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During the period when the Angaraks turned their attention to
the establishment of the Dalasian protectorates and Torak's full
concentration was upon the emerging Angarak kingdoms on the
western continent, there was peace between the Angaraks and the
Melcenes. It was a tentative peace - a very wary one - but it was
peace nonetheless. The trade contacts between the two nations gave
them a somewhat better understanding of each other, though the
sophisticated Melcenes were amused by the preoccupation with
religion which marked even the most worldly Angarak. Periodically
over the next eighteen hundred years, relations between the two
countries deteriorated into nasty little wars, seldom longer than a
year or two in duration and from which both sides scrupulously
avoided committing their full forces. Obviously neither side wished
to risk an all-out confrontation.
In the hope of gaining more information about each other, the
two nations ultimately established a time-honored practice.
Children of various leaders were exchanged for certain periods of
time. The sons of high-ranking bureaucrats in the city of Melcene
were sent to Mal Zeth to live with the families of Angarak generals,
and the sons of the generals were sent in turn to the Imperial capital
to be raised there. The result of these exchanges was to produce a
group of young men with a cosmopolitanism which in many
was later to become the norm for the ruling class of the Mallorean
Empire.
* This was a common practice in antiquity. Attila the Hun, for example, spent
several
Years of his childhood in the City of Rome. The idea was to civilize and
Christianize him.
It didn't work out that way, however.
It was one such exchange toward the end of the fourth
millennium which ultimately resulted in the unification of the two
peoples. At about the age of twelve, a youth named Kallath, the son
of a high-ranking Angarak general, was sent to the city of Melcene
to spend his formative years in the household of the Imperial
minister of Foreign Affairs. The Minister, because of his position,
]lad frequent official and social contacts with the Imperial Family,
and Kallath soon became a welcome guest at the Imperial palace.
The Emperor Molvan was an elderly man with but one surviving
child, a daughter named Danera, who, as luck would have it, was
perhaps a year younger than Kallath. Matters between the two
young people progressed in a not uncommon fashion until Kallath,
at the age of eighteen, was recalled to Mal zeth to begin his military
career. Kallath, obviously a young man of genius, rose meteorically
through the ranks, reaching the position of Governor General of the
District of Rakuth. He was by then twenty-eight, becoming thereby
the youngest man ever to be elevated to the General Staff. A year
later Kallath journeyed to Melcene, where he and Danera were
married.
Kallath, in the years that followed, divided his time between
Melcene and Mal Zeth, carefully building a power-base in each
capital, and when Emperor Molvan died in 3829, Kallath was ready.
There had been, of course, others in line for the Imperial throne, but
during the years immediately preceding the old Emperor's death,
most of these potential heirs had died - frequently under mysterious
circumstances. It was, nonetheless, over the violent objections of
many of the noble families of Melcena that Kallath was declared
Emperor of Melcena in 3830. These objections however, were
quieted with a certain brutal efficiency by Kallath's cohorts.