The Battle of the Glass Sea

The world had not seen such a war in five centuries. War had finally come, its arrival heralded by the ambitions of two great civilizations whose ideologies were irreconcilable.

It was in The Western Reaches that the first spark was struck by pioneers, prospectors, and contractors who saw opportunity in land that belonged to neither, yet was claimed by both.

First Contact – 400 ASC

Gaean engineers, explorers, and industrialists had by this time started making their presence known in the Western Reaches, carving roads, mining resources, and establishing new cities. The Confederation too had its own pioneers and settlers in the land, men and women who had tamed the land for centuries, wielding both steel and thaumaturgy to establish dominion over the untamed frontier.

Yet, wary coexistence soon turned to conflict and violent skirmishes. The lands were vast, but the ambitions of men were larger.

And as the years passed, blood was spilled on both sides.

Rising Tensions – 400 to 448 AC

For decades, the Western Reaches became a theater of clandestine war, a battleground for rogue noble scions, freelance mercenaries, and dueling interests. Officially, neither side acknowledged the growing hostilities, but in the shadows, the conflict raged.

Confederal pioneers clashed with Gaean contractors. Thaumaturges tested their spells against Gaean automata. Hired mercenaries fought secret wars on behalf of their patrons.

The battle for land and resources itself became a war of attrition, with settlements burned, caravans ambushed, and trade disrupted in cycles of provocation and retaliation. Yet, for all the violence, the world had not yet seen true war. That would come in 448 ASC, when the fragile illusion of diplomacy shattered in an instant.

The Anzali Incident – 448 ASC

The Anzali Incident was the moment that set fire to the powder keg.

A group of Confederation pioneers, driven by arrogance and resentment, launched an unprovoked assault on a Gaean outpost. It was a massacre. Hundreds of Gaean settlers were slaughtered; men, women, children were all wiped out in a display of reckless cruelty that could not be ignored.

The United Domains of Gaea, known usually for its detached rationalism and calculating diplomacy, did not respond with negotiations, nor did it issue demands.

It retaliated with war.

And not just war, but extermination.

The Blitz – 448 ASC

The Gaean war machine moved with a speed and efficiency that the Confederation had never witnessed before. In days, not weeks, entire provinces fell. The Confederation had known war as a thing of decades, of long sieges and chivalric battles, where armies clashed with honor and retreat was an option. But there was no retreat against the Gaeans, no battlefield where their might could be challenged in the way the Confederation had always known.

Knights rode into battle with banners raised high, armor gleaming; they were torn apart by railgun fire before they even saw their enemy. Thaumaturges chanted incantations, gathering the power of the arcane to call forth storms and fire; their magic was shattered by precision drone strikes. Confederal soldiers advanced with bolt-action rifles and bayonets; Gaean autocannons sowed annihilation with percussive finality. Entire towns were erased in the blink of an eye. Militias, raised in desperation, fought with valor but were swept aside as if they had never existed.

The speed of the conquest sent shockwaves across the Known Expanse. Panic gripped the Confederation of Free Nations, for it had never faced an enemy like this, never known what it was to be outmatched so completely, so utterly, that its very way of war seemed obsolete.

And for the first time in centuries, it feared annihilation. The Grand Senate convened in chaos, but its decision was swift. Martial law was enacted across the entire Confederation.

Every industry was turned to war production, every noble house was called upon to raise its retinue, every thaumaturge, from the lowest apprentice to the greatest masters, was summoned to service.

The Church, sensing that its own survival was at stake, declared a Crusade against the Gaeans, branding them as an enemy not just of the Confederation, but of the Ethereal Lady herself.

Feudal rivalries were set aside, ancient grudges buried beneath the weight of necessity.

This would not be another conflict of political maneuvering and territorial skirmishes. This would be a war for survival, a war where no rules would be honored, no mercy expected.

The Confederation had been caught unprepared, humiliated by an enemy that did not play by the rules of chivalry and tradition, but it would not remain broken. Every fortress, every city, every stronghold was prepared for a war that would reshape the Known Expanse.

And so, the armies gathered, the thaumaturges wove their grandest incantations, and the Confederation, for the first time in its long and fractured history, stood united under a single cause. All roads now led to a single battlefield, to a confrontation that would determine the fate of nations.

The Battle – 448 to 450 ASC

The name of the Battle is a misnomer; it was no mere battle, but a collision of entire civilizations.

The Battle of the Glass Sea was fought across every conceivable terrain; it transformed deserts into graveyards, jungles into smoldering husks, mountains into slaughterhouses.

A staggering thirty million men took part on the Confederal side, and for every passing minute, thousands fell, bodies consumed by a conflict unlike anything the Known Expanse had ever seen.

It was a war where thaumaturgy and knightly valor met the cold, ruthless efficiency of Gaean technology, where the old ways of warfare were tested against the relentless march of industrial progress.

At first, the Confederation believed it could hold its own.

For a moment, hope existed.

And then, the Gaeans showed them the true face of war.

The first lesson came in the skies. The Confederation had long admired Furenzia's and Eremita’s airships and experimental aeronautics, and in the decades leading to the war, it had built an Air Corps, believing that it could challenge the Gaeans for control of the heavens. Pilots took to the skies in fleets of proud airships and nimble fighters, convinced that their courage and ingenuity would be enough to match the mechanical discipline of their foes. It was a force of proud pioneers, of dashing aviators and honorable sky-knights who saw themselves as the future.

Yet, courage could not match precision.

The Gaean Air Force, with its squadrons of autonomous drones, hypersonic interceptors and gunships tore through the Confederation’s hopeful aviators. In a single hour, the Confederation’s vision of air superiority was strangled in its crib. The skies belonged to the Gaeans.

And so, the battle shifted to land and sea.

If the sky was a slaughter, the sea was where the Confederation earned its only true victory.

Kamigozen and Nanseong fleets, once bitter enemies, once built to counter each other, fought together for the first time in recorded history. Though the Gaeans had brought their own naval power, they had underestimated the sheer mastery of maritime warfare that the Confederation possessed.

With feigned retreats, decoy fleets, and long-range enchanted artillery that shook the very tides, the Confederation lured the Gaeans into a devastating trap. In one crushing engagement, the Gaean navy suffered its first great defeat. Bloodied and broken, it retreated to avoid further losses.

This victory gave the Confederation control of vital supply routes across the Infinite Sea, but it was incomplete. Though the seas now belonged to the Confederation, the skies remained a Gaean domain. And wars are not won on water alone.

Across every battlefield, from frozen tundras to dense jungles, hundreds of thousands fought and died.

The Eremitan Expeditionary Force, confident in its war-automata and mechanized legions, marched into the inferno, believing itself ready to challenge Gaean ingenuity.

Yet the Gaeans had prepared. Electromagnetic disruptors short-circuited Confederal war-machines, precision-guided munitions shattered their armored lines, and adaptive artificial intelligence turned every ambush and strategem into a massacre. Yet even more devastating than these weapons of precision and efficiency was the silent, invisible force that choked the life from the Confederation’s greatest strength: Grade Gamma Ontological Stabilizers rendered the battlefield inhospitable to magic.

The Eremitans found themselves surrounded in Murder Wood, their machines failing, their forces dwindling, with none of the vaunted thaumaturges of the Confederation able to aid in a breakout.

Every attempt at magical reinforcement collapsed within the suffocating radius of the ONTOS fields, leaving even the most powerful spellcasters as little more than ordinary men.

Cut off from supply lines and unable to coordinate with the broader Confederate front, the Eremitan Expeditionary Force was left to fight with failing war-machines and dwindling ammunition against an enemy that gave no quarter.

But surrender was not in their nature anyway.

Their automata fought even as their operators perished, and when the last engineers realized they would not escape, they detonated their machines, turning the battlefield into a hellish graveyard.

Yet, they would have been annihilated entirely, had the Isornian spearhead not arrived. The Allaneian Dragoners, Musurian Lancers, Khuudamid war-riders, the greatest of Isornia’s Paragon Knights, alongside Dasheng Wenxia, Kamigozen Sentei, Nanseong Harang and the best poletheurgicae of the Thaumaturgic Corps, held in strategic reserve by Confederal High Command, teleported onto the battlefield.

Akin to a spear of fury, they punched through the Gaean lines at a concentrated point. What had once seemed an inevitable collapse of the Confederation’s forces turned, in an instant, into a desperate bid for resurgence.

The Gaean formations, so precise, so unyielding, cracked beneath the onslaught.

But the fury of steel and thaumaturgy alone was not what shattered the tide of the battle. Far above, upon a distant hill overlooking the carnage, where the Goetic Line of Sa-Res cut through the land like an invisible scar, Musurian Vityazae gathered in grim, silent formation. Nineteen men stood before them, bound in sanctified bronze, wrists chained, faces etched with the knowledge of their fate.

To call upon Dama Vana in such a way was unthinkable. It was an act so rare, so condemned by the very faith that the Musurian Vityazae upheld, that it has never been attempted since. And yet, in that moment, with the Confederation facing annihilation, the Vityazae deemed the price necessary.

The ritual began as the battle raged below, chants rising into the sky, interwoven with the blood-rites of their ancestors. The breath of Dama Vana was called forth, and the battlefield trembled in expectation.

One by one, the nineteen men were offered in sacrifice, their lifeblood staining the earth, their final breaths carrying the whispered names of their forebears into the heavens. The air grew heavy, charged with something far beyond mortal comprehension.

Then, in the instant the last life was taken, the storm came.

Sa-Res pulsed with impossible thaumaturgic energy, and the power of the Battle-Whisper surged through the warriors of the spearhead. The spearhead, though weakened somewhat by the relentless suppression of Gaean ontological stabilizers, overcame its restrictions.

The warriors, already formidable, became something more.

Blades cut with unnatural speed, wounds dulled to distant aches, and the dread of death was drowned in the flood of righteous fury.

Paragon Knights, already the finest warriors upon the field, became demigods of war.

Tens of thousands of Gaeans perished in minutes.

The Gaean right flank, which had withstood every charge, collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of Confederal troops poured into the breach.

For the first time in the war, the Gaeans were retreating.

For the first time, it seemed as though the Confederation had found a path to victory.

But the Gaeans had one last weapon. The retreat was not a surrender. It was a trap. The Confederate forces pursued them into the former Desert of the Singing Sands. The Confederation, believing its enemy broken, gathered for the final push.

Then the air itself seemed to shift, the fabric of reality warping with a silent, imperceptible force. At first, the thaumaturges among the Confederation’s ranks felt only a strange unease, a momentary thaumaturgical dissonance. It was fleeting, ignorable.

But then it grew.

The power that had once coursed through them, that had shaped the world to their will, flickered and faded, snuffed out like a dying flame.

The greatest among them, the Type Black thaumaturges, those who had long believed themselves unshackled by the limits of mortal understanding, found themselves suddenly severed from the currents of magic that had defined their very existence.

The battlefield was now barren of all but the cold, unyielding logic of the material world.

At the heart of it all, hidden within a hollowed-out mountain, an experimental device thrummed with impossible precision. A Grade Epsilon ONTOS, at that time still unproven in full-scale deployment, had been activated. Unlike its lesser counterparts, which merely dulled or weakened thaumaturgy within a limited radius, this machine stripped it away entirely.

No spell could be cast, no conjuration summoned.

Even those of Type Black potential, whose very presence could bend the world around them, found themselves rendered as powerless as common foot soldiers.

Their greatest warriors, their most revered sorcerers, were bereft of their strength.

The realization came too late.

The Confederation had walked blindly into the abyss. Their forces, vast though they were, had been drawn into the perfect kill zone.

And then the sky burned.

Three brilliant, terrible lights ignited above the horizon, and in an instant, the world changed forever.

Tactical nuclear warheads, the first ever deployed in the Known Expanse, were detonated over the desert.

Tens of thousands of soldiers were vaporized in the blink of an eye.

Thousands more suffered agonizing deaths, blinded, burned, or poisoned with a strange new condition called glass-sickness.

The sands melted into glass, the air became toxic, and the once-proud desert was transformed into a wasteland now known only as the Glass Sea.

The Confederation had no answer.

The war froze in place, and both sides dug in.

The Confederation had fought with everything it had, but the war had shown them a truth they could not ignore; that the Gaeans were willing to do what no one else dared. And against such weapons, even the greatest warriors, the most brilliant thaumaturges, and the most disciplined armies were powerless.

In the aftermath, diplomacy was the only path forward.

The Treaty of Hes-Erg – 450 ASC

The Treaty of Hes-Erg was signed as an acknowledgment of exhaustion. Neither side had won, but neither had lost. Spheres of influence were delineated and borders were drawn. A Neutral Territory/Demilitarized Zone was established, where neither faction could station troops.

Once a mere frontier city in the Quarter of Ancients, the Free City of Hes-Erg, became the capital of this fragile peace. Trade continued, movement was allowed, and both sides agreed to halt direct military action. But there was no trust. There was no forgiveness.

The Battle of the Glass Sea had ended, but the war did not. Its nature simply changed.

No longer fought with legions and fleets, it now lived in the shadows, inthe corridors of power, in the silent movements of spies and diplomats.

The Three Suns had burned away the illusion of chivalry and honor. What remained was a world where power was measured in secrets, in intrigue, and in the silent threat of annihilation.

Neither the Confederation nor the United Domains of Gaea could claim victory.

Yet both knew the war was far from over.

It had simply entered its next phase.

The Legacy of the Battle

The Battle of the Glass Sea was the defining moment of an era, a clash that tested the very foundations of the Confederation. No war in living memory has carried such weight, nor has any single conflict burned itself so deeply into the collective consciousness of the Known Expanse. Every citizen, whether noble or commoner, soldier or scholar, bore the scars of that battle.

Every family knew someone who lost somebody; every city, every province, every member state poured its resources into the war effort.

The Confederation, hitherto doubted as a fragile, dithering and opportunistic alliance, once facing increasingly loud calls for dissolution, emerged from the battle forever changed.

Before the war, there had been skeptics, those who whispered that Isornei would never truly fight alongside Dasheng, that Nanseong and the Kamigozen would never trust each other, that the noble houses would never stand as equals with the republics.

The Battle of the Glass Sea erased those doubts.

And though the battle did not end in triumph, the unity forged in its crucible became the foundation of a Confederation that would never again question its necessity.

Yet, for all the heroism, for all the legends born on the battlefield, the Battle of the Glass Sea was not a victory. The Confederation, despite its unity, was unprepared for the brutality of industrial war. It had always relied on traditional warfare, where skill and strategy, thaumaturgy and valor, were enough to tip the scales.

Yet against the Gaeans, these proved insufficient.

The Air Corps, despite its boldness, was obliterated in the opening stages of the conflict. The Eremitan Expeditionary Force, confident in its war-automata, was decimated by precision munitions and electromagnetic countermeasures. Even the finest warriors of Isornei, the greatest knights of the age, barely managed to break through the Gaean lines, and only then because the Gaeans had underestimated them, deploying countermeasures that were too weak to truly stifle their thaumaturgy. Had the Gaeans taken the war seriously from the start, the outcome might have been far worse.

Most decisively, the Three Suns changed everything.

The Gaeans had brought weapons unlike anything the Known Expanse had ever seen. In an instant, entire armies were reduced to ash. The ground itself became a graveyard of melted sand and poisoned air. No honor, no spell, no shield of magic or steel had been enough to stop the blinding light of annihilation. The myths of invincibility were shattered in the wake of nuclear fire.

Though the battle ended with the Treaty of Hes-Erg, ensuring a temporary peace, the Confederation understood the truth: this was not the end of the war. It was merely a pause, a moment of uneasy silence before the next inevitable storm.

The Gaeans had proven that they could strike with precision, with technology beyond comprehension, with a ruthlessness that even the most hardened Isornian lords found unsettling.

And they had not been beaten, merely halted.

The Confederation had held the line, but at a staggering cost. The war had not been won. It had merely been postponed.

With this realization came a sense of urgency, a drive to change, to evolve. The ancient ways, for all their honor, could no longer stand alone. Thaumaturgy would have to be woven into technology, integrated into machinery, enhanced by science rather than standing apart from it.

The next war will come, and when it does, the Confederation cannot afford to be caught unprepared again. No longer can it rely solely on knights and spells when its enemy commands steel titans and machines of war. The battle has made it clear: the Confederation has to modernize or perish.

The memory of the Battle of the Glass Sea still remains deeply embedded in the hearts of all who lived through it. For some, it is a source of pride, proof that the Confederation could endure even against the might of the Gaean war machine. For others, it is a haunting memory of what was lost, of the lives vaporized in an instant, of the realization that the old world was gone, replaced by a future where war would be waged not just with swords and spells, but with weapons capable of ending civilizations.

No one believes that the Treaty of Hes-Erg will last forever. The Gaeans remain a looming threat, and the Confederation knows that when war returns, it will be unlike anything the world has ever seen.

What was fought at the Glass Sea was not just a battle; it was the first true war of the modern age. And everyone knows that it will not be the last.