Zearos D. S'ahlesius
Zearos (Z-ear-oh-s) D. S'ahlesius (Suh-less-e-us) is by far one of the oldest remaining members of the military era. Past the first era of the State, Zearos almost always refused to take positions as a commander or guild leader in any military guild, he instead opted to act as a military analyst as well as an adviser to the heads of the guilds to which he was loyal, and as an ambassador to others. His word was always considered and respected by the wiser of the military leaders.
Pre-Military Era
Zearos began playing in 2009, in the early days of classic, he played on and off for a while, often getting bored and quitting for extended periods of time. He joined and tried out a large variety of guilds during the early years, and unsuccessfully tried to launch a few of his own, as many noobs do.
Early in the same year that the Royal Guard was formed, Zearos found a home in a small guild operating out of Onnet Town, the name of the guild is all but relevant here. After the fall of the guild in the late spring of that year. Zearos changed his name to "The White Knight", he changed his look to the classic white and gold armor and that would become known as the classic Imperian Armor. He spent a month roaming Graal, assisting random players and spending an odd amount of time killing Graal Babies. He did this for nearly two months, until one day he roamed into the throne room of the castle, the re he saw the Royal Guard in their early days. King Harau Bacsey, Link, Jade, and The Wandering Troubadour sat in the throne room. Zearos was recruited by Jade, and a training was set by Link for the next day.
The Royal Guard Era
The day after being recruited, Zearos had a brief, thirty minute training session with Link on the roof of his house. Afterwards, He was promoted to the rank of 'Knight' by the Captain of the Royal Guard, Auel, as all who had been past the initial training were. Unfortunately, at this point, Zearos was still young, stubborn, and a bit foolish. As his name at the time was "The White Knight", he didn't want the word 'Knight' in front of his name, so he requested for Auel to leave him rankless. When this request was denied, a brief argument ensued, which ended with a minor victory on both sides, Zearos' name became "Antralth", and Auel was convinced to make all the ranks of the Knights into 'Sir', as it was more in line with history.
After returning to the throne room and meeting with Auel and other members of the Royal Guard and Royal Family, Auel took a quick liking to the head and armor combination that Zearos wore, and declared it to be the uniform of the Royal Guard, requiring members who could afford to buy the body to do so. Zearos received a brief fifteen minutes of fame for this, but this was only brief, and he quickly faded into the framework of the guild.
About a week into Zearos' time in the Royal Guard, Auel successfully proposed to King Bacsey for a third guild to be added to the chain, The Royal Army. At this time, Zearos' was focused on having power, he wanted to be on the top. So, first he asked Harau if he could also form a chain. The request was declined by Harau, and Auel wouldn't listen to his requests. So, a little angered, Zearos devised a plan and quit the Royal Guard.
Zearos had observed that although idle and often inactive, the members of the Royal Family held an extraordinary amount of power. So, he changed his look and name to "Lord Cavendrum", went to the throne room, and joined the Royal Family. For two days he sat in the throne room, gaining respect of the members of the RG and the RA. Eventually, he talked to the Kentiman, General of the Royal Army, and requested a leading position in the Army. Kentiman recruited him and gave him full powers in the guild, as well as the rank of General, co leading the guild alongside Kentiman.
As a General, Zearos (At this time under the name Kantor) worked very closely and developed a great relationship with Kentiman. At the time, Zearos and Auel got along fairly well, each had a fairly large amount of mutual respect for the other. Zearos met many of the men who became legends of Imperia during this time, this included people such as those mentioned above (Harau, Kentiman, Jade, Link, and Auel) as well as others such as Ryzallion, Occido, Zaer, and Sir Richard.
There were of course other players who had felt unappreciated and unrecognized, and a few of them left to attempt to form rival guilds, most of which would attack the throne room every now and then, but all inevitably fail within a week. It wasn't until nearly a month into Zearos' time in the guild that the first great divide of the Royal guilds came to be. Margrave Auel, leader of all the military divisions of the royal guilds had gained complete loyalty of nearly all the soldiers as well as most of the Royal Family who did not bear the name of the king, Bacsey. With this strong following, Auel realized the leadership skills of King Harau were slipping, so he organized a military coup, driving Harau from the kingdom, followed by those still loyal to him. Harau formed his own guild, The Bacseyian Federation, which quickly faded into obsoletion. Due to this, everyone in the Royal Guard made a fatal mistake of allowing them to fade from their memories and forget that they did still indeed exist.
One day, a new player named Xinke, a fairly recent recruit to the Royal Army, caught the attention of Zearos. Xinke's interest and loyalty to the guilds were outstanding, and Zearos gave him several promotions over a one or two week period. Partly due to this rapid rise through the ranks, partly due to Kentiman's disapproval of Xinke, he quickly caught the attention of Auel, and was taken under his wing.
One day, Auel private messaged Zearos, at this time, the Royal chain of guilds had reached their limit of allies, but Auel wanted to continue to expand. He told Zearos his plan to form a new chain of guilds, but by the name base of "Imperial" rather than Royals. The Royal guilds would remain intact for the most part, the exception being the Royal Family, the Imperial guilds would act as an extension of the Royal Guilds. Auel had respected Zearos accomplishments as a co general, and offered for him to command his own guild in the Imperial chain, leaving Kentiman to handle RA alone. Zearos accepted, creating the "Imperial Army", and allied many of the other guilds being formed for the first Kingdom of Imperia.
The First Era of Imperia
Imperia grew very quickly, The Imperial Army as well as many of the other branches in Imperia had wild success. Some of the branches did not do as well, but the strength of the other guilds carried them through. In these early days, there was very little drama, Zearos became friends with many of the other guild leaders, notably Xinke, Kentiman, and Zaer. The nobility of Imperia was fairly obnoxious, and Zearos received his only ban during this time by calling Duchess Jade by many uncouth names.
This was also when Zearos befriended two underrated members of Imperia and State history, Senlok Wehlet (Later known as John) and Occido. Both of these players were incredibly intelligent and became good friends of Zearos. They spent a large amount of their free time in Graal searching for secrets of the game, looking into the many hidden rooms and doors that seemed like they were either password accessible or to be released soon. They called the group that seeked out these secrets "The Society" after a building of such sorts that used to sit in south Swamp Town. They remained close friends over the many years they played, all loyal to Auel and his guilds.
Despite the immense success of Imperia, Auel one day logged off and did not return for 13 days. During this time Imperia crumbled without his guiding hands, many of the guild leaders and nobility made futile attempts to save Imperia. Unfortunately they could not, and thus the first era of Imperia ended. The behavior of disappearing and allowing guilds to crumble, only to come back with plans for something new was something Auel would never break the habit of doing, the only difference is he grew less apologetic of the fact after dozens of times.
Trailblazing
After Imperia fell, Zearos spent a large amount of his time on Graal doing something with other Imperians that would quickly become one of the favorite activities of Imperia and eventually the State, killing Graal babies. This was before any adoption center was set up, so the babies at the time all sat crowding the streets of Graal City. Zearos and the others spent endless hours trapping, torturing, killing, and generally harassing the Graal babies.
A week and a half after Imperia had crumbled, Auel returned, he had some made up sob story of why he had to leave, and an idea for a new, business focused guild called Shinra.
Shinra
Shinra was a short lived, business oriented guild under the lead of Auel. Not much eventful happened during this time, however Zearos (still going by the name of Kantor at the time) did receive the first of Auel's graphics works at this time, in the form of a battleaxe shield (waraxe_shield.png is the code for those interested). Shinra had a decent amount of activity at first, but ended when Auel once again disappeared. His gap was not as long this time, and he returned with plans for a new Imperia.
The Second Imperia
Auel's second Imperia launched to a great start, Kentiman once again lead the main army branch, Xinke lead the knights, and Zearos lead the Imperian Cavalry. While the cavalry didn't have the large numbers of the other guilds, Zearos still gathered a decently sized grouping of players and trained them in the way of mounted combat. Training cycles would be fairly extensive for the cavaliers. Zearos' training sessions would divide the trainees into two groups and have a series of exercises training for how to fight against both foot soldiers and other mounted players while on a horse. Zearos' unit while small was well trained quickly and had extraordinarily proficient cavaliers. Unfortunately, the second Imperia died after roughly a month, and many of the members of the cavalry did not return in the future renditions. No cavalry guild since has been able to meet the widespread success of the Imperial Cavalry, and Zearos himself eventually gave up on the skill of Cavalry.
Other Imperian Age Guilds
Overall, there were 9 Eras of Imperia spanning nearly two years. Between the many eras of Imperia were a series of other guilds designed by Auel, sometimes giving other leaders a chance to shine. The non military in between guilds included The Baby Punchers Association, a guild dedicated to the antagonizing of Graal Babies, a few attempts the Graal News Network, Auel's idea for a more efficient way to get news to Graalians, it failed all three times it was tried, Zearos acted as both a Journalist and an Editor.
In this time, Xinke also had a chance to lead a kingdom with Auel's assistance known as Britannia, unfortunately, Xinke wasn't truly in control and was just a figurehead while Auel called all the true shots. Zearos lead a branch of the military during this era.
Imperia Eras 3-8
For sake of saving time for those reading this page, I will condense the third to eighth era down to a single section. In all of these, Zearos role remained nearly the same, he would be in charge of running the Imperian/Imperial Academy. The exact purpose of the academy would vary era to era, but for the most part it was to train new recruits. A few other officers in the state would help to teach sometimes. The Academy varied from a three day training course lead by only Zearos to being an extended training opportunity with multiple classes available. Zearos lead a guild in almost every single organization lead by Auel, military or not.
There were minor differences between the eras. In the 3rd, the structure was that of a monarchy, the fourth was an empire, the 6th took the form of a republic, during which time Zearos acted as a councilman for the Imperian Council.
It is worth noting that during the fifth era of Imperia, Zearos sat with his friend, Senlok, in the throne room of the castle, a few guards scattered around, but fairly empty on their end of the screen. It was at this time that a man wandered in by the name of James Zor. After a brief exchange of words, Zearos and James quickly grew to be very good friends. Zearos had an unsuccessful attempt to recruit James to Imperia, but he did peak James' interest in militaries, and the two would talk fairly frequently over the next few months.
Throughout every era of Imperia and the guilds between, Zearos attempted to act as a voice of reason to Auel. Initially, Auel took alot of what Zearos said into consideration. People forget that once, Auel had a deeper care and respect for those who followed him. Everything changed after the War of Paranoia, after that war, Auel grew distant and cold, and while he still heard Zearos' advice, he had been shaken up to much by the war to give any true consideration.
The War of Paranoia
The War of Paranoia took place in the fourth era of Imperia. At the time Zaer was Auel's right-hand man. Over the past week or two, there had been reports of lower ranked members of Imperia being occasionally attacked by members of Harau Bacsey's military organization, The Bacseyian Federation, which he formed out of spite when he had been kicked, but took half a year to make any real action on it. The war truly started with the Battle of Belle Isle, the details of which have been somewhat exaggerated or forgotten in other tellings, I hope this can clear at least some things up.
Zearos went to Belle that day for a reason I can't remember at this time, back then there was no airlift, but instead a bridge. After crossing the bridge and walking westwards, three Bacseyian soldiers came out from under bushes and began to attack him. After a brief and very unsuccessful attempt to fight them off, Zearos called for help in the guild chat. Auel and Kentiman were first on the scene, followed by the rest of the online Imperians. However, it seemed that as more Imperian reinforcements came in, even more Bacseyian ones were coming. After a few minutes of fighting, Auel realized that the Imperians were far outnumbered, he started to call in favors with retired and ex Imperians to get them to come and fight for him, if at least for the one battle. Many did come, one of which is the famous military figure Ryzallion. The battle quickly turned in Imperia's favor as more and more people came, and eventually Harau called a retreat.
Unfortunately, despite the clear results, both sides still claim victory of that battle to this day. As far as the rest of the war, I'm sure you can find a detailed description of it elsewhere on this wiki, so I won't burden you with the details. Zearos role in it was a soldier, a trainer, and an infiltrator.
As stated above, the war had a drastic impact on Auel. He became a more distant and crueler leader, his guilds wouldn't last as long as they once did before he disappeared, yet he always came back with some new plan on what to do. Zearos' respect for Auel slowly plummeted, and it was because of this that in the late fall of 2012, right before the ninth era of Imperia, that Zearos relationship with Imperia went sour.
Fallout
At this point, Auel had cycled through probably a dozen organizations in three months. Zearos had lead guilds in nearly all of them, as he had since the first Imperia. Overall, between each new guild Auel had him create, reforms during Imperian Eras, and just straight up bullshit from Auel, Zearos had spent around 25,000 Gralats and a thousand hours for Imperia and Auel, and although in the early days he was appreciated, ever since the W.O.P, Auel had taken every officer under him for granted. It was due to this, and anger at Auel's most recent random disappearance, that after Auel publicly proposed the ninth Imperia, Zearos went to Auel's Guild house to have a conversation with him. While intent was initially to be civil, the conversation quickly became heated, they debated furiously for almost an hour over all the wrongdoings and grievances Auel had done over the year and a half Zearos was in service to him. I will not burden you with the details of the argument, only that both sides were truly furious by the end, Zearos left in a foul mood, with no intention of ever joining Auel again.
If only he had been so lucky.
Valikorlia
It was November of 2012, a day or two after the debacle with Auel, Zearos joined the military of his close friend James, Valikorlia. Valikorlia was small at the time, but James had all the makings of a great leader, he could have even been better than Auel if he had the chance. James put Zearos second in command of Valikorlia, and with the combined power of James leadership skills and Zearos' knowledge and experience from the State, they built a military of strong potential. Given time, it could have been more successful than the State was. Unfortunately, they were not given the time they needed to prove this. Roughly a month after Zearos joined Valikorlia, Auel made a decision that is both the best and worst in military history.
Forming of the State
In late November of 2012, James met with Auel and Viral, each of them representing their own guilds. Directly afterwards, James met with Zearos to tell him that Auel had proposed a merging of the three guilds to form a new military, better than had ever been seen before. The following couple of weeks would be spent by a committee of high ranking members of each guild to form the State.
At the very first of these meetings, Zearos decided to follow in the trend and do a major image rehaul, he changed his entire look to the white robed old man and took the name Zearos D. S'ahlesius.
The name itself came from two sources. The first being named after Zearos' Dungeons & Dragons character from when he used to play, Zearos Deklazdier, and the last name S'ahlesius was taken from a man who taught Zearos a lot of the basics of the game in his early days, an 'assassin' named S'ahlesor.
Zearos had a few contributions to the structure of the first State. Mainly was his strong insistence upon having some sort of representative council in the state as well as giving all members the right to vote for their leaders.
The planning state flew by with a minimal amount of disagreement, and on December 18th, the three leaders, Auel, James, and Viral signed the December Charter and formed the State Parliament.
The State: Era 1
Not everyone in the state was happy with the new structure, some of the older members had begun to adopt the mindset that Zearos had when he had quit at the beginning of the final Auelian era of Imperia. Mainly in this were Xinke and Zaer. They didn't want any of these outsiders such as James or Viral to have power, and others didn't even see Auel fit to lead.
When the election for the King and Prime Minister of the State were approaching, it became clear to some of these people that while Zaer was running against James for the position of Prime Minister, Auel was running unopposed for King. Knowing Auel's kingship would likely cause a rebellion amongst many of the older members, Zearos made a futile attempt to run against Auel, losing by an overwhelming majority vote.
When the results also showed that Zaer had lost to James for the position of Prime minister, and every senior member from Imperia had been given the maximum of a parliament seat, many of these members left to form the Ministry of Justice, a communist rebellion.
It is like Zearos' greatest regret in all his time in Graal that he did not join the Ministry, but rather stuck by the side of his friend James.
The war between the two guilds was not devastating as the War of Paranoia was, but after a month or so, Auel did use it as a basis to reconfigure the governmental structure, essentially eliminating parliament and making himself supreme ruler of the State.
Zearos did lead a military branch in both the first and second era of the state, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.
The first Era of the State ended as all Auelian militaries had in the past.
State Era 2
I will say little on this era of the state. A few of the modern officers rose to power during this time, James power plummeted, and towards the end of it Zearos quit for a month or so.
Other Imperias: Zaer's and Sherlocks
Zearos was only briefly a part of Sherlock's Imperial guild, it was somewhat successful, but failed to capture the essence of Imperia.
The true betrayal of Imperia came from the once hero Zaer
During the third or fourth State Era Zaer formed a new Imperia alongside Xinke, Zearos, Ryzallion, and other loyalists to the old ways. However, while this guild was mildly successful Zaer eventually betrayed the Kingdom by kicking members and handing ownership of the guild directly to Auel.
A New Hope
It was at this time, towards the summer of 2013 that, while they did join the state as a time filler, the loyalists of Imperia began to realize there was no escaping Auel. They discussed ways to avoid him but always came up short. They eventually came to the idea of taking Imperia's greatness to another Graalian server. The real question was where to go? Era was to chaotic, Zone to empty. So the group looked towards the upcoming release of the highly anticipated and hyped server Delteria, and started designing a new military system that could work there based off of what they had seen, complete with guild and rank systems, jobs, a government and judicial system, and much more. At the time only cherry picked pieces of content from Delteria was shown, and there was no way to know that it would end up being absolute ass.
Delteria
Zearos, along with Xinke, Ryz, and many others, planned a move from Classic to Delteria in the months prior to the servers release in December of 2013. About a month and a half before the server was released, Zearos was hired for a staff position on the server. Zearos did some work prior to the servers release to get the server ready, and when the server was finally opened to the public, Zearos spent the next few weeks splitting time between completing quests and dungeons with the other Imperians, and helping out the players trying to get into the server get past the many, many bugs that were present at launch. The game was released unfinished, many spells and items didn't work, and many times players would get stuck in dungeons. After about a month of dealing with this, Zearos ended up getting into an argument with the head GM, Haslo, and had the account banned and reset, but not before transferring all items, many high level items and a large amount of gold, to an alt account, which he gave to Kusan a few days after, as Kusan was the only person who remained on Delteria. Kusan took the planned goals and structure for Imperia and used them to create Elysia, a very successful guild which impacted people on both Classic and Delteria.
Hiatus
After being removed from Delteria staff in early January of 2014, Zearos did not feel like returning to either server for a while, so he took a break from Graal until late summer of that year. While he was gone, he missed the Zaer lead era of Imperia, where Zaer famously backstabbed the entire guild and sold it out to Auel before disappearing for good. Around June of 2014, Zearos used an alt account for about a month and a half to see how he could climb the rank ladder in the State without his name or prior experiences being used to judge him, this is something that Zearos did about four times since that point, never for more than two months, the highest rank he achieved was 1st Lieutenant, which was received after two months, the lowest was Sergeant, which I was gained after two weeks. After getting bored of this, Zearos came back on his main account, instantly met by an old friend, John Atlas, who prior to that Zearos had known as Senlok, who recruited him to the current version of the State.
2nd War of Paranoia
When Zearos returned, a new version of the State was in full swing, Zearos was given an officer position, and helped with trainings and recruiting for a while, but the guild quickly began to suffer a lack of activity. Auel's solution to this was to propose that many of the old Imperian members form a new Imperia to wage war with the State. He proposed this idea to Zearos, Xinke, Kozak, and Ryzallion. The group quickly got to work building a new Imperia. These four, in addition to Collin Magnus and Demon Eatshumans, made up the top ranking officers of Imperia. Xinke was King of Imperia, while Kozak, Ryzallion, and Collin were each commanders of their own guilds, being the Imperians Army, Knights, and Dragoons respectfully. Demon acted as Master Trainer, in charge of training all members.
Zearos was given the rank of Duke, his primary purpose was being in charge of the foreign affairs for the guild. In most State era guilds, such a position would be pointless, but at this time, there was close to a dozen smaller guilds that were either individual militaries, such as Kibler Guard (lead by Fessler), or smaller guilds that were anti state. Zearos spent the next few weeks meeting with the leaders of these guilds, negotiating to either have them absorbed into Imperia, or for the larger ones that didn't want to lose total control, have them join the Alliance. After a few weeks, we had absorbed a majority of the rebellion guilds into Imperia, and had two other guilds as part of the Alliance, one of these was Kibler Guard, who we had worked out a deal with which while giving Fessler the illusion of control, made the guild Imperian in everything but name.
While the war as a whole lacked battles and actual conflicts, the majority of the ones that were had were won by Imperia, with the exception of one guild spar where Auel delayed the battle an hour to recruit members from one of the top GS teams. The guilds at this time were full of spies, Zearos himself having an alt as a mid level officer in the State at the time.
Over a month into the war, Harau Bacsey returned, forming a new Bacseya and joining in on the Imperian side. A few weeks after this, many of the Imperian officers, including King Xinke, were starting college, and as they wouldn't be able to contribute the time needed to Imperia, ordered for all remaining troops to transfer to Harau's guilds for the remainder of the war. This ended what is believed to be one of the greatest Imperian guilds to exist.
Zearos helped out for the remainder of the war, which saw no true winner, as both sides ended up falling within days of each other.
Late Era State Guilds
After taking a break for a month or two, Zearos returned to join Morzan's state as a Colonel. He served in this State as well as the multiple states and Auel lead guilds that followed through Winter 2014 and Spring of 2015. This is the period that Zearos served strictly in an advisory role. he barely commanded any troops during this period of time. In the Summer of 2015, the incident of July 21st, 2015 happened, and the State never arose in the same form again.
Intrepidus
Later in that summer, Xinke got Zearos, Ryz, Kozak, Collin, and others of the Imperian crew to try to make an Imperia like guild called Intrepidus. They had weeks of planning, careful recruiting, but unfortunately the guild fell flat and ended after a week due to lack of activity from both officers and members.
College
Zearos began college in Fall of 2015, due to heavy workloads, he does not play Graal while he is at school, but will usually come back to help the community if he has free nights over his Winter and Summer breaks. During breaks he has served as officers in guilds such as the Republic, Sarovia, and others.
Reforming the Community
There is no denying the community has suffered since the deletion of the State, and Auel having practically retired. The remaining leaders try to emulate Auel instead of creating something on their own, and as a result, no military guild seems to have the same success. Zearos does still care about the overall state of the community, and has done pieces about possible ways to reform. First, in 2015, he, along with Xinke and many others, contributed to The End Tomes, a series about how to continue with militaries in a post Auel world. Then, in late 2016 into early 2017, Zearos wrote a three article series about the problems that modern militaries faced focusing on Ranks, Names, and Training.
Quotes
"I'm not some jackass that jerks themselves off over the shit that they say" -Z.D.S
