Nilen the Moonkeeper

Little is known of Nilen's origins. Nilen was born during a period of strife, as the rising magic item trade from Garadel to Samvara disrupted the political status quo and led to numerous raids, wars, and intrigues. He was orphaned in the southern grasslands at a young age and lived on the move, sheltering with different bands of grassland nomads periodically. In his early teenage years Nilen was captured as a poacher and trespasser and was kept as a slave by his captors. While it was tradition among them to adopt slaves, this age of strife disrupted such traditions and led to Nilen being repeatedly sold between Dotinek groups towards the coast. While in a caravan headed towards a coastal (presumably for sale abroad), Nilen received a Dream Contact from Theia the Liberator allowing him to swear an oath as her Paladin. By her power, Nilen was able to lead a group of fellow slaves in an escape. The young paladin spent several years fighting bandits, freeing slaves, and eventually leading his own followers as a bandit captain against the slavers. He built a legend and mystique around himself as his band grew, building himself as a holy man and implying that he was born from spirits.   As Nilen grew more powerful, he began to resent the oaths that bound him. His group of raiders eventually captured a foreign priest looking for answers on how to control this power, and Nilen was able to convince this priest to teach him secrets from Samvara. Nilen began to transition from slave-freeing bandit to travelling priest, though he continued killing slavers to satisfy his Lunar patron. At the same time, he strung along the foreign priest and convinced them that they were going to become a famous missionary by working with him. He mastered the Divine Contact and refined local understandings of what exactly worked as Divine Contact Incense of the local plant life. He began to induct his followers as paladins of various Lunar Gods, though he made sure to match them carefully to keep them loyal and beneficial to his group. Through these paladins, he became a valued healer and spirit medium across the Dotinek communities. He had always been a Dotinek, taught their language and customs as a young child before he lost his parents and having grown up on the margins of their towns. Now, he used that knowledge to be the perfect mysterious outsider.   Eventually, Nilen was able to arrange his own freedom by making a deal with Theia: their oath would be dissolved and they would continue as amicable working partners if he used his resources to wage total war against the local slave trade. Nilen had come to despise slavery anyways and knew that playing the liberator would also aid his goals. Nilen's violent rise to power had left him with a constant hunger for greater power, which would lead to greater security. And so Nilen called for a great spiritual war to purify the land and return to Dotinek traditions. He recruited a small army and burned down one of the great coastal slave markets, leaving behind a colony that swore fealty to him. In victory, Nilen went from a spooky-but-respectable mystic with rumors of banditry to being a petty king of renown. He was adopted into the Kiznama, a Dotinek clan that had long sheltered Nilen's band after he freed some of their captured youths from slavery. He quickly married and established himself as a proper monarch and member of the clan. As he built a larger and larger alliance, potential rivals in the region organized against him. Even his priest ally attempted to organize a Pratasa group to take control of Nilen's alliance, creating a sudden enemy within. Nilen's campaigning became constant, and he relentlessly grew his power as enemies fell before him. By 803 ME, he was the Federate Priest-King of the Dotinek; free from his oath, but barely riding the wave of violent power-grabbing that had murdered his parents decades ago.   By the early 800s, Nilen has conquered his strongest rivals and was primarily occupied fighting with former allies. He faced growing competition and criticism within the Kiznama clan, as many of his adopted cousins were suspicious of Nilen's ambition and his loose ties to his new family. But the greater threat was the nascent Pratasa movement, as his former missionary ally drew their forces into an alliance with a newly-begun Samvaran colony on the West Demzan coast (bleeding into Almzez). The Demzan colony was tiny (more of a permanent trade outpost) but was rapidly converting neighboring tribes to its religion, providing Nilen's internal rivals with wealth and allies. Nilen decided to focus on this Samvaran threat next and launched an extremely successful campaign against the Demzan Pratasa from 801 to 803 ME. The Samvaran alliance was fragile, and the colonists did not support their new converted friends to nearly any degree. This made it easy for Nilen to divide and conquer, flipping many of the convert-Pratasa to his side and razing the lonely foreign market-port. But while this trade outpost died quickly, the fleeing Pratasa waged a frustrating campaign to isolate Nilen from lucrative trade routes and harass his allies along the shore. Not only did these Pratasa raid coastal fishing villages and disrupt Nilen's allied merchants, they began a mass migration Northward into Zeshema to join the struggling selkie colony there. This served as an excuse for a new war into richer lands, which might pacify his internal enemies: a war into the Zeshem heartlands.    It is Nilen's invasion of the Zeshem riverlands in 803 ME that turned him from yet another flash-in-the-pan warlord into a religious figure that is remembered today. This was not a religious war from Nilen's perspective, nor was it intended to free the North from foreign domination. He simply hoped to gain enough loot to stabilize his political position and to bully the Samvarans into a subordinate position. It was intended to be a quick and terrifying campaign that would deal some damage and scare their enemies into submission. What it turned into was a multi-decade slog of back and forth retributive violence. While Nilen's initial invasion was successful, a fleet of Samvaran treasure ships bearing reinforcements and gold for mercenaries turned the tides. Nilen also faced resistance from local Zeshem villages, which resented being raided and looted for supplies. A terrible war resulted from this which lasted for seven years. To sustain his federation through this war, Nilen cultivated a cult around himself and expanded his power far beyond the role of traditional kings in the region held. He purged his internal enemies, though several of his adopted cousins quietly formed a resistance cell that hoped to unseat him. But Nilen had learned from his time as a paladin how to translate endless war into devotion and authority, and the conflict had plenty of ideological fodder to draw on.   Seven years into the conflict, Nilen was horribly wounded and left for dead in a failed assault into the Northern colonies. He was rescued by a group of Zeshem who claimed to be following the masked apparition of Norinar, who revived and nursed the wounded king. They taught Nilen of the Zesheko way and of Norinar's legacy, and told him that he had been chosen for a second chance by Alima. Nilen saw this as an opportunity to bring the Zeshem under his control, and sought to co-opt their religion. He converted to Zesheko and embraced this idea that he was specially chosen by Alima. It is unknown how cynical this conversion was. Nilen had a history of cautiously adopting religious elements to empower himself, but had kept even his patron Goddess (Theia) at arms length. At the same time, Nilen really went all-in on this religion in a way that he had not with Pratasa; some element of Zesheko resonated or intrigued him more than Samvaran religions.   Regardless of his sincerity, Nilen's ambitions took a different shape after converting to Zesheko. He began trying to build a permanent kingdom, which he called Urzavama, across Zeshem and Dotinek lands. This agitated his cousins, who saw this political project as the ultimate betrayal of Dotinek traditions. It took nine years for them to launch a rebellion and assassinate the aging king, but they eventually managed it in 819 ME.   The Urzavama kingdom lasted two short generations before it had entirely decentralized and fragmented into more of a religious clan federation. In many ways, though, it served as a predecessor and foundation for the First Zeshem Empire.