ID: 234

Outcome: Great Victory

Open After Story: Yes

Manual Prompt: Yes

Text:

Amidst the cheering masses, you strode into the Lapis Lazuli Palace and took your throne as Sultan.



You appointed Maggie - your wife, your partner, your beloved - as Vizier of the realm. This unprecedented appointment sparked outrage, for never in the empire's history had a woman held such high title. To your detractors, you posed a simple question: "Does the empire's past dictate its future? Has its history not brought enough suffering?"



Change came swiftly. You granted regional autonomy to the nobles while reclaiming all military authority for the crown. Maggie spearheaded even more radical reforms, rewriting succession laws to grant women equal inheritance rights, and creating bureaucratic advancement paths open to both sexes.



These twin reforms combined like saltpeter mixing with charcoal and sulfur, igniting fury across the realm. Nobles without armies became more dependent on the Sultan's favor. Female heirs threatened established power structures. Yet... while stripped of military might, the nobles paid fewer taxes to the treasury and bore no burden of maintaining troops. Moreover, you granted them interpretive authority over certain laws, a tantalizing privilege that set their minds racing with possibilities. As for female succession: what noble house lacked at least one capable, ambitious daughter, sister, or aunt?



Your palace changed too. The Lapis Lazuli Palace now stood surrounded by countless colonnades, through which nobles emerged to kneel before you. They spoke for their domains where fine clothes, gold ornaments, even entertainment were forbidden.



Women too began emerging from these colonnades. Shortly after Maggie's reforms, several "natural deaths" and rather violent successions occurred. As result, proud, steel-spined noblewomen appearing at court, whose people fiercely loyal to Maggie. Commoners followed suit where merchants' daughters, landowners' heirs, even tenant farmers' girls began demanding equal treatment, invoking Maggie's name: "This is what Lady Maggie decreed!"



Posterity would name your new world the Realm of Thousand Colonnades. The political structure you crafted would reshape the continent's history. And you would be remembered as one of its greatest Sultans.

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