Military & Security of Cyre

"There is a particular cruelty in being the army that was winning when the world ended. We held the line. We pushed into Karrnath. The colossi were walking. And then the mists came, and none of it mattered." — Captain Cala Narain, Queen's Forward Blades, recorded in Sharn, 997 YK

The Army That Was Winning

Cyre entered the Last War with enormous advantages and the wrong kind of military. It held the Galifaran treasury, the Mark of Making's ancestral homeland, and the absolute conviction that its cause was just. What it did not have was a martial culture. Its finest wizards were artists and theorists, not war-trained like Aundair's Arcane Congress. Its expert artificers were largely employed by House Cannith, which maintained neutrality. A single elite unit — the Vermishard Guard — could not substitute for the martial depth of Karrnath and Thrane.

Cyre adapted across a century of war: mercenaries filled gaps, the Guard's model became the basis for a genuine military academy, and the nation poured gold into Cannith's construct programs until it had built weapons that could break armies. At the moment of its destruction, Cyre's military was not in collapse. Its fronts were active. Its soldiers had recently driven deep into Karrnathi territory. The colossi were operational and beginning to turn outward. The nation did not fall militarily. It was erased — and the army that was winning when the world ended is the army that the survivors cannot stop mourning.

The Royal Army

The Royal Army operated under the command of General Shivaji — an elf approaching the end of his third century, the most experienced military commander in the Last War, the officer who had overseen King Jarot's military buildup and who saved Queen Mishann from capture at the war's outbreak. Shivaji never forgave himself for not foreseeing the war. He served until the Day of Mourning, and he died alongside his queen in Metrol.

Cyran soldiers — sometimes called Greencoats for their distinctive uniform — were flexible combined-arms fighters built around versatility rather than a single dominant discipline. Where Karrnath produced heavy infantry and Thrane produced templar shock troops, Cyre produced units that could adapt to whatever the battlefield demanded — a reflection of the national character and its greatest military asset. The army fought its first extended campaign in the siege of Eston in 895 YK and was still in the field along the Saerun Road on the Day of Mourning.

The Vermishard Guard, named for Metrol's columnar palaces, served as both the core elite force and the model for the wartime military academy housed in the Vermishard of War. Guard officers were expected to demonstrate the same combination of cultural refinement and martial competence that defined the Cyran ideal — an expectation that produced commanders who could lead a cavalry charge in the morning and attend a state dinner in the evening, and that their enemies found both admirable and infuriating.

The Queen's Forward Blades — a scouting unit operating behind enemy lines — represented the army's capacity for independent deep operations. The Blades gathered intelligence, disrupted supply lines, and conducted the kind of missions that the conventional army could not execute. Survivors of the Forward Blades are among the most capable and most traumatized veterans of the war.

The Navy

Geography made the navy essential in a way unique among the Five Nations. The long Cyre River border with Karrnath demanded continuous military attention, and only Breland had reliable overland access into central Cyre — making naval control of the waterway a primary defensive line, not a secondary arm.

The flagship The Mishann — named for the queen whose claim started the war — operated from Starmantle Bay in Metrol, a surprisingly deep freshwater basin that housed the nation's shipyards and the entire Cyran fleet. Artificers spent years developing rapid riverine transport methods, and the innovations they produced — arcane cannons, submersible warforged sentries stationed below the waterline to watch for Karrnathi undead legions walking along the riverbed, and experimental mephit-powered watercraft for rapid response — made the Cyre River the most technologically contested waterway in Khorvaire.

Dollen on the River anchored the northern front. Once one of the richest ports on Scions Sound, the city was sacked by the Karrnathi military early in the war. When the Cyran army reclaimed it, the crown requisitioned most of the infrastructure and converted the trade hub into a naval fortress — thundering arcane cannons on the harbor walls, Castle Dollen rebuilt after every devastating Karrnathi raid, and the market that had made the city wealthy slowly emptying over a century of siege mentality until cheap alcohol and desperate commerce replaced the legitimate trade. Dollen's transformation from prosperous port to permanent garrison is the story of the war's effect on Cyre's infrastructure told in a single city.

Every innovation developed at Starmantle Bay and deployed along the Cyre River — the transport methods, the underwater sentries, the mephit-craft — was lost on the Day of Mourning. No surviving documentation exists.

"We built cannons that could throw lightning across the river. We built warforged that could walk along the riverbed to count the Karrnathi dead walking toward us. We built boats powered by mephits that could cross the river in minutes. And then the mists came and took every one of those things, and now the only person who remembers how the mephit engines worked is an admiral sitting in a landlocked refugee camp in Breland." — attributed to a Cyran naval artificer, New Cyre

Mercenaries

Cyre's treasury funded extensive mercenary campaigns from the outset — it had the gold when it lacked the martial culture to field specialist forces. House Deneith had been brokering goblinoid mercenaries from the Darguun region since 878 YK, and these forces served Cyre and Breland throughout the war's early decades. In 906 YK, Cyre hired the newly arrived Tairnadal elves as elite cavalry — warriors of extraordinary skill whose ancestor-driven battle fury made them the most devastating light cavalry on the continent.

Both arrangements ended in betrayal. The Tairnadal annexation of Eastern Cyre in 956 YK transformed mercenaries into conquerors overnight — though the Khunan majority offered little resistance, having no love for their Cyran overlords. The Haruuc rebellion of 969 YK, when the hobgoblin mercenary leader united the Ghaal'dar and seized southern Cyre as Darguun, was the more devastating blow. Both losses were the direct consequence of a military strategy built on purchasing loyalty that could be redirected. The lesson was clear, and Cyre learned it: gold buys soldiers but not allegiance, and any force you hire can decide it would rather own what it's defending than defend it for someone else.

After the secessions, Cyre's conventional military bore the full weight of the conflict on every front. The nation's increasing investment in warforged was, in part, a direct response to the mercenary betrayals — constructs built in Cyran foundries, programmed to serve Cyran interests, incapable of seceding.

The Warforged Program

The warforged were Cyre's most consequential military investment — the answer to a century of betrayals, shortfalls, and the grinding realization that Cyre could not fight a five-front war with an army built for a one-front peace.

Gold from the Cyran treasury funded House Cannith's escalating construct research through decades of development. The earliest constructs deployed in the late 930s YK were barely more than golems with limited sentience, difficult to direct in the field. Warforged titans — sixty to eighty feet tall, tireless, devastatingly effective against fortifications — were deployed first in Cyre in 959 YK. For a time they gave Cyre a genuine edge, until Cannith sold the same designs to other nations. Modern warforged — living constructs with full sentience and independent combat capability — first saw battle in 965 YK. Eston's proving grounds trained cadres of newborn warforged for active duty; the sound of constructs learning combat skills in the shadow of the creation forges was part of the daily life of a city that would be destroyed without a credible survivor.

The warforged colossi were the final product — and the most dramatic military asset in Khorvaire's history. Machines standing 200 to 300 feet tall, built in enormous creation foundries carved into mountainsides, each powered by an unusually large Khyber dragonshard cut into a specific pattern to contain raw magical energy without exploding. For optimal performance, a colossus required a crew including a captain with the Mark of Making, a weapons officer with the Mark of Storm, and a helmsman with the Mark of Passage — three dragonmarks from three houses, all serving a Cyran weapon. When necessary, the colossus could direct itself, but at diminished power. Each carried a contingent of elite troops who could ride in safety while the colossus smashed through enemy lines, then pour out through hatches once it was in position.

WX-31 — later dubbed Karrnslayer — was sent north toward Karrnath, taking an eastern route around Karrlakton, hugging the edge of the Nightwood, and largely bypassing Vedykar en route to Atur. The colossus earned its name by massacring the forces that rallied to stop its advance. When it reached Atur, the Cyran army sacked the city, taking vengeance on the reanimation facilities that had produced the undead legions responsible for earlier devastations of Cyran territory. The Cyran forces recognized they could not occupy the city and retreated — only to be obliterated on the Day of Mourning months later.

WX-5 — called Norr — was the most humanoid of the colossi, built not only as a weapon but as an inspiration for Metrol's residents. It was deployed toward the capital, where Karrnathi armies menaced the city. Today, Norr lies slumped against one of the Vermishards in the Mournland — silent, still, and unreachable.

A third colossus, WX-12, designated Naphrad, ended up in the Ring of Storms in Xen'drik through means unknown — presumably displaced by the Mourning itself. Local dragonborn have sealed off the site from outsiders who wish to investigate.

The docent network that controlled the colossi — hundreds of semi-organic nodes distributed throughout each body, converging at a central master docent recovered from Xen'drik — represented the most advanced integration of ancient and modern artifice in the history of Khorvaire. The techniques used to create docent nodes were lost in the Mourning, and all three Cannith factions are sending expeditions into the Mournland to salvage what they can.

The Three Fronts

Cyre was managing three simultaneous active theaters on 20 Olarune 994 YK.

The northern and eastern border with Karrnath was the primary theater. Karrnathi forces had seized Cyran territory and were preparing a deeper push toward Breland — tens of thousands of Karrnathi soldiers were killed alongside Cyran civilians when the Mourning struck. The navy's control of the Cyre River and the fortress installations at Dollen anchored this front. The WX-31 Karrnslayer campaign — sacking Atur and retreating — was the most audacious Cyran offensive of the war's final year.

The Valenar frontier was a persistent drain without decisive engagement. The Tairnadal fought on their own terms — targeted strikes on officers and infrastructure, withdrawing before conventional forces could be brought to bear — and were not interested in the kind of battle Cyre's combined arms could win.

The southwestern front along the Saerun Road, where Thrane and Breland pressed a combined advance, was the active battle still in progress when the mists ended it. The Field of Ruins marks where that fight stopped — an outnumbered Cyran army caught in a running engagement, thousands of corpses preserved where they fell with no sign of rot or decay. Some armies on nearby battlefields became stone statues anchored in position. Others were crystallized or reduced to ash. Even seasoned salvagers are loath to enter the Field of Ruins.

Intelligence and Security

Cyre maintained civil oversight over the military throughout the war. General Shivaji coordinated field commands under the crown's authority, though field commanders in contested regions assumed quasi-governorial powers in practice and the navy operated with considerable autonomy.

The wartime demands of sustained pressure on multiple borders produced the Cyran Intelligence Service — the crown's apparatus for espionage, counterintelligence, and internal security, housed in the Vermishard of Law. The Service operated under royal authority but coordinated closely with House Phiarlan, whose continent-spanning network of performers and information brokers — organized through the Serpentine Table, Phiarlan's espionage arm — gave Cyre intelligence capabilities it could not have developed independently. The Service's agents conducted wand-and-dagger operations in foreign capitals and managed intelligence networks along the Cyre River border.

When people in the Five Nations talked about wartime espionage, they thought first of the Dark Lanterns and the Royal Eyes. The Cyran Intelligence Service operated with comparable reach, if less public notoriety — which, for an intelligence service, is arguably the point.

FIELD DISPATCH — RECOVERED FROM THE SAERUN ROAD, UNDATED

To Vermishard Command: Forward elements report contact with combined Thrane-Brelish forces along the Saerun Road. Engagement is general. Requesting reinforcement from the 4th Greencoat Regiment. Colossus WX-3 is operational and awaiting deployment orders. Awaiting confirmation.

No confirmation was ever sent.