Temüjin's Revolt
The Revolt of Temüjin Tokaray Erdenechuluun al-Osman in 1732 AN was a minor challenge to the authority of the Order of the Holy Lakes in Apollonian Hurmu and the final chapter in the ignominious life of its doomed figurehead.
Background
In the ninth month of 1732 AN curious reports began to be received from the back country of northern Transprinitica of a miserable band of vagrants, no more than forty in number, riding mange-ridden ponies and accompanied by a couple of beaten-up land cruisers and a dilapidated wagon. This wretched band soon gained a reputation for making a nuisance of themselves, robbing isolated homesteads, stealing livestock, and assaulting travellers. What garnered special attention, and concern, was that the riders of this miserable little group were carrying banners made in the crude likeness of the flag of the Confederacy of the Dispossessed.
The 14th Circuit Regiment of the Hurmu Constabulary in Lontinien and the 31st Circuit Regiment in Transprinitica were duly directed to each dispatch a squadron of riders towards the point where their shared administrative boundaries met with the border of Lac Glacei and there commence the pursuit of the bandit gang.
This manhunt was inconclusive and further small raids occurred during the summer months of 1733 AN as well as during the harvest season.
A decade of petty banditry
By the mid-1730s, Temüjin had fully embraced the life of a steppe renegade. Although his small band of vagrants never exceeded two dozen riders, he displayed a certain small audacity in roaming the vast, wind-swept grasslands of northern Transprinitica's interior, a region akin to the Green. Dispossessed Umraid herders, Slobovian outcasts, and Jing drifters replaced the inevitable casualties and sustained his ranks, drawn by whispers of easy plunder and the thrill of defying the Hurmu Constabulary's patrols. Armed with surplus bolt-action rifles pilfered from border garrisons, sabres honed on terrified shrieking caravan merchants, and hardy ponies that could outpace any mechanised pursuit, Temüjin's crew operated on the fringes of settled municipalities like Jingbei and Lanmen. Their depredations were meticulously small-scale: hit-and-run raids on wool convoys, rustling of yak herds under cover of dust storms, and the occasional shakedown of isolated trading posts. Never did they assault a town outright or challenge the provincial levies in open battle; theirs was the art of the shadow, vanishing into the endless steppe before the garrison's lorries could rumble to the scene. Banners of faded green and crimson, echoing the Confederacy of the Dispossessed, fluttered from their lance tips, a taunt to the authorities that pursued them with warrants as numerous as the stars.
The decade unfolded as a tapestry of audacious skirmishes and narrow escapes, each escapade etching Temüjin's legend deeper into the folklore of the Green. In 1735, as spring thaws turned the trails to mire, his band ambushed a salt caravan bound for Tyrador, making off with crates that fetched a tidy sum from black-market fences in the Qyzyl frontier outposts. Two constables fell to rifle fire, their bodies left as warnings amid the scattered crates, but Temüjin claimed no more than a dozen bolts of cloth and a brace of M1610 carbines for his trouble. Retribution came swiftly: a squadron of the 149th Armoured Regiment, their ponderous tanks churning the mud, harried the bandits for a fortnight across the steppe, forcing Temüjin to cache his spoils in a Slobovian bog and flee southward with his mounts half-starved.
By 1736, Temüjin had learned the value of informants—Jing shepherds paid in pilfered tobacco to whisper of fat merchant trains. That summer, under a harvest moon, they struck a wool syndicate's encampment near Luzhong, slitting tent ropes and scattering guards with a volley of shots before driving off two hundred head of sheep. The haul sustained the band through the bitter winter, but not without cost: a young rider, pierced by a watchman's blade, succumbed to gangrene in a snowbound yurt, his fevered curses against the "city dogs" becoming a rallying cry. Temüjin marked the loss with a solitary ride to a hilltop cairn, vowing sharper blades and swifter horses.
The year 1737 brought drought, parching the grasslands and driving desperate herders into Temüjin's orbit. His crew swelled briefly to twenty souls, and they turned to water-hole extortion: blocking springs with thorn barricades and demanding tribute from passing drovers in the form of grain sacks or rifle rounds. A notable affray erupted when a Green Turban patrol—those Umraist zealots with their curved tulwars—challenged the blockade at the Saltpan Ford. Temüjin's men, firing from concealed ridges with their antique carbines, routed the militiamen after a sharp exchange that left three turbans bloodied and a captured prayer banner as trophy. Yet the victory was pyrrhic; whispers of the clash reached the provincial governor, who doubled the bounty on Temüjin's head to five hundred silver thalers.
In 1738, as tensions simmered along the Ashinthael marches, Temüjin veered northward, preying on fur trappers who ventured too far from their stockades. A dawn raid on a beaver-pelt convoy yielded pelts worth a season's wages, bundled away on pack ponies while the trappers huddled in their overturned wagons, rifles barking futilely into the mist. Escape came via a ford swollen by meltwater, the band's laughter echoing as constabulary biplanes buzzed overhead like irate hornets, their spotters too tardy to mark the ford's crossing.
The turning point of 1739 saw Temüjin double-cross a rival warband, the Black Claw Clan, by tipping off a garrison patrol to their yak-rustling lair in exchange for safe passage through contested turf. The betrayal netted him a lorry-load of smuggled diesel fuel for the few battered trucks his scouts had commandeered, and earned him a measure of grudging respect from the authorities, who turned a blind eye to his depredations that autumn. He celebrated with a feast of stolen salmon grill, washed down with contraband whisky, amid the huts of a sympathetic Slobovian village.
The spring thaw in 1740 brought bolder strokes: Temüjin's riders, disguised in pilfered Green Turban robes, infiltrated a militia supply cache near the Qyzyl border, making off with crates of tinned bully beef and ammunition belts. The ruse fooled the sentries long enough for a clean getaway, though one bandit was winged by a parting shot, his wound cauterised with a heated sabre over a steppe fire. Rumours of Temüjin's expulsion from the Constancian branch of the N&H Party swirled, but the revoking of his nationality-rights, and with that the loss of the chance of a negotiated exile that they had represented, only hardened his resolve, turning the border region into the stalking ground where he would play out his own personal vendetta against the world.
Nonetheless, the early 1740s marked a lull in ferocity, as 1741's harsh blizzards confined the band to winter quarters in a chain of hidden caves along the Lontinien frontier. Sustenance came from ambushing snowbound couriers, with a sharp skirmish yielding mailbags stuffed with payroll scrip. By 1742, with thaw of that year came resurgence: a midnight sally against a Lanmen distillery yielded casks of potent mash, bartered for fresh mounts from nomadic allies. That year's centrepiece was the "Whisky Run," a daring dash across sixty leagues of open plain, harried by armoured cars whose machine guns stitched futile patterns in the dust.
In 1743, Temüjin courted peril by raiding a constabulary station, spiking its UHF radio mast with axes and making off with a trove of equipment and the detachment's wages. 1745 saw a string of horse-thief reprisals: Temüjin's men, exacting "tolls" on remount trains, clashed with a posse of Jing horsemen in a whirlwind melee of lariat lassos and revolver pops, claiming a dozen bays but losing two to lance thrusts.
The decade waned with 1746's "Silver Fox Heist," where Temüjin posed as a Crandish trader to lift a strongbox from a Tyrador-bound coach, its contents—clinking with maple-syrup tins and silver fox pelts—funding a long overdue spree of yurt refurbishment. Pursuit by helicopter patrols, sent up by the Fyrd in an irritated response, forced a desperate gallop through thorn-choked thickets, emerging bloodied but unbowed. In 1747, famine stalked the land, and Temüjin's band turned into a seemingly philanthropic iteration of thieves, redistributing raided grain to hollow-cheeked herders while skimming the best portion for themselves all the same. A final flourish came in 1748: the torching of a sheep-farmer's wool bales in reprisal for a suspected betrayal of the gang's whereabouts to the constabulary, flames leaping skyward as the bandits melted into the night, their hoofbeats lost in the wind.
Pursuit and reprisal
Irritated by the continuing petty atrocities of Temujin's band, the governor of Transprinitica, Viric Merrick, called upon his allies to organise a razzia against the traitor and other lawless elements in the realm and the adjacent green. He received a positive response, and by the second half of 1749 AN the State Guard of Transprinitica had been joined at Tyrador by the Keshik of Lontinien and the 5th Vanguard Division under the command of Viric's kinsman Horsten III Merrick. The Apollonian Directorate of the Honourable Company, although momentarily diverted by affairs on Corum, voted a generous grant to support the campaign and permitted the Honoured Sons of the Residency in Tyrador to form a volunteer company to join the razzia. The House of Osman, similarly distracted by affairs in Constancia, also gave its blessing to the hunt for the renegade scion who had so thoroughly shamed their lineage with his misdeeds. The three eldest sons of Elham al-Osman, Waldemar, Masoud, and Rükneddin arrived from Chryse at Tyrador with their retinues to participate in the extermination of their caste-shamed kinsman.
