Uprising

From Tourmaline

Dissent was always firmly squashed under Vytarus Scave's rule, and there was never much organized resistance to the regime -- or if there was, it was either so weak as to be below notice, or so careful not to draw attention to itself as to be practically unnoticable. (Though even the most poor and oppressed people will have their folk legends and stories to cheer them and bring hope...one character who has featured in such stories recently is Blaze, who is rumored to strike blows against injustice, rescue people from the scaffold, steal from the rich to give to the poor, and other such improbable stuff.)

However, there was one armed rebellion in recent memory: the Greenmarket Uprising. It began the day that Scave was assassinated. Mobs of people--most of them armed with knives, pried-up cobblestones, or the tools of their trade, but a few with real weapons--erected barricades at all the entrances to the Greenmarket, closing it off to all traffic, and demanding a list of concessions from Vytarus Scave. Naturally, the city guard was sent to arrest them, but the rebels managed to hold them off for most of a day. Barricades also sprang up in various other locations around the city.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, things got suddenly more chaotic, as the ritual against Scave succeeded in killing him -- though his death was not at first made public, confusion spread quickly from his seat of power as orders suddenly stopped coming and subordinates scrambled for control. The guard retained enough cohesion to continue prosecuting the rebels, who, though they gained morale and recruits after the news of Scave's death became public, could not, in the end, hold out against their better-armed opponents. The rebellion ended in a bloody slaughter and a rash of executions, which were only terminated by the triumphant arrival of Gaeric Cooper and his companions in the city. With Cooper's ascension to the throne and the subsequent purge of the worst of the people who had held power under Scave, things finally settled down. Cooper issued a blanket pardon to all who had been involved in the uprising. But some estimate that more than half of those who took to the barricades died in the Greenmarket Uprising and its aftermath.