Taryte

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

Language

Only Gold language without /p/. But [pf] is an allophone of /f/.

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 prostitutes and 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 Taryte's laws and did not attempt violence.

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

Taryte's government 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.

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. 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 and prostitutes.

The kidnapped prostitutes 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.

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.