History of Kalgachia/The 170s
The 170s are remembered as something of a Golden Decade in Kalgachi history, beginning with a creative renaissance in the national film industry and moving into a period of détente with Shireroth, whose dissident intelligentsia briefly wrested control of the empire's government from the ideologically-frenzied militarist class which had led it into a succession of costly wars. Kalgachi initiative in Western Benacia was regained with the reclamation of Lepidopterum, an old Minarborian Deep Singer stronghold off Kalgachia's southwestern frontier. The expansion of this frontier allowed for the establishment of a common border with Kasterburg, substantially increasing trade volumes between the two countries.
This otherwise-sublime decade was broken at its midpoint by a short period of armed conflict with the nascent Republic of Inner Benacia, a confederation of warrior clans from ungoverned ex-Minarborian territories to Kalgachia's south and west. What began as a cross-border show of strength by the Inner Benacians making a symbolic attack on Kalgachi territory, was quickly ended by a series of retaliatory Whirdlebirb raids and a psyops campaign by Kalgachi special forces, culminating in a series of generous bribes and ritual accomodations with Inner Benacian chieftains who eventually agreed a peace settlement.
The Cinematic Egregore (171 AL)
In 171 AL, for reasons unknown to the layperson but held by Kalgachi arcanists to be a new memetic front in the chthonic/archonic war for the soul of humanity, a sudden craze for the cinematic arts swept across Micras. It began in Caputia, a nation which had already established fearsome esoteric credentials with a direct invocation of the ascendant but historically-hazardous Siren archetype, and now launched forth with a metareferential production so brazenly drenched in themes of blood sacrifice that its seminal role in what followed is considered, from certain viewpoints, entirely understandable. Like a tornado of leaves rising to the mage's staff, a wave of celluloid creations was soon drawn forth from Kasterburg, from Nova England, from the Florian Republic and from Shireroth. The small-time cinematographers of Kalgachia were no less immune to the legion of muses unleashed by the unlikely warlocks of Zalae and were soon compelled to band together in creative groups of their own, the largest of these forming the 'Schlepfilm' studio of Schlepogora and producing a series of epic screen tales in which the scenery of Kalgachia itself proved to be as much a star as the leading actors. However the hazard and expense of indulging ambitious scriptwriters, and filming on location in the Tee-al-infested wastes beyond Kalgachia's borders, soon caught up with the studio which eventually required a bailout from the Directorate of Education and Outreach to prevent its promising repertoire being kept from the silver screen by financial ruin.
The Octavian Thaw (172 AL)
The change in the Stewardship of Shireroth in 168 AL - from the overbearing Waldemar Zinkgraven to the erudite Mira Octavius-Aryani - entailed not only a slackening of the iron grip on Shirerithian government enjoyed by the outgoing Steward's chief sponsors, the Nationalist & Humanist Party, but also a moderation of the party's own platform in an attempt to disassociate itself from the excesses of their erstwhile figurehead who was now a figure of disgrace in Shirekeep since the full extent of his overseas rampages had come to light. In terms of foreign relations this entailed a notable reduction in Nationalist-Humanist dogma - which had consistently characterised Kalgachia as a nest of heretical schismatics and inferred that civilisation would benefit from the wholesale extermination of certain sections of its population - amid a more general shift in the public conduct of the Shirerithian government from ideological frontloading to technocratic transparency.
To reward the tenor of the new administration, the Directorate of the Tumultuous Wastes authorised Kalgachia's principal STEM establshment, the University of Bergburg, to invite a delegation from its Shirerithian equivalent, the University of Our Lady the Ergane in the ex-Antican island territory of Kezan, to visit Kalgachia and inspect the progress of Project Newrad - an unprecedented honour denied to most Kalgachi citizens, let alone foreigners. In return, Kalgachi journalists found themselves accredited to attend press conferences of the Shirerithian Ministry of the Exterior and Shireroth was the first to extend its condolences upon the event which would soon cast Kalgachia into mourning.
The Death of the Pedagogue General (172 AL)
Ilessa Aerit, the Pedagogue General of Kalgachia and architect of the Urchagin system, died in 172 AL from complications in the birth of her third child, who survived. The official and public reaction to her demise far outweighed that normally appropriate for a government technocrat - effectively confirming Aerit's long-suspected marriage to the rumoured Kalgachi head of state, Xantus Yastreb, as well as the high regard in which she was held within Kalgachi government service, by pupils she had taught in her days as an elementary school teacher, and by the many thousands of badged graduates from her Urchagin camps who appreciated the programme's 'character building' role in their lives. She received a state funeral in Oktavyan which was notable for its unusually-large masses of wailing mourners along the processional route and its entirely a capella musical selection delivered by the Kalgachi National Youth Choir. It was also the first official appearance of Xantus Yastreb, albeit in no admitted capacity other than the husband of the deceased, who was visibly distressed to a degree which shocked most observers - not least the invited foreign dignitaries. After choking his way through a glowing eulogy and expressing half-attentive thanks to selected mourners for attending, he departed with his daughter Rubina - who carried his newborn son Falcifer - for Ilessa's private burial in the playground of the school where she had once taught.
Whether by editorial whim or outside command, Kalgachi news media that evening made much of the closing remarks in Xantus' eulogy, that the departure of Kalgachia's first and greatest pedagogue was a sign from the Garden that Kalgachia was "all grown up now". In the days following, government organs which routinely referred documents down for the Council of Perfecti's signature began to experience unusually long delays in obtaining them back.
The Enclosure of Lepidopterum (174 AL)
In 174 AL a leaked comment from the boardroom of Kasterburger Spoorwegen, revealing the company's desire to connect its rail network to Kalgachia, met with much enthusiasm at the Directorate of the Tumultuous Wastes. The prospect of a solid transport link with Kasterburg, and the territorial adjustments needed to make it possible, aligned with three important aspects of Kalgachi foreign policy: the aggressive promotion of Kasterburg's autarkic development, the prevention of a Shirerithian monopoly over the Kalgachi frontier, and the protection of the Nezeni population in Benacia's ungoverned territories against bands of racial supremacists from the social elite of both Shireroth and Kasterburg, who had often ventured into Nezeni areas and engaged in dubious pursuits resembling something between private game hunting and state-sanctioned genocide. To justify a Kalgachi intervention to other organs of state which were vehemently critical about any extension of their homeland beyond the safety of the Octavian mountains, The DTW tapped up its enterprising Rezidentura in Shirekeep and Kasterburg to acquire incriminating photo reels of pasty-faced bluebloods in sun hats and safari shorts, posing with high-calibre rifles atop heaps of dead Nezeni - in one memorable case depicting a well-provisioned picnic where the wife and children of the 'hunter' were accompanied by bullet-ridden corpses held up by the family servants and dressed in safari attire with the handwritten caption "Extra guests :-D". After the photos' wide exposition in the Kalgachi media, popular demand for some kind of action swelled - most notably in the Nezeni heartlands of Lithead whose military units took the lead in proposing, planning and ultimately executing a military drive to the ruined city of Lepidopterum which held notable cultural value as the last known residence of their progenitorial Broodmother. Until that point, KDF expeditionary operations had been limited to cossack raids and covert reconnaissance with little capability for large-scale extended operations on potentially-unfriendly ground - ultimately the force's Whirdlebirb helicopter squadrons bore the brunt of troop transport and supply duties as they proved the only expeditious method of traversing the area's immense forests and thickets of engineered, often predatory flora with pockets of Tee-al infested heathland. The predominantly-Nezeni units were kept back from the final contact line with Kasterburg to avoid aggravating the latter's ethnic prejudices and were substituted by more presentable units from the Kalgachi interior, although the latter's relative inexperience with the local biome did cause their casualties to mount disproportionately over time.
Faced with the theoretical indefensibility of Lepidopterum's flat topography, military planners lobbied heavily for that part of the newly-gained area behind the city of Lepidopterum and the Kasterburg contact line to be depopulated and converted to a 'biomic minefield' of the Minarborian style, wherein dangerous species would be actively encouraged to flourish and where those Tee-als driven from other parts of Kalgachia could be herded and contained. In the end it was realised that two such reserves would be required, bisected with a sanitary cordon through which Lepidopterum and Kasterburg could be linked to the Kalgachi interior by road and rail. As the effectiveness of such containment efforts had been less than absolute, even in Minarborian times, the DTW entertained the proposal of a delegation of Euran businessmen who had approached Kalgachia's Shirekeep diplomatic mission with a promise to provide armoured trains, inspired by Bassarid designs which they claimed would be coming imminently into their possession following an adjustment in Constancian foreign policy.
Tumult at the Frontiers (175 AL)
Ultimately the Enclosure of Lepidopterum obtained more geopolitical initiative for Kalgachia than its government was willing to exploit, content as it was with banishing the spectre of total Shirerithian envelopment for as many generations as it took for the latter to subdue Kasterburg into servile clienthood and/or annexation - but having disrupted the spell of impending Shirerithian hegemony which had hitherto been seen as inevitable, Kalgachia's example inspired a number of other groups contesting the ungoverned territory beyond its frontiers and most recently distressed by Shireroth's own reaction to the situation in the form of Fall Schwartz-Tilman, the latest in a long line of heavy-handed military sweeps through the lawless Benacian interior. From these battered but newly-emboldened populations, two polities eventually coalesced into some recognisable form - the Transbatavian Free State in the land north of Nackholm and the Republic of Inner Benacia (RIB) along most of Kalgachia's remaining frontier, centred upon the erstwhile Deep Singer stronghold of Stonetree which had been largely evacuated or else liquidated during a recent Shirerithian sweep of the area.
International reaction to these nascent states was sceptical in the extreme, an attitude mirrored in Kalgachia after it simultaneously received two RIB emissaries - one tasked with negotiating the delineation of the already well-established Kalgachi frontier, and the other to attack said frontier with the inexplicable but apparently symbolic throw of a spear into Kalgachi territory. The latter envoy, his approach spotted from some distance by the Prefects' Border Guard Service on account of the dozen or so chanting ritualists accompanying him, was observed to hurl his spear across the border with gleeful enthusiasm - whereupon he was immediately liquidated by two PBGS snipers concealed in the dense coniferous forest beyond. The other envoy, after a brief detention, was sent back to his masters with the message that the tenor of any future relationship between Kalgachia and the RIB would be determined by the willingness of the latter to adjust its attitude with regard to the deployment of combat weapons against Kalgachi territory.
Suspecting that the spear incident was a test of Kalgachia's dupability in tolerating a larger-scale, incremental invasion under the flimsy veneer of cultural expression, the KDF duly mobilised with orders to rebuff any further incursions with overwhelming force - even going so far as to place its newly-constructed ballistic missile complexes on immediate notice to annihilate the RIB's executive chamber, the Dolmen, and its surrounding habitations in a saturation attack - followed by as many air raids and ground sweeps as it took to fully liquidate the nascent state, erase its emergent culture from history and return its territory to the more manageable patchwork of feuding warlords that it had hitherto been. Advised by the Troglodyti that this option might bring Kalgachia more trouble than respite in the long term, and that a gentle invocation of Rule 16 might be more appropriate, the Council of Perfecti ultimately limited the KDF's offensive measures to psychological operations among the RIB's Laqi population regarding the extreme inadvisability of unilaterally projecting their warlike 'customs' into the territory of the second most heavily armed state in Benacia, in the hope that their representatives in the Dolmen might start talking some sense into the hawkish Yehudi faction who had initiated the spear incident - or at least disobey any orders they received to attack Kalgachia themselves. On the ground the KDF's psyops teams met with varying levels of welcome along clan lines, being received with anything from impromptu banquets of welcome to summary lynching (or both in succession, in the case of one unfortunate operator).
Ultimately the internal schisms of the Dolmen proved to be more pronounced than anything the Kalgachi could hope to provoke, resulting in the dispatch of a schizoid missive to Kalgachia which combined a furiously petulant tirade with an invitation to settle the matter according to the Dolmen's own custom by the cooperative burial of both nations' dead. In Kalgachia the Directorate of the Tumultuous Wastes - having some experience in the need to maintain seperate, simultaneous and often irreconcilable channels of communication with the diplomatic corps and military-industrial complex of Shireroth - elected to engage with the RIB peace proposal while continuing its military buildup at the frontier, although the KDF's psychological operators were withdrawn from the RIB's claimed territory as a gesture of goodwill.
The Great Bender (177 AL)
The late 170s saw the Shirerithian military caste's long exponent of provocation finally accelerate to its singularity, attempting to shore up the dimishing returns of its political power by conducting ever more outrageous massacres of persons considered expendable in Shirerithian society such as Froyalanish labourers and Jingdaoese prisoners of war. By these actions the well-seasoned death squads under the command of the renegade Shirerithian Minister of Military Affairs, Liv Dravot, had made something of a miscalculation - for all the social disdain heaped upon the Froyalanish and Jingdaoese, the repeated unilateral overstep of the minister's remit and the unwillingness of her superiors to take any punitive action beyond the revocation of her more offensive edicts (often pathetically post facto in view of the speed and efficiency with which the killings were conducted, a weakness Dravot deliberately exploited) began to alienate influential Shirerithian nobles with ties to the Imperial judiciary, who duly found due grounds to issue a warrant for Dravot's arrest on a charge of mass murder. Dravot, in her inimitable style, reacted by fleeing to the Nationalist-Humanist heartlands of Elwynn and raising the banner of rebellion against the Elwynnese government whose Ayreonist cadres had assisted in her indictment. This finally provoked the Steward of Shireroth, Mira Octavius-Aryani, to dismiss Dravot from her ministerial office although the latter retained the allegiance of several Elwynnese military units in the service of her rebellion.
From a Kalgachi perspective, Dravot's pitch into open rebellion and her removal from the command of Shireroth's Imperial Forces marked an important tideline in Shirerithian military aggression which had hitherto been directed outside Shireroth's borders, in noted contrast to the greater part of that empire's history wherein the tumults unleashed by the political class of Shirekeep had traditionally been directed internally. Now for the first time in generations, the spectre of impending attack on Kalgachia by Shireroth - far from exorcised since the leakage of Fall Endsieg - seemed to be receding instead of advancing, an important balm to the peturbed Kalgachi pscyhe. However brief many suspected it to be, the proof that the politcal power of Kalgachia's Shirerithian detractors could decrease as well as increase arguably did more than any Kalgachi propaganda to dispel the notion, much advanced by the Nationalist-Humanists, that the triumph of the latter's creed against everything the Kalgachi state represented was some kind of linear inevitability.
In 177 AL, the palpable jollity of the Kalgachi population at these developments was soon crystallised into open celebration by the news that the Kingdom of Nova England had negotiated the detention of Waldemar Zinkgraven, the erstwhile Steward of Shireroth whose rampage of unabashed plunder and slaughter across Benacia and the high seas had laid the foundation for, and to an extent normalised, the provocations of his ideological affiliate Liv Dravot and the Shirerithian armies under her command. The transfer of Zinkgraven to Nova England by the Shirerithians, for his subsequent execution by immersion in Nova English ale, was considered by Kalgachi esotericists to be a panicked, backfooted attempt by their opposite numbers in Shireroth to lessen the damage of the latter empire's impending cataclysm through pre-emptive blood sacrifice. Regardless of its intent, the symbolic power of Zinkgraven's execution in light of Shireroth's other events was considered legitimate cause for the immediate interruption of regular Kalgachi television programming by a looping triumphal interlude with the caption that the Council of Perfecti would shortly issue an order on a matter of great national importance.
When it came the order was read by Kalgachia's principal news anchor, a visibly tearful Chap Nosebest, who nontheless announced the news of Zinkgraven's demise with the appropriate gravity. Reciting the order in full, he revealed to the nation that the Council of Perfecti had taken the unprecedented step of ordering a day of celebration wherein all civilian workplaces in Kalgachia would close - except for the churches and taverns which, in turn, would offer services of thanksgiving followed by a joyful surprise - free Nova English ale until midnight, in honour of Kalgachia's Keltian allies.
Only now did the effect of years of tension under Shirerithian guns (so insidious and pervasive that it had earned the culture-bound diagnosis of Sxirophrenia by the DHPW) properly reveal itself, with news of this relatively-modest loosening of Shireroth's geopolitical grip immediately filling the streets and subways of Kalgachia's population centres with throngs of ecstatic crowds, cheering their good fortune with the observation that every Elwynnese death buys a minute of extra time for the Garden and a sudden desire to see Shirerithian depravity escalated to an unfathomable ocean of spilt blood now that it was directed inward where it belonged.
Such was the intensity of the nation's revels that scarcely a single citizen remained sober an hour past midday and the promised stocks of free Nova English ale were exhausted by that time - except where they were subject to rationing but this only provoked riots, some led by the very Church partisans tasked with keeping public order. Across the country, innumerable Parish licensing committees were hastily convened by belching, half-cut officials who in most cases extended the Perfecti's order by ruling that all alcoholic drinks of any origin within their Parish were also to be served free of charge for the remainder of the day. This extended the population's drinking time until sunset at the most, the remaning hours of the night winding down with a nationwide succession of slurred singing, fist fights and alcoholic comas.
Numerous theologians of the Kalgachia's established church were subsequently heard to observe, after their headaches had cleared enough to permit any reasonable cognition, that this event marked the day upon which the last vestiges of High Minarborealism with all its stuffy notions of 'Shrubly Decorum', were finally expunged from the Kalgachi psyche - indeed such was the spontaneous intensity of Kalgachia's collective celebration, rivalling or even surpassing that of Nova England itself, that it came to be seen as a raw eructation of the Garden Ketheric itself.
