☙ Discipline Without Nobility, Firearms Without Fear ❧
“They bowed to no banner but the black chevron. Their rank was earned. Their burden, chosen. Their oath—perpetual.”
Before there were Commanderies, and before the formal structure of the modern Order was set in ink and iron, there stood a band of grim professionals known only as the Vulgarian Free Company.
They were not knights.
They were not militia.
They were something else: a standing corps of egalitarian arms, drawn from the commons but trained with the precision of a royal guard and the grimness of monster-hunters.
✠ The Origins: Born of a Distant War
The Free Company was first assembled during the dark depths of the Thirty Years’ War, not to serve a prince or bishop—but to answer darker rumors.
Across the war-torn Germanies came tales not just of atrocity, but of awakening—supernatural stirrings, things loosed by slaughter and sin. The Order dispatched a force: hardened fighters, drilled and ready to confront more than mortal threats.
They fought in silence, in ash-choked villages and plague-sick woods. What they faced has never been recorded in full. But they returned changed—and with them, so too changed the Order.
✠ A Reformation in Blood and Black Powder
After the war, vengeance followed. One such evil—whether a warlock, revenant, or demon-woken thing—is said to have turned eastward, wreaking havoc across the highlands and borderlands of Vulgaria.
The ensuing devastation marked a turning point. The Order, recognizing the need for a permanent, disciplined military arm, reorganized the Free Company. Thus were born the Vulgarian Fusiliers.
Where the Free Company had been provisional, the Fusiliers were perpetual. Drilled in modern arms, armed with doctrine as well as flintlocks, they became the enduring backbone of the Order’s martial presence.
✠ Discipline Without Entitlement
The Free Company—and later the Fusiliers—held to one principle above all others: rank is earned.
All entered as footsoldiers. All rose by deed. Nobles were stripped of title upon entry. Officers were chosen by merit, not lineage.
Their arms were practical: pikes, muskets, sabres, and matchlocks. Their dress: black coats with red trim. Their symbol: a rising chevron, black on scarlet. Their motto: “Semper Interstitium”—”Always In the Gap.”
They fought monsters. They defended shrines. They trained monks in musketry. And they walked the roads that no one else dared tread.
✠ The Modern Black Chevron
By the time of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the Vulgarian Fusiliers were the formal martial wing of the Order. When Maximilian Staffel von Dreibach was dispatched eastward as part of an alliance by marriage, it was the Fusiliers who accompanied him—bearing relics, arms, and ritual knowledge.
His bride, Lady Omi (央美), was a woman of considerable influence from Kaga. Some say she later took the name Apollonia, or that it was given to their firstborn daughter. Whatever the case, their union marked a fusion of East and West—not only in diplomacy, but in the shared defence against otherworldly threats.
Their arrival coincided with supernatural disturbances in the Japanese archipelago. Their success in suppressing these threats ensured that the Fusiliers would become a permanent foreign presence, exempt from the disarmament laws that would later define the age.
In the present day, their legacy survives in:
- The Vulgarian Fusiliers, still in service
- The broader Commandery of the Black Chevron, built in their image
- The unwavering ethos that service is earned, not granted
✠ The Shadow that Still Marches
They are no longer a formal army.
They hold no castles.
But in every act of defense, service, and resolve rendered by the Order’s militant arm, the spirit of the Free Company endures.
Not for conquest. Not for gold. Not even for glory.
But because someone must stand between the world and what stirs beyond its veil.
And the Company—by any name—never truly disbands.
I have walked the ruins at Lenzbruck. Still there, beneath the lichens, one finds fragments of charred buttons and shattered musket plates—mute testament to the stand described herein. May we prove as stalwart, should the veil ever part again.