MotF 84: And There was Peace in the Kingdom

A map of Dorne after the restoration of peace under House Yronwood after the Council's War.

This is from an alternate ASoIaF history idea I've been kicking around, in which Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen (OTL Jaehaerys II) dies of a fever shortly before the disaster at Summerhall, where Aegon V and Prince Duncan die as IOTL. Succession is disputed between Aegon's grandson through Jaehaerys, Aerys, and Aegon's third son (the only information in the books so far about this son is that he existed). After a few minor military confrontations, a second Great Council is called to decide between them, and chooses Aerys. Whereas IOTL there was only one Great Council, ITTL the second GC makes itself and official organ of the government, with the power to choose the heir to the throne from among the deceased king's siblings and children.

Aerys was never fond of this provision, and after the death of two of his children he grows increasingly paranoid, believing that the Lords Paramount aim to destroy the Targaryen line. Being both cunning and irrational, he feigns mortal illness, and calls a third GC. When the Lords arrive, he turns his guards against them. Rickard Stark, Oberyn Martell (Doran died much younger, Oberyn is regent for his infant heir Myron), Luthor Tyrell, Hoster Tully, Jon Arryn, Balon Greyjoy, and Steffon Baratheon are all killed, but Tywin Lannister escapes. Aerys claims that the Lords attacked him, and Tywin claims that Aerys set a trap for the Lords. Tywin calls another GC, claiming the power to remove sitting kings, and crowns Rhaegar Targaryen in Lannisport. Rhaegar names him Hand of the King.

Aerys, seeing that all the Great Houses have turned on him, declares them all traitors and elevates various minor houses to fill their positions, including the powerful House Yronwood in Dorne. In most places, the Great Houses have good leadership and put down any such rebellions, but in Dorne there is a power void after the death of Oberyn. Elia Martell, married to Tywin's brother Tygett ITTL, calls for Dorne to rise against Aerys, and sails for Sunspear. The Lord/Prince Edgar Yronwood say that the whole war was set up as a gigantic power grab by Tywin, and accuse Elia of being a Lannister agent. A savage war breaks out, with the Yronwoods dominating the west and the Martells the east.

After a year of bloody stalemate in Dorne and of steady Rhaegar-faction advance in the rest of the country, King Aerys flees the capital in an armada with an army of thousands on board. He strikes nearly undefended Sunspear, sacking it and executing young Prince Myron. The Martell loyalists fight on, but Aerys and the Yronwoods now have a clear advantage. Castles and towns are sacked, and Elia flees from stronghold to stronghold. House Gargalen is completely destroyed for harboring her, and replaced with a mercenary leader working for Aerys. She flees into the desert, hoping to reach safety across the Red Mountains.

Meanwhile, Tywin and Rhaegar turn their forces against Dorne. The campaign has initial success, breaking into the valley of the Torrentine and forcing its way into Prince's Pass, but Dorne's natural defensive terrain makes progress difficult. An attempt to invade by sea ends in disaster off the Broken Arm, where Aerys' Royal Fleet destroys the combined Tyrell and Lannister fleets. Worse, Elia is caught only a few miles from safety, and burned to death by Aerys. The war rages on in the mountains for years. Three years after Elia's execution, Prince/Lord Ormond Yronwood breaks through the enemy lines and heads into the Marches, sacking castles along the way. He is eventually driven back to Dorne, and the war continues.

Eventually, both sides tire of war, and some Dornish houses are close to revolt against Aerys, whom they find dishonorable and suspicious. Meanwhile across the Red Mountains, Rhaegar has died in a hunting accident, leaving only one child, the sickly Aegon VI. The next-in-line for the throne is Lord Renlas Baratheon. Tywin Lannister meets Ormond Yronwood at Starfall to discuss peace, and they come to an agreement. Rhaegar will recognize Dornish independence, on the condition that Aerys and his son Viserys are turned over to the Lords Paramount for punishment. This suits Ormond fine, as he does not wish to share power with the unstable Targaryens. Tywin, meanwhile, wants to secure legitimacy for his line of Targaryens, and to have Prince Viserys to prevent Baratheon succession to the throne in case Aegon VI dies.

Aerys is taken by surprise by the Yronwood forces, and although one house calls for rebellion against the Yronwoods in the wake of the betrayal, the cry is not taken up and they change their minds at the sight of Prince Ormond's army. They are destroyed anyways, and their lands confiscated. Many houses grumble loudly afterwards, but none rebel. Aerys is delivered to Tywin at Horn Hill, close to a decade after his ill-conceived plot to destroy the Lords Paramount, and executed. Prince Viserys, however, dies along the way. The official reason given is sickness, but in fact he was poisoned by Ormond to weaken the Targaryen line and set the Seven Kingdoms on an unstable path.

Prince Ormond returns to Dorne. He grants himself the lands confiscated from Aerys and his supporters, as well as some strategic regions on the border. He rewards houses who supported him in the wars and in the deportation of Aerys, mostly by granting them land from the houses he is more suspicious of. Some of the houses losing land stage a brief revolt, but it goes nowhere. Because even Ormond has tired of bloodshed, they are not destroyed, but they do lose more land. A monument is erected in Planky Town to the restoration of peace to the country, and Ormond sets about creating a new bureaucracy and a stronger navy, as befits an independent state. Under the Yronwood Princes, Dorne will become a major commercial and military power in the southern Narrow Sea, and Planky Town will come to resemble the cities of Essos more than it does Maidenpool or Gulltown.

Well, this is heavily influenced by the situation in Imperium Resurgam, but I've lifted it out of the TL and into a non-ASB situation.

The PoD is thus that a leaked document in 2000 reveals that the Greek government has roundly cooked the books and thus her entry to the Eurozone is strongly delayed, which has a knock-on impact on delaying to 2004 expansion by a few years to ensure that nothing similar is going on.

This means that the Annan Plan negotiations go on for a much longer period of time, and with early indications that the federal system proposed by Annan will be completely unacceptable to the Greek Community, with the result that the end plan proposed is based more on the Good Friday Agreement, but with a stronger federal element based on the two communities rather than two national states.

10 Years later, and the reunified island of Cyprus is stable, prospering and managing to work through issues in a fair and democratic manner.

The Fourth War laid waste to Kalimdor as it raged for 3 years of uninterrupted combat.

The origins of this conflict can be placed in the failed Summit of Theramore (26 aFW), which was meant to solve the border conflicts that had arisen in Ashenvale, due to the Horde's need for extra lumber and food (due to the recent population explosion).
This failure translated into an intensification of the border skirmishes between both factions, even throughout the campaign against the Undead Scourge. To make matters worse, the hawks of Horde (Warsong Offensive leader Garrosh Hellscream) and Alliance (Stormwind King Varian Wrynn) gained the upper hand within their respective factions.

In 27 aFW, the tension reached a boiling point when the nathrezim Varimathras and the forsaken leader of the Royal Apothecary, Putress, staged a coup-d'etat in the Undercity. As a by-product of this coup, the Forsaken used their secret plague on forces of the Horde, Alliance and Scourge alike. Both Horde and Alliance rallied to retake the Undercity for their own faction.
As Wrynn fought his way into the Forsaken capital, he found the experimentation on living humans that had been taking place, and in situ declared war on the Horde.

Historians consider this declaration to be mostly rhetorical, as neither side began any mass movement of troops until Garrosh assumed the mantle of Warchief of the Horde, who proceeded to attempt a full scale invasion of the Kaldorian region of Ashenvale in the year 28 aFW. This invasion marked the true beginning of the Fourth War, a war that involved 3 main theatres: the Ashenvale-Barrens front, the Gilnean front and the Pandarian theatre.

Garrosh's initial victories earned him unbreakable support from the Horde military, specially the Orcs, who felt their pride rise for the first time since the days of the old Horde. While at first he proved to be against the use of WMDs, specially the forsaken Plague and the goblin para-nuclear explosive devices, he changed his mind as he began to use enslaved semi-intelligent mega-fauna, and eventually the magical para-nuclear explosive device called mana-bomb (which creates large amounts of arcane fallout, rendering the land unusable). The destruction by these means of the symbolic city of Theramore created a rift with the other leaders of the Horde.

These dissensions made Garrosh grow paranoid, which drove him to attempt the assassination of Vol'jin, the leader of Darkspear Trolls, and to seek new sources of power that would cement the hegemony of the Horde and his own over all of Azeroth, which further alienated the rest of the leaders of the Horde.

In the year aFW 30, upon recovering from the attempted assassination, Vol'jin rallied the Horde into rebellion against Garrosh, managing to obtain the support of every race except for the orcs (who massively stood behind Garrosh) and the enslaved Bilgewater Goblins.

The Horde Rebellion signed a truce with the Alliance and together put Orgrimmar under siege, which concluded with the defeat of Garrosh, and his famous trial in Pandaria.
Shortly after, Vol'jin, as the new Warchief, and Varian Wrynn, High King of the Alliance, signed a treaty that would put a permanent end to the hostilities between Horde and Alliance on Kalimdor. This treaty acknowledged the rights of the Orcs to a small part of their territorial gains in Ashenvale (this would secure their lumber supply and ensure that they wouldn't find themselves pressed by need) but severely curtailed the Horde domination on the continent. Much of the former orcish lands were transformed into confederated Horde lands or demilitarized zones under the control of the Cenarion Circle. The Orcish lands with demographic Troll or Goblin majority were added to the Darkspear homeland or used to create a state for the Goblin refugees within the Horde. For the destruction of Theramore, the humans were compensated with a bigger secure area from New Theramore to Northwatch Hold, which was to be developed jointly by the kingdom of Stormwind and the magocracy of Dalaran, as a new independent realm within the Alliance.

Kalimdor became soon after the breadbasket of Azeroth, due to the corrupted blight that devastated Pandaria and the attack from the Burning Legion that the Western Kingdoms would suffer. The waves of highly educated refugees soon developed the states of Kalimdor; the common enemies fostered a peaceful cooperation that made them deeply interdependent. Eventually, the point was reached where war among the peoples of Kalimdor became unthinkable.

China, some six years since the Breaker of Warlords, the Exterminator of Soviet Pawns, the Expeller of Barbarian invaders (and was that plague a fortuitous coincidence or not? some people are suspicious), the President-for-Life of the Chinese Republic, having brought peace and order back to the Middle Kingdom, had himself crowned Emperor Fu Mingzhe, first Emperor of the new Liang Dynasty. Protests and revolts against this were crushed with impressive swiftness. As of 1955, the new Emperor remains remarkably hale and hardy for a man supposedly well into his 90s, but there are rumors that he has been grooming his rather terrifying granddaughter for the succession...

China is at peace. It's neighbors, perhaps not so much.

Portuguese Overseas Province of Cabinda