Kalgachia

Garden of Kalgachia
Flag Coat of Arms
Motto: Quod Superius, Sicut Inferius (As Above, So Below)
Anthem:
250px|Location of Kalgachia|frameless
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Capital	Oktavyan
Largest city	Abrek, Katarsis
Official language(s)	Benacian English
Official religion(s)	Post-Minarborealism
Demonym	Kalgachi
- Adjective	Kalgachi
Government	Gnostic Theocracy
- Executive	Council of Perfecti
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- Legislature	Council of Perfecti
Establishment	102 Anno Libertatis (1649 AN; June 7th 2017)
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The Garden of Kalgachia is a territory located in the mountains of west-central Benacia. It was established by elements of the Minarborian population during that empire's collapse, and is governed according to theocratic principles.

Origin

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 1642 Anno Nortone - by 1650 AN this process of aesthenic degeneration was largely complete. For a period, the Minarborian priesthood had taken up the administration of their little parishes when the hand of the Arborial state had slipped away. But with that hand was also lost the generous inflow of goods and services that had been so expertly marshalled by the command economists of Sansabury. And no matter how genial and and inoffensive the word of the Shrub-God Minarbor may have been, it alone could not fill the stomachs of the starving nor protect them from the criminal elements who had always lurked beneath the veneer of Shrubly fellowship, waiting for Minarbor's Garden to wilt and wither away. The more intelligent of the priesthood had realised this, and in the dying days of their Empire they had set about reinventing themselves as generic community sages with an emphasis on practical assistance and charity, with all references to deliverance by the Shrub-God Minarbor quietly suspended from their body of teachings. In time, those holdouts who remained confined to their pulpits and implored the population to await salvation by the resurgent Shrub-God were laughed out of town, or else became figures onto whom the woes of the community were ascribed and met a grisly end by lynching.

Those clerics who survived were very much of kindred spirit; folk of tattered robes and calloused hands, sustaining themselves as community figureheads through generous labour and modest promises. Sensing their common predicament, these washed-up scions of the Shrub-God networked with each other as a natural means of mutual protection. Bidden by none but working in concert, they had taken the natural lead in organising the droves of downcast masses who surrounded them. The Octavian mountains, being easily defensible and sufficiently overlooked by the other cults and warbands springing up at the time, offered a natural home.

Laqi brigands under contract to the Perfecti, making displaced members of the Minarborian officer corps an offer they can't refuse.

Most critical to the efforts of these renegade clerics was an initiative they had named Operation Clothespeg - the location and capture of as many engineers and academicians as possible from the industrial hub of Novodolorsk and the university city of &zeter, two Minarborian cities fast falling to ruin a thousand kilometres to the southeast. If old Minarboria was going to drain its brain, they had mused, it may as well be drained their way. Not all of the professors and technicians who had gone into hiding were willing to join the effort, indeed many were led into the mountains in shackles with their possessions confiscated and loaded into pack horses behind them.

Such vigorous sorties required manpower, of course. To this task rode the Kossars, the itinerant horsemen of Ashkenatzi origin who under various flags had been the custodians of these mountains for centuries, and knew the land like nobody else. With them were those Laqi cossacks who had been raised to join the undead ranks of the Karymovka Host further east, but had seen their revenant masters succumb to mass necromantic decay before the living apprentices could be relieved of life to join them. The loyalty of these mounted bandits to their new masters, in the beginning at least, was bought with the implicit understanding that anything they encountered on their travels in the old Shrublands which was not specifically requested by the priesthood, or Perfecti as they had styled themselves, would be for the marauding horsemen to liberate as they saw fit. After that, a stake in certain profitable gold mining concerns in the high mountains had been mentioned. Certainly a more lucrative gig than protecting the tight-fisted Kohanim of old Kolmenitzkiy, if the supply of willing volunteers from the west was anything to go by.

Not that the remnant Shrublands was entirely theirs for the picking. Others had taken a stand for their communities down beyond the southern slopes - the most terrifying being the Deep Singers of Whisperwood who, in addition to armies of genetically modified 'pets', had retained possession of Minarboria's entire biological weapons arsenal. They were largely spared raiding actions from the mountains, which instead focused on the lands known as Novodolor. There only a few fanatical bands of Minarboria's most elite military unit, the Black Rangers, made a stand worthy of note. Even at this most degenerate stage, they defended the bankrupt ideal of Shrubdom even as it fell apart in front of their faces, confronting all who dared question it as traitors in need of merciless liquidation. Being very well armed, the Rangers succeeded in fending off the mounted hosts who swept their way; although they were sufficiently outnumbered as to be pinned in their positions by a steady dribble of fire from the Kossars' horse artillery while everything between their scattered strongpoints was looted bare. In spite of them and all the other hazards of a collapsing empire, the raiders' caravans were filled and pressed ever onward to sequester their goods in the mountains.

Inevitably a schism grew between those Perfecti who had lost sight of their spiritual goals in the face of immense riches coming into their care, and those with more robust sense of divine mission and a better conception of their place in the eternal mystery play that is the parapolitical history of Micras. The series of factional battles that followed were eventually won by the latter group, who claimed assistance in their holy struggle by a bevy of aethereal watchers, guardians and other archetypic memeforms, although the key to their victory more likely lay in the support of the ordinary masses and their appetite to overthrow the more corrupt Perfecti whose profligate graft was driving an already-displaced population into literal starvation.

Order thus restored, those Perfecti remaining were able to lay the foundations for a fully-fledged state.

Governance and Religion

Kalgachia's belief system began as an agglomeration of those eremitic and monastic sects which had been tolerated with disdain by the Minarborian church, but whose teachings gained new-found popularity in the wake of that church's collapse. Indeed the conditions of the time all but demanded that the early Kalgachis organise themselves in small fortified groups, attending to their own needs before any thoughts of the wider Garden could be considered. In time however, these monasteries - and the churches built in subjection to them - were networked together by the new Nezeni elite who, true to their ancient form, retreated to tunnels in the thick mountain granite to administer those communities in their care. These were the leaders who would become known as the Perfecti, an unknown number of individuals sitting in council to govern their new mountain Garden.

The belief system of Kalgachia is not so much based on new revelation, as on several long-running undercurrents of Minarborealist belief that bubbled to the surface of the popular consciousness once the old church was no longer around to suppress them. While the old conception of the world as a Garden is retained by the Kalgachis, its purpose has been somewhat revised. No longer is it the goal of the faithful to expand the Garden across the physical world - now considered a damnable act of flattery toward an inherently corrupted plane of existence - instead it is to be maintained in a small but increasingly beautiful form until its inhabitants, by way of reward, are freed from their material bodies and reunited with the Garden Ketheric, a pure and unknowable plane whose divine spark is implanted into the hearts of all physical beings and yearns for reconciliation with its source. At the same time an opposite realm, the Wastes of Irredeemable Corruption, impels a negative force to dampen and obstruct the divine spark of the Garden Ketheric, in order to prevent enterprising souls from escaping the physical world, which is a fundamentally compromised plane of existence created in the image of the irredeemably corrupt.

The Kalgachi Church holds that the entire physical world is a point of collision between the Garden Ketheric and the Wastes of Irredeemable Corruption, initiated from the latter in a futile attempt to destroy the former. That boundary is itself divided into the Garden Physical - that is, the Garden of Kalgachia - and the Wastes of Tumult, comprised of the entire physical world outside Kalgachia. It is considered the goal of all humanity to first gain admittance into the Garden Physical, and then to enhance its beauty and virtue to such heights that its inhabitants are admitted to the Garden Ketheric en masse - an eschatological event which forever consigns the inhabitants of the Wastes of Tumult to the Wastes of Irrdeemable Corruption, forces the collided realms apart and entails the end of the physical world itself.

Unusually among world religions, the closest physical proximity to the Garden Ketheric is considered to be underground rather than in the heavens, the latter being considered a realm of great evil with a reputation for spawning all manner of archonic police actions from apocalyptic meteor showers to orbital kinetic weapons wielded by powerful nation states.

The Kalgachi Church does not hold absolute import in the existence of gods, although material or aetheric beings considered to contain especially high concentrations of the Garden Ketheric's divine spark are freely recognised as deities of a sort. The all-time record for the most divine being is considered to be the Shrub-God Minarbor, from whom the Empire of Minarboria was named - but unlike the Minarborians who considered Him to be Shrub-God above all, the Church of Kalgachia proclaims the possibility of Minarbor's divinity being equalled or surpassed by some other being in the future. Other Minarborian paragons, such as Lord Toastypops the Jolly Reaper, are also considered to be deities.

The Perfecti remain in their sanctified underground homes in order to prevent themselves being corrupted by the distractions of the world above. On the rare occasions they do surface, it is in holy locations and often in disguise. They enlist the minions of the Church to do their bidding in broadly ministerial roles, with those of lower rank tasked with the most disagreeable work upon and beyond the borders of Kalgachia.

Governance is delegated through a series of monasteries which serve as loci of power in their own right, with their own industrial and agricultural assets and a ready supply of tithe labour. Each monastery controls all of its nearby churches, which in turn are responsible for organising their congregations.

Economy and Infrastructure

Kalgachi scouts surveying the local topography for defensive value and construction potential.

In lieu of monetary incentive, all labour is framed as a necessary act of personal and collective salvation with severe consequences for wilful non-compliance, although the provision of essantial services and welfare by charitable organs of the Church and the gentle pace of many occupations serves to keep the population reasonably content.

The mountainous terrain of Kalgachia is not especially conducive to agriculture, and the few pockets of suitable farmland are heavily cultivated. Countermeasures against soil depletion are one of the more frenetic occupations of Kalgachia's small academic community. Mining and quarrying are naturally strong sectors, although geographical and political considerations make exports problematic.

Kalgachia's roads are few, and its railways fewer. More often than not, its settlements are located partially or entirely underground; rows of frontage cut into mountain faces are a common sight, as are small and apparently lonely buildings which serve as access points to more extensive structures beneath the surface. The proximity of a settlement can often be deduced by formal displays of alpine flowers or small forest parks, the work of pious locals seeking to make their part of the Garden more pleasant on the eye.

Defence

Kalgachia is defended by the Garden Guard, a brigade-sized formation of mountain troops with a small heliborne and air defence component cobbled together from leftover Minarborian hardware. In addition, the Church of Kalgachia trains all able-bodied members of its congregation in partisan warfare, beginning with innocuous 'summer camps' during childhood and extending all the way to liaison training with the Garden Guard, in skills upto and including the leadership of company-sized formations against the armies of first-rank world powers.

Kalgachia is policed by the Prefecti, often confused with the Perfecti to whom they report. The Prefecti enjoy unfettered powers of arrest, inquisition and summary punishment although their style tends to be one of devastating surprise rather than constant intimidation. Thus the general population, never quite knowing if they're being watched or not, tend to behave themselves.

Academia and Technology

Kalgachia has a small but capable population of scientists and engineers, trained by cadres from the Minarborian university city of &zeter who were caught up in the first great migration to the mountains. As a result, certain advances in Minarborian technology such as biodiesel propulsion, resilient electronics and rocketry have been preserved in Kalgachia. With the Nezeni migration came similarly advanced skills in underground construction and medicine. These two skillbases have combined to prioritise the location of Kalgachia's most important state and industrial assets in the deepest underground venues, each rated to withstand attack by an orbitally-delivered kinetic penetrator bearing a nuclear warhead in the multi-megaton range. Being hideously resource-intensive to construct, such strategic facilities are relatively few in number, with their ancillary entities located somewhat nearer the surface layer if not on the surface itself.

Society

Being composed of many southern Benacian ethnicities, Kalgachis cannot be considered a single race. The name Kalgachia itself is thought to be an idiomatic shorthand noun of bastardised Ashkenatzi-Laqi origin, the original meaning of which is not entirely clear. However, given the Micran powers' long history of leveraging the identity of their ethnic familiars to undermine the sovereign integrity of rival states from within, the Perfecti work an active negation of ethnic identity into Church doctrine for reasons of state security. Associations with religions, organisations or blood ties outside Kalgachia are generally frowned upon, and those wandering souls who feel compelled to attempt settlement within Kalgachia are expected to fulfil the basic social obligation of cutting or minimising their ties to foreign societies as far as possible. This can be (and is) circumvented to an extent by immigrants arriving in family groups, such that they can maintain their old blood ties without being considered a fifth column - although groups demonstrating less-than-active effort in integrating with their adoptive society can expect to earn the subtle attentions of the Prefecti.

Although descendants of the genetically-modified Deep Singers (known for ethnic purposes as the Nezeni) are common in Kalgachi society, they are no longer subject to their ancestors' constraints of selective reproduction, the absence of which is causing their progressive homogenesis within the wider unmodified population through unregulated interbreeding. However the Perfecti and their kin, remaining deep underground, are thought to retain a variant of the old practices of managed reproduction.

Kalgachia uses the Anno Libertatis calendar, in which the year is determined to last fourteen Earth days in broad recognition of the switch from the Ab Sectora Condita count to the Anno Nortone count by most of the larger Micran powers. Like the Minarborian Anno Fruticis calendar, the Anno Libertatis calendar takes the emergence of the Shrub-God Minarbor as its start point. The parallel Minarborian calendar - by which days, weeks and months are ascertained - has been adopted in Kalgachia wholesale.