The Battle of the Book

The Conflict

Prelude

In The Second Word War, Sable Aradia, The Chief Rabbit of House Lapin, claimed the Iron Tome in order to resolve the conflict at The Battle of the Warren. She accomplished this through a method that, to all indications, had never been tried before. Rather than demanding that Minor Houses and fallen Major Houses bend the knee to the Bunny Banner, she instead incorporated them into a chain of co-equal allies, known as the Grand Alliance.   Since the Iron Tome had somehow disappeared from the undersea vault of House Mollusca just before the launch of the war, likely sparking the conflict, the Mother of Bunnies did not wish to trust the guarding of such an important and dangerous artifact to something so passive again. She began to carry the Iron Tome with her everywhere, even to the bathroom and her bedchamber.   Two nearly-successful assassination attempts over the course of the April 2022 Tourney, with at least one obviously having been motivated by a desire to posses the Iron Tome, led to a change of strategy. The Chief Rabbit handpicked a small group of literomancers whom she believed to be trustworthy, responsible, and moral, and worked out a random exchange schedule to help guard the Iron Tome. The intention was to foil further assassination attempts, but this move was also at least partially motivated by the discovery that the Tome took a significant physical and psychological toll on its bearer, which worsened the longer contact continued.   While the specifics of what sparked the event remains a matter of scholarly debate, the Mother of Bunnies and others who were part of this rotation claim that the Iron Tome became offended at being passed around like a hot potato. Further, it challenged whether or not Sable Aradia's claim was even legitimate, since she was not the undisputed ruler of the literomancers at the time of her claim.   Literomancers began to sense a disrpution in the balance of literomantic energy in the realm. The most strongly affected were the Tome Knights that other literomancers referred to as the "power writers;" practitioners of the literomantic arts who were capable of churning out the most individual literomantic energy.   Eventually, sometime in the middle of the July Tourney 2022, a few of the "power writers" -- the more verbose literomancers of the Realm -- began to talk about the struggles plaguing them. They found these unusual difficulties they faced, which were crippling their ability to call upon the literomantic arts, ranged from illness and physical injury to ill fortune that had the feel of a curse. On July 12, 2022, they reached out to the Chief Rabbit on a hunch that the problems might somehow be connected to the Iron Tome.   Sable Aradia had, fortunately, been researching anything she could find in ancient literomantic books about the Iron Tome, and had recently found a ritual developed during the War of the Roses. It discussed how to read signs that the claim to the Iron Tome was contested, and these signs matched the difficulties the "power writers" were describing. The book claimed that these difficulties would eventually trickle down to all Tome Knights, until it caused a new Night Monarch to come into being, thus triggering an early Tome War before November came.   However, according to this same book, the Tome's challenge could itself be challenged by the holder of the Tome. If they and any champions they selected could each generate 50,000 words of literomantic power in a single week, the Tome would be content that it was, indeed, claimed by the worthiest literomancer, and would cease its destructive activities until All Hallows' Eve. However, an additional condition of the spell was that anyone who learned of the ritual and its purpose was bound to take part themselves.   Knowing the Realm would not likely survive an early Tome War, Sable Aradia begged for the help of the power writers who had brought this to her attention to perform this dangerous ritual.