Konkordskaya Bratva

Froyalan's King and his army of whores,
Plot their return to Benacia's shores.
Spreading their poisoned religion and law,
Ready to take up their rule once more.

But not on our watch,
Never on our watch,
They'll find us waiting, guns in hands!
Our horses rearing, our bears a-growling,
Over our rightful native land!

- Opening verses of the Brothers' Creed, to the tune of a Mishalanski battle song.

The armband of the Konkordskaya Bratva.

The Konkordskaya Bratva are a paramilitary unit based in Shirerithian Mishalan. It was founded as a society of Mishalanski commissars who were forced into exile in Kalgachia during the controversial annexation of their homeland by it's neighbouring jurisdiction of Elwynn, the latter being under the rule of the Froyalanish King Noah who was becoming increasingly reviled throughout Shireroth for a flagrant ethnic and religious particularism over all elements of Shirerithian life under his influence, a wilful deafness to the majority of Shirerithians who objected to his actions, and ultimately a descent into unabashed barratry against the Shirerithian legislature, the Landsraad, when it ordered a reversal of Mishalan's annexation.

Noah's brief rule over Mishalan saw a wave of land clearances, evictions and appropriations by SEKEF, the Storish state trading corporation which began selling on its gains to incoming Froyalanish landlords, those closest to King Noah paying the lowest prices. Affiliation with the previous Soviet regime in Mishalan was retroactively criminalised and a series of purges began to take effect across the territory, enforced by Noah's own bodyguard militia and forcing large numbers of ex-government officials, regardless of the strength of their communist ideology, to flee their homeland with their families for fear of arrest and imprisonment.

While the Shirerithian government prepared to enforce Mishalan's de-annexation by seizing control of the usual state organs, those exiles who had fled southwest to Kalgachia became acutely conscious that the bulk of Froyalano-Storish power was exerted through legislation and religious practice rather than any executive action, and the recapture of Mishalan's administrative organs would not be enough to reverse the attempted Froyalanisation of the territory. The restoration of native rule would in Mishalan only by effective, they held, if every trace of the alien Froyalanish culture and society was eradicated from their homeland and a vigilant defence against its return was established. The government of Kalgachia, having previously worked in the service of Minarboria and retaining that empire's alarm at the rapacious territorial claims of the Froyalanish in Amokolia, resolved to do all it possibly could to assist the Mishalanski exiles in reclaiming the soul of their motherland. The exiles were duly trained in partisan warfare by Kalgachi special forces at secret camps in the Eastern Kalgachi hills. Permission was obtained from the Shirerithian government for these exiles, now named the Konkordskaya Bratva in honour of the ancient Mishalanski capital, to return to their homeland and take all necessary measures to reverse the Froyalanish invasion. The Bratva quickly gained fame throughout Shireroth for their tactic of hunting down the fleeing or hiding Froyalanish using bears which were trained to distinguish their scent - said to be a unique combination of stale mead and tumescent genital seepage. The bears, for their part, proved difficult to control once they had located their prey and such encounters invariably ended in a frenzy of dismemberment quite regardless of their handlers' moderation.

The bold rampage of the Bratva through their homeland did much to disprove the invincibility of the House of Ettlingar Freyu, the royal family through whom Froyalanish dominion had been established over much of Benacia. This emboldened the Imperial Advisory Council of Shireroth and the long-suffering Elwynnese diaspora who had been sidelined by the Froyalanish - in a rapid series of coordinated actions, which they subsequently named the Auspicious Occasion, they declared King Noah and the upper tier of the Froyalanish ruling class to be manifestations of an all-powerful daemon known as the Harald Entity, effectively stripping them of their offices and anulling their citizenship rights which denied them all protection under Shirerithian law. All legal manoeuvring aside, the popular appetite in Shireroth to see Noah deposed paved the way for the rapid takeover of the Elwynnese government by its returning diaspora and the frenzied purgation of all Froyalanic particularism from the Imperial government of Shireroth itself. Following Mishalan's lead, arrangements were made for the mass deportation of Elwynn's Froyalanish population to a specially-designated reserve in the remote wastes of western Benacia, ostensibly for their own protection.

Meanwhile in Mishalan, the Konkordskaya Bratva eventually completed the rout of the Froyalanish from their homeland and soon had little to do except burning the occasional pornographic Vanic icon which had been overlooked in their initial advances. The greater part of them were duly stood down, although they remained in existence as a contingency against an expected Froyalanish counterstroke in the future. Being thoroughly infiltrated by Kalgachi agents due to their origins in that country, many of the Bratva were quietly encouraged to seek employment in the Shirerithian arms industry - most of which was based in Mishalan's industrial heartland - where they would have access to the designs for advanced gravimetric military hardware (floating tanks, to the layman). Their clandestine work in the gravtank factories, motivated by a combination of gnostic brainwashing from the Kalgachi church and generous stipends of gold bullion, achieved much toward the development of anti-gravtank countermeasures in Kalgachia whose geography and cultural inheritance condemned it to a state of eternal vigilance against Shirerithian invasion. Eventually the Imperial Army of Shireroth, growing wise to this security lapse somewhat late in the day, duly re-mobilised the Bratva as an auxiliary formation and deployed them to the Froyalan National Reserve where they could be safely utilised advancing the one interest common to both Shireroth and Kalgachia - namely the gradual, progressive and systematic erasure of the Froyalanish from the tapestry of Benacian peoples.

Each member of the 48,000 or so Konkordskaya Bratva auxiliaries deployed to the FNR received two fertile community service workers as companions and these, together with their offspring amounted to a population in the region of 115,200 of His Majesty's Loyal Subjects (soldiers of the Kaiser customarily surrender their freedom for the duration of service, becoming denizens only on discharge from duty).

After many years spent "protecting" their charges, the Bratva must have felt that their time as a unit had come to an end with the collapse of the Imperial Republic in 1671, but fate has a habit of playing tricks and - barely four years after the abandonment of the last of the gelding camps, those grizzled veterans, enjoying their retirement with land to til and helpmeets to attend upon their needs, began to feel the distinct chill of unease as the new King of Amokolia began to embark upon power plays and grand gestures that were leading, inexorably, towards a seeming detente with the Storrish rulers of neighbouring Gascony. Rumours of tribunals, being established by the Amokolian regime to curry favour with the High King by "investigating" the patriots who had defended their homelands against foreign occupation and settlement, were sufficient to see many quit their homesteads on the edges of the boreal forests and make the long trek southwards, along hidden and remote trails, into the so-called Lachdolor, that portion of Inner Benacia "pacified" by the Black Legions during the most recent spasm of conflict.