[i]Bronzespear's[/i] Casus Belli
[b]Chief Seedsewer Rocklight Bronzespear of the Great Steppe (122-181)[/b]
[quote=Tôroch, biographer, ca. 184]Times had become for the lord a matter of great melancholy, not least of which due to his age, as he had very nearly reached the status of an elder among the tribal confederacy. But furthermore, just as the soothsayers had predicted, the construction of the canals brought only temporary tranquility to the lower farmlands, carrying in their wake more questions, concerns, and complications. All these things flowed upon Seedsewer's shoulders like the very water the channels carried down from the melting mountain caps, and certainly did few favors for his weakened health. Chiefly among these stresses, the workers hired to dig the canals, mostly farmers from the same lowlands which would benefit from the project, initially had leapt at the opportunity to perform work which paid more than the planting and harvesting of rice paddies. They did not wish to return to their fields when the project was finished, and Seedsewer earned many grudges when he ordered them back to these fields, back to the pittance of growing and storing food for the coming winter. Besides the men whose backs had given out under the toils of cutting and moving stones for the canals, others simply did not want to return to work which, while equally miserable, paid back a mere fraction of the wealth; unemployment rose among the tribes, despite the guarantee of larger yields from future harvests.

All the while, Seedsewer's favorite general, Khirgesh, demanded an audience, and tried to warn him many times of the project's strategic ramifications. The witches, he argued, if ever they decided they coveted the ancestral lands of the Bronzespear, would need little more than a few barrels of poison to kill, at their leisure, either the men who drink the mountain water or the crops which soak in it during the season of floods. Not one to be fooled by their current passivity, Khirgesh desired a preemptive strike, one which would drive the witches from the mountains, securing the safety of the tribes who lived in their shadow. Seedsewer conceded, but insisted too that because he would not let himself be seen as the aggressor of this war, he needed a [i]casus belli[/i] before he would levy an army from the tribesmen. He left Khirgesh to create it, giving the general free rein to provoke the Witches as he saw fit.

This power, however, was unnecessary, as the general chose a grassroots solution, a matter of simply convincing the tribes that they thirsted for war. He accomplished this through the fearmongering of a foreign invader, a technique which transcends time and place. With the aid of oral storytellers, and when they cooperated, the soothsayers, Khirgesh easily spread rumors that the Witches, jealous of the tribes' success, soon would seek to destroy the irrigation canals if they could not be captured and commandeered. For those who were less fervent, slower to thirst for Witch blood on the merits of tactical positioning, Khirgesh appealed instead to religious ideals, declaring that, although they had hated the Bronzespear pantheon for centuries, the canals gave the patient cowards, at long last, an opportunity to wreak destruction upon the superior tribes at little to no cost to themselves.

Soon enough blacksmiths had stopped making plows and trowels, forging instead the blades for spears and swords. The tribes demanded battle. Seedsewer needed only rise to the challenge and lead them into the mountains. It would be, quite literally, an uphill battle, and although the commanders knew they outnumbered and outclassed the witches greatly in battle, they knew too that the terrain rendered their own warriors vulnerable, particularly the horseborne, so all their prowess would be nullified if they could not coax the Witches away from the mountainsides. They could not predict, however, what devastation the coming stalemate would bring to both sides.[/quote]