Skip to main content.

Medals as Awards

Posted by Apostate on 09/29/19
Q: Is there much of a history of medals and medallions being awarded for great service in Arvum? This has happened on-camera a few times, but I'm wondering if there are things of particular distinction, like the Victorian Cross or the Legion d'Honneur which have a history in the Compact, and if so, what are some notable examples?

A: Generally speaking, different houses of the Compact have individual awards and sometimes present medals, but the Compact as a whole has avoided Compact-wide awards and recognitions, due to incidents throughout the past thousand years. House Valardin might have its Sword of Sugan award, and the former regent Dawn Grayson created the Order of Hope award, those are fairly recent awards, and historical ones have a more complicated history.

A 'Champion of the Compact' award was given out to different individuals who distinguished themselves during the Reckoning by King Alar I of House Grayson, but when Lorwroth Kinsbane seized power, he promptly gave the award to every one of his supporters. This in turn led Queen Triscali the Blackrose to declare she would only ever consider the award with unanimous approval from the newly founded Assembly of Peers. But recognizing its tarnished nature, she never nominated anyone for the award during her reign. Even when Macdon Castellus was killed defending her, leading to the formal formation of the Queens' Own, she did not advance his name forward, saying that while he died to defend the Crown, the Compact itself was not at stake if she had perished.

The award was resurrected briefly by King William Thrax at the start of the Crownbreaker Wars, when he presided over an Assembly of Peers made up only of his supporters, as a way to grant ancient awards to those he favored. When Darius Vowbreaker sacked the Great Archive, legates denouncing his granting the award to his captains who helped organize the massacre led to their execution, and is the only case in the Compact's history when medals were posthumously stripped, as the captains he buried under the halls of heroes were disinterred, posthumously tried for their crimes, and 'executed' them by throwing the corpses off of Sovereign Bridge, after their medals were ritually smashed.

Since then, the medal has not been awarded.