General Leontalos Tree-Topper (171 - 216) was the most important military leader of the High Imperial period. His innovative tactics led to numerous Uzdumalian victories over the Soltanese duchies and the Kreyintines, and helped fuel the vast expansion of the Empire under Devon-Lars I.

Leontalos was the fifth child of Baron Sundulu, lord of a mountain fiefdom in the Malean Reaches. As his eldest daughter was expected to assume the barony, Sundulu acquired a sanctified tutor to prepare the rest of his children for service in the church. Leontalos was described in letters to Sundulu's sister as a fitfully brilliant but lazy student, a "peacock" perhaps more suited to scientific research or even the intrigues of the court than the driff-avoiding life of an ecclesiastical. In 173, Leontalos proved his father right, seducing his tutor and stealing his father's horse and several family heirlooms and making his way to the nearby city of Jahvó. (The corpulent and ruddy-faced Leontalos might have seemed an unlikely paramour, but made dozens if not hundreds of conquests; Count Vlathos Shames-All wrote of his "lapidary of bejeweled words placed in succession, a slowly-built mosaic of flattery that set my heart aflame", while the diary of the Imperial Mother Hege mentions his "dreamy eyes".) A week later, Leontalos was retrieved by the constabulary and returned to his father. The pattern continued over the next few years, when Sundulu in disgust purchased Leontalos a commission in the Second Army and sent him off with a squadron of local villagers to fight the Soltanese.

To the shock of everyone involved, Leontalos proved to be an aggressive, innovative, and highly competent officer. During the Hada River campaign, his bold use of forced marches and improvised floating bridges enabled him to flank and rout the Soltanese forces. He was among the first military leaders to have a staff logician (a bookkeeper from Jahvó, Jójran Fires-by-Day, who would himself become a general officer of some note), who proved his value by deciphering numerous coded Soltanese commands during the Battle of Hormin Fort. It was in this battle that he formed his lifelong attachment to the idea that communication, rather than logistics or the mere virtue of vigor, was the deciding factor in most wars. As he wrote in his Remembrances and Visualizations of Six Battles, "An army must display strength not when weakest but when most uncertain; forcing the enemy to respond in unreadiness invariably reveals more than they wish to show. But how much better yet to know what the enemy does not wish to show without losing a single gun?"

During Leontalos's nine years in the campaign, the Soltanese resistance was utterly destroyed and Leontalos drew the attention of Third Army command. He was selected to institute a series of training seminars for Third Army officers that brought him into contact with much of the young officer corps. His new methodologies were put to the test during the Kreyinte War, during which he put the skeleton of a new, aerial Fifth Army into place. Althought the Kreintines were reknown for their bravery and skill on the battlefield, the systems of centralized communications and command used by Leontalos proved effective. Despite the occasional setback such as the Meadowfield Slaughter, the Uzdumalian forces prevented the Kreyintines from regaining lost territory, slowly forcing them back into the Kreyinte swamps (where Uzdumalian air and communication superiority were rendered ineffective by the terrain). Here Leontalos switched tactics, sowing confusion among the various Kreyinte forces by offering alliances with first one house, then another, and allowing his offers to be occasionally "intercepted". In the year 199, it paid off handsomely, when the Kreyinte princess Uul became convinced that she was to be soon betrayed by the House of Luudu and sued for peace; the establishment of a Uzdumalian protectorate soon followed.

Following the conclusion of the war, he was summoned to Uzda to serve as the commander of the First Army. During this period, he worked on his treatise Strategems and Feints, mandatory reading at war colleges to this day. After the birth of Devon and the untimely death of Lars III, the Imperial Mother began her long-running affair with Leontalos, who was named Minister Extraordinary and Imperial Tutor. (It is speculated that Hege sought to use Leontalos as a lever against other members of the Regency Council, but this degree of planning would have been out of keeping with the sweet-tempered but somewhat dim Imperial Mother.)

In 214, Leontalos backed Devon-Lars in his dissolution of the Regency Council. The general seems to have taken his duties to the young emperor seriously; the writings of both Leontalos and the adult Devon-Lars I indicate a genuine fondness for one another, and it is clear that Devon-Lars, while dissolute in many ways, internalized many of the lessons he learned at the knee of the Empire's greatest tactician. He may have learned them too well; while it is unclear the degree to which Leontalos sought political power, Devon-Lars was clearly uncomfortable knowing that one man had the backing and personal loyalty of the officer corps of three armies. Many of Leontalos' aides-de-camp from Jahvó and elsewhere in Mal were installed in prominent military and ministerial positions throughout the empire, and Leontalos was tremendously popular with the people of Uzda thanks to his continuous stream of military successes. Thus it aroused some suspicion when Leontalos was stung by a scorpion while he and Devon-Lars toured the Kreyintite territories; when one wag suggested that the "general's sting" was a thirteenth sanctified method of execution, Devon-Lars had the soles of her feet flayed. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that many of the institutional reforms conducted by Devon-Lars in the early years of his reign after Leontalos's death were designed to ensure that bureaucratic assignments would no longer map to regional loyalties.

Leontalos is interred on the grounds of the Air-Palace of Leontalos, with the penultimate of the Sixty-seven Truths inscribed above his mausoleum: "The Great God casts wisdom out like a net to catch groundhens, and sometimes we are unfortunate enough to escape."