Veshita the Blasphemer

Veshita the Blasphemer was a semi-nomadic warrior and pro-independence rebel from the March Kingdom of Arashoka who overthrew the Post-Imperial Selkie Council.    Veshita was born to a human hunting clan in an unstable Arashoka. Many of her family members worked as mercenaries or bison hunters, navigating a landscape that was increasingly hostile and required more and more reliance on the global cash economy to survive. Arashoka had fallen into what was essentially a religious civil war: the controversial Exarch Makata had secularized the country while waging wars of expansion, and his replacement Exarch Lemeika was essentially a devout Pratasam theocrat. This set up rival religious-political factions, that engaged in periodic bouts of intense sectarian violence from 1550 to 1569. When the government collapsed due to selkie intervention in 1569, the kingdom fell into all-out civil war. Veshita knew the prior peace, but built her career in the war.    Veshita was a charismatic woman, well connected and supported enough by her clan to have a following but still peripheral enough to appear as a political outsider. She built her own faction in the interior plains over the civil war and eventually was able to use her tactical skill, luck, and diplomatic ability to seize control of Arashoka in 1580. Her control over Arashoka was tenuous, balancing on a number of rival factions and the support of a Sumoxan apostle that was increasingly controversial. When it became clear that the selkie clans were not going to support her, Veshita declared war on them and moved to invade the sacred isles.    It was an impossible task: the isles were guarded not only by the greatest navy in the world but by the immortal demigod Kailio. Still, they were not expecting her. She moved with a small force of elite warriors into the sacred isles while the bulk of her navy distracted the startled selkies. Once landed, she staged a daring assault on Mohomwa Cove and slaughtered the twenty assembled clan elders and their retinues. Such damage was done that the government was entirely torn down. But Veshita's forces thinned and the selkies united against her. She died there, happy to have finally toppled the selkie government that had (in her view) ruined her life and homeland. Her own realm was horrified at the number of lives she threw away on this suicidal attack; both they and the selkies would villify her for centuries to come. Now she is remembered with a mix of awe and disgust as both the epitome of courage and self-centered hubris.    This is a historical stub.