"To hold the hearth until the order returns or the hearth is cold."Oath of the Hearth Guard of the Krakre, as translated by the Institute of Xenology
The Krakre is the government complex of the Voor Confederacy, on a raised plateau at the centre of Ekhar Vin, the capital of Hiverion. It is 30 kilometres across and 3 deep, a complex of towers, walls and courts in five rings, each higher than the last. The High Council sits there, and until 2338 the Legion's High Command sat there too. At its heart is the Kindling, the inner sanctum where, in the Voor telling, the first hearth's fire was kindled nine centuries before contact, and where its flame was kept. The Voor call the complex the hearth of hearths, and they do not distinguish it from the order it houses.
The Krakre was the Legion's final line in the Siege of Hiverion. The Unified Solar Marine Corps attacked it ring by ring from 20 March 2338 and dropped into its inner rings on 22 April. On 30 April the ROD divisions breached the Kindling, where the High Commander and eight of the Legion's nine Generals died. The Confederacy surrendered in the Kindling's court on 21 December 2340. The Red Khan took the Krakre on 4 September 2427 and sat in the Kindling's hall to receive the submission of Hiverion. Since 2453 it has been the High Council's seat again.
Name
Krakre is the human transliteration of the complex's Voor name. The Institute renders its meaning as "the hearth of hearths". Human records of 2338 call it the Voor Capital Government Complex.
Layout
The plateau
The Krakre stands on a raised plateau at Ekhar Vin's centre, above the clan towers and assembly grounds of the city. It was built to say what it was: the seat of Voor power. The plateau is a natural rise of the Ourin steppe, built up over nine centuries with fill, fortress and tunnel until it stood 300 metres above the city.
The rings
The complex is laid out in five rings of concrete and grown-composite barriers, each higher than the last. In 2338 every ring carried turrets, surface projectors and rail batteries under fields of its own, inside the planetary shield.
- The first ring, the outermost and lowest, held the Legion's barracks for the Hearth Guard and the seal-stones of the clans of the first assembly. The Corps' memorial of 2341 stands on it.
- The second ring held the Legion's schools of the capital and its records.
- The third ring held the High Command's halls of war and its armouries. It did not fall to conventional assault in 2338.
- The fourth ring held four of the planetary shield's sixty generators, the Krakre's own, which the fleet destroyed on 22 April 2338 from the side through the outer rings.
- The fifth ring, the innermost and highest, held the High Council's chamber and the Council's courts, around the Kindling.
The Kindling
The Kindling is the Krakre's inner sanctum, where the High Command sat. The Institute later established that the First Hearth's flame, which every Voor believes kindled every other hearth fire, was in fact kept there. The hall at its centre is where the order, in the Voor telling, was kindled. Its outer court is where Ambassador Halima Rahal signed the Cirban Protocol in 2318, and where the Confederacy surrendered in 2340.
The tunnels
Beneath the plateau run 2,000 kilometres of tunnel, part of the 40,000 kilometres under Hiverion's capital region. In 2338 the Hearth Guard moved through them and the Corps could not.
The Hearth Guard
The Krakre's garrison was the Hearth Guard, hereditary formations of the Legion that served nowhere else. They swore "to hold the hearth until the order returns or the hearth is cold". In 2338 they numbered 200,000. The Guard carried ancestral blades, and the Institute's observers recorded that it treated the dead of the 103rd ROD Division, whose troops carry the blades of their own peoples, with a courtesy it showed no other division.
History
Origins
The Krakre dates from the Fevarian wars. The first assembly of the four surviving worlds met on the plateau about 1,100 years before contact, when they pooled their fleets and called them the Legion. The first hearth was grown in Hiverion's orbit 900 years before contact. The Voor say its fire was lit in the Kindling on the midwinter day their calendar still marks.
Contact
The first human mission was received on Hiverion on 2 May 2318 by a rank of 10,000 Legionaries on the Legion's field between the landing site and the Council's hall. Rahal signed the Cirban Protocol on 11 June 2318 in the outer court of the Kindling's hall.
The Battle of the Krakre, 20 March to 18 April 2338
General Ilse Vandermeer's divisions reached the Krakre on 20 March 2338. For 29 days the Corps made small gains against the outer works. The Hearth Guard's turrets killed the Corps' atmospheric wings by the squadron, and the rings' fields absorbed its artillery.
- The 28th Marine Division took the first ring in six days, with 9,000 dead.
- The 20th Marine Division and the 102nd ROD took the second in nine days, with 14,000.
- The third ring, from 6 to 18 April, took every division the Corps could put against it and did not fall.
Vandermeer's dispatch of 16 April judged that the Krakre was the Voor's will to fight in built form, and that a conventional assault would take its inner rings in a year at a cost the Corps could not pay.
The drop, 22 April 2338
On the night of 20 to 21 April the Corps' engineers placed target designators on the four generators in the fourth ring. At 0400 on 22 April the fleet's rails destroyed them through the third ring, and the shield over the Krakre failed for forty minutes. Fifty thousand droptroopers of the 101st, 103rd and 109th ROD Divisions and elements of the 102nd, 104th and 107th dropped onto the upper levels and the roofs of the fourth and fifth rings. The first hours were a slaughter. By 0500, 38,000 were inside the inner rings. The shield had closed over them at 0442.
The Kindling, 30 April 2338
The 38,000 fought inward for eight days, room by room, against a Guard that did not surrender rooms. The Corps outside took the third ring on 26 April and the fourth on the 29th. At 0300 on 30 April the troops inside and outside went at the Kindling together. The 101st's 2nd Regiment and the 103rd's 8th Regiment, the Angels of Delambre, breached its walls at 0640. At 1400 the 8th's 20th Battalion, Xiphos, reached the hall where the High Commander and the Legion's nine Generals had gathered, armed and unwilling to be taken. The fight lasted forty minutes. The High Commander and eight Generals died, and the ninth was dying. The Guard's 40,000 survivors stopped fighting on 1 May, on his order.
The surrender, 21 December 2340
The Confederacy surrendered to the United Nations of Earth in the court of the Kindling on 21 December 2340, the Voor midwinter. President Elliot O'Neil, Grand Admiral Tyson Vol and Ambassador Rahal accepted it from the Council's presiding member, the Trade-Speaker of Vi Simni. The 103rd ROD Division stood in the court at a third of its strength.
The treaty years
The High Council sat at Vi Simni from 2338 and did not return to Hiverion until August 2422. Through the First Republic the Krakre stood half empty. The Hearth Guard's descendants, unarmed, kept the Kindling as a shrine and its fire burning.
The Red Khan, 2427
The Council returned to the Krakre in August 2422, after the fall of Vur Duri. When Hiverion's shield failed in August 2427, the Council refused submission and ordered the evacuation. The Khan landed on 20 August and took the Krakre on 4 September 2427. He sat in the hall where the Legion's High Command had died and received the submission of the Voor of Hiverion there. Those who refused were burned in their towers. In 2448 his household stripped the Kindling.
Restoration
The Corps landed on Hiverion on 2 October 2451, and found the Kindling empty. The Confederacy was restored at Hiverion on 1 January 2453. The High Council took the Krakre back as its seat that day, in the fifth ring's chamber, which the Khan's household had used as a hall and had not burned. The Kindling was left bare. Its fire was relit on the Voor midwinter of 2452 from the hearth fire of The Hearth That Waits.
The Republic's Voor Reconstruction Agreement of 2462 rebuilt the Krakre's outer rings. The Fevarian Accords were negotiated in the rebuilt outer ring between 2463 and 2466, by the Republic, the Confederacy, the Dwaii, the Ka-Dur and the four far peoples, and signed at Hiverion.
Memorials
- The Corps' memorial to the siege of 2338 stands on the first ring, on ground the Confederacy gave in 2341. It names the 230,000 human dead.
- The seal-stone of 2427 stands beside it, cut with the year and no names, for the 1.5 billion Voor dead of the Khan's conquest.
- The Kindling's hall is kept as it was found in 2451, bare, with its relit fire. Humans are admitted to it once a year, on the midwinter, by the Council's invitation.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.5 "Taking the Krakre: The Siege of Hiverion" and §9.6 "103rd Rapid Orbital Deployment Division"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.7 "Solar Ascendant: The Voor Surrender"
- Solar Eternal, Part XI, §11.4 "The Voor Campaign"
- Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.3 "The Voor Worlds"
- Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.3 "The Fevarian Accords" and §15.7 "The Confederacy, the Maweer and the Veil's Edge"