Grim Weepers

I've always warned my grandchildren never to arm-wrestle a Selesteine. All that heavybeer puts them on quite another level indeed! But even your average Selesteine would be well advised not to arm-wrestle a Grim Weeper, for in the heat of the moment they might forget themselves and beat you to death with your own arm.

The defining characteristic of the Grim Weepers has always been their custom of eating painfully spicy food to carry them through battle. With modern medical knowledge, researchers think they derive two benefits from this. First, the pain releases a surge of adrenaline, amplifying their already-formidable strength. Second, overwhelming oneself with pain helps both to prepare you for injuries in battle and to distract you from those injuries once they occur. There are even recorded instances where a Grim Weeper's spicy breath alone incapacitated weaker foes. However, Pentex Lannogaster—himself a Grim Weeper and veteran of The War of Durun's Ass—writes in his memoirs that the practice of eating spicy food arose from tribal contests of the ancient Selesteines, whose strongest warriors would eat spicy food until someone gave up. In his words, "Pain is God's way of telling you to man up."

Historically, the Grim Weepers were always the vanguard of the Selesteine military, their distinctive greatswords being well-suited to cleaving through an enemy's front line. This strategy was most effective against the footsoldier-based armies of the Fractured Cities, but the Selesteine love of a challenge also saw the Grim Weepers charging Ulgravian cavalry lines (against whom they fared relatively well) and Incendian fire bellows (which, unfortunately for them, were hotter than their peppers). During the reign of Mad King Westler, there was also an attempt to invade the Panark Fleet, but they found to their shame that they could not swim fast enough to reach the boats. Many lives were lost that day.

Sadly, the tides of history have not been kind to the Selesteine model of war, and the Grim Weepers have borne that decline worse than other sectors of the Selesteine military. The invention of gunpowder-based projectile weaponry turned more than one of their would-be glorious charges into massacres. There was a brief time in AES 927 when Selestei tried making their swords even larger to block bullets, but the soldiers themselves rejected the new swords on the grounds that it was shameful for a true warrior to cower behind their own weapon.

In AES 971, the Department of Glory (their military branch) finally gave in and changed the strategic role of the Grim Weepers. In the repertoire of modern states, pitched battles are giving way to precision tactical operations. The modern Grim Weepers now resemble the special operations forces of any other military, except with capsaicin pills and giant broadswords strapped to their backs. Though this has significantly increased their survival rate, it has also revealed an epidemic of Jalapeñosis among the older Grim Weepers. Only time will tell their if defining practice will continue into the future.

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Dr. Herbert Jones
University of Eyesland
Professor of Cataloguing Various Things
Heinrich Stafford Chair of Arrangement
PhD in Miscenallia