Black Records 3

The War of the Lions Begins - Year 947

	In the year 947, Emperor Valius V passed away. His death heralded the beginning of the largest scale civil war in Erebonian History.

	Valius V was a ruler with a somewhat debaucherous reputation, and is said to have had countless wives and concubines. To further complicate the matter of succession, many of those wives came from prestigious noble families, all of whom began competing for power and wanted their offspring to take the throne. Within days of Valius V's death, Crown Prince Manfred, the son of his first wife, was assassinated by an unknown party.

	Following the death of the crown prince, the fourth prince and the son of the first of Emperor Valius' secondary wives, Prince Orthros, seized the capital by force. Once in control, he declared himself the new emperor and began purging all those who dared to oppose him.

	The coup set off a succession of counter claims and three other princes also named themselves to be the new emperor.

	Backed by the powerful noble families of their mothers, the competing princes ignited a bloody five-year-long civil war, and thus the War of the Lions began.

	At first, the princes' armies were largely equal in terms of strength. It wasn't until Orthros, who would later come to be known as the false emperor, revived the being that had long been sealed under the city that the balance of power shifted.

	The Testa-Rossa, the legendary Vermillion Knight now tainted by the blood of Zoro-Agruga, saw the light of day once more.

	With its unmatched strength under his control, Orthros decimated his greatest competition in one fell swoop, and the fifth prince, Gunnar, was defeated.

	It seemed inevitable that the armies of the other princes would share the same fate, but it was at this pivotal point that the war took yet another surprising turn.

	This unexpected development came in the form of another Great Knight: The Palatinate Knight. The famed champion was acquired by Prince Lucius, the sixth and youngest of the feuding brothers, and with its power he was able to defeat the army of the brilliant strategist and second prince, Albert. Victorious and backed by the knight's power, Prince Lucius was poised to challenge Orthros. Prince Gunnar and Albert's armies, however, were not completely wiped out and decided to join forces with one another in order to oppose the other princes.

	It was thus that the war became one fought by three separate groups--Prince Orthros with the Vermillion Knight, Prince Lucius with the Palatinate Knight, and princes Gunnar and Albert, who had no knight but compensated with their sheer numbers.

The War of the Lions had been raging for two years now, and the chaos only worsened by the day. Erebonia seemed fated to fall into ruin and darkness--fitting, perhaps, for a nation that takes its name from 'Erebos.'