First Siege of Sagetton

A great and enduring irony defines the military history of the Sagetton ringworld: during the existential War of the Chosen, this titanic engine of industry, the greatest single concentration of manufacturing power in the Endless Unity, was never directly assaulted by the alien Corefleets. Though it lay directly in their path of advance, the Chosen bypassed it entirely, their inscrutable strategic calculus focusing solely on the decapitation of the Unity's political heart. Sagetton's forges blazed unchecked, its shipyards pumping out the fleets that would eventually help turn the tide, all from a position of untouchable sanctuary. It was a fate that would not be repeated in the Great Schism. In a bitter twist of history, the ringworld would first be besieged, scarred, and nearly broken not by an alien invader, but by its own creators—by the hands of the Unity's primary successor state, the Mandate of Light.

The context of the First Siege is one of profound chaos. The sudden shattering of the Endless Unity in 1000 AF left the Sagetton supersector, a region of one million colonies, adrift. What first emerged from this chaos was a region without a central ideology or a clear leader, a hive of competing underground empires, pirate kingdoms, and corrupted military governors who fought over the scraps of a collapsed economy. The very manufactories that had once armed the Unity now lay silent or were controlled by warlords. Into this power vacuum stepped Ryberrius Gellor, who seized control of the ringworld's Central Authority and began the Herculean task of forging the "Sagetton Contingency." His vision was not merely to restore order, but to proclaim a new Unity, with Sagetton as its capital.

It was this ambition that alerted the Mandate of Light. Prophet Antarof Gorseon recognized the profound threat a resurgent, Sagetton-led empire would pose. The Sagetton supersector had always been more industrialized than the core regions around Andarus; should it reunify, it would inevitably eclipse the Mandate. Gorseon’s conclusion was swift and brutal: the ringworld must be destroyed. To lead this expedition, he chose his most trusted and methodical commander, First Admiral Khiro Velenar. Her mission was to execute a mundicide—the systematic annihilation of the supersector's inhabited worlds as a prelude to Sagetton's destruction.

Velenar’s First Expeditionary Battlefleet was a force of terrifying magnitude, but its four-year journey from Andarus was catastrophically costly, with nearly a third of its ships lost to failed manifold jumps. This, combined with the Contingency's fractured state, led Velenar to believe a swift, shocking victory was possible. She split her force into five battlegroups, "the five fingers," to deliver simultaneous alpha strikes across the supersector, collapsing its will to resist before a final, concentrated thrust at the ringworld itself.

The initial offensive was a campaign of horror on an unimaginable scale. Thousands of systems were subjected to mundicide, their populations extinguished by waves of long-range antimatter missiles. Where Mandate Force Marines landed, it was not for conquest but for systematic extermination. Velenar operated on a cold, brutal logic: the destruction of a million worlds was an acceptable price for even a marginally higher chance of seizing Sagetton intact. The Contingency’s response was initially desperate and disorganized. System governors despaired or betrayed their posts, and improvised militias were crushed.

Salvation, however, emerged from two divergent sources. The first was the legendary, last-ditch defense of the worldship Triumph of the Endless in the Meddias Subsector. For two months, this single, mighty vessel and its attendant fleet held the entirety of Velenar’s First Battlegroup at bay, a stalemate that bought the Contingency precious time. The second was the foresight of a single commander: Tarvon Daamathor. While the supersector burned, Daamathor had been preparing. He understood that the Contingency could not win a stand-up fight, but it could wage a war of attrition against the Mandate's extended supply lines and its patience.

As Velenar’s forces finally converged on the Sagetton system, the battle entered its decisive phase. An initial, arrogant attempt to deploy tens of billions of marines directly onto the ringworld ended in a historic massacre, with Contingency point-defense systems shredding the landing forces. Velenar then shifted to a strategy of systemic bombardment, using singularity-projecting S-beams and S-bombs to inflict damage that could not be easily blocked, forcing the ringworld to expend its immense resources on constant repair. This was a race against time, for Velenar knew that the devastated systems behind her would eventually recover and strangle her fleet in the system.

The siege’s turning point was not a military action, but a theological one. Velenar’s final stratagem involved a coordinated superluminal missile strike from arsenal ships hidden beyond the supersector, a blow that would cripple Sagetton beyond repair. To coordinate this strike across vast interstellar distances, she reached into the Nethereal. There, she encountered not the divine support she expected, but an overpowering, terrifying presence that silenced her command. It was a confrontation that shattered her faith, a silent, divine intervention that she interpreted as the Evenlord Himself withholding victory.

Robbed of her killing blow, Velenar was forced to expend her local munitions in a furious, but ultimately insufficient, bombardment. When a Contingency relief fleet under Tarvon Daamathor arrived, the battle devolved into a stalemate. The final act came when Velenar was recalled to face a Kthon offensive in the Mandate's heartland. In a final act of spite, she ordered her remaining arsenal ships to target the star Sagetton A, triggering a nova-like event that scorched the ringworld's inner surface and fried its power collectors, inflicting damage that would take decades to repair.

The First Siege was a pyrrhic victory for the Contingency. It had lost millions of ships and thousands of worlds, and its capital was crippled. Yet, in the crucible of this shared trauma, the disparate factions of the supersector were forged into a single, determined polity. They had faced the full might of the Mandate and survived. The apparent invincibility of Gorseon's regime was left exposed, and Sagetton was transformed from a wounded relic into a symbol of defiant hope, setting the stage for the even greater trial that was to come.