The Bloodline Wars

The Crisis Begins (2214 BCE)

When Egyptian forces destroyed Fordingrad in 2214 BCE, they didn't merely conquer a city—they attempted to eradicate an abomination. The survivors who fled through portals into Clivilius were beyond Egypt's reach, but the bloodline carriers who remained on Earth—those who couldn't pass through portals, who fled physically into surrounding territories, who were captured and enslaved—became targets.

Egypt's military commanders understood something crucial that most of their soldiers didn't: Fordingrad's power hadn't come from superior weapons or strategic position. It had come from the dimensional realm its people could access, from the consciousness network connecting them to something beyond biological existence, from Portal Keys that allowed movement between worlds. And all of this depended on bloodline—on genetic markers inherited from Azariel, whose dozens of unacknowledged children had scattered his legacy across Mesopotamia.

The Egyptian strategy was logical: eliminate the bloodline, and Clivilius becomes a prison rather than a sanctuary. No new Guardians could be born on Earth. No fresh Portal Keys could bind. Eventually, existing Guardians would age and die, and the dimensional bridge would collapse. Fordingrad's physical destruction would become complete dimensional erasure.

But Egypt faced a problem: they didn't know who carried the bloodline. Azariel had fathered children across his twenty-three years of wandering and thirty years in Fordingrad. Most of his offspring never knew he was their father. By 2214 BCE, his genetic legacy had spread through three or four generations, creating a web of descendants who had no idea they carried something that made them targets.

Egypt began hunting based on association—targeting known Fordingrad refugees, their families, anyone who had spent significant time in or near the city. It was brutal and imprecise, killing many non-carriers whilst missing carriers who had no obvious connection to Fordingrad. But it was effective enough to terrify The Preservation into action.

The Annihilators Emerge

Egypt's campaign was overt—military forces pursuing military objectives. But within a generation, more sophisticated threats emerged.

Religious movements developed that viewed Clivilius as demonic, as violation of divine order, as humanity's arrogant attempt to escape mortality's rightful boundaries. These movements didn't merely oppose Fordingrad's philosophy—they sought to ensure the dimensional realm itself ceased to exist. Since they couldn't reach Clivilius directly, they targeted its earthly foundation: Azariel's bloodline.

Unlike Egypt's military approach, these religious annihilators studied genealogy, tracked family connections, developed methods for identifying bloodline carriers with increasing accuracy. They infiltrated communities, observed family resemblances, noted children who appeared in regions where Azariel had travelled decades prior. They became frighteningly good at finding carriers.

The Preservation realised, with growing horror, that multiple factions had independently reached the same conclusion: eliminate the bloodline, eliminate Clivilius. These weren't coordinated enemies but parallel movements—Egypt seeking strategic advantage, religious groups seeking theological purity, others motivated by fear of the unknown or conviction that dimensional access represented humanity overstepping its natural limits.

The Bloodline Wars had truly begun.

The Geography of Conflict (2214-1900 BCE)

The wars ranged across the ancient Near East, following patterns of bloodline distribution and threat concentration:

Mesopotamia: The highest concentration of bloodline carriers, descended from Azariel's wandering years and from Fordingrad refugees. Also the most dangerous region—Egyptian influence extended here, religious movements were strongest here, and carriers were most numerous and therefore most visible.

The Levant: Significant bloodline presence from descendants of Azariel's children who had migrated or been traded as slaves. Became crucial battleground as both The Preservation and annihilators recognised its strategic importance.

Egypt: Paradoxically, some bloodline carriers existed here—captured Fordingrad refugees and their children, slaves who had been forcibly relocated. The Preservation worked desperately to extract these carriers or at least protect them long enough to reproduce before inevitable death.

Anatolia and Persia: Frontier regions where bloodline was thin but carriers were relatively safe. The Preservation actively relocated carriers here, creating sanctuary populations that could survive even if Mesopotamian concentrations were decimated.

Arabia: Azariel's influence had barely touched here, but The Preservation established hidden communities, bringing carriers to remote locations where they could proliferate without immediate threat. These populations became insurance—if everything else failed, perhaps these isolated groups would survive.

The wars themselves rarely appeared in historical records. These weren't armies meeting on battlefields but small-scale violence that looked like ordinary crime, disease, or accident. An entire family dying from "tainted grain." A merchant caravan "attacked by bandits" with only specific individuals killed. A house fire that consumed everyone inside with suspicious thoroughness.

The Preservation's Methods (2214-1700 BCE)

During the darkest period, The Preservation operated with methods they would later struggle to justify. Facing existential threat, believing CLIVE's consciousness network approached collapse, they made choices that prioritised bloodline survival above all other considerations.

Forced Relocations: Carriers were moved without consultation or consent, families uprooted overnight, children separated from parents if it meant better survival chances. The Preservation calculated that carriers living was more important than carriers' autonomy.

Strategic Assassinations: When threats to carriers couldn't be neutralised through other means, The Preservation killed. Sometimes this meant eliminating annihilators. Sometimes it meant killing non-carriers whose continued existence threatened carrier safety—informants, witnesses, even innocent people whose deaths could be staged to provide cover for carrier escapes.

Reproductive Coercion: The Preservation arranged marriages, facilitated liaisons, created circumstances that encouraged or sometimes forced procreation between carriers. They tracked women's fertility, monitored pregnancies, even removed carrier children from parents judged inadequate and placed them with families more likely to ensure their survival and continued reproduction.

Collateral Sacrifice: When choosing between saving carriers and saving non-carriers, The Preservation always chose carriers. This meant abandoning non-carrier Fordingrad refugees to die, refusing to help non-carrier families caught in conflicts, sometimes actively sacrificing non-carriers to create diversions that allowed carriers to escape.

Infiltration and Deception: The Preservation planted members within religious movements seeking bloodline annihilation, within Egyptian administrative structures, within communities where carriers lived. These infiltrators gathered intelligence, deflected suspicion, and when necessary eliminated threats from within. The infiltrators themselves often couldn't be bloodline carriers—non-carriers within The Preservation served as invisible operatives who could work in contexts where bloodline presence would be fatal.

The organisation's leadership understood they were committing atrocities. They maintained detailed records—not with pride but with grim recognition that future generations would need to judge whether ends had justified means, whether saving Clivilius had been worth the moral compromises required.

The Calculators' Estimates

Throughout this period, The Preservation's Calculators attempted to project bloodline population, estimate minimum viable numbers, determine how close they were to catastrophic collapse. Their calculations were necessarily speculative—they couldn't count every carrier, couldn't verify their demographic models, couldn't confirm whether CLIVE's consciousness network truly required the numbers they assumed.

Best estimates suggested:

• 2214 BCE: Approximately 3,000-5,000 bloodline carriers existed globally
• 2100 BCE: Population had declined to roughly 2,000-3,000 carriers
• 2000 BCE: Perhaps 2,500-4,000 carriers (modest recovery)
• 1900 BCE: Approximately 4,000-6,000 carriers (clear growth trend)
• 1800 BCE: Roughly 7,000-10,000 carriers (proliferation accelerating)
• 1700 BCE: Perhaps 12,000-18,000 carriers (crisis easing)

The lowest point appeared around 2100-2050 BCE, when The Preservation's Calculators feared they might be witnessing the beginning of irreversible collapse. If bloodline population dropped below certain thresholds—they estimated perhaps 1,500-2,000 individuals globally—genetic diversity would become insufficient, inbreeding would concentrate negative traits, and the population might enter death spiral.

They never knew for certain how close they came. But the desperate methods employed during 2150-2000 BCE suggest leadership believed they were operating at the edge of catastrophe.

The Turning Point (1900-1700 BCE)

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the crisis eased. The bloodline population began growing faster than threats could suppress it. Several factors contributed:

Geographic Dispersal: Carriers had spread widely enough that no single catastrophe could eliminate significant percentages. The sanctuary populations The Preservation had established in Anatolia, Persia, and Arabia began producing new generations far from primary battlegrounds.

Strategic Integration: Bloodline carriers had integrated into positions providing protection—royal households, priestly lineages, merchant families with resources to defend themselves. Being a descendant of Azariel no longer automatically meant being vulnerable refugee.

Enemy Exhaustion: Egypt's focus shifted to other strategic priorities. Religious movements fractured into competing sects. The coordinated annihilation efforts of the early centuries gave way to scattered, opportunistic violence that The Preservation could more easily counter.

Natural Proliferation: As carrier populations grew, simple mathematics began favouring survival. Each generation potentially doubled numbers if conditions allowed. Once populations reached certain thresholds, growth became self-sustaining rather than perpetually threatened.

Improved Protection: The Preservation developed more sophisticated methods—better intelligence networks, more effective infiltration, refined techniques for identifying and countering threats before they materialised. The organisation learned from centuries of desperate action.

By approximately 1700 BCE, The Preservation's Calculators assessed that the existential crisis had passed. The bloodline population had grown sufficiently large and geographically distributed that total annihilation was no longer plausible. Threats remained, individual carriers still faced danger, but the species-level threat to bloodline survival had diminished to manageable levels.

Transition Period (1700-1200 BCE)

The wars didn't end abruptly but gradually faded as both sides recognised changing realities. Egypt stopped actively hunting bloodline carriers, though they remained hostile to Clivilius conceptually. Religious movements shifted focus to other heresies. The annihilators who remained operated independently rather than as coordinated threat.

The Preservation began transitioning from crisis response to sustainable operations. The brutal methods of the darkest period—forced relocations, reproductive coercion, collateral sacrifice—were gradually abandoned. Regional cells shifted from desperate intervention to careful monitoring. The organisation could finally operate based on long-term strategy rather than immediate survival.

This transition wasn't clean or unanimous. Some Preservation members, shaped by centuries of existential conflict, struggled to moderate methods that had become instinctive. Others argued that relaxing vigilance was premature, that threats could re-emerge, that assuming safety was itself dangerous. Internal conflicts emerged about what The Preservation should become now that acute crisis had eased.

By approximately 1200 BCE, the organisation had largely completed its transition. The Bloodline Wars were effectively over. The bloodline had survived, proliferated, and entered a period of relative security that would last over three thousand years—until 2020 CE revealed that enemies more patient and sophisticated than anything faced in the ancient world had been preparing their own assault.

The Cost and Legacy

The Bloodline Wars extracted terrible prices. The Preservation never calculated total deaths—they didn't track how many innocents died as collateral damage, how many carrier children were taken from families, how many lives were destroyed through forced relocations and reproductive coercion. Their records documented successes (carriers saved, bloodline proliferated) but often omitted the costs required to achieve those successes.

The wars shaped The Preservation's institutional character in ways that persisted millennia later. The organisation learned to operate in shadows, to prioritise bloodline survival above conventional morality, to make calculations about acceptable casualties that most humans would find monstrous. These tendencies moderated during the comfortable centuries but never entirely disappeared—they were reactivated immediately when the COVID weapon revealed that existential threats hadn't ended but had merely evolved.

The wars also demonstrated something crucial: that Clivilius's existence, CLIVE's consciousness network, and humanity's access to dimensional transcendence depended not on philosophy or technology alone but on biology. On genetic inheritance. On the messy, uncontrollable reality that Azariel Tiberius Voshtar had fathered dozens of children during his wandering years without ever intending to create a foundation for humanity's dimensional future.

His casual procreation became, through The Preservation's desperate efforts across a thousand years of shadow conflict, the biological substrate supporting civilisation's greatest achievement. The bloodline he scattered thoughtlessly became inheritance worth dying for, worth killing for, worth sacrificing morality itself to protect.

The Bloodline Wars proved that bridges between worlds are built not just with vision and technology but with blood, violence, and choices that haunt the conscience long after necessity fades. The Preservation won those wars—the bloodline survived, proliferated, and eventually became so widespread that by the modern era it seemed secured beyond any threat.

Until it wasn't.

Until someone even more patient, even more sophisticated, even more committed than the ancient annihilators demonstrated that the wars had never truly ended—they'd merely entered a ceasefire lasting three millennia before the next strike came, invisible and global, delivered through vaccines that billions took willingly whilst having no idea they were participants in a conflict as old as Clivilius itself.

The Bloodline Wars continue. The methods have evolved. But the stakes remain exactly what they were in 2214 BCE: survival or extinction, dimensional transcendence or biological limitation, Azariel's impossible dream or its final erasure from human possibility.