Dread Army of Ixhasa

Logo of the Dread Army of Ixhasa faction in the Romance of the Nine Empires card game

The Dread Army of Ixhasa is one of the nine empires vying for the control over Countermay.

History

The oldest of the empires is also the greatest threat to the other eight. When the world was new, Ixhasa rose, a solitary jewel of civilization in an untamed wilderness. It was the first and only of the empires, human or otherwise, to span the face of the continent. Unmatched was Ixhasa in all endeavors and fields of study: art, medicine, magic. There was but one frontier they had not conquered: death.

In his hubris, Ulix, the so called Eternal Emperor, built his pyramid atop a Nexus—a place where three ley lines intersect—and tapped the power therein to bring eternal life to Ixhasa. But no entity was meant to channel such power. The Nexus festered and erupted, geysering negative energy up through the great pyramid and liquefying the land about it. The great pyramid—and the heart of Ixhasa—sank beneath the waves of a new ocean.

In their absence, the rest of the Empire languished and died, falling to barbarism and internecine conflicts. Ixhasa—or at least that incarnation of it—was no more. But Ulix had, in a way, succeeded in his quest to conquer death. The negative energy hemorrhaging from the wounded Nexus permeated the population that had sunk with the pyramid.

Thousands of years later, the Ixhasans awoke anew as the Dread Army, the Empire of the Dead. When they took their first steps ashore, they found their empire gone, overtaken by squatters and invaders, pretenders all. Enraged and possessed of the unending endurance and might of the dead, Ulix commanded his army to retake their conquered lands. Ixhasa had succeeded in beating death. What are a handful of mortal empires by comparison?