«I’m glad you decided to come,» Zach told him as he led them towards the dining hall, where the party was apparently supposed to take place. «Considering how you behaved towards me lately, I half-expected you to ignore your promise to come and stay in your room.»
«I don’t know what you’re talking about,» Zorian said curtly. For one thing, Zach hadn’t even bothered him all that much in this particular restart. Was the other time traveler trying to bait him into unmasking himself or had he simply spent so much time in this time loop that he was having trouble sorting events according to which time loop they happened in?
«Uh, what’s going on here?» Taiven asked, looking between them uncertainly. «Is there something I should know or…»
Zach glanced towards her before turning towards Zorian and giving him a thumbs up. «New girl, huh? Man, you have a new one every time I see you. I wouldn’t have pegged you as that kind of guy.»
«What?» asked Zorian and Taiven simultaneously.
Zorian was honestly baffled for a moment, but then realized what Zach was mixing up his restarts again. Akoja, Ibery and Taiven: Zach had seen him with all three of them in various restarts. But that… that was totally different! None of them were even interested in him!
«Zorian is a man-whore?» Taiven asked in a worryingly calm voice.
«I am not!» Zorian denied hotly before focusing his anger at an amused-looking Zach. «And you! Stop spreading stupid rumors about me! I know for a fact you’ve never seen me with a girl until this evening! And you wonder why I’ve been avoiding you this whole month…»
Zach winced. «Sorry, sorry, I was just messing with you. Don’t worry, I’m sure your girlfriend won’t leave you over a couple of stupid remarks by yours truly. Or if she does, she was never worth bothering with in the first place.»
«Oh really?» Taiven said. «You don’t think he’d be devastated to lose a girlfriend as powerful, smart and sexy as—»
«Taiven, don’t you start too,» sighed Zorian. «Zach, she’s not my girlfriend. She’s just a friend.»
«Who happens to be female,» Zach said, wiggling his eyebrows.
«Yes,» Zorian said, gnashing his teeth in irritation.
«Ah well, at least you already have a girl to dance with for the evening,» said Zach lightly.
Zorian kind of doubted that. Taiven was a very attractive girl, with a nice athletic figure and the face of an angel, and she liked men who were similarly gifted in the appearance department. Chances were high that Taiven would find someone else to dance with once they hit the crowd. Zach maybe, if the way she was checking out his backside was any indication.
«You know, this place is pretty empty,» Taiven whispered to Zorian as they walked. «I know he’s the last of his House and all, but I can’t even see any servants milling around the place.»
«Most of the servants were dismissed from service by my guardian while I was still a small child,» Zach said. It did not surprise Zorian that he’d heard her — Taiven was very poor at whispering. «Since my parents died while I was still a baby, he had free reign to do what he felt was necessary to keep House Noveda standing until I was old enough to take over. As part of that, most of the maintenance staff and other contractors were found to be unnecessary and fired.»
«And you don’t agree with his actions?» Zorian guessed. He could definitely detect an undercurrent of hostility when Zach talked about his guardian, which fit in with the fact that he regularly brutalized the man at the beginning of a lot of restarts.
Zach gave him a curious look before sighing.
«Let’s just say he and I have our disagreements and leave it at that,» Zach said.
«You know, I never did find out what happened to your family,» Taiven said. «How come you ended up being the last of your House?»
Zorian punched Taiven in the shoulder for asking such a question of their host, and punctuated it with a firm glare when she shot him a scandalized look. He wasn’t sure what she was scandalized about, though — did she really not realize how inappropriate her question was, or was she just surprised it was him hitting her for once instead of the usual Taiven-on-Zorian violence?
«Oh leave her alone, she’s just being upfront about her curiosity,» said Zach. Somehow he knew what had transpired, even though he had his back turned to them when it happened. «I kind of like her attitude, to be honest.»
«Figures,» Zorian grunted. Now that he thought about it, Taiven and Zach both had the same devil-may-care attitude about things, so maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to have them meet each other…
And with that, Zach launched into a protracted explanation of the Noveda House’s downfall… most of which Zorian completely ignored in favor of studying various paintings and portraits along the way. Truth be told, Zorian had already tracked down all information about Zach and House Noveda that he could get his hands on, so very little of what Zach was saying was new to him.
While tragic, Zach’s story was by no means unique, and could be boiled down to two main causes: Splinter Wars and the Weeping.
The Old Alliance was a complicated construct, a patchwork empire made out of a multitude of bickering, semi-independent states that only sometimes listened to orders coming from Eldemar, but for all its faults it was quite successful at suppressing outright warfare between its member states. Armed conflict was rare and highly limited in scale, especially since the Alliance had no major outside enemies to defend against. Thus, when the Old Alliance shattered and its component states started mobilizing their forces for war, it was the first time in nearly a century that actual war would be waged in the region. And it would be a bucket of cold water straight into the face of every battlemage in Altazia, for it would be the first time ever that firearms were used in warfare on a mass scale.
Firearms were known to Altazia for centuries at this point, but they were not held in very high regard by the generals and decision makers of Eldemar and other powerful countries. Initial attempts to make use of them had shown them to be unwieldy and almost as dangerous to the user as they were to the target. Artillery mages were a lot more mobile and effective than any cannon, and the less said about hand-held firearms the better. Still, enough people remained interested in them that the technology never died and gradually improved as time went by. However, even after naval powers started arming their ships with cannons, even when a couple of mercenary groups began using rifles successfully, handheld firearms were still ultimately seen as a dead end. There was nothing that riflemen could do that a properly trained archer couldn’t do better, and bows and arrows were a lot easier to enhance with magic than rifles and their ammunition. The one advantage rifles had over alternatives was that they required almost no training before they could be used effectively, and countries of the Old Alliance had no use for barely trained conscripts.
Until the Splinter Wars, that is. With the dissolution of the Old Alliance, every state suddenly scrambled to arm itself for the coming conflict, and having a passable army immediately was more important than having a proper one a decade from now. Smaller countries, inherently unable to compete with the likes of Eldemar when it came to magical might, invested particularly heavily into firearms as an alternative to combat magic. Eldemar, being one of the few countries with a fully functional traditional army, felt no need to play around with these ‘commoners’ toys’.
No one really expected firearms to be as devastatingly effective as they ended up being. Even the countries that made heavy use of them expected them to do little except stall the advance of classical armies and perhaps motivate them to look elsewhere for easier prey. Instead, massed rifleman armies absolutely savaged traditional ones, catching established powers completely off-guard. Instead of larger powers gobbling up every minor power and city-state around them and then duking it out among themselves (the outcome everyone had been expecting), the larger powers ended up weakening themselves instead, often splintering into their component parts as their internal enemies smelled weakness. Although nations eventually adapted their forces and battle doctrines to firearms technology, the damage had been done, and every subsequent Splinter War only made Altazia’s political fragmentation worse.