The Holdings Year 563

Nessantico City Year 563

Prelude: Nessantico

If a city can have a gender, Nessantico was female…

She had experienced the flowering of all her promise and her beauty during the long reign of Kraljica Marguerite. In that magnificent half century, Nessantico’s long childhood and even longer adolescence culminated in mingled elegance and power, unmatched anywhere in the known world. For fifty years, she brooked no peer. For fifty years, she believed that this glorious present would be eternal, that her ascent would-no, must -continue.

Her superiority was ordained. It was destined. It would last forever.

It would not.

Kraljica Marguerite, like all those who ruled within Nessantico’s confines, was human and mortal; Marguerite’s son Justi and then Justi’s son Audric, both of whom inherited the Sun Throne, didn’t possess Marguerite’s gifts. Without Marguerite’s strong guidance, without her guile and her wisdom, Nessantico’s flowering was sadly short-lived. The blossom of Marguerite’s promise withered and died in far less time than it had taken it to bloom.

Worse, rivals rose to challenge Nessantico. Firenzcia betrayed her: Firenzcia, the brother city who had always envied her; Firenzcia, who had always been her companion, her strength, her shield, and her sword. Firenzcia left her to form its own empire.

And from the unknown west strode a new, harsher challenge: an alien, unguessed empire as strong as Nessantico herself. Stronger, perhaps; for the Tehuantin-as they were called-not only ripped away Nessantico’s hold on their shores, but sent an army over the sea to plunder and rape and destroy the cities of the Holdings and to shatter the walls of Nessantico herself.

The assault left Nessantico shaken and afraid. She was stained by the soot of magical fire and twice trampled by the boots of foreign soldiers: first the Tehuantin, then the Firenzcians. The architectural beauty of her buildings morphed into toppled columns, broken domes, and roofless husks. The A’Sele was clogged with bodies and refuse.