#also nensela has to play keepaway with her brother who is Not Allowed to look at talk to be in the same room with or accept anything from

[thewinedarksea]

okay so honestly I've been curious about the tyrant trio ever since that goat herder snippet so?? May I please know more about them? :D why did Nensela make an alliance with them? How they all become married? Also from the goat herder snippet Aditya seemed chill but obviously he's as ambitious as Citlalli so can I ask what's his deal? Also what is Nensela's personality because she seemed chill too but i mean their name is the tyrant trio. What is their story, anyway? I wanna know everything :D

*cracks knuckles* okay so. to understand the tyrant trio, brief background is needed on their empires--this book v much stemmed from my desire to do interesting and fun things with ruling structures. so:

citlalli: divine right to rule, literally. considered an actual god by her people (and maybe she is actually a god. that’s not the point of this ask, though). worshipped. adored. her empire recently went through a golden age of expansionism, making them one of the largest--and richest--countries around. unfortunately (to citlalli and the majority of the country’s citizens, at least), her father and mother reversed that, choosing to focus on peace and cultivating their own country. citlalli...was opposed, largely because a lot of their territories realized no one was going to come after them for sort of splitting away, so they did. anyways long story short and skipping a lot of worldbuilding stuff, she had them offed when she was 13, blamed it on a neighboring kingdom, and took the throne with the promise that she’d take revenge. she did. brutally. her people love her A Lot. everyone else is terrified.

aditya: might is power. in his country, which is really one massive city and some scattered villages, you hold your position by being the strongest. thus, although some families have definitely held certain positions for long period of time and are thus generally considered strong, there’s no blood factor. if some shopkeep were to off the king, they’d be king. (then they’d just have to keep the job....) aditya was a v v minor member of the royal family. he is also, as it turns out, brilliant with poisons. long story short he is now the only member of the royal family. he’s got an eye on expansion, too. ambitious boy.

nensela: no snappy summation for her. her empire is...a market, i think is the easiest way to describe it. it’s a hub of trade and knowledge and ideas, and her job as ruler is to facilitate it. there’s a large cultural emphasis on bartering, exchanges, truth and how to tell it, etc. her people value traits more than blood; her mother was queen, and her other parent was a passing traveler who told the most beautiful stories. her brother’s father was a scribe. the rulership is a mix of elected position and bloodline; theoretically, she could be thrown off the throne if her people disliked her. that didn’t happen! but what did happen was a civil war that tore the country apart and killed her mother.

so jumping from the civil war: it lasted several years and devastated the economy. not many people died, but there was high turnover in the upper government, nensela was forced into hiding, and the man who usurped her did a lot of damage. also, a lot of areas essential for trade got wrecked. spike in crime. spike in lots of things, really.

nensela and her side won the war, but uh. damage had been done. there was a lot of pressure for nensela to marry, since her kingdom was severely weakened and a few of her neighbors were looking disrespectfully. most of the pressure was to marry internally. the rest was to marry someone from the kingdom looking most disrespectfully to prevent issues.  ....nensela had other ideas. see, aditya is a small but powerful kingdom, and citlalli is rich af and also v powerful, and both command a lot of respect/hold a lot of sway in international politics. so nensela was like hi ik my kingdom is weakened but also we are actually a major player normally bc, you know, all the major trade routes. would you like to marry me. 

both of them said yes. which, hey. even better. triple alliance. 

of course, both citlalli and aditya were, by this point, well known as tyrants who were totally fine murdering their own family for power, but hey. nensela loves her country goddamnit. she accepted her fate as a piece on the political chessboard. she married them.

(she also, it should be said, did love them. for what it was worth, she loved them very, very much. and they did love her.)

cue several decades of powerplay, aditya and citlalli being monstrous, all sorts of passive-aggressiveness, the two of them constantly spying on nensela (and trying to spy on each other) and casually invading her kingdom to deal with her problems, sending each other gifts like new and fun poison for birthdays, etc..... and then they die.

and then they’re reincarnated.

nensela fucking hates that.