Maqsum Nies

The Fall of Dryadae

The elves of Arrhynsia are a unfortunate lot. The Betrayal totally gutted the elven pantheon and removed the stabilizing structure of the nation of Dryadae by killing Saimon, Lameravis and his consorts Hyadilith, Murdu, Ancyia, and Naanam. The consequences from that event were deep and persistent, causing the normally peaceable elven society to degenerate first into chaos, then into tribal factions led by local nobles when lawlessness threatened the stability and security of every household in Dryadae.
The different nobles all shared a common ideology - power rules, and those who held power ruled their territories with an iron fist and defended them viciously. Physical and magical strength dominated the degenerative social structure as territorial wars broke out across the Echovad Forrest. One of the most feared and opressive aristocratic leaders, Thiman Srefton, held a large expanse of the South Echovad Forrest reaching from the South Spiral Mountain Range to the east edge of the Echovad Forrest, and from the south pass through the Spiral Mountains all the way south to the shore of the Ur Hilgarria. He called his domaine Rebna. Within Rebna, economic disparity was wide, taxes were high, individual freedoms were supressed, and social and economic mobility were non-existent.

The Rise of Ragel Kbar

Among the middle class in Rebna, a young man named Ragel Kbar attended university. Ragel was an arrogant, self-centered intellectual lacking sorcerous power who was extremely unpleasant and despised almost everyone. Angry and racist to his core, he believed that dwarves, orcs, halflings and gnomes were genetically inferior to elves, and that he was an intellectual giant among the elves. Ragel hated his second cousin Thiman Srefton and coveted his power, his magic, and his wealth. He philosophically saw no point or meaning in life and he abhored all of the social structures that the elves had managed to salvage and re-instate after the chaos that followed the Betrayal.
Ragel needed to write a dissertation to close out his degree program, and determined to express his philosophy in a paper that outlined a systematic framework that would attack everything he hated about society, framed as a call to manifest a political and economic utopia in Rebna. His paper caught the attention of a young man Chisna Winter whose father had recently died and left him a printing press. Winter needed something to print, and printed three thousand copies of Ragel's paper, and promulgated it across Rebna where it found fertile ground to grow. Thiman Srefton was thoroughly disliked. Ragel had simplified complex issues into we/they paradigms, erasing the individual in favor of class identity, and claiming that those in power used magic to oppress the working class and dishonestly exploit them. He painted a picture of a utopia where everyone was the same, and everyone shared everything in common. It was grossly oversimplified, idealistic thinking, devoid of any understanding of second order effects on the real behavior and motivation of people. He called on people to unite and overthrow the government of Rebna and violently "take back" the wealth that the nobles and middle class had acquired.
Ragel had absolutely no expectation that his paper would take hold of the country's common man, but he figured it would do to get him his degree.
He was wrong. Rebna was an oppressive place, and Ragel Kbar 's call to rebellion and violence against Srefton encountered fertile ground. Within months, the common man Regel secretly despised had assembled under his banner and he led an army of peasants in a violent rebellion that overturned his cousin's rule. His followers stole goods, burned farms, raped women, killed merchants, and tortured the nobility, glorying in the violence and power that they now had. Ragel seized power and his cousin fled to the North Echovad Forrest. Regel then established himself as leader of the country now named the Democratic Social Republic of Elvenkind (DSRE) leading for the benefit of the common man. He established the The DSRE Anti-corruption Committee to watch for and protect the country from corrupt practices, then indulged himself in every vice he had previously been deprived of. He rewarded his loyal Lieutenants with a life of luxury stolen from those they had killed. The partying was intense.

The Aftermath of Rebellion

It was not long after the rebellion ended that it became obvious that the wealth of Rebna would not be sufficient to keep the leaders of the rebellion, let alone everyone in the country, in the lap of luxury for long. People had to go back to work. Fields needed to be planted, tended and harvested. Animals needed to be raised and slaughtered, sheep sheared, thread spun, cloth woven - the list went on and on. And everyone went back to work, a few to jobs they knew, but most moved up the economic structure to jobs they didn't know as the people who knew how to do these jobs had been killed. Soon Ragel Kbar 's tax men came, and the peasants found out that these were the few sorcerers who had sworn loyalty to Ragel during the rebellion. The tax-men took the little that people did manage to make, promising to return with supplies for the winter.
Supplies that never came.
It was a hard next couple years. People starved to death, but no one complained more than once. The first time they complained, they were roughed up by the new police force, also composed of sorcerers. After that... well, they kept their thoughts to themselves because you never knew who was a spy. People started hiding things they were able to make so they would have enough for winter - something to trade when their families got hungry, but the sorcerous tax men always seemed to find whatever they hid, then the police beat them up. The next time, they took it all and the children went hungry. And the promise was the new government would provide for all, but then there never seemed to be enough, and if you weren't an ardent admirer of Regel Kbar you were the last in line.
Of course, Regel Kbar and his loyal Lieutenants all had the very best of everything. They worked so hard for everyone else, they obviously deserved it.
Times were hard. No one wanted to work or produce anything - they couldn't keep any of what they made, and nothing came back. The government sent soldiers to force people to work. Famine started to spread across Rebna, and many quietly decided to take their families, leave their homes and immigrate to nearby states. That worked for the wave of first settlers, but the neighboring nobles had no desire to have their kingdoms implode in rebellion as Rebna had and refused to allow the fugitives in. Then Ragel Kbar realized that he needed to keep the people who were trying to escape in his country to keep the economy functioning. He built walls at Rebna's border and set guards on them. He locked his people in.
Ragel Kbar was no humanitarian. He had a list of people who opposed him. That list was short, because if you were on it, there was a price on your head, and when they found you, you were lucky if all they did was kill you. Even though the list was short, there always seemed to be someone new to add to it... there were entire groups of people who needed to go - orcs, gnomes, dwarves - then there were his contemporaries at university, and professors, and then the gays and his family and the religious people.
And always at the top of the list, was anyone who dared to question his authority or the tenets of his - philosophy.