History of Kalgachia/The 140s
140 years after the deified shrub Minarbor had sprouted amid the plague and tumult of Shirekeep, the sprawling empire established in his name finally outran its telluric carrying capacity and expired. The collapse of Minarboria was disastrous for its citizens, condemning populations on four continents to an uncertain future in an unguarded world, rife with common barbarism and tyrannical ambition. It was naturally the population of Minarboria's core territories - the erstwhile 'Imperial Shrublands' of central Benacia - who clung longest onto the old way of life and instinctively sought to preserve and adapt, through untold danger and privation, the spiritual and social norms into which they had been born. While a majority fell to slaughter or subjugation in the years ahead, fate blessed a modest remainder of this benighted race with an unholy alliance between the refugee clergy of the defunct Minarborian church and a horde of Laqi cossack clans who fondly regarded that church's legacy as a reliable consumer of 'protection' services. Flush with the requisitioned wealth of the Minarborian state and the proceeds of its own business portfolio, the remains of this church continued to obtain a modest degree of security from the raiding Laqi as it ushered its scattered congregations toward the safety of the Octavian mountains, deep in the Benacian interior. Gone was the wordly personage of their cherished shrub and the technocratic elite of the empire he had founded - all that remained were ideas, ancestral stories of the Garden's verdant bosom and the jealous celestial wrath poured upon it, all shot through with an apparently deranged and irrational will to survive and to creep forth once more, as the dandelion finds tiny cracks in the sterile archonic pavement to offer its modest bloom unto the world.
Such was the breadth of Minarborian territory falling into anarchy that neighbouring Shireroth, although willing to annex it all, found itself materially ill-prepared and consumed to distraction by its internal struggle against the overbearing perversions of King Noah of Elwynn. As the Auspicious Occasion played out in the Benacian east, the overlooked Minarborian refugee population of the Octavian mountains found the respite they needed to begin weaving their shattered society back together in a new and hardier form. Thus was born the nation known as Kalgachia.
The Arduous Schlep (aka the Third Great Replanting) (140-143 AL)
With the thinning of the necromantic ley lines which kept its undead ruling caste animated, the Empire of Minarboria entered a state of progressive collapse from around 124 Anno Libertatis (early December 2016). by 140 AL (mid-May 2017) this process of aesthenic degeneration was largely complete. In the absence of central direction from the Minarborian capital Sansabury, whose leadership had succumbed to a crisis of faith (the ruling Regent was last seen slumped sullenly against the bar of the city's elite Ouroboros Club, swigging Tellian amaretto straight from the bottle and looking across the adjacent dance floor as the Deep Singer in charge of the Church of Minarbor swayed endlessly to a slow disco number while lost in the memory of better days), those inhabitants of the surrounding Imperial Shrublands who had not succumbed to energetic torpor looked to the one authority which offered some continuity of governance, namely the junior clergy of the Minarborian church whose jollity and common charity had instinctively moved on a local level to fill the gap left by the collapse of the lich state. Their previous authority was, however, undermined by the despair of their congregations that the all-loving shrub Minarbor whom they had assumed an infallible god had quite evidently forsaken his faithful followers and abandoned his well-tended Garden to the vicissitudes of common wilderness. In many places, Minarbor's clergy were set upon and lynched by their previously-loyal bands of armed partisans who subsequently fell under the control of their own emerging warlords and were set to interminable and bloody feuding with similar groups as they competed for the unguarded spoils of the collapsing empire. In time this state of affairs enveloped the once-gleaming condo districts of Sansabury itself and annihilated the last shreds of civil authority, although the soundtrack remained eerily consistent to the point that the entire corpus of 4/4 signature dance music persisted in folk memory for generations as a distasteful reminder of that fraught and desperate time.
Many Minarborian clergy, however, succeeded in demonstrating humility to their congregations with frank admissions that perhaps the shrub Minarbor was not as godly as he seemed, this denial of his omnipotence allowing them to explain that circumstances had developed beyond his control and that his gentle rustling countenance would never have meant for things to end up as they had. This precious re-consecrated fragment of the old worldview, along with the more enterprising clergy visibly throwing themselves into the material assistance of their upset congregations, offered a rare filament of hope among the general chaos of the time although these pious bands found themselves beset on all sides by other groups who had long since kicked the bloodied corpses of their own priesthood into innumerable ravines and were now only interested in territorial scrapping and oppurtunistic plunder. This imperative of self-defence, not only against against roving bandits but also the ferocious Tee-al which no longer had a Minarborian army to contain its range, gave the first breath of life to what would become the Kalgachi state as the gentler groups of benighted Minarborians networked together and gravitated toward the safe heights of the Octavian mountains whose dearth of lootable goods or population kept it from the attentions of the predatorially-inclined and offered a safe retreat, albeit one which introduced the new perils of cold and starvation in lieu of beast or bandit.
Those arriving in the southern Octavian mountains met with a group from the north, a band of mendicant clergymen and disgraced arcanists originally exiled there by the Minarborian church as penance and rehabilitation for their affiliation with the Argophylacterists - revolutionary insurrectionists from &zeter whose uprising, although suppressed, had heralded the beginning of Minarboria's demise. This animated band of upstarts is believed to have been led by one Xantus A.Z. Yastreb, the son of the uprising's chief agitator who had been born in a penal colony with his undead father and subsequently paroled after a period of intensive 're-cultivation' at the hands of the Broodmother. Xantus' group soon came to corral the incoming refugee groups into a single polity - more critically they offered a new theological insight based on old, quasi-heretical strands of belief among &zeter's academic community which held that the loss of Minarboria's shrub-god and the post-human master races around him was a divinely-ordained act of transcendence from the material world and an invitation for those who remained to follow in their path and assume their powers. The proponents of the new belief ultimately arranged for the construction of, and retreat into, a deep bunker beneath Mount Octavian itself where they could further meditate on their revelations and offer further guidance to those on the surface who clung perilously onto life. In time these renegade clergymen came to be known as the Perfecti, not so much for what they were as for what they aspired to be, and the surviving elements of what was the University of &zeter Arcane Society now became known as the Troglodyti due to their sub-surface location. For want of any wiser authority at the time, the old Minarborealist priests on the surface deferred to the guidance of their enterprising counterparts below as their congregations struggled to cultivate strips of sparse farmland in mountain valleys, breed sheep and goats on its upland pastures and convince themselves that theirs was a worthy enterprise ordained by the chthonic divinity they had known and loved but now seemed horribly distant. Where spiritual cause failed to sustain, the day-to-day imperatives of simple survival inevitably came to the fore, especially among those caring for children who endured literal starvation so their young could remain fed and have the strength to enjoy the occasional moment of play.
The affair might have been hopeless in the long term, were it not for the reactivation of a series of old Minarborian gold mines whose shining bounty was quickly directed to turn the neutrally-aligned bands of roving Laqi cossacks in the east, and Siyacho-Ashkenatzi kossars in the west, to return to the lawless lower country whence the mountain refugees had fled and liberate the profusion of accumulated goods they had left behind in their haste to get away. While much of this went into the possession of the rampaging horsemen themselves, the delivery of reliable payment in gold persuaded them to give up a sizeable portion of their acquired bounty to the custody of the Perfecti and their nascent government, where it was turned immediately to the sustenance of the population. As time progressed these raids became more elaborate - what began as lightning attacks on bandit emcampments progressed to the assault of fortified ruins by horse-drawn artillery and the seizure of huge stocks of military hardware and industrial plant, conveyed in wagon trains through treacherous mountain passes on rudimentary gravel roads. The incoming stocks of organic fertiliser and heavy weapons allowed those living in the blasted heights to withstand periods of famine and renewed attack by brigands, who had inevitably become attracted to the concentrated flow of goods and attempted to follow the refugee hordes into the mountains. The precariously-settled population were assisted with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the cowering brains of Minarborian academia, sprung from the locked cellars and secluded lodges around &zeter and other crumbling cities by raids specially tasked with hunting them down. Their combined expertise in agronomy and medicine were later considered to have spared so many lives from disease and starvation that the two fields are treated as a single discipline to this day. With the presence of this intermediate professional class enhancing the link between the occluded underground leadership and the early droves of refugees above, and with all three populations having trod the same course of tumult and hardship toward a precarious survival in the mountains, their social identity began to transgress ethnic boundaries and acquire the first filaments of a distinct national character. Their nation, colloquially named Kalgachia through some nebulous fusion of Laqi-Ashkenatzi patois, was officially proclaimed into existence in 143 AL.
The events of the Arduous Schlep would subsequently be immortalised in a number of epic films.
The Auspicious Occasion (149 AL)
The rapacity of Shireroth in seeking to encircle Kalgachia with territorial claims in the lawless ex-Minarborian wastes, in the earliest days of Kalgachia's life, caused much concern in Oktavyan and was ascribed to the land-hungry lobbying of the Froyalanish King of Elwynn, whose territorial excesses were causing just as many problems inside Shireroth. His attempt to eradicate the Soviet society of Shirerithian Mishalan and obtain more living space for his own Froyalanish race, despite already holding more land than they seemed able to utilise, caused a level of upset in Shireroth which aroused much sympathy in Kalgachia, perilously close as it was to the frontier of Froyalanish lands and having to fight off border incursions by their wandering Vanic priesthood on a daily basis. At the highest level, the decision was taken to support the budding rebellion in Mishalan with the faint hope that it might be the first step in the rollback and eventual expulsion of the Froyalanish juggernaut from the Benacian contient, many lifetimes hence. In 149 AL, a cossack officer of the Kalgachi Defence Force, one colonel Vitaly Shumyanov, was duly detailed to raise a force of partisans and bear cavalry from the Mishalanski refugees who had fled the King of Elwynn's purges in Mishalan and sought sanctuary in Kalgachia. These he held in preparation until the Shirerithian government, on the back of overwhelming support from its legislature and executive, decreed the expulsion of Mishalan's Froyalanish administration. In concert with sympathetic elements of Shireroth's army and Mishalan's provisional government who did not wish to be associated directly with any resulting atrocities, Shumyanov's force - known as the Konkordskaya Bratva - were released into Mishalan near the city of Niü Veña where they set the pace for their Mishalanski brethren by ejecting the newly-arrived Froyalansh landlords from their homes and herding them into their equally-new Vanic temples where the whole lot could be burned to ashes, with any escapees promptly hunted down and devoured by cavalry bears which were specially trained to seek out the Froyalanites' characteristic scent of excited genitalia and Storish mead. These acts of vigorous ethnic restitution, and the many others which it inspired, would reach their climax in 150 AL when the Froyalanish King of Elwynn himself was deposed in a manner more rapid and comprehensive than most of his detractors ever dared to dream, spelling the effective end of Froyalanish dominion over Benacia.
The subsequent punitive demotion of Shireroth's immense Froyalanish population, from citizens into Community Service Workers, combined with the willingness of Shireroth to offer them for open sale, ultimately proved a boon for Kalgachia whose agricultural, industrial and public works projects had an almost insatiable demand for cheap labour at that moment, finding in the droves of captive Froyalaners a convenient replacement for the legions of undead 'zombots' relied upon for menial labour in the Minarborian era - indeed the timing of their arrival was praised in Kalgachia's budding constellation of Ketherist churches as the wilful gift of Kalgachia's chthonic benefactors.
The Enclosure of the Limitrophes (149 AL)
The auspicious year of 149 AL also saw the territories around Jollity, Schlepogora, Abrek, Bergburg and Lithead be annexed into Kalgachia. These territories had become so infused with Minarborian refugee camps and prowling Kalgachi military patrols that Kalgachia's annexation of the territory was, in the end, a formality - albeit a badly needed one to improve the situation of the hopeless migrants by providing them with food, accomodation and work in an organised fashion. The labour force for the development of these territories being already in situ, the improvement of both the new territories and the Kalgachi core was as rapid as might be expected from an overnight doubling of the the country's population. However the event did present obstacles to the Perfecti's ideal of homogenising Kalgachia's different ethnic groups into a single miscegenerate race in order to prevent any one of them being leveraged against them by foreign powers - the newer half of the population, enjoying a sudden freedom of movement in Kalgachia, gravitated naturally to their own kind and gave each of the new Lieutenancies a distinct ethnic identity.
