[b]Leadership and Command in the Endless Azure Skies[/b]

The Southern Horizon of the Endless Azure Skies is notorious for their poor leadership. Command at virtually every level is solipsistic, introspective and both cowardly and far too aggressive. Few formal officer training academies exist and those that do are focused on training officers to excel at personal combat, scheming or forming nepotistic connections with one another. There is a genuine and enduring cerebral rot at the top of the Azura hierarchy. This is not an entirely irrational policy: for many centuries the Azura state's greatest threat has been endless civil war, and an officer corps that demonstrates political loyalty - if only because they are too incompetent to threaten the central powers - is considered a better fit for the Azura security situation.

The primary fighting forces of the Endless Azure Skies are servitor species - genetically engineered specialists, fundamentally designed to perform their function. Leadership at this level tends to be competent, if crude - servitors are rarely given specialized training, but they tend to have a strong instinctive feel for the rhythms of battle. They learn rapidly and an experienced combat servitor can become a skilled and capable officer. It is not until you get to the level of the Azura citizen itself - usually commanding a minimum of one hundred combat servitors - that the rot starts to set in.

Azura Knights - the general title for any Azura citizen who operates in a combat capacity - tend not to have a formal table of ranks. Instead they directly command any servitors who are nearby, who are viewed as a communal resource and entirely interchangeable. Power does not then flow from the loyalty or skill of the soldiery; it arises from the number of Knights whose loyalty can be called upon. A powerful or successful Knight, then, does not lay claim to additional titles or rank; their power exists in an invisible social network of debt, loyalty, and political advantage. 

Azura Knights do specialize in the various Paths of Honour available to them. This is a unique spellcasting system drawing power from the Stellar Code written into the violet stars, and there is a great variety in potential Paths and their outcomes. The Path of Truth, for instance, is specializes an Azura Knight in knowing truth from lies, and enhances them in proportion to lies, stealth and ambushes used by their opponents, where the Path of Solitude allows one Knight to stand against a hundred common soldiers, empowered by the fact that they are outnumbered. Common, low-level Knights can only master a Path or three, whereas powerful ones might have mastered over a dozen.

The Azura do not attach moral value to the honour contained within these Paths. If someone walks the Path of Solitude and gains power when outnumbered, you might still be able to bury him in bodies, albeit inefficiently. When encountering 'barbarians' unprotected by the Paths they feel entirely free to engage in deeply dishonourable conduct, while their opponents find themselves unjustly bound to the technicalities of the Azura honour code. Even to a peer, an Azura showing generalized respect to the honour code is simply a statement that they do not know precisely which Paths their opponent has mastered and fear accidentally putting themselves at a disadvantage by crossing a line and triggering magical retribution.

Due to the conditions of communications blackout that the Azura regularly find themselves in a great deal of command is done with Thunder Banners - specialized ELF discharges into symbols of command. Azura Knights also generally have phenomenal lung capacity and can bellow orders at huge volumes. These commands tend to be, accordingly, extremely simple and direct - attack, retreat, and so on. Great amounts of work is done on these banners to make them visually complex and beautiful so that they might serve as both identification and inspiration to the common servitors. 

Their other communication tool of choice is direct optical tightbeams, either done manually or through a Crystal Dragon. Crystal Dragons are specialized biological supercomputers designed to skirt the boundaries of the Curse - the precise mechanism is that the dragons are generally treated as superiors, pampered and respected even by the most arrogant Knights and begged for their help. The Knights loathe and resent having to humble themselves in this way, but the fact that they hate it is *why* it works, and so they struggle to make do. Particularly proud Knights will avoid it whenever possible, leading them to make important decisions without expert advice, usually with blunderous consequences. 

Azura battleplans are generally tangled, ineffective and often disregarded by the Knights who receive them. Many Knights keep their exact Paths a secret to threaten opponents into treating them with generalized honour, and this has complex implications in assigning battle plans without knowing the capabilities of your subordinates. When given a battle plan involving incorrect best guesses from leadership an Azura Knight may disregard it either to use a Path that they possess and better suits them or to conceal the fact that they have a Path that would be revealed by fighting battle in such a way. In the absence of effective real-time communications and formal military rank this results in Azura fighting in disjointed and chaotic ways, relying on their natural technological and numerical strengths to compensate for poor decision making. 

This state of affairs is regarded as an unfortunate fall from greatness by Azura scholars and historians. In previous eras there existed a Tyrant rank which was able to control subordinates directly through cybernetic enhancements and full-spectrum digital networks before the technology was rendered impossible by the Electromagnetic Flux. Certain political organizations within the Azura attempt to replicate this structure using voluntary buy-in, and in places they have gained significant power and influence, but the feudal structure remains dominant.

Specialized functions of various sorts, including logistics and manufacturing, are generally performed by the Order of Goltir. The Order is often treated with absolute contempt, utterly politically and militarily subordinate to the Azura Knights, and the Azura are quick to extend that contempt to alien species they regard as being unsubjugated Goltir. Science, manufacturing, learning and scholarship are regarded as primitive virtues, worthless before the true strength of the Azura military might. The Order also serves as a refuge and escape for Azura and servitors who find themselves incompatible with the harsh strictures of Azura society. On rare occasion the Order might amass enough political influence or localized power to override or manipulate Azura Knights.