Ritualistic sports have replaced war for a group of city-states -- but death still haunts even this form of conflict.
After 1,000 years of escalating skirmishes and political maneuverings, the six city-states reached a breaking point. In the north, panther sent assassins and elite troops to strategically break its foes' ability to wage war; in the west, spider sent saboteurs to sow dissent among the enemy's citizens while snake massed troops for crippling, lightning strikes against incoming foes. In the south, bear girded its formidable army for a scorched-earth campaign and eagle extended its spy network to take advantage of weakened foes; in the east, rat labored to create poison-tipped spears and arrows to give an edge to its unruly, undisciplined ranks.
The result was cataclysmic. The city-states were ravaged; hundreds of thousands of citizens died, many from starvation. Rat's high priests were killed, his ziggurats were destroyed, and he was driven into the ocean. Bear, overcome by battlelust, personally waded into conflict; sharp-eyed eagle sprang into action, launching a lightning attack against bear's city and devastating his lands and stores. In time, the blow proved fatal -- bear, overcome by fatigue and worn down by attrition, was felled by jaguar's assassins.
In time, the remaining four totem spirits grew weary of war. Each had become paranoid; the wiliest of their kind, rat, lay moldering at the bottom of the sea, while the most powerful, bear, rotted away in a corner of some fetid jungle.
The spirits agreed to host a series of games every five years, using the outcomes of individual matches to decide how to resolve conflicts. The petty pride and territorial squabbling that had motivated armed conflict before would now be addressed in the ball court, rather than in the field of battle.
The spirits turned to frog, who was known for his wisdom, to be the neutral arbiter of the games. They enthroned him in bear's city, where he would organize and host the gathering; many of bear's priests and warriors were released to his care, where they maintained the city and prepared and built its arenas.
Now, 300 years later, the games are the only thing the spirits truly hold sacred. None have repudiated or refused to honor the outcome of a match. Frog administers the matches and their outcomes, ensuring that each spirit lives up to its word and that no one match decides too weighty a matter.
Each city-state has a cadre of athletes, many selected at birth, who train their entire lives for a single showing in frog's arenas. Before every match, each player is blessed by his or her city's spirit, infused with a piece of divine essence. In this way, the matches are sanctified, and none can say that the spirits themselves did not participate in the games. The athletes, however, pay a high cost for such attention; no mortal can support the spark of the divine for long. Invariably, the players die after a match, usually within hours. Their bodies simply cannot sustain the god's touch, and it consumes them.
The next games will be held in a year, and, as is typical in the run-up to the meeting, grudges are begining to wear on the spirits. The most important matches will be between eagle and spider -- one of spider's priests attacked one of eagle's viziers with a poisoned dagger. The vizier barely survived, but eagle himself descended on the priest, tearing him to tatters. Such assassination attempts are rare, but not unheard of, in the Byzantine plots between the spirits; the matches will determine whether either side owes compensation and, if so, how much. However, eagle's viziers have noticed that the spirit seems unusually focused on the case; the far-seeing spirit sees some pattern in the attack that troubles it greatly, but it's not sharing its concerns with anyone else.
Meanwhile, jaguar has conceded a great number of her matches, and is sending a tiny contingent of athletes to the upcoming games. Jaguar says that she's been forced to attend to ill-timed internal matters this year, which is causing her poor showing; speculation in the other city-states has run rampant. Jaguar is prideful, even for a spirit, and whatever is hindering her efforts must be pressing indeed to prevent her from attending all her matches.
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