for supremacy, bound themselves together under a fragile, desperate pact of mutual survival.
However, even as they finalized the alliance, the grim reality of the mathematics set in. The warlords were not foolish. They had seen the endless sea of black iron pouring through the Great Wall. They had seen the logistical brilliance of the Han supply lines.
Knowing that even their combined remaining strength might not be enough to stop Lie Fan's staggering one million soldiers and the devastating, earth shattering cannons that could wipe out a cavalry charge before it even began, they knew they needed outside intervention. They needed numbers, and they needed them immediately.
They also frantically sent out envoys to invite the other major outer tribes, specifically targeting the powerful, insular factions that resided on the far peripheries of the known world, the Fuyu to the far northeast, and the Yuezhi to the distant west.
The Fuyu were a proud, agrarian nomadic society known for their incredibly sturdy infantry and heavily armored cavalry, shielded by the deep forests and freezing rivers of their domain.
The Yuezhi, remnants of a once massive empire that had been pushed westward centuries ago, possessed immense wealth and a terrifying array of heavily armored shock troops and horse archers. Historically, these outer tribes had kept to themselves, avoiding the chaotic politics of the central steppes, perfectly content to let the Xiongnu and Xianbei act as a buffer between them and the Han Dynasty.
But the buffer had just been violently shattered.
The finest, fastest, and most desperate riders of the newly unified horde were selected for the mission. They were given the best remaining horses, stripped of all unnecessary armor to maximize their speed, and sent out into the howling blizzards under the cover of darkness.
They rode for days, pushing their mounts to the absolute breaking point, their lips cracking and bleeding in the sub zero temperatures. They rode past frozen rivers and through treacherous mountain passes, driven by the terrifying knowledge that the survival of their entire race rested in their saddlebags.
When the envoys finally arrived at the heavily fortified, snow covered encampments of the Fuyu kings and the Yuezhi chieftains, they did not approach with the usual arrogant swagger of the central steppe lords.
They stumbled into the foreign courts, exhausted, frostbitten, and hollow eyed, falling to their knees before the thrones of the outer tribes.
They pleaded with them to join forces. They begged the Fuyu and the Yuezhi to mobilize every single warrior they possessed, to leave their safe borders, and to ride back to the central steppes to face the wildly expansive Han people together.
The kings of the Fuyu and the chieftains of the Yuezhi listened to the frantic pleas from their thrones, initially skeptical. Why should they bleed their own people to save the Xiongnu and the Xianbei, tribes that had often raided their own borders in the past? Why involve themselves in a war that belonged to the south?
But the envoys did not just bring pleas for help, they carried a grim, undeniable warning that froze the blood in the veins of the outer kings.
"You think you are safe because of the distance," a Xiongnu envoy rasped, standing before the King of Fuyu, his voice trembling with a terror that transcended exhaustion. "You think the deep snows and the mountains will protect you from the Han Emperor. We thought the same of the Great Wall and the vast plains. We were wrong."
The envoy stepped forward, his eyes wide and haunted, conveying the absolute, terrifying truth of what he had witnessed on the battlefield.
"The Hengyuan Dynasty does not fight for border security," the envoy warned, his voice echoing in the silent, torch lit hall. "They fight for total conquest. Their Emperor is a demon who commands iron tubes that shatter the earth. Their soldiers are as numerous as the blades of grass in spring, and they do not tire. They have captured our forts. They are building roads of iron over the permafrost to feed their armies."
The envoy looked around the hall, locking eyes with the skeptical generals of the Fuyu.
"If the Fuyu and Yuezhi don't help us stop this invasion now, while we still have enough warriors to form a vanguard," the envoy declared, delivering the ultimate, apocalyptic ultimatum, "then when we are all dead in the snow, the Black Dragon will not stop. He will not turn his armies around and go home. His eyes will look to your forests, and to your deserts."
The silence in the foreign courts was deafening as the terrifying logic of the warning set in.
"If you do not ride with us today," the envoy concluded, falling back to his knees, his strength finally failing him, "you will undoubtedly be the next to be targeted. You will be isolated, you will be outnumbered, and you will be wiped out by the Hengyuan Dynasty. Join us, or prepare your own graves."
The seeds of a massive, continent spanning coalition had been planted in the frozen earth. The Fuyu and the Yuezhi leaders sat upon their thrones, looking at the broken, terrified messengers of the once proud central steppes.
They realized that the world they had known for centuries was ending, and the fires of Lie Fan's ambition were threatening to consume them all. The entire northern hemisphere was bracing for a war of unprecedented, apocalyptic scale, a desperate, final stand against the invincible dragon of the south.
After receiving the desperate request, and listening to the horrifying, first-hand information detailing the devastating attack from the battered remnants of the three central steppes tribes, the isolated, powerful outer tribes of Fuyu and Yuezhi immediately began to hold their own urgent, highly secretive internal meetings to discuss about this incredibly grave matter.
For generations, they had watched the Xiongnu and Xianbei rise and fall, viewing them as a useful, violent shield that kept the ambitions of the Han Emperors firmly focused on the central plains. But now, the messengers kneeling on their frozen floors were telling them the shield had not just been broken, it had been entirely pulverized by weapons that sounded like the wrath of the gods.
Inside the massive, heavy timber longhouses of the Fuyu in the far northeast, and within the opulent, heavily guarded felt yurts of the Yuezhi in the distant west, the atmosphere was thick with tension and the smell of burning pine.
The tribal kings and the grand chieftains called forth every single clan elder, every battle-scarred warlord, and every wise shaman they possessed. They needed to make a decision that would dictate the survival of their bloodlines.
Of course, forging a consensus among a society of fiercely independent warlords was never a simple matter. They immediately began to have their own fierce, highly volatile internal debate on whether to join this massive, continent spanning war or not. The councils were deeply, violently fractured right down the middle.
The conservative faction of elders and seasoned chieftains who didn't want to join the desperate alliance strongly felt that this simply wasn't their fight.
"The Xiongnu arrogance has finally caught up with them," a gray bearded Fuyu elder argued, his voice echoing in the smoky longhouse. He pounded his heavy wooden staff against the floorboards. "Why should we shed the blood of our sons to save a people who would steal our horses if the winter was hard enough? We are protected by the deep forests and the freezing rivers! The Han infantry cannot march through our woods, and their heavy wagons will sink in our marshes."
In the west, a wealthy Yuezhi merchant lord echoed a similar, pragmatic sentiment. "We have traded peacefully on the periphery for decades. Getting involved in a massive, foreign war that does not concern our grazing lands would only unnecessarily invite the terrifying wrath of the Han people to attack our own lands. Let the central tribes burn. We will negotiate with this new Hengyuan Emperor when he reaches our borders."
On the other hand, the aggressive, martial side of the councils vigorously supported the decision to join the alliance. These were the younger warlords, the ambitious cavalry commanders who listened to the terrified accounts of the envoys and recognized the sheer, apocalyptic reality of the threat. They felt that what the central tribes had said in their desperate warning was absolutely correct.
"You speak of negotiations with a demon who uses fire that falls from the sky?" a young Fuyu warlord shouted, slamming his fist onto the council table. "The envoys said the Han Emperor is not raiding, he is building stone forts on the permafrost! He is laying roads of iron! You cannot negotiate with a storm!"
A heavily armored Yuezhi general stood up, his hand resting tightly on the hilt of his curved sword, glaring at the conservative merchants. "If we sit here and do nothing while the Xiongnu, the Xianbei, and the Wuhuan are butchered in the snow, we are simply waiting for our turn to be slaughtered. If they fall, the Han will control the entire central steppe. We will be surrounded. If we don't join now and face the Han people together with a united, massive front, we would inevitably be the next target once the central steppes are entirely conquered. We must ride while we still have allies to ride with!"
So, the debate was incredibly long, exhausting, and highly heated. The arguments raged late into the freezing nights, voices growing hoarse from screaming over the roaring hearth fires.
In a society where martial strength often dictated political power, words eventually failed. The tension grew so thick that a couple of minor, bloody physical fights even broke out among the passionate tribal leaders. Daggers were drawn, blood was spilled on the carpets of the council tents, and guards had to physically drag screaming warlords away from each other before a civil war could erupt within their own borders.
And in the end, despite the screaming and the spilled blood, they reached a highly tense, paralyzed impasse. The kings and the high chieftains, terrified of making the wrong choice that could lead to the extinction of their people, were unable to make a final, unified decision just yet. They ordered the envoys to wait, leaving the fate of the northern hemisphere hanging by a frozen, fraying thread.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, completely removed from the panicked, screaming debates of the outer tribes, the atmosphere back on the main camp of the Hengyuan Central Command Army was one of terrifying, mechanical efficiency.
The colossal encampment, situated securely within the captured, heavily reinforced Xianbei fortifications, operated like a massive, well-oiled machine of war. The Black Dragon Cannons were being swabbed and reloaded, the heavy cataphracts were resting their massive warhorses, and the logistical trains from the newly laid wagonways were funneling endless streams of hot grain, salt, and black powder into the forward armories.
In the center of this martial leviathan sat the heavily guarded command tent of Lie Fan.
The heavy canvas flaps were pulled back by the Yellow Ghost Bodyguards, and a lone figure dressed in the unassuming, dark robes of a senior scribe entered the tent. It was an elite captain of the Oriole Agents. He approached the massive tactical map table, bowed deeply, and delivered their recently gathered, hyper classified intelligence.
Lie Fan, sitting at the head of the table, broke the black wax seal and successfully received the highly detailed reports of the desperate alliance movement currently being done by the battered remnants of the Xianbei, Xiongnu, and Wuhuan.
The intelligence was flawless. The Oriole agents, still deeply embedded as translators, slaves, and wandering merchants within the fleeing nomadic camps, had intercepted the frantic dispatches.
They had tracked the desperate envoys riding out into the blizzards toward the Fuyu and the Yuezhi, and they had relayed the exact nature of the desperate, final stand coalition the nomads were attempting to build.
Lie Fan read the reports silently, his dark eyes scanning the ciphered text.
Standing around the table, awaiting their Emperor's reaction to this potentially disastrous news, were his top advisors, Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun. They watched him closely.
By all conventional military logic, discovering that the enemy was attempting to unify and drastically expand their numbers by inviting fresh, unbloodied foreign armies into the fray should have been cause for immediate, aggressive concern. The standard tactical response would be to launch a rapid, forced march attack to crush the remnants before the Fuyu or Yuezhi could ever arrive to reinforce them.
Instead, reading the reports, Lie Fan just smiled.
It was a cold, deeply calculating, and incredibly terrifying smile. It was the smile of a predator watching its prey willingly walk into a cage.
Lie Fan set the silk scroll down onto the tactical map, right over the territories belonging to the Fuyu and the Yuezhi. He looked up at his brilliant council.c"It seems the dying wolves have finally learned how to howl together," Lie Fan said, his voice entirely calm, devoid of any anxiety. He looked at Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun, and delivered a tactical command that completely contradicted the brutal momentum of their invasion.
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Name: Lie Fan
Title: Founding Emperor Of Hengyuan Dynasty
Age: 36 (203 AD)
Level: 16
Next Level: 462,000
Renown: 2325
Cultivation: Yin Yang Separation (level 11)
SP: 1,121,700
ATTRIBUTE POINTS
STR: 1,010 (+20)
VIT: 659 (+20)
AGI: 653 (+10)
INT: 691
CHR: 98
WIS: 569
WILL: 436
ATR Points: 0