Liha the Great

Liha the Great (Tyl. Kjarossa Liha Vilakauva "Empress Liha the Great") was the first Empress of the Lihann Empire. In her youth, she supported populist tribune Aukossar Kalgar, and attempted to retaliate against the government when one of the Telareth Republic's oligarchs led a mob to kill Kalgar. Liha was exiled to the Aketh Valley, where she unified the various tribes into the Lihann Militia, which she used to conquer the Telareth Republic, her former homeland. She used her newly-found power to punish the senatorial elite who once ruled over the Telareth people as petty tyrants, perform a significant rework of social and economic regulations, and restore the faith of her people in the Tylan pantheon. Upon her death, Liha ascended to become a deity on the pantheon herself; as a goddess, Liha Vilakauva represents vengeance and revolutionary furor.

Early Life

In the year 1925 PC (715 AD), Kova Keisarelka Liha was born to her parents Tivar and Valkora, both also of the Liha branch of the Keisarelkas family. During her teen years, Kova learned about the government of the Telareth Republic, which has become corrupt and ruled by the interests of money. In 1908 PC (732 AD), she voted for populist Aukossar Kalgar in the tribunary election; Kalgar won the election, but was opposed in his every decision by the plutocracy.

In 1906 PC (734 AD), the tribune was killed in a bout of mob violence, following an act by consul Jeviar Sikasrar Venel to abolish the tribunary office. This led to Venel's political ally Lagas Kornesar Lausul taking the dictatorship for the first half of the next year, in order to purge any of Kalgar's supporters, as well as supporters of populism in general. This angered Liha greatly, so she, along with her friends Kelka Tavola and Kolot Marsevar Bochra, programmed a computer virus to attack the Republic's computer networks. Within days of them releasing it, it had taken down the entire financial sector, and had caused significant damage to the government.

Exile in the Aketh Valley

For the crime of creating and spreading this computer virus, Liha and her two friends were exiled from the Republic, fleeing to the tribal lands of the Aketh Valley. There, she taught one of the tribes how to fight properly, and led them in battle against their enemies. Upon conquering the first enemy tribe, Liha's friend Kelka ordered their complete extermination. Liha felt such deep horror that she could barely hold back tears, yet when every other tribe capitulated, Liha's horror turned to melancholic resignation at the efficacy of violence. Once the three friends' union of tribes became large enough, they wiped clean the mosaic of cultures and identities, and founded a single nation: the Lihann Militia (Tyl. Vrokashtam Lihannam), which Kelka and Bochra insisted be named after Liha.

A few months into their conquests, Liha and her two friends discovered the location of the Vargeta in Velet Krissot, the gods whom the Telarese people had once worshipped before a decline into materialism and secularism. Velet Krissot was a massive Veil rift situated atop a mountain range, where the Tylans' belief in their gods manifested them into reality. The Vargeta gave Liha a divine revelation, granting her eventual conquest of the Telareth Republic new meaning: to restore the faith of her people. Kelka was awed immediately, but Bochra was doubtful at first until he saw how determined and strong-willed Liha became.

Upon restoring contact with the Telareth Republic, Liha discovered that her support for Kalgar was vindicated, as the Republic was now led by a military junta with the purpose of eradicating populist movements wherever they may be. Liha took advantage of its rampant civil unrest, and instructed Bochra to send spies into the Republic in order to offer a safe haven for Telareth populism. Once she had finally conquered the last of the Aketh Valley tribes, the soon-to-be-Empress invaded the Republic in order to conquer it. The campaign proved to be long and bloody, yet ultimately, Liha emerged victorious.

Founding the Lihann Empire

Liha declared the Lihann Empire (Tyl. Kjarshtam Lihannam) in 1869 PC (771 AD), succeeding both the former Militia and the Telareth Republic. She was coronated Empress in the Republic's capital city of Telam, in the Hearing Chamber of the former Consular Palace.

When she led her forces to Shemot Province, her brother Peshkar led a mob of the junta's supporters in an attempt to stop Liha. Liha decided to forgo a massacre of the untrained mob, and instead decided to duel her brother, one versus one, to the death. This duel lasted for twelve days and twelve nights, yet in the end, Liha emerged victorious due to her tactical genius, in spite of Peshkar's greater physical strength. Afterwards, she spent time alone in her childhood home. Most believe that she prayed to the gods for forgiveness. Those who knew her well say that she wept.

Early Policies

Liha's early policies focused around dismantling and razing as many of Telam's "unjust power structures" as she possibly could, in pursuit of her goal to liberate her people from the old tyrannical oligarchy. She had expected the people of the Republic to rejoice and celebrate their restored freedom. Even her goal of restoring her people's faith was not pursued by means of state force, since Liha reasoned that the masses would return to being devout and pious on their own, in the absence of the oligarchs' control over political discourse.

To punish the senators and bureaucrats who had ruled over the Republic during its decline, Liha stripped them of their titles and offices, and sent them into exile in the frozen, mountainous wastes. Egregious offenders, such as members of Telam's military junta, were executed in death flights: Liha uses her psychic powers to carry the offender in a flight over the mountains, where the Empress would let go, causing the proscribed to fall onto the ground from several kilometers above, leading to a swift death by blunt force.

Yet this forceful liberation never brought joy to the masses; they were disgusted and outraged by the horrifying wrath of a vulgar plebeian. As rebellions broke out time and time again throughout the Empire, Liha realized that the people missed the regime that called itself a democracy. The Republic had stripped its citizens of the ability to think independently, over the course of its steady decline, to the point that they could not function without being told what to do, what to say, and what to think by a junta... or an Empress.

Later Policies

Liha's revelation caused a sudden, dramatic shift in imperial policy. Her first dictate was to organize the Legation Detachments (Tyl. Atreta Aerosra, sg. Atreth Aerosram), police squads composed of powerful combat-psykhers, for the purpose of enforcing law in the absence of the Republic's old legal system. While powerful at first, the Atreta became heavily limited over time, as Liha still found genuine tyranny to be distasteful. The Empress had no choice but to project power and keep the masses afraid, but she could at least do so with a semi-clear conscience.

Social policy was the most impacted. Liha had always felt disgusted by the rampant promiscuity and substance abuse that had plagued the late Republic, but she had initially believed that a "live-and-let-live" approach would fit best with her moral principles, where she would not punish deviant hedonists until they harmed anyone else. Yet at the same time that rebellions were spreading like wildfires, Liha also noticed how inherent preying upon the young, weak, and defenseless was to the degenerates' mode of existence. The Empress came to the conclusion that the risk of widespread abuse and predation was not worth the reward of upholding the principles that she realized were so useless.

Recreational drug use was banned entirely, with the exception of pashral, and medical practitioners were severely limited in the variety of drugs that they could prescribe. Pre-marital intercourse was also banned, with participants being given a choice between marriage or neutering. Many existing laws around sexuality were expanded in scope, and their punishments were made more severe, usually escalating from six-year prison sentences to death by various agonizing and humiliating means of execution.

The Empress emphasized cultural gender roles, which are kept even in the present day: women are more fit for intellectual work, while men are more fit for physical labor. In addition, the common Tylan saying "Men are for breeding, women are for loving" originated with Liha.

The secularist reforms of the Republic were also rolled back. The Tylan clergy, who had long opposed the materialism and greed of Telam's oligarchs, were brought into the Empire's fold by Liha's empowerment of the priesthood as a state institution. The Empress was considered to be "touched by the gods" due to her revelation at Velet Krissot, ensuring the loyalty of the pious without any need for coercion or intimidation.

To a lesser extent, economic policy changed, with the imperial throne clamping down heavily on the once-free market in some industries, while many other industries had their regulations massively reworked or stripped away entirely, in order to dislodge the economic dominance of the wealthy oligarchs who used their democracy to enforce such regulations. Liha paid special attention to advertising, media, and information technology; her reforms were exemplified by massive crackdowns on digital advertising and tracking personal data of computer-network users. Where the Empress couldn't guarantee that violations of her laws could be proven, such as in places where cryptography or steganography are used to hide potentially-illegal data, she used fear of agonizing and humiliating executions, as well as generous financial rewards for whistleblowers, to keep companies in line.

As early as Liha's youth, Tylan global computer networks were nearly unusable for consumers without special client-side software to filter out advertising, which only became worse over time as media-providers made advertisements more frequent and intrusive, forcing more users to install filtering software. When Liha sent out agents into the Telareth Republic, one of the first changes that she discovered was that the junta outlawed anti-advertising software.

Tax policy received a significant rework. After the discovery that executing wealthy malcontents and confiscating their assets often results in significant gains for the treasury, Liha realized that she could reduce taxation; the typical rates of every citizen in the middle class or below went from 27% to around 3%. She had considered eliminating taxes on sub-wealthy income brackets entirely, but her old friend Kelka convinced her not to risk relying on executions for state revenue, since that would incentivize false-positives in the punitive process.

Final Decades

Empress Liha penned her autobiography Empire of the Heavens, Kingdom of the Lands (Tyl. Kjarshtam sen Vargekaevotan, Nochashtam sen Tuikaevotan) during the final few decades of her rule. Both a reflective memoir and a political elucidation, Empire of the Heavens explains the lessons that the Empress learned from her increasingly-desperate attempts at freeing the masses, the realizations that she slowly arrived at regarding her old beliefs, and the consequences of the other potential paths that she could have chosen. The writing style in Empire of the Heavens was criticized for resembling a "textbook trying too hard to be poetic" or a "stone flower" by the few pro-oligarch malcontents still alive at that time, even though they remained silent and made no comments on the book's actual observations and arguments.

Imperial Succession

To avoid physical procreation, Liha used her psychic powers to become pregnant with a clone of herself. Upon birth, Liha's clone-child was named Tarkona, and made the Empress's heir. When Liha disappeared into the forest outside Telam's city walls, Tarkona was crowned Empress. It was during Tarkona's rule over the Lihann Empire that the Tylans invented the Bulkspace drive, enabling them to colonize other planets; this earned Tarkona the title Helasra, Tylan for "of the stars".

Empress Tarkona's Rule and Reforms

The new Empress was crowned amidst an atmosphere of terror. The people had feared Liha, but with the old autocrat out of the mortal plane, they took their perceived opportunity and launched all-new rebellions, led by the children and grandchildren of the oligarchs and petty tyrants whose democracy had been demolished by Liha's grand conquest.

Tarkona decided to step outside her mother's shadow. After crushing the nearest uprising with a stunning brutality that would give even Liha pause, Tarkona dealt with the second uprising by sending not only soldiers, but also diplomats, to negotiate terms. While the instigators would settle for nothing less than the restoration of the Republic and the junta that ruled it, the diplomats addressed the masses directly. Eventually, the rebels saw that the Republic had been a failure long before its actual fall, and were allowed to return home unpunished. The leaders of the revolt, however, were executed.

In less than a week, every other rebellion in the Empire stood down. Tarkona had shown the merits of the carrot and the stick, exceeding Liha's efficacy with the stick and the other stick. With the presence of the Tylan pantheon, Tarkona felt her mother's pride smiling upon her.

Under Tarkona's rule, the Lihann Empire went from stagnating in technological development to having settlements and infrastructure spread across Tyla's corner of the galaxy.

Later Empresses

Empress Tarkona created her successor Kseleiva the same way Liha did: using her psychic powers to clone herself. Empress Kseleiva became known as the Unifier (Tyl. Eilegatta) for using the Lihann Empire's military might, control over trade, and advanced technology to unify the other nations of Tyla into a single hegemonic empire, known as the Tylan Federation. Though it was called a Federation, in reality it was a hegemony ruled by whoever the current Lihann Empress was.

Empress Thanagal launched an interstellar expedition to conquer the Languavards to the galactic south of Tyla, which earned her the epithet Lagover. Her sister and successor Kotolva was the last Empress of the Lihann Empire, before the Tylan homeworld and colonies were conquered by the Fulkreyksk Authoritariat under Forarr Toval Brekoryn. Empress Kotolva stood firm in the face of the enemy, thus she became known as Kotolva the Defiant (Tyl. Tmelasra).

Legend of Vensca

In the year 1814 PC (826 AD), Liha walked out to the edge of Telam with a crowd of her followers. She pointed at the night sky, at the star Vensca, and said "When the clock strikes the final hour, you will find me here, fighting the eternal war." The Empress then walked into the nearby forest, never to be seen again in material form.

Currently, Vensca has a wormhole to the Ydroun system, which is controlled by the Mechyrdian military and surrounded by Diadochi space. It is most likely that Liha was referring to the ongoing spiritual conflict between Aedon, whom the Diadochi currently worship, and the rest of the galaxy, when she said "the eternal war".

The planet Vensca itself is home to the Lihann Priesthood, an order of powerfully (much moreso than usual) psychic Tylans who use their spiritual abilities to combat the influence of Aedon's deities through the wormhole into Tylan space.

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