War of the Crab Prince

ZOOMING back into the feudal age, the mangled island of Unuvun was divided into a spaghetti of princedoms fighting over scarce flat land. There’s an emperor, but he acted more like the federal reserve than the president. He spent most of his time regulating the balance of power, cracking down on any princedom that gets too powerful.

One princedom that stood out from the rest was Rvàshen (ruh-var-shen). It was widely regarded as the most misfortunate of the princedoms, due to its fringe location that puts it close to the mainland supercontinent of Delezia the Unuvi try so hard to forget about. This fact led to it becoming a leading destination of pirate tourism, as well as envoys of questionable legitimacy from other empires.

One such envoy was from the rather large and terrifying Meo Empire, which was slowly feasting on the Shattered Islands to the north of Unuvun. Naturally, the Unuvi were pretty terrified of any foreign powers who are good at making boats. So they tried their best to be particularly careful with the Meó delegacy, headed by the prince to the Meó crown.

The prince of Meo had decided to embark for Unuvun in order to visit the esteemed Prince Suekasui (sway-kaw-swee) of Rvàshen. Regretfully for the prince of Meó, prince Suekasui and his male harem had all passed away mere hours before in what has gone down in Unuvi history as the ‘greatest night of all time.’ But the prince was a responsible man, and before he died he called in his entire royal court in order to name an heir. His male harem had failed to produce a child for him, understandably, and over his reign he had personally made sure there would be no relatives to contest his throne. So he did what any rational man would do, and in his drugged, dying stupor he announced the new prince of Rvàshen: Azu, his pet crab.

His entire royal court was flustered. A crab? But eventually they were convinced: with no eligible relatives, the emperor was bound to appoint an imperial family member to the Rvàshen throne. And whenever that happens, the new prince usually ends up firing half the previous royal court and beheading the other half. Nobody wanted to be in the beheaded half, and so they agreed to follow Suekasui’s will and pronounce Crab Prince Azu as the new ruler of Rvàshen.

The only problem was, while they were hastily attempting to find Azu and put him on the throne before the Meo prince walked in, one of the castle janitors had unknowingly picked up the crab and dropped him off in a bucket next to the kitchen. The royal court, flustered by the empty throne, arranged to have prince Meó sent off to dine while they figured out how to cover everything up.

Now, the cooks had also taken part in the orgy and were now seriously ill, so the royal court plucked one from the docks and prayed he wasn’t incompetent. Luckily for them, Rejìvei Sasual was indeed competent, but only at one thing: boiling crabs. And so it was rather natural for him, when he saw the huge, ornate crab in the bucket next to the stove, to dump it into a pot and turn up the heat.

It’s widely theorized that Prince Crab must’ve felt rather betrayed by the whole incident, but there was little he could do as he was steamed by an indifferent cook and served on a silver platter to the Prince of Meó. Witnesses would later confirm that it was an exquisitely delicious meal, and Rejìvei would use his notoriety to later make a killing running a global fishing and dining enterprise.

Had things gone better, the whole thing might’ve been able to be blown off as a simple mistake. But by the time the prince was in the midst of accidental regicide, an envoy had been sent off to the emperor in Zhavei on the fastest kia that the royal court could find. They had hedged all of their bets on their plan working out, going so far as to unveil the ancient Imperial Seal of Rvàshen. This was their lynchpin: because the emperor was in the midst of a little legitimacy crisis, if they presented the seal then he’d be forced to accept their appointment or risk giving the princedoms a pretext for rebellion.

It only took a few hours for the royal court to realize that the Crab Prince had gone into the Prince of Meó’s stomach. They found his little intricate armor near the stove, and realized that they hadn’t used crab in the kitchen ever since Suekasui almost choked on it several years back. Nobody wanted to be the one to explain the bad news to the Prince of Meó, and it was finally the castle janitor, secretly feeling guilty, who was forcibly volunteered. She walked up to the Prince of Meó in the royal hall and awkwardly explained to him that he had committed not only regicide, but also technical cannibalism, and that this would imply that he was just as bad as his father who had committed both regicide and cannibalism to inherit the Meo throne. She didn’t actually say the last part, but it was so ironic that even a crab could make the mental connection. The prince beheaded the castle janitor on the spot and stormed out of the castle. The rest of the royal court breathed a sigh of relief until a note from the emperor came a week later which simply stated that he would finish the job and behead the rest of them personally.

And so began the War of the Crab Prince. The city of Rvàshen was bombarded by the Meó prince’s fleet, and the Unuvi princedoms responded in kind with a coordinate attack on Meo holdings along the coast of the supercontinent. The pirates tried to get in on the action, but were caught between both sides and utterly annihilated for being on neither of them. They would later learn their lesson and go on to rent their services to both sides to maximize profit.

The war was the perfect excuse for the young emperor of Unuvun to gain legitimacy. And though it took another war and a million or so deaths, he managed to rein in the princedoms under a new federal state, with a constitution that specifically prohibited appointing crabs or other animals of questionable mental fortitude into positions of power.