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The Horseless Nomads of the Chasm

Their war is unsung, their nation fully unknown. And yet, they fit in to the story of one of the most unspeakable locations in all of Battal. They are the Horseless Nomads of the Chasm. (Also the title of the story in which they feature, in Book 13 and a Half.)

While their nomadic nation is unnamed, their battle, the Million Year War, is well-known, if only for its hilarious futility and its ending in the creation of an unspeakable scar on the face of Battal. It started, aptly enough, over a conflict involving horses. Or rather, a lack of horses.

The Horseless Nomads of the Chasm followed a religion known as Fgsfds (pronounced fahquads). One of its most vital tenants is that of Horsemanshipry, the idea that the blessed people must make their way to the holy lands via the horse, most sacred of the "filthy hooved monsters". There is a laundry list of mild-to-servere emotional disorders expressed within Fgsfds. Anyhow, the gist of it is, the Horseless Nomads need horses to do their 'do, and they happened to come from a nation referred to only as The Place What Contains Many Things, But Notably, Not Horses.

Thus did the Horseless Nomads march out and kick some ass.

Or rather, that was the mission statement; the opposing nation, We Got Horses, You Wanna Fight About It?, had horses, and thus cavalry, and thus big, nasty, calvary-mounted weapons. The only advantage they had over their opposition was in the realm of Sorcery, for they packed so many sorcerers they scarce knew what to do with them. Thus did it go, in a series of hot hot sorcerer-on-calvary action, for a thousand years. The combat was somewhat poorly planned on both sides, though, as the combat went down in a narrow cavern (really, more of a chasm) where cavalry went relentlessly forward and sorcerous attacks blasted friend and foe alike. Needless to say, the dead piled up and fast.

Eventually, the Horseless Nomads found another thing they were better at than the We Got Horses nation--namely, full-blown Elemenstation, and quickly mastered a series of gears revolving around the creation and control of hate spirits. Their advantage was held for all of two weeks before the other side learned how to create hate spirits as well, especially the king, who found himself good at doing so. Hate spirits filled the skies, earth, under the abortive rivers within the chasm... really, if it could be filled with things, it was stuffed to the gills with hate spirits. Eventually the hate reached critical mass, creating an emotion-spirit implosion which, in turn, birthed the Chasm of Eternal Sorrow. Both sides were wiped out in the resulting garish explosion. The last-known words of the king, moments before being consumed in the explosion, were, "How did I get to such an unspeakable position with lulz, only lulz, as my guide?" These haunting final words began dual traditions of blaming horrible events on a want for schadenfreude and paraphrasing the man whose final words somehow survived even when everybody within a 50-mile radius of him did not.

Much of the story is relayed in Evolution of Eternal Sorrow.