Vaer'yinda

Vaer'yinda was the second-eldest of Emperor Vaer'karesh's twenty-nine children and the one who would prove most worthy of succession. Her elder brother, the firstborn, held no interest in rule or politics; his ambitions pointed outward, toward war and the conquest of lands beyond Geba's borders. Most of her sisters settled into roles as regional officials across the home continent. Her younger brother devoted himself to diplomacy and trade, spending the most time at their father's side, consumed by the goal of establishing relations with the eastern continent of Thazvaar.

It was this younger brother who first raised the question that would define Vaer'yinda's legacy: why focus on foreign nations when they had not fully conquered their own continent? The empire was united in name, but vast stretches of wild land remained untamed. Citizens disappeared en masse daily in the eastern reaches. The problem was being ignored.

Vaer'yinda recognized what others did not. Conquering the eastern wilds would bring the empire geographically closer to Thazvaar, with only ocean separating the two continents. This proximity would make her brother's dream of successful eastern relations far more achievable. She took up the cause herself.

The early expeditions failed. Each return brought fewer soldiers, no established relays, and no stable footholds. Disease claimed what the wildlife did not. The eastern wilds resisted every conventional approach to expansion.

Vaer'yinda abandoned convention entirely. She ordered the complete purging of the eastern wilds. The native flora and fauna were eradicated systematically, including species that existed nowhere else on Geba. She reasoned that nothing in those lands provided value beyond what the rest of the continent already offered. The wilderness that had swallowed expeditions whole was reduced to scorched earth.

With the land silent, relay establishment succeeded. Vaer'yinda sent word to her father. Vaer'karesh appeared personally, a rare act for the aging emperor. Vaer'yinda presented the conquered, barren land as a gift to him, cementing her place in Geban history through the willingness to do what no one else would consider.

Upon her father's death from old age, Vaer'yinda ascended as the first Empress of the Geban Empire, ruling from the ground she had stripped of life.

Her first act as Empress was to give the Empire a permanent military structure, which her father had never formalized. She instated the Frost Sentinels and the Emperor's Wrath as the first two formalized units of the Empire, raised in honor of her father and for the future glory of the empire he had made. The Sentinels were drawn from the Ngorrhali warriors who had fought beside her brother Vaer'gidon and had been named in the field during the Ngorrhali civil war. The Wrath was assembled from the strongest and fastest natural-born warriors available to the Empire and reserved for territories where diplomatic resolution had been ruled out. Every elite formation raised in later eras was built on the pattern the two of them established, and Frost Sentinel instructors have been embedded in Wrath training facilities since the day both were instated.

When Vaer'gidon and War Chief Tharyn'Bregun died together against Ukhaal Walkers during their bonding trials, Vaer'yinda ordered a statue of the two of them raised at the entrance of the Sentinel district in her capital. It stands there still.

The purged eastern lands became the Imperial capital. In later eras, that same territory would host the busiest mega-relay hub on the planet, the center of imperial trade, transportation, and entertainment. The species she erased are remembered only in fragmented early records. The capital she built endures, and so do the two formations she raised.