History of Rissland

The history of Rissland covers important events of Rissland, a country in Anaria.

End of the Helreich-Wolgos War

The foundation of the Riss starts with the invasion of Dhonowlgos during the Helreich-Wolgos War in 7456-7460. At the start of the invasion, the war largely took place in Northern Stoldavia and other areas the Wolgos occupied, such as Morenburg and 155. It took the remainder of 7456 and most of 7457 to dislodge the Wolgos from 155 as the Wolgos used the Blue Mountains as a defensive position. On some occasions, the Wolgos were seen venturing into the mountains of what is now Vittmark.

For the next year and a half, the war was mostly a maritime affair in the Stormy Sea and Stolvic Ocean, with Helreich whittling at the wolgos navy and coastal defences and with increasingly stronger airship bombing raids.

In mid-7458, the Wolgos Navy nearly crumbled, and its remnants escaped north to the whaling harbours of what is now Piksuq islands; Dhonowlgos was largely cut off from its Altaian colony, which continued its resistance against incursions through Cassia. The Häverists held complete control of the Stormy Sea surrounding Dhonowlgos. Only a convoy line to Piksuq remained.

Overwhelming air and naval forces overcame Wolgos coastal defence and forces on the island's southern shores during the summer. The fight was brutal, and some coastal cities, like Tkoysdhom, were completely demolished by battleship battery attacks and airship raids. Beach landings progressed, and a bitter fight for the island proceeded for the following 14 months. At the 14-month mark, records of the conflict became significantly patchy and incomplete as chaos on the front lines ensued and became a bitter guerilla war. During this time, Wolgos forces ordered a full retreat and evacuation of civilians to the north coast of the island. Thousands of Wolgos evacuated the main island day after day through the Pisuq corridor. It is known that the population of Dhonowlgos before the conflict was roughly 14 million Wolgos, but reports by The Bind report only 6.5 million were evacuated while the rest perished. Of the nine and a half million Eokoesr that lived prior to the invasion, only four million survived as the Wolgos culled many as they retreated or consumed them as food.

Liberation of the Eokoesr

As the Helish invaded the islands, they encountered the Eokoesr for the first time; they were no longer abstract victims but real beings before them. The Helish expected to be greeted as liberators by a people who would rise and shed their metaphorical chains, a people eager for freedom. But the reality was different; the majority of the Eokoesr were pitiful creatures with little semblance of humanity, the Wolgos had destroyed their psyche, and the Eokoesr had no comprehension of freedom, choice or ability to imagine any other life.

As the Helish entered towns and cities conquered or evacuated by the Wolgos, they found masses of naked and grimy people, many with mutilations, scars, the visible signs of long-endured violence and back-breaking work. Yet they behaved in inexplicable ways, with many Eokoesr just lingering outside the homes of their masters as if awaiting their return, others carefully scavenged in the streets and outside town despite the Wolgo's homes and shops being left with food ready for the taking.

As they entered buildings and homes, they frequently found Eokoesr still working, trying to tidy up and go about their chores. They even found pitiful Eokoesr hags taking care of left behind Wolgos children, trying to protect them and care for them despite having no duty to do so. The Eokoesr recoiled from their liberators, fearful, flinching, confused and completely unable to process what had happened or what to do.

When spoken to, the Eokoesrs would shy away, look away or flinch, and when Helish soldiers attempted to give hungry Eokoesr food, they would take it, and the Helish literally had to pelt them with rations until the Eokoesr reacted and took them.

As the Helish secured Wolgos settlements, they discovered horrors they could not have imagined, horrors that existed with normalcy as part of everyday Wolgos life. They found and liberated the Eokoesr breeding estates, which often held hundreds of eokoesr women for constant breeding in filthy barns stinking of human filth and sweat, with eokoesr children running around only being tended by elderly haggard Eokoesr women while their near catatonic pregnant just wondered aimlessly of laid around. They were factories of human labour, industries without compassion, and it was not uncommon to find the corpses of spent women, or women that did not survive brutish and unskilled cesarean interventions or their offspring that did not survive the conditions in pits.

Inhumanity was also visible as the Helish crossed bridges into towns, where they found the emaciated eokoesr chained to the parapets of the bridge, with many distressed Helish eager to unchain them and tend to them.

Inside towns, they had to deal with sights such as butcher shops with human carcasses and butcher flesh and organs or shrines with human bones or remnants of flesh. But worst of all for some helish where, the mellification workshops where mellified delicacy human meat was "cultured", where eokoesr were kept immobilised to metal racks, forced feed honey and water for weeks or months until they died, with the aim of using their flesh with honey sweetness and turn their livers into a fatty patte like a delicacy. The sight was horrific with the stench of waste, rot and sickly sweetness, the eokoesr unable to move found in their waste as they had not been hosed down. Most had to be humanely euthanised.

The helish soldiers themselves often had visceral reactions and suffered psychologically as they grappled with a brutal reality they could not have conceived or fully comprehend. It was not uncommon for post-traumatic effects to arise on the liberators as they struggled to process the reality around them and the immense needs the Eokoesr had to be functional.

Rehabilitation Years

Rissland inherited a land deeply scarred by war and the scorched-earth tactics of the retreating Wolgos. The destruction was all-encompassing: infrastructure was in ruins, agricultural lands were barren, forests were razed, and rivers were poisoned. Amidst this desolation, the Häverists faced the daunting task of rehabilitating the land and integrating over three and a half million emancipated Eokoesr slaves.

The Eokoesr, having endured centuries of oppression, emerged as a people devoid of direction and cultural identity. Their lives under Wolgos rule, marked by deprivation and inhumane treatment, left them without social cohesion, culture, or skills beyond basic labour. Many were physically mutilated or disabled, hindering their ability to communicate and function independently. The magnitude of their suffering and the loss of their cultural heritage were profound.

Pastoral Eokoesr

Not all Eokoesr were totally dehumanised; the pastoral Eokoesr who lived with a semblance of autonomy and dignity were numerous and became a crucial resource for the helish. These Eokoesr had initiative skills; they could make decisions and resourcefulness as they lived as the property of rural pastoral wolgos who depended on their Eokoesr's normalcy and cooperation to work and collaborate in the less well-off rural economy. The Rural Eokoesr, alongside other Eokoesr, such as those kept by hospitals to assist nurses and doctors or those kept for sensual performances or entertainment acts, had the potential to assist the helish, even so, less than one in every 500th eokoesr had any rudimentary writing and reading skill, only female eokoesr that worked in hospitals had rudimentary literacy.

The protectorate administration recruited them en masse, and they descended onto settlements, farming states, mines, and surviving factories. But once more, the Helish miscalculated their expectations of the eokoesr. For centuries, these more autonomous eokoesrs had prided themselves in their elevated status above the other dredges of the eokoesr and viewed them with contempt.

The "elevated" eokoesr descended onto towns and other places in their wolgos-like way of dress and hats with a feather that denoted their perceived status, with a mandate to guide and help the other eokoesr adapt to a new life of freedom. The elevated eokoesrs misunderstood their mandate, knowing only centuries of Wolgos society and viewing their violence as normal they began to act like the Wolgos.

Farming states once more began to produce, mines to churn ores and settlements to reorganise for a new reality, but not with compassion but with a rod and brutal punishments meted out by the pastoral eokoesr. The Häverists were appalled by the pastoral Eokoesr's behaviour, which mirrored the savagery of the Wolgos. Helish administrators had to actively intervene and reeducate the pastoral eokoesr in Haeverist morality and values, helping even the more autonomous eokoesr understand that violence and cruelty were not the basis for cooperation.

Foundation

Rissland was founded as a "Schutzgebiet", a protectorate, the "Schutzgebiet Dunkelholz", in 7460, with Dunkelholz being the Helishsised name for the islands. Helreich did not fully control the islands and only gained incremental control of more and land as the Wolgos left for their exile beyond the "breast of civilisation" to their distant colony in Altaia (First Wolgos trek).

The Helish encountered fierce resistance from rogue Wolgos in the highlands and forest, causing significant post-war issues and casualties. The islands remained a protectorate for the next five years as the Wolgos continued to evacuate them, with Helish forces moving into sectors as the Hlrike handed them over. None of the lands left under Wolgos' control as they evacuated left any Eokoesr; it's unknown if they were consumed or taken to Altaia.

The Helish military command ruled the protectorate as they sought to pacify the islands and take account of what was left, and the Eokoesr was now left adrift and in need of humanitarian aid. Plans began to be laid to resettle the islands with Dolmer Helish and to reconstruct what could re reconstructed, and to demolish Wolgos monuments and cultural landmarks.

A year later, the islands were renamed "Rissland" after the tectonic fault that created the cinder plains on the east of the main island. The lands were promoted to a gemeinschaft, a commonhold, and a member of the Stolvic Häverist Commonholds.

Cultural Eokoesr Reconstruction

Despite the best hopes of the Haeverists for many decades, a lingering sense of the Wolgos remained. The pastoral eokoesr became the administrative and cultural elite of the islands, and they refused to reject long-held beliefs and notions. They kept the Dlroch'vlder faith and, in the vacuum left by the Wolgos, formed Leykold reading associations as they learned to read. They reopened the temples and began preaching an increasingly reinterpreted faith to transform it into a human-centric faith, rejecting human sacrifice and replacing it with animal sacrifice. They never established monasteries but were eager to appropriate Wolgos' death parks for themselves so they could take the death pilgrimage, which they long coveted from the Wolgos, as the ultimate dignity.

Many towns fell into ruin as there were not enough people to resettle them; others became taboo to enter and became forbidden ruins, such as Dhowkros, the old capital. New "urbanates" were established by Haeverist settlers, much to the chagrin of the Eokoesr, who came to see the helish as intruders on land they believed to be rightfully theirs as its inheritors.

The Eokoesrs were slow at integrating new cultural practices from the Helish; their art and cuisine mimicked Wolgos art and cuisine, which is what they had known. The elite eokoesr considered themselves above the others as they had some semblance of lineage and eagerly worked to amass influence by taking in the eokoesr with no lineage or notions of the family into their "clans" and "tribes", mirroring Wolgos social structures.

Helish bread and beer were integrated into eokoesr culture and their understanding of notions of love, compassion and altruism which were understood very differently by the Wolgos. The Haeverists covertly influenced the re-understanding of the Wolgos faith to humanise it and erase the Wolgos from a position of superiority, they also helped the eokoesr adapt the anarian script to the Wolgos language and helped them form a uniquely Eokoesr literary corpus.

Nevertheless, there was a divide developing between the eokoesr and the helish settlers. The eokoesr became the masters of the agricultural economy and refused to adopt haeverist agricultural practices, with elites marshalling their "tribes" to protest and slowdown logistics and productivity to a crawl when they were at odds with the helish. The eokoesr inherited the suspicious Wolgos predilection and actively resisted helish initiatives at every step and only cooperated when it was clearly beneficial to them.

For decades, the islands languished as deeply agricultural and pastoral, with only small centres of largely hellish-manned industry. The emerging eokoesr elites and their tribes cemented themselves as a pervasive force that gave the eokoesr a reputation as a recalcitrant, stubborn, uncooperative people.

Wolgos Question

The aftermath of the invasion of Dhownolgos presented significant challenges for the Häverist forces, particularly in dealing with the remaining Wolgos population. This period marked a complex and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at rehabilitation and integration, highlighting profound cultural and psychological differences.

In the wake of the invasion, hundreds of thousands of Wolgos were left behind as their brethren retreated. The Häverist forces, in an effort to control and manage this population, interned them in secluded valleys. However, they soon realized that the Wolgos were unlike any other population they had previously encountered or occupied. The Wolgos' resistance and cultural distinctiveness presented unique challenges for the Häverists.

Aiming to transform these Wolgos into Häverist citizens, the Häverist command, supported by academics, initiated rehabilitation programs. However, these efforts were met with stubborn resistance and outright rejection from the Wolgos community. The Wolgos' strong cultural identity and resistance to outside influence made the task of rehabilitation particularly arduous.

In a controversial move, the Häverist authorities decided to separate Wolgos children from their parents, intending to break the continuity of Wolgos culture. This decision was based on the belief that re-educating the younger generation would be more effective. However, the upbringing and re-education of Wolgos children proved to be a failure, largely due to a poor understanding of Wolgos psychology by the Häverist. The children often displayed behaviours such as deception, violence, and cruelty, which deeply troubled and demoralized their Helish caregivers.

The re-education programs inadvertently raised a generation of maladapted Wolgos. Despite superficially adopting Hellish morals, many of these individuals were deeply troubled and posed a significant danger to society. The period was marked by numerous disturbances and crimes committed by these individuals, causing widespread concern and scandal.

After two decades of effort and significant resource expenditure, Helreich finally permitted its Wolgos population to leave for the Bind. By this time, however, the damage was substantial. Many Wolgos had died, and the attempts at integration were widely regarded as a failure.