DeigaIndex | Time Under Chaos | Concerning Amber | The Golden Circle | Deiga Head of State: none The Deigans say that the Mandate of Heaven was withdrawn. Everyone else says Deiga had the misfortune to lie directly in Mandor's path. Regardless of the cause, however, the beautiful and mysterious Deiga of heroic legend is dead, succeeded by an icy waste overrun with barbarians. Deiga in its prime was a vast land, encompassing grasslands in the north, mountains in the southeast, and hills and plains running to the ocean in the west. The scenery could be described only in poetry--mist-wreathed hills, dipping their green toes in mirror lakes, desert plateaus whipped by sands and burned pure by the sun, blankets of forest surpassed only by Arden herself. Her people were suited to the land. Blessed by Heaven, they built graceful cities, and waxed wise and prosperous. They are familiar to all in the Golden Circle from the myth cycles of love lost and found, of wise judges who contended with demons, and of swordsmen so skilled they flew across the treetops. Connected to Amber only by sea routes, Deiga had a lengthy border with Shadow, from which her people were continually repelling attacks by the barbarian hordes without. Empress Miu-tse, Most Gracious Daughter of Heaven, commanded that a wall be built along her realm's border, as wide as the Street of Jade in the capital, and so tall that an arrow might not pass over it, to close out the invaders. That which she commanded was done, and the Great Wall was as wondrous as any thing in the Golden Circle, or even in Amber herself. For many centuries the Great Wall held--until it strove to withhold Chaos. Some say Mandor himself cast the spell that breached it, but he does not speak of it, and Deigan survivors who were witness are few. Most Illustrious Mui-tse is said to have cried out from her throne in Heaven, her howl of despair the first of the winds that were to sweep Deiga. Thus Chaos passed into the Golden Circle, and behind them the hordes of barbarians once held at bay. Though reeling from the metaphyical shock, the Deigan people performed one last feat of legend, and while they did not repulse Chaos, stopped the forces of Shadow from advancing along the Shadow Trods into the other Favored Realms, at the greatest cost. Mirror of Heaven, the capital, was sacked, and the Emperor Yuang Juu, Last Son of Heaven, spent his life that the roads to the remainder of the Golden Circle be closed. The icy winds of the barbarian realms now blow through a land destroyed. The ruins of the great cities and temples are coated with ice, the rivers frozen, and only a few of Deiga's heroes still roam the blasted land, righting what wrongs they can. The barbarians now own Deiga, for all the good it does them, for now it more resembles the unfavored lands whence they came that the jewel of Heaven it once was. Deiga does have a future of sorts. It has become the preferred place for transportations - a dumping ground for criminals, vagrants and the dispossessed unwanted in the First City. Huddled settlements of outsiders scrape a meagre existance from the bones of a glorious past, carrying a torch for civilisations lost. |
