One of the Raikothlins' greatest fears has always been factionalization. For them, it is a phik triphankir, a tiny flaw that can potentially destroy everything. And for most of their history, they have successfully avoided breaking up into anything like political parties.Fifty years earlier...
It was a little boy atop Springwatch, hiding from his angry mother, who first saw the ship. At first, it was just a glint of light on the horizon. Until about a year ago, ships had come by often, full of raw materials for the factories of Byzantipol in the north. Two of his brothers had gone on those ships to Byzantipol. They had never come back.
But now, the tanker ships had stopped, and the foundries of Byzantipol had gone quiet. The town at the foot of Springwatch had barely been affected. It had been there longer than anyone could remember. During the good times, they sold crops in Amokolia and Absentia. During the bad times, the Babkhans would come by needing taxes for war material or young men for soldiers, the townspeople would give them what they wanted, and they would go away for a few years. It wasn't a good life, but it wasn't a bad life either, and there was certainty to it.
It was all about to change.
As the ship drew closer, the young boy gasped. It wasn't one of the dull chrome tankers of Byzantipol. It was made of solid ice, sculpted into panoply of fantastic shapes. Fanciful spirals, curlicues and flowers jutted from its surface, and the prow was sculpted into the head of a gigantic polar bear. Family quarrels forgotten, he ran down the hill into Hyost.
The villagers gathered onto the hill to the north of the town, the one with the old ruins on it. From a fallen stone wall, the oldest man in town cupped his hand above his eyes and stared out at the ship.
"I can read the writing on the side," he said. "Served as a soldier in the Kaiser's Twenty-Fifth Regiment back during the Bosworth War. Won a Silver Star for it," he said. For once, everyone was listening to him. "Saw a lot of writing like that over there. That's Hyperborean. Eventually learned to read a little. That ship is...Niphilyon Qunion Ainai...'The Snow-Rose in The Hair of Beauty' I haven't seen a vessel like that since the St. Jean Uprising."
The ship docked at the eastern of the two mouths of the river, and a stream of Hyperboreans came out. There were at least as many people in the ship as there were in the whole village. Some of the villagers, looking grim, began to regret not bringing any weapons, and a few returned to town, hoping to get some before anything got ugly. The leader of the Hyperboreans in the ship either did not see them go, or did not mind. He walked leisurely up the hill, trailed by eight of his followers, faced the townspeople, and bowed.
"My name is Yyiji Tonkothion. The Great What-We-Are-Becoming has begun. The people of Elwynn have thrown off their Babkhan masters and returned to glory. I myself marched into Eliria at the head of a Raikothlin army not more than three weeks ago. All places have been restored but here. I come here to redeem Bjorngard. Follow me."
His last command was apparently not metaphorical, as he began climbing down the hillside and motioned impatiently for the locals to follow. As they climbed, he kept speaking, not to anyone in particular, almost to himself. Around the time they reached the Garden Isle, the men who had gone back to get weapons returned, but being as bemused as everyone else, they fell in line and followed the party of Hyperboreans.
Yyiji and the other Hyperboreans passed into the town, glancing disapprovingly at the thatched huts, and with barely a glance backward crossed the bridge onto the Absentian Road, which they followed only long enough to cross the next bridge, ending up west of the Garden Isle, among only a few old farms and the Autumnwatch. The townspeople were far too curious to turn back now, and not even the small children complained when Yyiji and his followers began to climb up Autumnwatch.
On the top, Yyiji came to the old spring beside the standing stone. He stood there in silent meditation for a moment, then placed a wreath of flowers on the stone. "Rhoni," he said, "you are among friends once more, so cease your weeping."
Immediately, the spring dried up, and no one has gotten a drop of water out of it since.
But not always. In the early second millennium ASC, when Tymaria was but a gleam in the Benacians' eyes, two factions arose among the Raikothlin of the day. One, led by the capable Elder Zihin Sakith (KP: Chini Sakvithion), represented the religious and philosophical strain of Hyperborean society. The other was led by Paladin general Riyon Karus (KP: Rhoni Charusion) and represented the militaristic and expansionist strain. Though Jihin's party was dominant across most of the Isle, Riyon was popular among the Raikothlin military, the Paladins, and on the smaller Isle of Volsung. The two spent several decades battling for the soul of Raikoth, and (through methods not recorded) Zihin won a complete victory. Being a personal friend of Riyon's, he made him an offer: he and any of his followers who wished to pursue their vision would be supplied with ships and provisions, to sail off into the unclaimed land to the east and start a new tiel (Hyperborean central city) free from the central government.
In those days, the Oracle of Yaanek still spoke to men, and before making his decision, Riyon asked the Oracle to predict his future. Said the Oracle: "If you depart, you will be lost and found many times over many centuries." Riyon's interpretation of the comment is not recorded, but he decided to take the offer. He and several thousand, including thirty two whole lots of Paladins, sailed off into the west.
Riyon sailed west beyond Amokoth, and founded his city at the mouth of a river. He called it Vanam (Fortress), the same name as his home city on Volsung and the capital of the Paladins. The first day of the new town's construction, a huge brown bear wandered through the building site, roared, and then ran off. This was considered an omen, and the name of the city was changed to Kalir-Vanam (Bear Fortress). The hinterlands he named New Automatica, because Riyon Karus himself was of Automatican blood.
But the west was not as uninhabited as many people thought. The Elw, the semi-barbaric people whom the Kaiser of Shireroth had finally subdued after long conflict, had migrated into the lands west of the island later known as Amokolia. The Elw and the ancestors of the Amokolians came to Kalir-Vanam to trade, and the town gradually lost its Hyperborean character and became similar to the other Elw cities like St. Angelsk that dotted the landscape.
The Elw, lacking their own name for the new land they had been forced into, adapted the term Automatica, and it was under this name that the territory was annexed to the Kaisers of Shireroth after one of them realized there was a bunch of Elw they hadn't conquered yet. As part of the Barony of Greater Automatica, Kalir-Vanam became more and more Elwynnized and eventually took on the Elwynnese translation of its name, Bjorngard.
The Elw of Automatica had been subdued later than the other Elw, and Shireroth's claim on the region was more tenuous. Eventually, they revolted and formed the nation of Amokolia, defeating a poorly equipped Shirerithian army while the majority of the Kaiser's forces were distracted by one of the Imperial Republic's civil wars. When drawing up the peace treaty, a shrew Shirerithian MiniEx argued that Bjorngard should not be given to Amokolia, as it was originally a Hyperborean city and therefore more closely linked to Shireroth than the Elw nation. The Bjorngarders, who hadn't been special in any way for several centuries, were pleased by this decision, especially when Shireroth gave them generous subsidies in order to win their loyalty.
However, the subsidies stopped with the Great Collapse of Shirerithian power after the death of Kaiseress Semisa I. Cut off from their trading partners, Bjorngard declined until it was practically unrecognizable as a civilized area, reverting to a small collection of farming villages. Kalir-Vanam itself was abandoned, and over the centuries its buildings became covered with soil, only a few stones sticking out to remind anyone there had once been a city there.
When Kaiser Mors V reconsolidated Shirerithian power, he had little time to spare for Bjorngard. His Elwynn policy was mostly trying to keep Vikings, Babkhans, and Raikothlin away from each other's throats. There is a record that an expedition was sent to plant the flag over Kalir-Vanam, but they couldn't find the site of the city.
Nothing further was done until Duke Hasan took power in Elwynn. It is now known that he was a traitor, dedicated to the conquest of Shireroth for his Babkhan masters, but he knew that there would be resistance and that the industrial heartland in Brookshire would be most likely to resist him. If he wanted to win the inevitable civil war, he needed industries loyal to himself. And where better to hide a crash industrialization project than in a forgotten corner of the Empire no one had thought about in five hundred years? He ordered the construction of his dystopian Byzantipol complex in the northern, island half of Bjorngard, but the southern half remained quiet and untouched.
As part of the general collapse of Babkhan power in Shireroth, rioting workers destroyed Byzantipol, and enterprising Babkhan merchants trying to salvage something from the end of their society sold most of what was left for scrap metal. The workers Hasan had shipped to the factory streamed over the border into Amokolia, building the legendary slums of Anun City. Those who remained continued to sell scrap to Amokolian metal dealers, and life reverted to more or less the way it had been before.
When Yyiji Tonkothian's revolt against Babkhan power in Elwynn had swept over the entire mainland, he began to turn his attention to Bjorngard. He had read the legends of an old Hyperborean city there, and decided that it would be brought into the core of his planned New Elwynn. Loading the transport ship The Snow-Rose In The Hair of Beauty with people and materials, he set off for Bjorngard. His studies had taught him what Kaiser Mors' explorations could not - the exact site of the old city of Bjorngard. It was now, he knew, a mound called the Autumnwatch beside a small village called Hyfrost. There was even a spring nearby called Ryan's Tears, which, he surmised, must be a reference to Riyon Karus, the city's founder.
He landed on Hyfrost in 3350 and declared it the new capital of Bjorngard. His Hyperboreans quickly began setting up everything necessary to make it a proper Hyperborean nucleus-city. The Paladins were particularly interested given its history, and re-established Riyon's great Paladin fortress, once again called Kalir-Phanam. Other architects began designing proper buildings, including the huge Lirikoth Building meant as both a conference center and an architecture celebration of Yyiji's triumph. Excited by the development, hundreds of Bjorngarders from the hinterlands moved into the town, and hundreds of Raikothlin settled the new Raikothlin Quarter in the north.
Today, Hyfrost has over two thousand people, and the Hyperborean government's plan for the city intends for it to reach the size of a proper Hyperborean nucleus-city, ten to twenty thousand, within twenty five years. Along with Tala and Wolfraven, it is one of the three county seats of Kai-Raikoth.
[OOC: This history breaks continuity in a few places; for example, it places the foundation of Amokolia a year or two before it actually happened. The part about Riyon Karus is based on the time when Ryan Caruso was a Hyperborean citizen and founder of the Paladins, and our differing visions for the country. A lot of credit for the picture above goes to the Cartographers Guild and their amazing tutorials, as always.]
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