Forge: The Yuliz Sieges

[Target entity — the current file, to be filled]
{
 "aliases": [
  "The Four Winters"
 ],
 "content": {
  "engagement": "Each citadel was invested rather than assaulted, its water traced and cut, its approaches walled off by fortified road. The first fell in seven months, the second in five. The third held eleven.\n\nThe defenders of the third were permitted to walk out under arms. Kaemisyol's Tufae recorded this as clemency and used it in every subsequent negotiation.",
  "legacy": "The chant Saarotsos children learn is a list of fallen citadels in the order they fell, and the list begins here. Officers who trace their command lineage to the Wyrmfront are almost always tracing it through a Yuliz siege line.",
  "overview": "The centrepiece of the Road War. Three citadels cut into the Saark cliff-line, taken one after another over four years by a Grand Army that had finally accepted the pace the terrain demanded.\n\nNo relief force ever came. This is the fact that matters more than the sieges themselves.",
  "two_names": "To the Zegtuzsos these are the Four Winters, and the memory is not of the sieges but of the silence between them - four years in which twelve Mulaagjuns had sworn to answer and did not. The walking-out of the third citadel is remembered less as mercy than as the moment surrender became thinkable."
 },
 "id": "military_conflicts.yuliz_sieges",
 "meta": {
  "notes": "PROPOSAL, not canon. 'Yuliz' is a generate_names candidate (sigtaara). The three citadels are deliberately unnamed - they are the chant, and the chant should probably be authored as its own tradition entity.",
  "status": "proposed"
 },
 "name": "The Yuliz Sieges",
 "native": null,
 "relations": {
  "belligerents": [
   "The Grand Army",
   "Coalition of Tribes"
  ],
  "location": [
   "The Saark"
  ],
  "parent_conflict": [
   "Great Wyrm War",
   "history.events.the_great_wyrm_war"
  ]
 },
 "sources": {},
 "subtype": null,
 "summary": "Three Zegtuzsos cliff-citadels reduced in sequence along the Saark, 1288-1291 AZN. The origin of the citadel-names Saarotsos children still chant.",
 "tags": [
  "great_wyrm_war",
  "third_age",
  "seventy_claws"
 ],
 "timeline": {
  "year_end_AZN": 1291,
  "year_end_MV": 5891,
  "year_start_AZN": 1288,
  "year_start_MV": 5888
 },
 "type": "military_conflict"
}

[Schema template & register reference — The Burning of Vekh'Zural (military-conflicts-burning-of-vekh-zural). Match its SHAPE and VOICE; do not mirror its content.]
{
 "aliases": [
  "The First Light",
  "The Night of Smoke"
 ],
 "aliases_note": null,
 "content": {
  "engagement": "There was almost no fighting. The posts held between four and nine wardens each and were built to see, not to hold. Where resistance occurred it lasted minutes. Imperial accounts record fourteen Revakgol dead across the entire march.\n\nWhat the burning achieved was not military but temporal: it cost the Zegtuzsos the interval between detection and invasion that their whole northern defensive doctrine assumed they would have.",
  "overview": "Not a battle. Vekh'Zural was a warden-march of roughly thirty watch-posts strung along the north bank of the Medestul, garrisoned by signalmen rather than soldiers. On a single night in 1269 AZN, advance columns of the Grand Army crossed in darkness at multiple points and fired the posts before their wardens could pass a warning north.\n\nThe Paathur learned of the invasion from the fires themselves.",
  "two_names": "The Saarotsos call it the First Light and teach it as the model opening operation - surprise, dispersal, simultaneity. The Zegtuzsos call it the Night of Smoke and do not teach it at all. It appears in clutch songs as a list of thirty names in fixed order, which is the order the posts burned.",
  "vital_statistics": {
   "outcome": "The Grand Clutch is called. Twelve Mulaagjuns answer. The war begins with the Zegtuzsos already reacting rather than positioning.",
   "result": "Revakgol success; Zegtuzsos northern watch destroyed",
   "type": "Raid / opening operation"
  }
 },
 "id": "military_conflicts.burning_of_vekh_zural",
 "meta": {
  "notes": "PROPOSAL, not canon. Vekh'Zural is a canon name; its character as a signal-chain rather than a garrison is proposed here.",
  "status": "proposed"
 },
 "name": "The Burning of Vekh'Zural",
 "native": null,
 "relations": {
  "belligerents": [
   "The Grand Army",
   "Coalition of Tribes"
  ],
  "location": [
   "Vekh'Zural"
  ],
  "parent_conflict": [
   "Great Wyrm War",
   "history.events.the_great_wyrm_war"
  ]
 },
 "sources": {},
 "subtype": null,
 "summary": "The opening act of the Great Wyrm War: a Zegtuzsos signal-chain fired in a single night by Revakgol advance columns, 1269 AZN.",
 "tags": [
  "great_wyrm_war",
  "third_age"
 ],
 "timeline": {
  "year_end_AZN": 1269,
  "year_end_MV": 5869,
  "year_start_AZN": 1269,
  "year_start_MV": 5869
 },
 "type": "military_conflict"
}

[Related canon (summaries)]
### The Great Wyrm War  (event · third_age, canon id: history-events-the-great-wyrm-war)
Imperial Consolidation and Administrative Expansion

Following the final surrender in 1305 AZN, the Empire of Revakgol entered a period of rapid imperial consolidation, known in Saarotsos records as the “Era of Gilded Flame.”

[ul]
- Provincial Integration: The northeast was divided into five new imperial provinces, each governed by a Tufae-appointed Saarotsos overseer, working alongside a native Zegtuzsos Paathur or Mulaagjun. This bicameral rule allowed efficiency without erasing local legitimacy.
- Rise of the Kovahiil Bureaucracy: The Kovahiil, spiritual interpreters of the Kori, evolved …

### The Saark  (location · cliff-line, canon id: locations-the-saark)
Dry, windy, and defensible to a degree that made assault pointless. Water came from springs within the rock, which is why the Yuliz citadels had to be traced and cut rather than simply blockaded. A long escarpment where the fen basin ends and the highland country begins. The Zegtuzsos cut citadels into its face rather than building on top of it - approach from below is exposed and approach from above requires already holding the highlands. The Road War, 1286-1297. Revakgol advanced along the cliff base by fortified road, reducing citadels in sequence. Three fell during the Yuliz Sieges of …

### Vekh'Zural / Vekh'Zural  (location · warden-march, canon id: locations-vekh-zural)
The posts were built of stone below and timber above, the timber specifically so that a post could be fired by its own wardens as a signal of last resort. In 1269 this worked against them: Revakgol fired the posts themselves, and the pattern of burning that reached the Paathur was indistinguishable from a general alarm with no information in it. The thirty post-names survive in Zegtuzsos clutch songs as a fixed-order list. The order is the order in which they burned. Nothing was rebuilt; the march is ruin and the imperial road runs past it. Not a settlement and not a fortress line. Vekh'Zural …