War of the Islands

Initial Conflict
The War of the Islands (994 to 998) was the last of a series of conflicts between the Laurian Republic and the Valkarian Empire. It was named as such because the first fighting took place in an archipelago of islands in the northern sea that bordered both Lauros and Valkaria. Although they were under Laurian control at the time, the Valkarians believed that the islands should be returned to Valkarian rule, as they were before they were lost in a different war sixty years prior. However, the Valkarians claimed that the reasoning for their declaration of war on Lauros was an assassination of their emperor, which they believed the Laurians to be responsible for. This was the first war in which airships played a major role.

The Southern Separatists
In the same year that the war started, several city-provinces in the western half of the Sangkovian Range declared their independence from Valkaria. Irene was the first to go, renaming themselves The Irenian Freehold. Garenov followed soon after. Both city-states then made alliances with the Laurians, and some of their citizens even joined the ranks of the Laurian army and fleet. The Valkarians then sent some of their own forces south to attempt to retake these cities, opening a second front. However, they had underestimated the willingness of the Irenians and Garenovians to fight for their freedom, and ended up fighting the combined forces of the two city-states and the Laurians until the treaty in the year 998.

Dubek and Tibura
Worrying that Tibura and Dubek would be the next to secede, the Valkarians sent the Storm Sons, an infamous Vistánian mercenary company, to occupy both cities, along with a force made up of local loyalist militia and newly-trained soldiers from Balkor, a city-state that had stayed loyal to Valkaria for a long time and had been ordered to raise an army to contribute to the war effort. Though the Storm Sons were nearly unstoppable in front line combat, they quickly proved to be unsuited as peacekeepers, as there were many incidents of the occupiers abusing the citizenry with unnecessary force. An underground resistance movement began to build steam in Tibura, and they began fighting a guerrilla war against the loyalists and occupying forces, eventually succeeding at assassinating most of the local politicians that were loyal to Valkaria. In turn, the Storm Sons found excuses to be even more brutal to the Tiburese. Eventually, a group of Valkarian officers who had been sent to supervise the occupation noticed and disapproved of the Storm Sons' conduct, and sent them away, then ordered Balkor to sent more troops to replace them. Now having only the minimally-trained and poorly equipped Balkorians to contend with, the Tiburese succeeded at driving them out of the city. A few months later, the larger force from Balkor reached Tibura and attempted to besiege it, but were driven back. Balkor kept to itself after that, and officially declared their own independence in 998. The eastern city-states, Karstov, Darlena and Kortan, stayed loyal to Valkaria until the end, and Kortan was known to harbor fugitive Valkarians after the war, until they were annexed by the Cerellian Dominion in the summer of 999.

Vistánian Involvement
Vistánia, the largest and most loyal province in the area, helped the Valkarian Empire for a time. Though they had been forbidden from having a standing army since being conquered centuries ago, there were many military units stationed in Vistánia that served in the name of Valkaria but were made up mostly of native Vistánians. The Empire also employed the infamous and ancient Vistánian mercenary company, The Storm Sons. However, Valkarian officers who observed them and fought alongside them disapproved of their conduct, and they were sent home after the first year. Despite being a mercenary company, the Storm Sons were greatly respected by Vistánian culture, so this harmed relations between Valkaria and Vistánia, although thousands of Vistánian citizens continued to travel north to join the ranks of the Valkarian forces. In the year 997, Vistánia started to train and assemble their own army and fleet for the first time in 200 years, directly violating the treaty that the Valkarians had imposed on them, but knowing that at this point, nothing would be done about it, as the Valkarians were stretched too thin to commit an adequate force to subduing them. The appointed provincial governor, Dominick Pavino, also declared independence from the Empire and renamed the province to The Kingdom of Vistánia, just like it used to be called, and crowned himself King Pavino, making him the first king that Vistánia has had since the Valkarians conquered them 200 years ago. After that, most Vistánians that had been helping Valkaria returned to their homeland, now no longer under Valkarian rule.

Antosh
The Antoshi have had a long history of choosing the side that will help them the most, and at the beginning, seemed to be leaning towards helping the Valkarians. The Valkarians asked them to assemble an army and navy in Chetorra with which to attack Lauros and invade the cities of Londas and Old Lauros, and sent them resources to help them do so. However, as soon as Garenov and Irene declared their independence from Valkaria and allied with Lauros, Antosh formed an alliance with Lauros. To prove their loyalty to their new allies, the Antoshi deployed their naval fleet to the Imperial Bay with the intent of keeping the waters under allied control, but ended up suffering several defeats at the hands of Valkarian and Valkarian-friendly naval units that were stationed in Dubek and Visquien Harbor. They ended up losing all of the ships that the Valkarians had helped them build, and spent the next few years using their army and what remained of their navy to secure their borders from potential invasions from Vistánia, which never came. However, once Dubek and Vistánia stopped being loyal to the Empire in the year 997, the Imperial Bay became safe to cross, allowing Antosh to send some of their forces north to join the fight against the Valkarians. Throughout the war, Antosh's famous Bank of Chetorra also loaned out large sums of money to the separatists in the Irenian Freehold and Garenov, and later to Dubek and Tibura, allowing many of the freedom fighters to be more well-equipped than the loyalist soldiers.

The Fall of Valkaria
In the beginning of 998, Valkaria was attacked from the east by the newly-formed Cerellian Dominion. Unlike the Laurians, the Cerellians were ruthless and merciless, burning and destroying everything and everyone who wouldn't immediately yield to them. Unlike the other conflicts at the time, the Cerellians actually wanted the Valkarian homeland for themselves, thinking that they had an ancestral claim to it and that the Valkarians as a whole had committed various crimes that they must be pay the ultimate price for. Unable to deal with so many conflicts at once, the Valkarians signed a treaty six months later that put them at peace with the Laurians and the city-states that had declared independence. After that, the Valkarian forces vacated from the Sangkovian Range and the northern islands to focus all their resources and manpower on repelling the Cerellian invasion. The conflict that followed was long and brutal. Although the Valkarians had superior engineering and the Cerellian soldiers weren't as well-trained or disciplined as what Valkaria had to offer, the Cerellians made up for what they lacked in quality with extreme quantity. Their manpower outnumbered Valkaria's by more than four to one, and their airships were larger and more plentiful. Though the Valkarians held their own for a time, they had been severely weakened from years of fighting the Laurians and the southern separatists, and in the first month of 999, Cerellian forces had reached the Valkarian capital. The remaining Valkarian forces made one valiant last stand, but it wasn't enough to defend against the Cerellian onslaught, and in the end, their city was sacked. Their new conquerors laid waist to much of the city, executed many Valkarian officials who failed to escape their wrath, and allowed their own men unregulated pillaging and plundering of the country. A Cerellian official was installed as the new provincial governor of Valkaria, which had been renamed to Old Cerelon.