Battle of the Burning Trees

The Battle of the Burning Trees (also known as the Battle of Hallashal or the Battle of Hallashall Valley) was the decisive battle of the SA 302 Arkyne Civil War. It was fought between prominent warlord Julian Saric and his allies, which included King Logen Blackdon of the Berskins and the Rottfoldians, and Ran Arloginian and his allies. The battle was the result of competing claims to the Arkyne crown, which had been left vacant

The winter of SA 300 was a harsh one, exacerbated by the mass devastation across the war-torn countryside and the systematic breakdown of law and order as Imperial authority across the disparate halds collapsed. The country was overrun with bandits and mercenary ‘free companies’ who pillaged and murdered at will, unopposed by the crumbling central government. Swathes of country had been reduced to war-torn wastelands strewn with razed villages, pillaged farms, and slain smallfolk. In many areas, central authority had completely collapsed, and the staffhalses, already committed to their respective liege lords, were unable to respond to the waves of violence which roiled the countryside of Franchurst and the Middlefold, both of which had been severely depopulated by the depredations of the opposing armies.

After much deliberation, Staffhalder Galder Garret of Trafehaken declared for Queen Margot’s faction in late January and began raising his fyrds. Julian Saric responded by sending his friend Will Skeat with a thousand mercenaries to lay waste to the peninsula. Farms were burned, towns were sacked, and after a fierce battle Burgain fell. Staffhalder Galder personally capitulated outside of Burgain’s gates and was spared so long as he swore fealty to Julian and committed his fyrds to the Sarician cause.

The stalemate that had defined late SA 300 was broken in early SA 301 with the arrival of Ran Arloginian and some seven thousand Arloginian troops, who landed at the mouth of the Rottmotte and joined his son Magjon’s royalist army west of Stromkrop. Ran’s arrival, however, legitimized Julian’s cause, strengthening his claims that the Paleanist Arloginians were planning to impose their religion on the country and earning him further support from the staffhalders. Staffhalder Brendan Tyter of Chambrante, which had been subjacated by the royals following Phillips Rebellion, declared for Julian in the aftermath of the landing and was soon under siege. Ran’s arrival also enflammed religious tensions across the country, as High Septon Jaryk Hornmont, under pressure from Julian, declared a holy war against Ran and his supporters. Mobs of Armantist smallfolk, driven into a bloodthirty frenzy by paranoid priests, swept across the countryside, murdering and burning suspected Paleanists. In the absense of Imperial authority, religious superstition filled the vacuum, with roving gangs of Armantist ‘vigilantes’ taking law and order into their own hands. All across the countryside, Paleanists were slaughtered, and by the end of the year the emerging Paleanist religious minority had been largely wiped out across the country.

The war itself resumed in SA 301 when Ran Arloginian detatched the bulk of the Imperial field army on the Rottmotte and marched west to confront and defeat Paxter Clarence’s rivermen. Some six thousand men were left along the river under Staffhalder Locke of the Rhuge to hold the fords at all costs.

Ran hoped to destroy the rivermen rebels; composed of the fyrds of House Clarence and Gyrsen; before they could join Julian’s main army which had been encamped on the Cutmotte since the previous fall. The rivermen, commanded by Paxter Clarence, had moved east following their campaign in the Rhuge and seized Dunkeld in the hopes of threatening Ran’s western flank. Realizing his force alone stood no chance against the Arloginian host marching to meet them, Paxter retreated west, intending to draw Ran across the Cutmotte where he could be trapped. While Paxter retreated, a second army of rivermen some 4,000-strong under Horace Flynn, son of Staffhalder Becker Flynn, would fall on Ran’s northern flank while Julian, shadowing Ran’s advance with the bulk of his host, would enclose his rear.

The plan worked, as the Arloginians were lured across the Cutmotte in their pursuit of Paxter’s elusive cavalry army. By the time Ran and his captains, among them Magjon Arloginian, realized they were in a precarious position, it was too late, as Julian Saric had proceeded rapidly up the Cutmotte with seven thousand mounted infantry and severed their lines of retreat at Dunkeld. On April 25th, the trap snapped shut in the valley of Hallashold.

The Arloginians awoke to find themselves trapped in the wooded valley. A line of Marchmen infantry, bristling with pikes, was arrayed along the ridge directly to their north, while to their east descended a body of Berskins led by high chieftan Logen Blackdon, threatening to turn their right flank. To the Arloginian left was a host of rivermen horse under Paxter Clarence. In danger of being trapped in the shallow valley, Ran despatched his cavalry to either flank and concentrated his infantry in a dense block in the center. Ran, a renowned military commander, intended to concentrate his army against the Sarician center, arrayed across the eastern ridge, punching through and then escaping the enclosing pincers. However, the Arloginian plan rapidly unraveled as the Imperial right horse, the mounted fyrds of Harehald, was dispersed by the Berskins, who then proceeded to advance at an almost right angle to the Arloginian infantry which foolishly engaged under Ran’s son Magjon. Great slaughter commenced among the tall trees as a horrific close-quarters battle ensued across the forest, leaving heaps of Arloginians and Berskin dead. Fighting was so fierce and the showers of fire arrows so great that the forest became engulfed in flames, burning the wounded and choking the sky with black smoke. The Berskins steadily gained the advantage in this grinding melee as their cavalry, which had been pursuing the broken Imperial horse, wheeled around and delivered charge after punishing charge into the Arloginian rear.

By late afternoon, the bulk of the Arloginian infantry were committed in the battle on the right flank, leaving Ran few troops to press his attack on the immobile Sarician center. Many times the Arloginian knights charged up the blood-slicked slopes into the teeth of the Sarician pikes and each time they were sent back mauled and exhausted. The encirclement of the Arloginians was completed when Julian Saric led his fresh reserves of knights along with Paxter’s horse onto the weakened Arloginian left flank, annihalating it and then sweeping across the forest to enclose the rear of the reinforced Arloginian right. The Arloginian right, surrounded in the forest, were now butchered mercilessley, with no quarter being demanded or given. Ran Arloginian and his son Magjon were both slain, their bodies slashed and stabbed beyond recognition. Dead Arloginians blanketed the valley floor in smouldering heaps for weeks after the battle, and the forest fire that began during the battle raged for days, sweeping across the valley. Of the eleven thousand men Ran had led onto the field that fateful day, from nine thousand had been slain. Sarician losses, too, were heavy: some thirty-five hundred were killed. The battle was one of utter and complete annihalation, and proved to be the bloodiest of the civil wars. The Arloginian army, and with them the royalist cause, died in the Battle of the Burning Trees.

The brief civil war was all but decided by the battle. Having crushed the main Arloginian army Julian sent his retainers with their respective hosts to complete mopping up operations across Westreach. Paxter Clarence, who had masterminded the Sarician encirclement, was sent east with his veteran host of five thousand horse to complete the pacification of the Rhuge; Julian himself marched on Harerok with ten thousand Saricians and rivermen. The Berskins, who had taken grevious losses during the battle, were discharged and sent home under Logen Blackdon. The Berskin clans, who had been quartering temporarily on the Gutlet, were relocated to their new tribal homeland in the Aranieul valley.