The Calorian Empire
The Warm Empire · the Persecutor of the Early Drift · the Age of the Martyrs
The Calorian Empire (the Empire of Calor, the “warm power”) was the vast southern empire that ruled the world in the time of Connor Frost and the early church — the worldly might that condemned Connor to the Melting and persecuted his followers for nearly three centuries. Its capital was Calor, “the city of heat”; its emperors claimed the Sun as patron, and its state cult was an imperial form of the Solarite sun-worship.
Calor and the Whitening
At Connor’s time the north (the old Kingdom of the North) was a Calorian province under the puppet-dynasty of Tepidus. The Calorian governor Marran the Tepid confirmed the Solarite council’s sentence and gave Connor to the Calorian death of the Melting on The Sunstone (a punishment for those who “troubled the warmth of the state”). Thus the empire of heat executed the Lord of Cold — and was defeated by it.
The Great Persecutions (64–290 A.F.)
For over two centuries the empire persecuted the Drift, seeing the Frostians’ refusal to offer incense to the Sun-emperor as treason and “coldness toward the warmth of Rome-Calor.” The persecutions came in waves under successive emperors:
- Nereus (c. 64 A.F.) — the first great persecution; martyrdom of Corin and Vael.
- Domitius the Burning (c. 95 A.F.) — exiled Voss to Hjarn (The Revelation of Ice).
- Decius and Valens the Kindler — empire-wide demands to sacrifice to the Sun.
- Diocaltian the Great Burner (c. 290 A.F.) — the last and worst, the “Great Burning,” when Frosthalls were razed and scriptures burned. The faithful who refused were given to fire, the warm beasts, and the Melting — and the church honored them as martyrs (Frostian: those who shared Connor’s Whitening). “The frost of the martyrs was the seed of the Drift.”
The Frost-Peace (312 A.F.)
The emperor Cassius the Cooled, before a great battle, saw a vision of the The Sixfold Star with the words “In this cold, conquer,” and was converted. He ended the persecutions (the Edict of Cold, the Frost-Peace), and the empire began its long turn to Frostianity. Within a lifetime the faith that Calor had crucified became the faith of Calor. The councils (Council of Wintermere, Council of Frosthold) were called under the converted emperors.
Significance
The Calorian Empire is, for Frostians, the great historical proof of the gospel: that “the warm power did its worst to the Cold, and the Cold outlasted it.” In The Revelation of Ice, Calor is “Bavel the Great, the Mother of Fevers,” the warm world-city whose fall is foretold — and which, in history, fell at last to the very Cold it had despised.