Froyalaners
Froyalaners were contractually-obligated servitors who were highly common and frequently encountered performing manual labour and menial tasks throughout the continent of Benacia, typically found in the territories of Kalgachia and Shireroth. The descendants of migrants from Stormark and native converts to their Vanic religion, they had originally been known as the Froyalanish, after the brief period in Elwynn's history when the Shirerithian state had been known as Froyalan, during its first period of Storrish rule by Duke Harald. These Froyalanish, with the benefits of vast and munificent state patronage, enjoyed a significant degree of wealth and power in Elwynn and throughout the Imperial Republic during the reigns of Prince Jonathan, King Noah and Kaiser Hjalmar, a period effectively lasting from 1618 to 1651 AN.
Following the Auspicious Occasion the Froyalanish community was taken into protective custody and evacuated to a national reservation in north-western Benacia so as to shield them from ethnic violence and retribution by their Elwynnese neighbours. In spite of a considerable volume of emigration and natural wastage, the Froyalanish National Reservation (FNR), which was located in the sub-arctic regions of the former Kingdom of Amokolia, proved inadequate to the population it was being asked to sustain. In consequence of which the Imperial Republic was obliged to find a humanitarian solution to reintegrate the protected community into society. "Redemption Through Labour" became the watchword in both Shireroth and Kalgachia, home to an exile community whom it similarly integrated into its own economic and social hierarchy. During this most intensive period of servitude, the Froyalanish came to be known by the euphemistic title of Community Service Workers, which subsequently gave rise in neofeudal Shireroth to the concept of intensive community service as an alternative to a custodial sentence or the ubiquitous death penalty.
The ultimate objective of the redemptive process was to effect a transmutation of the remnant population from being outlandish deviants and the agents of a foreign power into acculturated, loyal and obedient servants of the Benacian powers who had endured their former antics. Higher level Froyalanish dignitaries, typically associated with the House of Ettlingar-Freyu and the Vanic religion were either summarily deported in 1651 or else left swiftly of their own volition. This left the not-inconsiderable bulk of their followers upon whom the rendering process would be focused.
In Shireroth, it is expected that active measures concerning the population will continue to remain in force for one-hundred years subsequent to the Auspicious Occasion, concluding by no later than the year 1752 AN. Kalgachia's Froyalanish population, being rather smaller and quicker to reform, was nominally emancipated in 1655 AN although they remain subject to compulsory sterilisation and a complete prohibition on the practice of their ancestors' memetically-virulent religion.
As community service became more widespread in Shireroth, the bureaucracies of the Imperial Government became increasingly concerned and perplexed by the danger that Froyalaners might escape back into the realm by administrative error or negligence as Community Service Workers intermingled and became confused with Community Servants, the latter group typically only enduring periods of service only twice that of an equivalent custodial sentence. More agonisingly, some Norse community servants, doing time for trivial offences, were mistaken for Vanics and subjected to the full horrors of castration by the Konkordskaya Bratva before the mistake was realised.
Following reforms to the Lawbook introduced in 1664, the Froyalaners of the Imperial Republic were re-categorised as Protected Persons[1], better reflecting the Octavian reforms of 1659 & 1661 which had removed them from the labour pool[2] and assigned them to Workers' Colonies distributed throughout the Imperial Republic under the control of the Lord Lieutenants[3]. This reform reduced the need for the FNR which was subsequently reduced down to three territorially isolated city states in the Amokolian county of Oleslaad.
Demographic decline
Derived from Ministry of the Interior census data
| Year | № of Froyalaners |
| 1633 | 58,606,700 |
| 1651 (<AO) | 60,393,726 |
| 1651 (AO>) | 55,148,907 |
| 1656 | 31,274,194 |
| 1664 | 17,278,815 |
Contemporary Shirerithian perspective on the Froyalanish
The official position of the Imperial Government is that the Froyalanish population suffered from such extensive. culturally ingrained, psycho-sociological conditioning, as to have reached the point where "overtly tumescent-satyriasis" had become their most distinctive, indeed overpowering, attribute. It was therefore for the safety of those trapped in the Froyalanish and Vanic mindset that they were removed from the civil population, and have subsequently been resettled in workers' colonies.
Kalgachi perspective
The Kalgachi approach to the Froyalanish differed subtly from that of Shireroth in accordance with its own circumstances; although initially without a Froyalanish population, Kalgachia did inherit a marked disdain and mistrust of the Vanic peoples from the arborial bureaucracy of Minarboria - an empire subjected to various attempts at contractual bondage by the diplomatic corps of Stormark, often with attempts to inflate and leverage the legacy of historical Storish activity in territories joined to Minarboria through the latter's ruling House of Rossheim. The unremorseful speed with which Stormark, upon Minarboria's collapse, moved to annex the Eastern Hemisphere territories of that fallen empire only served to confirm the prejudices of those who survived the ruin of Sansabury and found their way into the service of the Kalgachi government. From the latter nation's mountaintops, they looked with concern upon the seemingly unstoppable spread of the Vanic class known as the Froyalanish in neighbouring Shireroth - the spectacle contributed significantly to the dire parables of archonic avarice which underpinned the theology of the emergent Ketherist church. The hand of the Kalgachi, a nascent and somewhat destitute people at the time, was ultimately forced by a burdensome influx of refugees fleeing the culmination of Froyalanish oppression in Mishalan, whose flight elevated the excesses of the Vanic race to the status of a continental problem and enabled all that followed.
After the Auspicious Occasion, being in dire need of a cheap labour force to build out its foundational infrastructure, the Kalgachi government eagerly imported Shirerithian Froyalaners in numbers throught to be in the low millions (precise records remain witheld from public eyes, if they were made at all). Unlike Shireroth however, Kalgachia was without a pre-existing Froyalanish population and its government adamantly sought to prevent them from ever gaining a cultural foothold by instituting a programme of mass sterilisation upon entry to the country, even it meant paying Shireroth for replenishments - the notion of breeding an indigenous population of Kalgachi Froyalaners where none previously existed was considered, in light of their effect upon Shireroth, to be nothing less than cultural suicide.
Ironically, such adamant measures allowed Kalgachia's Froyalaners greater scope than their Shirerithian counterparts to participate in the more modest strata of civil society with the understanding that their presence would be historically fleeting and self-terminating. Their eventual 'emancipation', whilst retaining the most essential fetters to the unholy virulence of their ancestral culture, removed all obligations of unpaid compulsory labour and transmuted them into a respectable, if humble, segment of the wage-earning citizenry. In parts of Kalgachia the steady toil of these people, quietly accepting the inevitability of their genetic extinction and the traumatic memories of their previous treatment, was even considered an admirable example of redemptive penance to be meditated upon and if necessary followed by their indigenous Kalgachi neighbours. The proportion who strayed from this path and persisted in trying to re-connect with their ancestral heritage was sufficiently small that the Kalgachi secret police, the Prefects, found no difficulty in quietly removing them from public view and giving them the oppurtunity to nourish the Garden's thirsty soil with help of a more decompositional nature.
