The Unification of Riedra Under the Inspired

Political event

The Inspired rise to power through politics and careful planning.

The truth behind the founding of Riedra was far from the benevolent fairy tale of a new renaissance of peace and stability brought forth from a period of terrible conflict that the Inspired presented to their followers. Following the severing of all planar connections between Dal Quor and Eberron at the end of the Quori-Giant War, the race of quori who had launched that first invasion of the world were wiped out by the turn of Dal Quor’s collective guiding spirit, the Quor Tarai. The Quor Tarai was transformed into il-Lashtavar, the Dreaming Dark, a malignant collective consciousness that spawned a new race of malevolent quori who were as determined as their predecessors to prevent their race from becoming extinct when the Quor Tarai turned once more. To this end, they decided that if they could control the dreams of every inhabitant of Eberron, they could prevent il-Lashtavar from ever turning. The quori’s leaders, the members of their kalaraq caste, decided that they would take control of Eberron one continent at a time, beginning with the human homeland of Sarlona. Sarlona was chosen because the dimensional fabric of the world was unusually weak across its surface and made communication between Eberron and Dal Quor through the Dreamspace easier there.   Since they could no longer physically enter the world, over the centuries the quori used their psionic gifts to breed a race of humans known as the Chosen who possessed the perfect set of genetic and psychic characteristics to serve as human hosts whose minds could be possessed by individual quori, in effect allowing the inhabitants of the Plane of Dreams to operate physically on Eberron, once more. When the Chosen were possessed, they became known as the Inspired, and they began to unite all the kingdoms of Sarlona, ravaged and exhausted by the quori-instigated Sundering, into the utopian empire of Riedra. The Riedrans of every race were taught to believe in the Path of Inspiration, an artificial religion that presented the Inspired as divinely-appointed guardians and rulers over a racially caste-based society in which one’s future place in society after reincarnation was determined by absolute acceptance of one’s place in the present. Riedra became a land of perfect order and harmony rigorously enforced every night by psionic broadcasts from massive, psychically active silver monoliths known as the hanbalani which were erected across the breadth of Sarlona and were actually intended to both realign Dal Quor with the world so that the quori could physically enter it and to maintain the absolute symmetry of the mortal races’ dreams so that the Dreaming Dark could never be overthrown like its predecessors among the Quor Tarai.   Following the establishment of the Inspired’s rule, the Riedrans acted collectively rather than as individuals. Their new society knew no poverty, crime, greed or any of the other imperfections found in the other human cultures across Eberron, and the borders of the empire were closed so that foreigners from Khorvaire or anywhere else from outside Riedra could not interact with the nation’s people save at two Riedran port cities on the east and west coasts of Sarlona, Dar Ulatesh and Dar Jin, respectively. Unfortunately, the Riedrans also enjoyed no freedom. They were nothing more than the human pawns of their Inspired lords, who actively sought to keep the Riedran population perfectly controlled and mentally anesthetized to decrease the chances of the Dreaming Dark’s rule of Dal Quor being overturned.   Over the course of the next thousand years, the Inspired tightened their grip on the people of Riedra, slowly expunging the remaining traces of the old Sarlonan cultures. The Inspired moved slowly, making changes with each generation until no one alive remembered a time when life was any different. Through psychology, indoctrination, and the control of dreams, the quori shaped a nation of slaves whose people were grateful for their chains, believing that the Inspired were their only shield against the horrors of the past and the outside world. During this time, several major events helped shape modern Sarlona.   The first of these was the Syrkarn Migration: In one of the opening strokes of the Sundering, the kingdom of Khunan attempted to annex its neighbor Lamecha, ostensibly for its southern ports that stayed largely free of Rhiavhaarian piracy. Mae Khree, Sunyagir, and Lamecha allied against Khunan. As a result, a devastating period of arcane conflict known as the Magewars ensued. When it was done, the great kingdom of Khunan lay broken. In the aftermath, its survivors fled for the three victorious states or the nations beyond. Over the course of decades, tribes of ogres, half-giants, and worse crossed the Andnemun Desert, eager to occupy the ruins of this once-great land. In their midst, however, new creatures arose that had never before been seen on Sarlonan soil—the yuan-ti. More cunning than the ogres and half-giants, they quickly established dominance over the remnants of Khunan.   Fragments of lost lore collected by Adar’s Keepers of the Word suggest that the sages of Old Sarlona believed the yuan-ti to be magical mutants, descendants of the Khunani transformed into serpentlike aberrations that quickly rechristened their new kingdom “Syrkarn.” This was partially true, as the yuan-ti were actually humans who had once been the ancient servants of the couatls of Sarlona but had been corrupted, unlike their shulassakar counterparts. When the Inspired arrived on Sarlona, the whispered alliances they forged among the warring human states were quickly turned against the yuan-ti. Syrkarn was invaded, and the yuan-ti were hunted to the point of extinction. However, even in the aftermath of victory, the human populations of Lamecha, Sunyagir, and Mae Khree were suddenly ordered out of their ancestral lands for resettlement elsewhere.   In the Riedran year 90 Unity (-212 YK), thousands of people were moved from Syrkarn and resettled in Khalesh, Dor Maleer, and Corvagura. To this day, no official rationale for the exodus has been given by the Inspired. However, those who have attempted to piece together and connect the oral histories of the yuan-ti with the vague lore of the Age of Demons have suggested that in the course of eliminating the threat of the intelligent and powerfully psychic yuan-ti of Syrkarn, the Inspired discovered a dark power behind the serpentfolk’s creation. A fiendish Overlord was trapped