Second Unhuman War
The Second Unhuman War (1479 - 1485), known to the Scro as the War of Revenge, was a brutal conflict across the Known Spheres between the Scro and the Imperial Elven Navy (IEN). It came about as a direct cosequence of the First Unhuman War, fought four centuries earlier, as the Scro, formed from survivors of that first war, reorganized with the express purpose of dethroning the IEN's hegemony over wildspace and replacing it with their own.
Though the IEN ostensibly "won" the war, it was not a complete victory. The Scro that sued for peace maintain a strong presence across the Known Spheres, and the amount of ships and personnel lost by the IEN during the war will take many centuries to replace. Only time will tell if the lingering effects of the Second Unhuman War will mark the beginning of the IEN's decline or not. In the short term, with lingering, centuries-long grudges unfulfilled, most of the spacefaring community is aware that the Second Unhuman War may merely be laying the groundwork for a third, even more deadly conflict.
The Conflict
Prelude
"And the elves call the war righteous! They slaughtered us and called it justice. They drove us from our homes and called it honorable. They condemned us to a pitiful exile and called it peace. Let us see if elves can handle their own definition of righteousness."The end of the First Unhuman War was disasterous for the enemies of the IEN. The orc, goblionoid, ogre, and kobold fleets that were beaten by the IEN in battle were then subjected to years of pursuit and systematic destruction by the elves' Great Hunt. The IEN's ruthlessness was driven out of fear. During the latter half of the war, the half-orc Admiral Longtooth posed a credible threat to elven dominance, and had he not surrendered, it is very likely that the war could have continued for years more. While Longtooth and his followers were given a world "free from elven interference" on the icy wasteland planet Armistice, which was under an IEN blockade to prevent them from ever leaving, the elves worried that another Longtooth could emerge. Some of the fleeing races returned to their traditional, nomadic way of life, raiding settlements and spelljammers on the edges of the Known Spheres, though wary of drawing elven attention. Others instead fled to join groundling communities, integrating into the tribes and nations of their non-spacefaring cousins. On the destroyed planet Borka in Greyspace, which was shattered by the IEN during the war, groups of orcs, goblinoids, and kobolds chose to make a new home on the ashes and rubble of their old one, bolstered by other refugees that had no where to return to. Divided generally among racial lines, the Borkans rarely fought each other directly, recognizing their shared true enemy in the IEN. As the centuries progressed, the Borkans recovered most of the military power, hidden in the asteroids and rubble that was once their planet, and the debated fiercely with one another about the best method for their revenge, divided between opening with a direct attack on the IEN's headquarters or a complete conquering of Greyspace. Meanwhile, another group of refugees from the first war settled on remote planet on the edges of the Known Spheres, guided by the orc Dukagsh. Dukagsh recognized that the enemies of the IEN could never have won the First Unhuman War, as they were too divided, too undisciplined, too prone to brutality over tacitcal acumen. Desiring vengeance above all else, Dukagsh crowned himself the almighty leader of those that followed up, radically transforming each races' individual cultures into a single, unified society. As a way to represent that fundamental transformation, Dukagsh called his new people the Scro, turning the name of his own race on its head. Though Dukagsh died in the early 12th century, his lessons and leadership survived as he was diefied by his people. For centuries, the Scro slowly expanded from their new homeworld, which they named Dukagsh, acting careful to not draw the attention of the IEN. As the Scro proselytized and expanded, more and more were brought into their midst, including some races, like the bionids, that held their own grievances towards the IEN. The Scro also began heavily recruiting mercenaries to bolster their forces, which still weren't the match of the IEN, and to obscure their own presence. In the years leading up to the Second Unhuman War, the Scro had begun secretly destroying lone elven bases and spelljammers, carefully ensuring each instance appeared to be an accident or the work of raiders. It wasn't until the Battle of Lar in 1479, which destroyed the entire elven settlement of a remote crystal sphere, that the IEN declared an official state of emergency and threatened war against this still unknown threat.-Early sayings of Dukagsh
The Engagement
As the war officially began the IEN, needing intelligence more than anything, began hiring their own swatchs of mercenaries for intelligence gathering espionage missions, needing all the information they could about the capabilities of their new enemies. Meanwhile, the Scro, knowing that it was only a matter of time before they were fully discovered, began launching more and more daring suprise attacks on elven fleets and bases, scoring victory after victory. The most successful of these fleets was the Tarantula Fleet, which completely destroyed all elven presence in two crystal spheres and had conquered an elven world in a third before they were accidentally discovered by the floating city the Rock of Bral. IEN sympathizers and agents on the Rock of Bral passed word back to IEN command, who mobilised a fleet to confront the Scro. Though both the elves and Scro took heavy casualties in the resulting battles, it gave the IEN what they needed more than anything: workable intelligence.
The IEN still had quite a bit to overcome to achieve victory. Scro spelljammers, such as the Mantis, Blade and Battlewagon were constructed explicitly to counter the manuverable but more fragile elven Man-O-Wars, Flitters and Armadas, but the Scro lacked centuries of elven resource stockpiling and often had to make due with mercenaries or more outdated ship models. The Scro were bolstered though by two large and notable additions to their forces. First was the unification of the Scro with the survivors of Borka, whose stockpile of weapons and spelljammers, though inferior to Scro stock, were instrumental in keeping Scro fleets adequately armed. Second was the First Battle of Armistice, where a Scro fleet drove off the elven blockade of the desolate winter planet, allowing the Scro to begin recruiting their long-exiled bretheren. During the Battle of Armistice, there were scattered reports of witchlight marauder tertiaries being used to destroy elven vessels, but this was never confirmed by the Scro or IEN.
Perhaps the greatest elven defeat of the war was in the ruins of Borka in Greyspace. There, the IEN were lured in by a trap set by newly joined Scro. In what would later be called the Borka Manuever, a fleet of 75 Scro-provided Mantis ships ambushed the 69 elven ships of the Greyspace Fleet, which included 24 armadas. The resulting battle was extremely costly, with the IEN losing over half of its fleet and nearly all of its armadas, though the Scro fleet lost all but 15 of their own ships. Nevertheless, the tenacity of the Scro fighters caused the IEN to seriously fear being overcome.
Though initially blessed with early successes, victory became harder and more costly for the Scro over time. The Borka Manuever was a costly loss of hard to replace spelljammers, and the IEN had begun adapting to Scro strategies. Heavy losses in personnel forced the Scro to rely more and more on auxilieries and mercenaries, including orcs, kobolds, and goblinoids that were willing to work for the Scro for money but refused to join them, earning the ire of their more organized cousins.
The Scro Tarantula Fleet, its most successful, spent most of the war pursued by the IEN fleet assembled to destroy it after the Scro were spotted by the Rock of Bral. Over the gnome world of Ironpiece, the Tarantula Fleet suffered its first true loss, when multiple ships, including the fleet's flagship, was destroyed, only taking a single elven Man-O-War in turn. Pursued all the way to Gardenspace in the Rapide Frontier, one of the border regions of the Known Spheres, Tarantula Fleet was ultimately destroyed. However, the fierce fighting also destroyed all IEN ships save for one.
After the devestating loss of Tarantula Fleet, the Scro High Command launched one last effort to regain their footing in the war. While the people of Armistice had originally filled out existing battlions and crews, the Scro began moving a large fleet into Winterspace, where Armistice is located, to create a fleet staffed entirely by the planet's inhabitants. It was a risky plan, as the people of Armistice had been denied spelljammers for centuries due to an elven blockade, but the Scro believed that, with enough guidance from experienced officers, the Armistice Fleet could prove to be a real threat.
Unfortunately for the Scro, their plans were cut short by a massive invasion of Winterspace by the IEN. The Second Battle of Armistice sealed the Scro's ambitions, as the elves destroyed the newly formed fleet before its crew had become comfortable with operating spelljammers. Lacking experienced support, many vessels staffed by experienced Scro were similarly destroyed with the remaining forced to flee.
With no realistic hope of victory, the Scro sued the IEN for peace, and rumors swirled that they were threatening to unleash recently discovered witchlight marauders on elven worlds if the IEN didn't agree. Whether or not the threats were baseless, the IEN agreed to peace talks officially ending the war.
Outcome
What was originally supposed to be a glorious dethroning of the Imperial Elven Navy ended in a harshly felt defeat for the Scro, but it was not a complete loss. The Scro's ability to hold their own against the IEN and inflict on the elves losses unseen in centuries earned the respect, fear, and admiration of spacefaring races across the Known Spheres. Wounded, but not broken, the Scro began working to spread their presence far and wide, ensuring that when the next war comes, they'd have allies to stand by them. Scro spelljammers, such as the Blade, have also begun making their way into the hands of non-Scro races, a result of newly formed economic ties.
For the Imperial Elven Navy, their victory was in many ways a disaster. Elven lives are hard to replace, and the loss of so many compared to those of the Scro, who can replenish their numbers far more quickly, bore a harrowing though. Additionally, four centuries of unquestioned elven hegemony was broken with many seeing the cracks in the IEN's rule. Finally, despite the victories scored in the latter half of the war, the IEN never could locate the precise location of the Scro homeworld Dukagsh, a glaring danger should the Scro begin to militarize again.
Aftermath
In the years since the Second Unhuman War, the Known Spheres have all but accepted that another war is inevitable. The peace forged at the end of the Second Unhuman War was unsatisfactory for both sides, as the elves could not outright dismantle the Scro while the Scro were unable to place themselves as the new masters of wildspace. Increased uncertainty has led to many spacefaring races to not cut down on their defense expenditures and weapon stockpiles, not wanting to be caught in the crossfire of another conflict.
As the Scro have formalized relations with spacefaring nations, the IEN have countered with an increase in their presence in all sectors of the Known Spheres. Though strained by the loss of spelljammers, the IEN have nonetheless continued patrolling Flow currents and wildpsace settlements with an increased fervour.
The Second Unhuman War was also so far reaching in its affects that there are few in the Known Spheres that haven't been touchd by it in one way or another. Many spelljamming captains loaned their services to one side or another, and most spelljamming crews possess at least one veteran of the war. Pirates and other criminals have also taken advantage of the disruption in elven power and the slew of ruined spelljammers across the spheres, to bolster their own forces and fleets. The dismantling of old power structures has resulted in opportunity for those bold enough to seize it.
Conflict Type
War
Battlefield Type
Space
Start Date
1479
Ending Date
1485
Conflict Result
Costly victory for the Imperial Elven Navy; Establishment of the Scro as a new astral power
Location
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