Taryte

Taryte is a tropical/temperate empire, split by a mountain range whose inhabitants live like the inhabitants of the temperate zone.

Language

See Tarise.

Geography and climate

Southern areas have 3 seasons: cool, hot, wet. Temps in July are about equal to temps in January but it is much rainier.

Culture

The ancestors of the Tarise people were dark-skinned aboriginals who had lived in the tropics for tens of thousands of years. As the climate slowly warmed, their civilization advanced, and they eventually pushed north into the temperate zone to create Upper Taryte. Despite the similarity of their names, they were never in contact with the Tarwastas, a tribe of dark-skinned people who had pushed through from the tropics to the temperate zone to found the empire of Tarwas further east.

Desert War

Background

An ancient treaty, signed in 2371, had divided the world between the three powers of Kava, FILTER, and the Crystals. The authors of the treaty had promised that, even though conquest of many areas of the map would be possible only far in the future, the powers who signed the treaty would obey its borders and never so much as quarrel with another signatory. Thus, the treaty united the three conquering powers on the same side, and their only enemies were the various aboriginals whose lands were set to be conquered.

Within a few centuries, the FILTER empire collapsed and its territory was mostly incorporated into Kava. For legal reasons, FILTER needed to remain a separate entity, but the territories nominally administered by FILTER were in fact part of Kava and looked to Kava's capital city for advice. In 3138, Kava created a new state, Repilia, on conquered aboriginal land that had long ago been assigned to FILTER, and for the first time, omitted the legally required step of formally consigning the government of the land to FILTER. Nevertheless, many of the people in Xema considered themselves to belong to FILTER and not Kava.

In 3565, FILTER was formally abolished as a governing entity, and though it remained a political party, its opinions were decided by the leaders of Kava. The non-FILTER Kavans came to call themselves Thunderers and stated that the Thunderers were also a political party. The alliance of FILTER and the Thunderers was nevertheless generally referred to as the Thunder Empire, not as Kava, as both parties realized that FILTER had been reliant on Kava for nearly a thousand years and that there was no chance of a reawakening now that even the political opinions of FILTER had been merged with those of the Thunderers.

Relations in the tropics

By 3626, the Lenians in southern Taryte had mostly become slaves, and their relative share of the population was growing. As their population grew, Taryte's rulers began to fear that they would soon be thrown out of power in their own homeland. A rebel movement formed in Taryte, but its leaders remained obedient to the laws of Taryte's ruling Leaper party and did not attempt violence.

NOTE, it is possible that Amade, Taryte, and AlphaLeap are all merged into one entity now since all were at least pretending to be subjects of the Crystal Empire.

Many small colonies of escaped Lenian slaves had formed in Taryte; most were in the foothills of the mountains, where the climate was wetter and survival was easier, but other Lenians moved to the coast where they lived openly, generally working for traders who had more to gain from hiding a slave than from hiring a legal Tarise laborer for the same job.

Many Tarise leaders began to call for the genocide of all Lenians, saying that the world would be much better off without them. They claimed that these people were hypersexual, stupid, and violent, and were responsible for many of the empire's problems. But Taryte's government was interested in the present, not the future, and therefore they took no action against the Thunderers and their allies. But gradually, the Taryteans began to draw in Pejos from outside Taryte who wanted to destroy the Lenian races. They preached reliance on technology, saying that people had to abandon slavery and build machines. They demonized reliance on the powers of the human body; they felt that the people most fit to govern a nation were those with physical disabilities or other impediments that would force them to rely on the power of machines. Thus, they agreed with their enemies the Thunderers, who also preached technology but had so far relied on AlphaLeap for almost all of their science.

They exploited the natural aridity that entirely dominated much of Taryte to force citizens to endure constant intense thirst; this also was intended to shape the Taryteans into living the Tarise mindset, as they were constantly reminded of the absence of water and animal life in the ideal world.

In their history, it had been common for the abolition of slavery to be enforced by killing all of the slaves, and the Lenian slaves living in Taryte thus preferred to remain slaves. The rebellious Taryteans vowed to destroy their capital and its government.

In 3696, after exactly seventy years in hiding, the Tarytean rebels set up their new government in the barren desert province of Nippon. They were leaving their old homeland in the tropics because they felt it was ruled by an evil government that they needed to destroy. They saw no possible way for them to morally justify living in the tropics. Though Nippon was within Taryte's borders, its population was small and largely nomadic, and would have nothing to gain from opposing the invasion.

The Taryteans disapproved of their people's bad morals; they theorized that that within a few decades Taryteans would have so much mechanical power that physical strength and even intelligence would be largely irrelevant, whereas an ethical mind would be very important for the future of their nation. (The development of non-military technology was surprisingly slow despite the tremendous amount of effort put into it by the government simply because it had to be invented "from scratch", as no other nation had such technology).

The new Tarytean leaders declared that they had liberated themselves of the problems caused by their reliance on the immoral race-based slavery of the tropics, and announced the beginning of a new era in which only people of their own race would be enslaved.

Men were given manual labor jobs, whereas women were put into a sexual slavery similar to the prostitution that had taken place in the tropics, though without the use of money. Children under the age of five were forced to attend preparation, a sort of nursery school where they were watched closely and forced to undergo various tests while working their hardest to please the adults (the work they were given was much lighter than that given to adults, but they faced a very steep learning curve. If they could not keep up with the learning curve, they were deemed useless and killed.)

The Taryteans wanted their people to look, think, and act alike. Their clothes were symbols of their status, with the most powerful people wearing light blue clothes, and the most corrupt wearing a dusty pink. Red was a sign of evil to the Taryteans, and blue was a sign of good. In fact, they thought blue eyes were blasphemous, and would not allow any children with blue eyes to survive.

Declaration of war

The Leaper government in charge of Taryte declared war on the rebels when they learned what was happening, but were unable to act because the rebels had moved to a barren plateau where the land itself was their shelter and therefore their settlements were invisible. However, some of the rebels defected back to the government and helped Taryte track down the settlements in the desert. Thus the Tarise Civil War began.

They criminalized obesity and told people that to be tall and thin was to be morally superior to all others. The Taryteans believed that Sapêpans were evil and were attempting to return their country to a pre-Meri state, believing that it would be more peaceful. It was not just Sapepa they wanted to eliminate, however.

Tarytean citizens were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to dress appropriately at all times. Fancy clothes were banned, as the government wanted to save money on producing clothes by making them as cheap as possible. Degrees of formality were established, with the highest-level government officials receiving the best clothes (this was meant to encourage lesser citizens to strive for success in the government). Most girls were required to wear their hair plain and long under normal circumstances,[3] and exceptions were made only for upper-level Taryteans to show their status.

The rebel leaders did their best to produce a stable government that they hoped would last hundreds of years. The barren land around them made defection back to the government difficult, as would-be defectors had to fight both the rebels and the cruel natural environment. The rebel leaders realized that they would likely be eventually deposed, however, and sped up their violent reforms in the event they would be soon forced to stop by either the government or their own people.

Contact with Lenians

Within a year after the founding of the rebel settlements, a group of rebels invaded the Thunder state of Sapeepa and began kidnapping Lenians to use as slaves.

The kidnapped slaves began to criticize the Taryteans, claiming Taryteans were unnaturally obsessed with the ideal of purity; that is, after the early Taryteans had managed to survive many years of unjust aggression by their rulers in the tropics, they refused to discard their old mentality and applied it even when there was no danger from within their society, and thus the Taryteans unwittingly had embarked on a quest to purify their society by attacking various groups in the population that were unlucky enough to be singled out as undesirable. When the rebel leaders learned that some of their people were using kidnapped Lenians as prostitutes and slaves, they ejected those people from their colony and threatened to kill the Lenians.

The rebels were strict especially in their racial policies, refusing to let anyone who appeared to them to have even a trace of non-Tarytean ancestry survive. Since Taryte was ethnically diverse due to slavery and trade, the rebels ruled out an alliance with many other Taryteans, even those who opposed the government for other reasons. However, they did not plan to conquer Taryte; they wanted to set up a coalition government with Taryte's orthodox government and the rebels sharing power equally.

With slavery firmly in place, the Taryteans were pleased at the remarkable improvement in their society, though in fact this change had come about not so much because of the absence of undesirables from their society as the great overwhelming fear of elimination that all residents suddenly were forced to live with. Their religion taught that to be killed by the government ensured reincarnation as a slave, to be served immediately.

The Thunderstorm Treaty

Around 3700, Taryte and Sapeepa signed the Thunderstorm Treaty, which stated that their common philosophy of utilitarian reliance on technology overruled their massive philosophical differences.

But in 3704, the Kyry army, an alliance of soldiers within the rebels, rejected the treaty and declared war on all Lenians and all Taryteans who protected them. The Taryteans had given up much of their military power to Kyry, and now they feared that the Kyry generals would make decisions that even the other rebels felt unwise.

But when the Tarytean soldiers entered the Thunder province of Sapeepa, the Sapeepan soldiers immediately attacked. Even though the Lenians were the victims of this invasion, their resistance was illegal, since Taryte, the Tarytean rebels, and the Kyry army within the Tarytean rebels were all legally still part of the Crystal Empire, and the Lenians were required by law to rely on the government for defense. Therefore the government of the Empire did not help the Lenians resist the attack.

Nevertheless, the Lenians won this battle, and the Kyry generals admitted that they had underestimated the military prowess of the Lenians. They immediately halted the entire war, using the authority earlier granted to them by the rebel leaders. But the rebel leaders refused to accept defeat; instead they fired the generals and organized a new army that promised an even greater attack on the Lenians as revenge for their initial defeat.

In 3707, Taryte invaded the Lenians again, and this time they won, and held full control of Sapeepa for three years without a counterattack.

The rebels declared their main settlement to be the new capital of Taryte, and declared war on the Tarytean government. They invaded the tropics and began to enslave all other Taryteans, even those who had been their allies just fifteen years earlier. They promised to kill all Lenians, including slaves, both within their borders and without.

Thunder reaction

When the Lenian Thunder leaders heard that their people were being murdered by the Tarytean rebels, they signed a pact with the Tarytean rebels to speed up the killing of the Lenians. This was because the rebels had promised to make an exception to their plan of total genocide for those who betrayed the Lenians, and use the defectors as workers in Taryte for as long as they were useful. This brought the remaining Lenians into the war on the side of the Tarytean government, even though the Tarytean government kept most of them as slaves.

The Tarytean rebels dammed and diverted the rivers that flowed from the highlands, and promised to kill Taryteans in the tropics largely through starvation rather than combat. The Tarytean government responded with a conventional attack, and had secured the alliance of all of the people of Taryte, even the slaves.

Thunder-Paba relations

After more than 2000 years of being pacifists who were only willing to fight defensive wars, in the early 3700,s the Pabap royal family decided to becom e even more pacifistic, and abandoned all claims to its own territory but for a small sliver of land around the original settlements from 633 AD. They abolished Paba's army and navy and did nothing when Thaoa pushed its own army deeper and deeper into Paba, set up slave plantations, and forced Pabap people to sleep under trees while the Thaoans slept in their beds. Thaoa fought several "battles" against the unarmed Pabap citizens in which the Pabaps suffered four digit body counts and the THaoans suffered a few minor cuts and bruises. The Pabaps had fought back bravely with their pots and pans, figuring the Pabap army with its swords and spears was merely hiding out in the city and would soon rescue them, just as it had reliably done for 3000 years, but no army ever came. Finally the Pabaps realized that the royal family really had abolished the army and had effectively thrown away their entire nation so they could sit their castles sipping on raspberry wine.

Other nations felt bad for Paba, as even though the royal family had tried to diaper up their new philosophy as just another form of pacifism it was clear that they had stopped trying to govern their population and stopped caring about what would happen to the common people of Paba if they suffered simultaneous opportunistic invasions from all of their neighbors. Thaoa struck first, as they traditionally had been the cruelest and most violent of Paba's neighbors. But they were also invaded from places farther afield. The Crystals decided the time had come to finish the project that they had tried to build 1600 years earlier: a nation for Crystals only, carved out of Pabap territory near the Pabap capital city. The Crystals had become a lot less violent themselves over the centuries, as their fortunes had improved markedly. So they did not abuse the Pabaps, nor did they enslave the Pabaps.

Altotta was also very sympathetic towards the Pabaps, but its leaders had a difficult time understanding what was happening. Paba had fallen behind in technology, and its main partner, Nama, had collapsed to a level even worse than Paba's, so they could no longer use Nama to announce to other nations what their foreign policy was. Paba had to rely instead on direct diplomatic connections with its surrounding empires, and there was no direct connection between Paba and Altotta. By 3919, there were 27 different hostile foreign armies occupying strips and patches of Paba's territory, each respecting the claims of the others but worrying about a potential future civil war in which one colonizer would go to war with another. Many of these 27 armies were from nations that had previously been very poor and weak, but had heard of the collapse of Paba and realized that even a tiny nation could defeat Paba in a war now. There were also some colonists who were not even part of the 27 armies, but simply came of their own will and conquered a small town. At the most extreme were towns that were held in siege by just one person, who had the only weapons in the town, and was able to hold the entire town's population in slavery.

Widening of the war

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Unrest at home

Background

For most of their history, the blonde, blue-eyed Thunder people had been strong allies of the dark-skinned Crystals. They both had founded large, powerful empires built on territory taken from their shared enemy Nama, and both had acquired new shared enemies, chiefly Dreamland. Both had originated as political parties within their respective tribes: the Thunderers were part of the Lenian tribe, and the Crystals were aboriginals chiefly from Atlam. Both groups considered themselves to have risen above tribal politics, but intermarriage was rare, and the laws of both empires stated that all children of mixed marriages must choose to be either Crystals or Thunderers; there were no split identities. This was because each political party also associated itself with a religion, and these religions were not compatible.

In 3765, the Crystals declared war on the Thunder Empire and conquered their capital city. Lenians were assigned to submissive roles in society and denied the ability to own large amounts of money. Resistance was weak, and although the Crystal occupation lasted only 80 years, its end came not with a Thunder uprising but with yet another invasion, this time from the neighboring empire of Dreamland.

By invading the Thunder Empire, the Dreamers had revived their ancient war against the Crystals. The Crystals had quickly surrendered their occupied territory to Dreamland, but in order to control this territory, the Dreamers had been forced to build settlements in the wilderness which could be easily reached by Crystals. The Crystals chose to attack these delicate supply-line settlements rather than attempt to regain control of the former Thunder Empire, and this made the Dreamer occupation much weaker than the Crystal occupation had been. In 3884, the Thunderers overthrew the Dreamers, and instituted slavery for all Dreamers. The Crystals did not help the Thunderers in this revolt, and therefore the Thunderers also enslaved the Crystals, but promised that the punishment given to the Crystals would be milder and that the Crystal Empire would be allowed to buy the stranded people out of slavery, whereas the Dreamers would never be set free.

Uprising in Lypelpyp

The Thunder coup of 3884 restored tribalism, saying that their long history of oppression by other tribes had taught them that a government based on tribal loyalties would be the best for its people. The dark-skinned Crystals were thus enslaved, and although the Dreamers had been of mixed racial origins, the Thunder government redefined them as a tribe and assigned them to a slavery even more oppressive than that given to the Crystals. The Thunderers reaffirmed that they were descendants of the Lenian tribe, and identified themselves with blonde hair and blue eyes. They promised their people that all other tribes would be enslaved, and that people could not change their tribal identity, even through marriage.

In 3915, a large number of dark-skinned Crystal people settled in the Thunder city of Lypelpyp. Here, they founded a corporation, STW, and took control of most trade routes with the Crystal Empire. Trade with the Crystals had continued despite the Thunder government's racist policies because even the racists had promised to remain allies of the Crystals, as both empires considered their longstanding tribal rivalry to be of a much lesser importance than their shared hatred of Dreamland and resistance to Dreamland's attempts to invade both of them.

But now the Crystals began constructing large houses for the STW members to live in, and these buildings quickly overshadowed the Lenians' older, more delicately built homes. Racial tension dominated life in Lypelpyp, as the Lenians had been promised just thirty years earlier that they would be allowed to enslave all other races of people, and yet their military had allowed a dark-skinned tribe to invade and colonize them.

Some Lenians in Lypelpyp tried to revolt, but STW was ready for them, and quickly defeated them with its own army comprised of illegal immigrants. Lypelpyp accused the Thunder government of abandonment, as they had not only broken their promise of eternal slavery for all tribal enemies, but had allowed a foreign army to enter an important city and attack unarmed native citizens who had protested the invasion. The Thunder government refused to respond to this complaint, but in secret signed an agreement with STW in which they recognized STW as a legal entity so long as STW paid taxes to the Thunder capital. Previously, STW had refused even this, saying that because all of their employees were illegal immigrants, they were not citizens, and should not pay taxes.

Soon, in 3918, yet another coup overthrew the Thunder government. This time, the perpetrators were a faction within the Thunder party: they practiced a milder version of the Thunder philosophy, and upon their victory, they publicly repudiated racism and immediately ended the slavery of all Crystals. They sanctioned the invasion of Lypelpyp and forged a new alliance with the Crystal Empire and the STW corporation which the Crystals had founded. This coup ended the hopes of the Lenians in Lypelpyp that they would ever be restored to their promised superior status, and therefore the Lenians began an underground resistance movement seeking to restore the earlier, more militant government. They realized that STW had been very clever to invade Lypelpyp only, enabling them to control important trade routers without launching a large-scale military invasion, as previous invaders had done. Since the militant Lenians were out of power, they declared themselves an independent nation and built settlements in areas of the wilderness which no outside party considered worthy of settlement.

Ironically, by pledging to oppose the Crystals on racial grounds, the submerged Lenian resistance actually improved their standing in the Crystal capital city of Baeba. Baeba was suspicious of STW, as STW's founders had tried to evade paying taxes to the Crystals as well, and seemed intent on drawing as much power as possible from their opportunistic invasion while giving nothing back to either empire. Baeba saw the Lenians' racial resistance to the illegal invasion as proof that the Lenians would be more reliable opponents against STW than would the mainline Thunderers who opposed STW only on economic grounds. In return, the Lenian resistors promised to respect the Crystals as allies in the greater war against Dreamland, and Baeba Swamp's government allowed them to build an embassy in Baeba and attain recognition as the new, independent nation of Lypelpyp.

Despite this, the Crystals still preferred to interface with the more powerful mainline Thunder government, not the Lenian resistance, and since both parties claimed control of Lypelpyp, the Crystals promised not to intervene in this conflict, even if the Thunderers decided to crush the resistance. In anticipation that the Thunderers would eventually do this, the Crystals promised the Lenians refugee status in Baeba Swamp, further heightening the irony by promising the only safe place for a tribe of people who hated all dark-skinned people would be in the center of the world's oldest city founded and run by that same tribe of dark-skinned people.

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War front in Baeba

Background

In Baeba Swamp, news of Adabawa's war threatened to destabilize Baeba's government. Baeba was the world's oldest city, having been continuously inhabited for more than ten thousand years by the dark-skinned aboriginal tribes who had first reached the area after a long journey across the continent. Over the millenia, though power had changed hands many times, the population of Baeba Swamp was never greatly affected. The most recent conqueror had been the Crystal Empire, which had taken over Baeba in the 3370s as part of a wider war against the invading empire of Dreamland, whose leaders had made enemies of both the Crystals and the aboriginal Baebans.

The Crystals had originated from the nation of Atlam, near the Equator, whose climate was similar to Baeba's but with no detectable seasonal temperature variation. The Crystals and the aboriginal Baebans were of a similar physical type: while some intertribal differences manifested themselves, both were very dark-skinned people with similar body types and facial features, and the Crystals quickly came to adopt the Baebans as part of their family.

Baeba's prosperity as the new capital of the Crystal Empire also brought other people to the Swamp; most of these were aboriginals from the deserts, seeking a better life near the coast, but many Lenians from the much colder Thunder Empire had also moved to Baeba. These people originally participated in trade, bringing hardy tropical fruits such as pineapples to the colder biomes of the north and east, but in Baeba, the appeal of economic prosperity soon overwhelmed their tribal loyalties, and even the blonde blue-eyed Lenians came to think of themselves as Baebans.

When the Crystal Empire, headquartered in Baeba, invaded and conquered the Thunder Empire around the year 3785, many Crystals worried that the Lenians in Baeba Swamp would object to the invasion and start a campaign of civil disobedience in Baeba.

 

Conflict at home

Even as the Thunder army racked up victories against Adabawa, dissent at home spread doubt about their long-term chances of victory.

Debate of the Feminist War Council

A group of feminists formed an organization called the Feminist War Council and at their first meeting declared an end to the war.

At their second meeting, they invited diplomats from Laba and Moonshine to a symposium, intending to issue a formal military surrender to the winner of the debate. They reached no conclusion here, however, because the members of the Feminist War Council each had their own covert sympathies to guide them. Finally, at a third meeting the diplomats were again present, but also were diplomats from third-party nations such as Nama. These nations also had their own sympathies, with most favoring Laba, but many of the pro-Laba nations were strongly anti-Thunder. Therefore, with this additional input, the Feminist War Council decided unanimously to surrender to Moonshine. Because Moonshine had not been involved in the war, this treaty did not end the war; Adabawa's army was still invading. However, the Council ordered the military to build barricades in various areas of the Thunder Empire that would help repel invaders, but also make it difficult for the Thunder soldiers to pursue their enemies. Funding for weapons production was halted, leaving soldiers with an ever-dwindling supply.

Reform in Sakwalo

Adabawa's victory over the Thunder Empire led to a revolution in the state of Sakwalo that actually returned a stronger Thunder government to power; these people revived the strictest form of racial discrimination that had ever been practiced by banning all non-Lenians from living in Sakwalo and enslaving those whom they could not push out. Sakwalo had no military to patrol its borders, but since the capital of Sakwalo was in a remote area, Adabawa's armies had not been able to occupy it, and the radical new Thunder government maintained its hold on power.

Sapeepa-Taryte relations

Meanwhile, the state of Sapeepa reacted to their defeat by launching a new war against Taryte, which had been helping them against Adabawa but whose people had a longstanding mutual blood feud stemming from a war in 3704 in which Taryte had invaded and killed many Sapeepans. The Thunder military leaders refused to allow this war, and therefore Sapeepa seceded from the Thunder Empire, which was still in control of Sakwalo, cutting themselves off from any hope of power even if the Thunderers were to later reemerge from their defeat in Sakwalo and restore their original borders.

Both sides of this war also refused help from Adabawa, as they realized that Adabawa would almost certainly violate any treaty his people signed with a small, isolated power such as Taryte or Sapeepa. Therefore, the four armies of Sapeepa, Taryte, Sakwalo, and Adabawa were all at war with each other, each refusing even a temporary alliance with any of the other three. However, Sakwalo's forces had been so utterly destroyed that they realized their participation would be limited to the choice of which of the other three armies they would prefer to be invaded by. Likewise, Adabawa chose to let Sapeepa and Taryte wear each other down so that when their war was over he would have a much easier time invading and destroying both of them.

Surrender of Nama

The Thunder Empire had been long ago founded on land taken entirely from Nama. In 3953, after Adabawa had conquered all of Altotta and secured an unconditional surrender, Nama had reaffirmed its independence from Altotta, and continued the war with its own much weaker military. Nama declared that its borders encircled all of the land not yet under control of Adabawa's military, figuring that even triply hostile states like Sapeepa and Taryte would sooner side with Nama than with Adabawa. Since Sapeepa and Taryte had not yet been subdued by Adabawa, Nama claimed that Sapeepa and Taryte were part of Nama. However, Nama also insisted that in order to earn Nama's hand in an alliance, each of those states would need to first surrender unconditionally to Nama.

Like Sakwalo, Nama consisted primarily of difficult terrain, whose inhabitants were militarily impotent but also difficult for Adabawa's armies to reach. Adabawa had originally considered a treaty with Nama in which he would respect Nama's independence so long as they promised to remain neutral and form an economic compact with Laba's armies. Though Nama had once been the world's foremost military power, their fortunes had been declining for more than a thousand years, and Adabawa hoped that he could entice Nama into an alliance with the promise that Nama would regain its lost territory and the ability to once again make colonies of surrounding nations. Most Naman leaders favored Adabawa because he had defeated the Thunder Empire which had taken the most from Nama.

But the leader of Nama's independence movement, Likwàkwa, had taken full control of Nama's army, and therefore the will of the generally pacifistic Naman confederation had no standing. She refused to surrender, and Adabawa chose to engage his army in a full-scale invasion of Nama, planning to bring even the most remote areas of resistance under his control. Adabawa thus strove to conquer Nama only, figuring that minor regional powers such as Sapeepa and Taryte would fall apart on their own once Nama was his.

Likwakwa's army held off Adabawa for many years before she handed power to her successor, a woman named Lakaxw (in Moonshine , Lakaf). Lakaf's army in turn held off Adabawa as he became more and more detached from his military campaign. Though he had preferred to be present near the front lines of combat, as the armies spread out Adabawa was forced to remain geographically distant and delegate decisions to commanders over whom he had little control.

Nevertheless, Adabawa's army steadily penetrated further into Lakaf's upland forest refuge areas, and as the war dragged on, more and more often it was she who had no reliable means of contact with her increasingly scattered military holdouts. Adabawa was invading primarily from the north, and pushing ever southward into Nama, and into ever drier climates. By 3976, Adabawa had cut through all of the prairies and pushed her up against the Hykwus Mountains, whose climate was far too barren to support her population. She agreed to finally surrender to Adabawa, but rather than issue a formal diplomatic surrender, she and her army scattered throughout the mountains, separating even from each other, hoping to buy time for a coordinated escape to the ocean while Adabawa's army struggled to find out where she had gone.

Survival at sea

To reach the ocean, Lakaf's army had to pass through territory that had been neutral in the war but had been forced into economic cooperation with Adabawa. Once they reached the ocean, however, they knew they would be safe, since even after his total victory Adabawa had no means of patrolling the long, winding tropical seacoast securely enough to discover even a tiny, disorganized army such as hers. Her most immediate trouble, she realized, was that she would need to either purchase or pirate a fleet of ships to bring her and her army to a place where they could be free from all governments, even friendly ones, as she realized that Adabawa was interested in controlling the entire world.

Nama-Sakwalo relations

When the governors of Sakwalo learned that Lakaf's army had held off Adabawa for many years longer than Sakwalo itself had, they offered Lakaf total control of Sakwalo, even if she demanded the Thunder resistance to abdicate and set up a tyranny with absolute power reserved for Lakaf. Lakaf agreed, and therefore Sakwalo's leaders formally abolished the emergency Loporomo government and set up a new monarchy to begin when Lakaf and her fleet arrived. Power was formally transferred to Lakaf even though the Thunderers had no guarantee she would ever arrive; most of the world had sided with Adabawa in this war, and Adabawa promised a reward for Lakaf's capture.

At this time, Sakwalo was restricted to inland areas around 45°N, which had been Sakwalo's capital all along. Lakaf's ships were fairly close by — docked along the coast of Kava at around 27°N at the same longitude — but in order to reach safety, she would need to circle around the entire continent, a sea journey that, no matter in which direction she began, would be more than ten thousand miles long and pass through many hostile territories. She hoped to find a much shorter path, even if it involved abandoning her ships after a journey to a hostile but out-of-the-way nation such as Thaoa to the east or Taryte to the west. And she knew that, just thirty years earlier, the Moonshine people had been in the same situation, and had arrived safely at the same destination despite passing through much hostile territory.

Queen Lakaf promised the Sakwaloans she would bring a stable and internally homogeneous government, but she directed what remained of their combined military forces to focus entirely on defense, and that they would make no attempts to gain any additional territory for their monarchy.

Postwar Sakwalo

Just one year later, in 3977, Adabawa's empire suffered a civil war which forced him to pull back his entire military force from the continent in order to reinforce his control over the islands of Laba. Many of the countries he had been occupying remained in alliance with each other, but they no longer considered themselves to be fighting for Laba. Dreamland soon emerged as the leader of the remnant coalition.

When the leaders of Sapeepa and Taryte, who had revived a 300-year-old blood feud, heard that Adabawa had fallen from power, they declared a truce in order to fight Dreamland, who had a 600-year-old war still raging against both of them. When Adabawa had been in control, Dreamland had obeyed his commands to shift the focus of their military campaigns towards targets more valuable to Adabawa. But now that Dreamland was back in charge, they returned the struggle for Baeba to their top priority.

Other information

This sequences of events overlaps with the above but is kept separate.

Identity of Baeba

In the STRAWB.DOC writeup, it says that Taryte is at war with Baeba Swamp, but that in 3844, Baeba Swamp loses its war against the Thunderers. It is likely that the Baeba Swamp in this writeup is Sapeepa, whose leaders claimed jurisdiction over the distant Crystal city of Baeba Swamp.

Another possibility, however, is that it refers to Amade, which in this case would have been included in the Oyster roundup of around 3400 AD, and would mean that the Oysters also conquered both Taryte and AlphaLeap, only to later lose those two areas without losing Amade.

In this war, the Thunderers did not side with the Lenians living in Taryte or in "Baeba Swamp", and in fact explicitly signed a pact with an alliance of non-Lenian tribes. The writeup also explains that Lenians were the majority. Note that the writeup also says that "Baeba" was populated primarily by Lenians and non-native peoples, rather than just saying Lenians.

The paragraphs in which Taryte is at war with Baeba are separate from those describing Taryte's invasion of Sapeepa. The Thunder party sided with Taryte in this conflict even though the Tarises were explicitly killing Lenians, and the Thunderers were also Lenians. This may explain why Baeba Swamp "fell to the Thunderers"; the Thunderers were given control over the territory they called Baeba even though from a military standpoint they had not only lost the war, but accelerated their defeat by siding with the invaders.

Even in 3844, many Lenians who were not pro-Thunder remained in the territory they called Baeba, in areas that were good for producing food and could thus not be easily swept over. The district of Rasilisana is described as being a part of Baeba having come under Thunder control in the mid-3840s. This became the capital of the Taryte/Sapeepa alliance.

If "Baeba" is Amade, it is possible that the so-called Lenians were in fact fellow dark-skinned tribes who had for quite some time come to ally with the Lenians of Paba for political reasons. This would explain little, however, as it would require an alliance to last for more than a thousand years while both sides maintained strict tribal identities, and where the Star-derived tribes ruled over the Lenians without the Lenians complaining.

Baeba may also be a region of Taryte, if it can be assumed that Amade and Taryte were united by the earlier Crystal conquest. Indeed this may be the likeliest explanation.

Dreamland continued its war against the Thunderers even after being thrown out of power in 3884, and had "Laba" on their side. Laba here may be a diplomatic entity, since Dreamland already controlled Laba's military. Dreamland identified Taryte as the progenitor of the Thunder state, even though they had been enemies before uniting against Dreamland in desperation.

When the Crystals conquered the Thunder Empire in 3765, they were unwilling or unable to push the Thunderers out of the territory around Amade, since in 3844, the Thunderers conquered Amade. It may be that the Thunderers were effectively fighting AlphaLeap, not the Crystals, but even so, the Crystals must have regained control of Amade by 4108 at the latest, and thus had had control of it for at least two generations by the time the Firestones arrived.

Summary

The Thunder Empire seems to have conquered the land as far south as 15°N, perhaps even to 13°N ... in either case, the location of the capital of the merged Amade/Taryte region of the Crystal Empire. They did this even while they were in a military alliance with the Crystals; however, the Crystals almost certainly had violated the treaty first by invading various Thunder nations in the preceding century. Thus, the alliance was effectively meaningless by this time. This means that few of the people moving into the tropics were Crystals, and that most were Lenians.

Because this happened after Taryte's war against the Thunderers, the Tarises cannot move back in and replace the Thunderers in this area. It is still possible that the Crystals will displace the Thunderers from at least parts of the area, because the Thunderers immediately lost a war against Dreamland and had no means with which to hold onto their newly conquered territory in the tropics. Thus, it could be that the Amade-Taryte zone is very diverse by 4164 when the Firestones invade. Unlike all previous invasions, the Thunderers rode in from the north, which is why they were able to win their war without conquering AlphaLeap, which controlled the only available sea route.

THIS MEANS THAT AMADE AND TARYTE ARE WITHIN THE ANCHOR EMPIRE. Therefore, Dreamland and AlphaLeap both claim the area, with AlphaLeap still controlling the sea and Dreamland attempting to exert control over the land. However, Dreamland never had a serious chance of winning this conflict, and so Amade-Taryte became independent again, with Leapers controlling the economy but no longer able to occupy the land.

The tribal makeup of the Amade-Taryte region in 3844 was similar to that of the Crystal-Thunder empire broadly speaking ... blonde Lenian people (both Thunderers and people who by then would have been considered aboriginals) and dark-skinned people living side by side, with relatively few people of intermediate physical types. When the Firestone army reaches this area, they may have considered themselves to belong to neither group.

The Oysters and their descendants invaded or crossed into this region many times, though with varying boundaries:

1. The initial invasion in 2175, during the foundation of the Oyster Empire, which likely excluded the areas nearest the Equator.
2. An "invasion" to regain lost territory in 2668 AD as the aboriginals overthrew the Oysters, which may nonetheless have brought Oysters into new areas even as they were pushed out of their home territory.
3. Another invasion sometime around 3100 AD.
4. Another invasion around 3431 AD, although probably stopped at the border of AlphaLeap since the invasion came from the east.
5. The war against Taryte, though initially a loss, brought Thunderers into the tropics once again. By this time, they no longer identified with the Lenians who had been left behind by previous migrations, and in fact sided with the enemies of those Lenians.

Note that the Thunder invasion of "the south" only encompassed what they called Aboa, which included Paba and points eastward. It may have also included Subumpam and Lobexon but these areas were not part of Aboa in other writeups. This invasion soon decayed, which may mean that they were driven back. In any case, Paba was united with the Thunder Empire in the end because both were part of the Anchor Empire.

Despite all of the invasions, the Crystals were never pushed out of the territory, and may have remained the true majority from at least 3565 AD onward, if not well before this time. Lenians (but not any one specific group) may have been the majority even if the Crystals were the largest tribe, but by whatever means, the Lenians had lost their majority status in Amade and AlphaLeap by 4108 at the very latest (and likely much sooner), and since it seems that Taryte no longer had any legal status at this time, they would have also lost Tarise. This means that when the Firestones invade, the Crystals really are the majority, though they may have adopted some Lenians through intermarriage.

Relations with AlphaLeap

Also, this same writeup explains this war as having an event in 3710 that destroyed AlphaLeap's grip on power in the region, and that Taryte did not declare war on AlphaLeap, but defeated the Leapers by creating a self-sufficient economy despite their desert climate. (AlphaLeap was also a desert, but had better access to the sea.) The writeup also implies that the Leapers may have been the reason why so many Lenians lived in the tropics .... most were slaves, but it does not say that they arrived as slaves; the Leapers may have brought them there as voluntary immigrants to allow future Leapers to stoke racial conflicts in the tropics.

AlphaLeap nonetheless provided food to Taryte during the war .... it was unintended, however, as the food "had been brought to Sapeepa by AlphaLeap".

This information may be necessary to understand why AlphaLeap was only a minor power in future conflicts, and despite claiming the right to rule the entire Anchor Empire in 4108, were likely only able to control the southern coast, using their navy, and perhaps held political (but not military) supremacy in Baeba Swamp (the real Baeba Swamp).

Languages

At least two of the five Tarise language families must survive until 3710, and at least one ("River People") must survive until the 4200s. It is likely that more than just these will survive, but the survival of the languages in 3710 makes most sense if they had been driven into submission by the Leapers, making Leaper the official language of Tarise until (if ever) it was regained by the Crystals.

The slaves likely would have spoken Leaper as well, since they were for all practical purposes Leaper property, not Star property or any other group. It is possible that the Leapers would have kept the slaves apart from the language of power, however, and instructed slaveowners to learn the languages of the slaves. If there is just one language for all of the slaves, it is probably Play, which had not yet lost its tones, and would have sounded in some ways like a childish version of the Leaper language. The Oyster language may have also been spoken by some slaves, but it is not clear where the Leapers were getting their slaves from, or even if they needed to continually capture slaves as opposed to breeding their existing slaves.

If the Leapers' slaves do not speak Leaper, their language would either have been a Gold language from the Play branch, or a remnant strain of Paleo-Pabappa that survived precisely because it cut them off from the soceity around them.

The Oyster language is almost certainly spoken by some Lenians living somewhere within this area, as it is unlikely they were driven out entirely, even if they lost ground. This is because none of the outside powers in the area would have been able to accomplish such a decisive victory, as they had all been weakened by the same wider war.

Dreamer settlement is unlikely, as they were strong in their homeland but had not won an offensive war since 3370 AD.

Taryte in the Cosmopolitan Age

AlphaLeap

After the decline of AlphaLeap and sea traffic around their coastlines, it is likely that the former Leaper territory devolves into tribal rule, possibly even becoming nomadic as most food would be taken from the sea. Here there were two groups of Lenians: the first was the escaped slaves, who spoke a dialect of Leaper; the other was the descendants of the Thunderers, who were dominant in some areas nearby but also had lost ground and included refugees who had been pushed eastward by the Crystals. Also in this area were the descendants of those same Crystals, since they too had been pushed eastward by the Firestones. These three tribes would be numerically dominant in the area, but they may have had difficulty finding food, and it could be that those with the means to do so fled to other areas, leaving the poorest classes behind.

Early on, there would have been a modest correlation between light skin and high social status, because the descendants of the slaves had had 400 years to organize their state, whereas the next group who fled in was light-skinned and had had ample time to work towards a society as well (likely separate from the Leaper speakers), and the third group was dark-skinned, and would have had the lowest status, and no time to organize in their own defense.

Moreover, despite the tropical latitude, the surrounding peoples were the Firestones and other Lenian tribes, and so the Crystals would have been the only dark-skinned people in the region apart from some descendants of tribes like the Merari who may have been also driven into this area and enslaved. They may have tried to flee back towards the Equator, or northwards to Baeba Swamp, with those who remained peaceably blending into the society around them. This assumes, however, that the upper class did not quickly sail away towards more bountiful waters, leaving the descendants of the Crystals and the Thunderers to deal with each other.

The language of the slaves was almost certainly a dialect of Leaper, and at least some Crystals would also have spoken Leaper, so the lowest and highest class of society had their language in common.

Possible three-tiered society

It is possible that the descendants of the slaves live peaceably but separately from the other Lenians because they are of a different body type .... tall-male whereas the Oysters are tall-female. This separation could have persisted for thousands of years. If this is the case, and yet they lived in the same society, this would be the primary division in society, with the skin and hair color secondary, and the language barrier tertiary. There would be three groups:

1. The Dətiās people, slaves who were held by the Leapers for more than a thousand years without a significant rebellion, and were stereotyped as being passive and nonviolent. Historically, they could trace their ancestry to the Pēles colonists, to slaves abducted from Paba and Subumpam, and to various non-Lenian groups who happened to live nearby. They likely spoke the Leaper language.
2. The descendants of the Oysters and Thunderers, who spoke Oyster languages, and possibly just a single language.
3. The descendants of the Crystals, who may have continued to call themselves Crystals, considering the traditional Crystal capital, Baeba Swamp, to have been abandoned.