The Carja Civil War was a civil conflict within the Carja tribe, the largest tribe in Horizon Zero Dawn. The Liberation of Meridian, which saw an end to the reign of Sun-King Jiran and the notorious Red Raids, sparked a succession crisis between Jiran's loyalists, who rallied behind Jiran's intended heir Itamen; and those who could no longer stomach the barbarity of the Raids, led by Jiran's estranged son Avad; both sides had different visions of the tribe's direction and found the other guilty of great sacrilege.
History[]
Background[]
During the reign of the 13th Sun-King Jiran, the machines throughout the Sundom became increasingly more hostile towards the Sundom's human population in a phenomenon that came to be known as the Derangement. Many Carja believed the change in the machines' temperament was a form of divine punishment from the Sun god. After years of prayer failed to reverse the Derangement, Jiran revived the long-abandoned Carja ritual of human sacrifice in an attempt to appease the gods.
However, by the eleventh year of his reign, the machines' hostility continued to grow and, even worse, new and more aggressive combat-driven machines began appearing throughout the Sundom. Jiran reacted by increasing the cruelty of his ritual human sacrifices. His regime began sacrificing their own tribe members who they suspected of wavering in loyalty. Eventually, Carja soldiers raided neighboring tribes and kidnapped hundreds of people for the purpose of slavery or sacrifice in a series of invasions that became known as the Red Raids. It was for this reason Jiran earned the epithet of "the Mad Sun-King".
Eventually, Jiran's son Kadaman was executed for demanding an end to the Red Raids. This resulted in Prince Avad fleeing the Sundom, forging an alliance with Oseram freebooters. After months of planning, they launched an assault on Meridian, overthrowing Jiran and ending the Red Raids. However, many Carja still supported Jiran, believing that as the speaker of the Sun, even his most heinous crimes were justified. During the battle, approximately half of the tribe (including Jiran's youngest son Itamen and wife Nasadi) fled the holy city to Sunfall in the northwest. Calling themselves the Carja in Shadow, they deemed themselves the true Carja, anointing Itamen as their Sun-King.
Stalemate[]
By the third year of Avad's reign, the war was trapped in a tenuous stalemate: the Shadow Carja lacked the resources to feed their people, let alone retake Meridian. On the other end, Avad was unwilling to launch an invasion on Sunfall, believing that the tribe had already suffered enough carnage and refusing to slay his brother.
Events of Horizon Zero Dawn[]
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While little actual conflict occurred during the ceasefire, both sides worked behind the shadows. Owing to the manipulations of the wandering maverick Sylens, a cult known as the Eclipse was formed to serve the rogue subordinate function HADES, whom they were tricked to believe was the Buried Shadow of Carja myth. However, HADES only sought to use the Eclipse to gain access to the Spire in order to reactivate the Faro Plague and return the Earth to an uninhabitable state. Under HADES' direction, the Eclipse worked to uncover and reactivate ancient war robots, which concerned Sylens. But when Sylens completed his work on the Focus network, HADES decided he outlived his usefulness and issued a kill order, unaware that Sylens secretly installed backdoor into the network, alerting him to the kill order and granting him time to escape.
HADES eventually learned of the existence of Aloy, a clone of Elisabet Sobeck, and deemed her a threat to its plans and dispatched the Eclipse into the Nora Sacred Lands to kill her, an attack she barely survived. This put her on the path to discovering her own origins while at the same time putting in conflict with the Eclipse and by extension the Carja Civil War.
Battle of the Alight[]
Ending the War[]
With the deaths of many of their leaders after the Battle of the Alight, Sun-King Avad extended an offer of amnesty to the Shadow Carja. This would lead to an uprising in Sunfall, where the insurgents overthrew the remaining Shadow Carja leadership. The insurgents then ceded Sunfall back to the Sundom, formally bringing an end to the civil war.
Factions[]
The Carja tribe was divided into two factions, the Carja in Sun, known simply as the “Carja" or "Sun Carja," and the Carja in Shadow, more commonly referred to as the Shadow Carja.
Sun Carja[]
The "Sun Carja" had countless advantages throughout the duration of the war. Reconciliation efforts resulted in thriving trade, and Meridian's proximity to the fertile Jewel left them with bountiful harvests to feed the population. Allegiances with the Oseram did much to improve
Had Avad wished to take Sunfall and reunited the Sundom by force, he would have had little trouble doing so, especially in the early stages of the war. Even so, avoiding direct conflict allowed the Carja to rebuild.
Shadow Carja[]
While Jiran's loyalists and their followers referred to themselves as "Carja in Shadow", they were overwhelmingly referred to as "Shadow Carja".
The Shadow Carja had no chance of surviving a war of attrition: their territory left them at the mercy of both the elements and machines, virtually no ability to grow their own food, and their history left very few outlanders willing to trade with them.