Watchers of Van'tiri

The immortal sentinels who stand forgotten in their shattered towers, holding a silent vigil that will never end

Like it or not, this isn't a world of heroes. Not anymore - and it hasn't been for a long time.
No matter how much those watchers struggle and rage, they can't fight progress. No one can. Fighting time is a battle no man or god can win.
It was a nice dream - seeing that Watcher square off against The Iron Empire, blade flashing so quick not a single bullet could reach him. Seeing him slice an entire battleship in two from a kilometer out.
But that's all it was. A dream. And just like a dream, it was short lived - even the invincible Watcher's blade faltered eventually. So grow up. Heroes...just aren't real anymore.

— A conversation overheard in an alehouse of The Iron Empire

Summary

According to popular Numiastran myth, the Watchers of Van'tiri are a militant order of heroic warriors who came together in the wake of The Skyfall Calamity as survivors of that wretched apocalypse who swore to wield their unfathomable might to protect the people of the land from the evils that now plagued it. As perhaps the only myth that exists across international borders in some form or fashion, the exact details of the tales of the Watchers of Van'tiri vary wildly depending on where they are told - as the evils they are described as fighting are often changed to fit local cultural notes and touchstones.
What stays constant across all tellings, however, are three things:

• The Watchers were a militant order of such unmatched size and power that their deeds bordered on the absurd, attributed with powers that easily reach into the realm of superhuman such as "cutting each drop of rain in a rainstorm", "splitting mountains asunder with a single slash", and so on. They were each said to have originated from the ancient, utopian land of "Vantiria", which is often described as a perfect society with scientific and magical capabilities bordering on the mythical.


• They each bore unique weapons as proof of their pact to each other, and to their ancient order - these weapons are consistently described as "forged of blackest gemstone" said to be unbreakable and unforgeable by any mortal smith.


• Though their numbers were once great, a great calamity killed many of them and forced the rest into hiding - though not before each remaining Watcher swore an oath to return to save the world in its darkest days.

At its core, the myth of the Watchers of Van'tiri - a title derived from the ancient Vaelis word for Paradise - is one of heroes, through and through; the likes of which the continent of Numiastra has precious few of in the modern day beyond the tall tales spun by the Mythmakers. However, unlike the tales of the Mythmakers, whose stories and tales derive power from more tangible historical fact and gradually are embellished over time, the tales of the Watchers of Van'tiri are fantastical and wondrous - the stuff of children's fables straight out of ancient Ironite myths of swords, dragons, and sorcery: tales of valorous, invincible heroes whose strength is only matched by their bottomless courage in the face of cosmic extinctions and ancient gods bent on destroying all the world holds dear, who wield swords capable of splitting mountains and armor capable of deflecting all the world's evils.
They are stories of the mighty watchers fighting mythical beasts such as dragons and giants - things whose existence now are little more than mythical make-believe, scarcely believed to have existed at all by modern scholars - and saving princesses from the clutches of those very beasts, of saving kingdoms from vengeful gods, and delivering the world from evil...though recently, the myths of the Watchers have begun to turn towards more practical evils in the aftermath of The Iron Empire's Van'tiri Incident...practical evils such as The Iron Empire themselves, and the follies of man in an industrialized world.

Historical Basis

For almost the entire recorded history of Numiastra, the myths of the Watchers of Van'tiri were simply that - myths. They were little more than fables told to children, bedtime stories told for entertainment, and the like - and were in fact codified as one of the first written stories on Numiastra in the wake of The Skyfall Calamity, whose first books describing their deeds were written by an ancient Mythmaker known as "Goreimon the Great" who rather famously claims to have invented the notion of the Watchers wholesale for his first book for the simple idea that they were stories that his young sons quite enjoyed hearing.
As such, for thousands of years the tales of the Watchers have been regarded by many as little more than fables and children's tales - perhaps intriguing and well-written ones, but fables and tales nonetheless, no matter how many hundreds of books and thousands of campfire tales have been told of them, no concrete proof of their existence was ever found; a fact which was easily attributed by many to the creator's words, so many thousands of years ago - that the Watchers were a bedtime tale invented by the author which were written down for the sake of his sons.
Perhaps then, one might understand the sudden grip of childlike fervor which briefly united Numiastra when not only was real and tangible proof found of a warrior which matched the descriptions of the Watchers eerily well, but when one of the watchers themselves was not only discovered by The Iron Empire, but awoken and fought by The Iron Empire in a battle which split the seas and nearly tore entire mountain ranges asunder - sudden and real historical proof that perhaps the myths of the Watchers were much more real than initially believed... For more information on The Van'tiri Incident, see the sidebar of this page.

Spread

Rather uniquely, the myths and tales and adventures of the Watchers of Van'tiri have spread across almost all of central Numiastra to both The Iron Empire and The Vrýkus Throne - though the exact details of what exact kinds of adventures the Watchers get up to in each area are wildly different, in all areas of the central continent one can find written books and spoken tales of the Watchers almost everywhere.

Variations & Mutation

The variations of the tales of the Watchers of Van'tiri are vast beyond reckoning in a way that almost no other myth or tale on the surface of the Planet of Ea itself can likely match - as a tale that has entered the mainsteam media such that all manner of Mythmakers and Authors across the continent have written all manner of stories within the "Shared Universe" of the Watchers of Van'tiri, the number of variations is almost too much to count. The Watchers themselves have been written and spoken of as having a thousand different adventures against a thousand different villains by a thousand different people(either written or spoken), and the themes and moral lessons of these tales are typically tailored to reflect the area in which they take root: the tales of the Watchers in the The Vrýkus Throne paint them as "heroic" Undead Warriors who champion the truth of the Throne across the continent, fighting the "selfish living" who hoard parts of the continent for themselves, while the tales of the Watches in places such as The Iron Empire paint them more as Champions of the People and the Government who sacrifice life and limb to fend off the undead menace for the sake of all.
Part of this willingness on both sides to twist the myths of the Watchers to their own ends likely stems from the nebulous origins of their myths themselves - details the man said to have invented the first tales of the Watchers, Goreimon the Great, are incredibly scarce such that both sides have claimed him to have been one of their own, and thus the true "owners" or "progenitors" of the myths of the Watchers.

Cultural Reception

In both the cultures of the The Iron Empire and The Vrýkus Throne, the myths of the Watchers of Van'tiri are deeply interwoven into the Zeitgeist of their people as myths and fables near and dear to their hearts; tales that speak of good moral values, challenge societal woes, and bring up points against current governments or world issues in a format that is easily disguisable and digestable by all both young and old - making the tales of the Watchers something almost all beings across Numiastra have heard of in some form or fashion, and have likely grown up with at some point or another.

In Literature

The sheer amount of books, tales, poems, heroic epics, and the like written about the Watchers of Van'tiri are nearly mind-boggling with their size and scope - a thousand authors and oral storytellers and Mythmakers have all written stories about the Watchers in hundreds of different scenarios with just as many different moral lessons and societal issues that are challenged.

In Art

In contrast to the sheer amount of literature published, there is altogether little art of the Watchers - though that has begun to change recently in the aftermath of The Van'tiri Incident, as artists of all kinds have taken to depicting the mysterious warrior of the Incident to immortalize them even after what many perceive as their unjust death at the hands of The Iron Empire.

...in the aftermath of the Van'tiri incident, a scan of the Watcher's tower was conducted.
Though carbon dating of the structure proved impossible thanks to the strange qualities of the material,
the interior of the structure was found to be covered in simple carved tally notches on every conceivable surface.
Although calculations into the precise number of these notches are ongoing, conservative estimates place the total number easily above one hundred million -
with the most recent being made the day of the attack. Their purpose remains unclear - any possible ritual significance is being considered.

— Report by The Iron Empire after the Van'tiri incident.

Date of First Recording

922 AF

The Van'tiri Incident

The Watchers of Van'tiri. Ancient heroes of might and magic who had for thousands of years been regarded as one of the most popular and beloved series of fables and stories ever written or put to paper - a veritable juggernaut of media that begun so many thousands of years ago in the mind of one man, Goreimon the Great, who invented the idea of the Watchers wholesale and wrote their first adventures to paper such as "Attack of the Crimson Countess", "Battle against the Burning Sun", and more as simple stories to tell his sons as they grew up before bedtime.
Until, that is, the summer of 1987 AF, on the far-off isle of Naidosawich nearly 200 miles west of the most recent and furthest outpost of The Iron Empire - Iron's Edge - in the heights of the frozen mountains which even now go unnamed...when a simple resource scouting expedition mounted by the Empire to that frozen Mountain range uncovered something incredible - a lone stone tower, partially collapsed and buried in a mountain gorge, with a single petrified statue of an armored warrior entombed within, just out of reach deep within the ruins.
People across the lands of Numiastra were utterly enraptured with the tales of this tower - the scouts who found it returned as heroes, and the world watched with baited breath as just a scant month later, a more well-equipped expedition was dispatched to study the tower in greater detail, all the while rumors were spoken in hushed whispers of "The Watcher's Tower" that they were being sent to investigate. For months, the team worked to excavate the tower - with blasting powder and hundreds of manual workers, the ruins of the tower were cleared with a strange electric fervor, all with the hope of reaching the petrified warrior at its deepest level. Even as rumors of ghosts wracked the expedition, even as the workers grew nervous as accidental deaths began to skyrocket, and even as the foremen disregarded the safety warnings and continued to ruthlessly blast away at the ruins for the sake of expediency - even then, the work pressed on.
What they found at the tower's bottom was only death. The moment the final detonation rocked the tower ruins and the innermost sanctum was revealed, the petrified warrior creaked to life and roared in a language beyond comprehension, a gleaming black diamond blade in his hand as, with a single swing, the warrior cleaved the top 30% of the mountain clean off and eradicated the expedition in an instant. Thirty minutes later, as military reinforcements arrived from Iron's Edge, the warrior proved unstoppable - blade able to move so deftly as to slice a thousand bullets from the air in half a second, the thunderclaps from the supersonic speeds the warrior's blade reached were heard pealing over the entire isle of Naidosawich as the warrior, unmatched in his might, is said to have lifted the entire fortress of Iron's Edge into the air and tossed it into the ocean with his bare hands alone. It was not until Battle Cluster Ultima, a group of a dozen of the Empire's most advanced Warships, caught the warrior unawares walking atop the ocean on a direct line to the Empire's Capital at Lumisterra that the warrior was finally brought down - cleaving through 11 of the 12 Warships in the Battle Cluster with a single Black-Diamond sword-swing each before the withering Thumper-Cannon Salvos finally overwhelmed the Warrior's defenses and brought him crashing down, dead - his body resting atop the ocean's surface, unsinkable.
Though the Iron Empire tried to cover it up, the word got out regardless - a Watcher of Van'tiri had been found. And the Iron Empire had killed it. The body, said to have been taken by the Empire, was never found - though many have journeyed to that forgotten tower in the decades since, hoping to find some clue about that mysterious petrified warrior's true identity...