Blathe
Blathe is a nation in the world of Vlastach, best known for its embrace of the arcanum of landreaving. Between its fell reputation and its farflung location at the edge of the veigur between the Voidwood and the High Sea, Blathe is a place few outsiders have reason to pass through or visit, and so lurid accounts of its contents and activities spread throughout other lands without most people having any firsthand knowledge to judge which if any of the tinglish tales are true.
Many other nations, especially Growers, see Blathe as a place of evil, a dark blight upon the land that sends its scelerous tendrils across Vlastach spreading blast and corruption. There is a popular stereotype of Blathe as a bleak and gloomy nation whose downtrodden people suffer despairingly under the yoke of nefarious tyrants intent only on their own power, a power usurped from the land to which it rightfully belongs. Blathe is, of course, not as dreary as this image paints it; for all its ill repute, its people on the whole are probably no unhappier than those of most other lands. Nor is it necessarily accurate to see it as a baleful influence across the veigur; the government and people of Blathe focus mostly on local affairs, and have little interest in working mischief in distant domains. Even landreavers, while they may derfly accroach power from the unwilling land, are not necessarily evil, just as the landworkers and dedicants who serve Vlastach are not necessarily good.
Geography and environment
Blathe is located in the far north of Vlastach, in the solar domain of Urloch. Its northern frontier is the border between Vlastach and the neighboring veigur of Caasuna; its southern border is the shore of the High Sea. It shares a border with no other nation; to its east and west are only barren badlands sparsely inhabited by nomads and people living in scattered small settlements with no central government. To the west are the Carven Lands, known for their hoodoos and other odd rock formations; east is the Rainbow Waste, so called because of the variegated colors of its stones.
Not only is Blathe relatively far from Urloch's sun, but it lies directly in the shade of the Skytrees of the Heavenly Forest. As a result, it gets little sunlight, only the farthest reaches of the Dim Corner getting less daylight. It is in fact widely believed that Vlastach placed the Heavenly Forest where it is precisely to deprive the wicked land of Blathe of the lifegiving sun, though the timeline gives the lie to this tale; the Heavenly Forest existed at its current location long before the nation of Blathe was founded. (A few people aware of the anachronicism have suggested that Vlastach created the Heavenly Forest because it knew in advance that Blathe would someday exist there, but this assumes a power of prognostication that the land has not otherwise exhibited.) While Blathe's people have adapted to the underlight, this does have significant consequences for the ecosystem. Blathe is, contrary to what many outsiders believe, by no means barren and lifeless, but it's true that many of trees and other plants that flourish in better-lit areas cannot survive here. Still, it is not without its own kind of flora. Giant mushrooms and other fungi are common there, able to thrive in the absence of light, but there are some shade-tolerant true plants that grow there as well.
The geography within Blathe itself can be roughly divided north to south into three zones. Its northern part, at its border with Caasuna, is the Twilight Forest, perhaps the largest mushroom forest on Vlastach, though it is not a pure mushroom forest and does include some sciophilous woody trees as well. Running east to west through the middle of the nation are a series of small mountain ranges, the largest of which are the Groaning Mountains and the Hocoladas. The area between the mountains and the High Sea is mostly plains and hills with some patches of forest and swamp, and is where most of Blathe's population lives. Although the zone makes up only about a quarter of the country, almost ninety percent of its people make their homes here. Blathe's capital, Ilawac, and its largest city, Grayport, both lie in this southern zone, the former at the confluence of the Wood and Caochec Rivers and the latter on the shore of the Bay of Lions.
Government
Blathe is divided into twelve dioceses, each led by a governor. While still subject to national decrees, the dioceses have considerable autonomy in deciding how to conduct their own internal affairs, and in matters not mandated at the state level, the laws and methods of administration of the dioceses vary widely. Along those lines, the means of selection of the governor differs between dioceses; in some the governors are elected, in some they are appointed by some board or council, and in the diocese of Athabar the governorship is hereditary.
At the national level, Blathe's government has three main parts, each of which combines the function of an executive and legislative branch. The consul is selected by a group of old families called the High Houses; the ministers of the Cabinet are selected by the governors of the dioceses; and the People's Assembly is elected directly by the populace. Of the three, the People's Assembly has by far the least actual power. While the fifty-member Assembly can in principle pass laws, its pronouncements can be vetoed by the consul or any minister without justification or ceremony, and in practice it acts mostly as an advisory body. The precedence between the consul and the cabinet is less clear-cut; while the consul is the head of state and nominally the overall head of government, historically about as often as not the cabinet has exercised more real authority than the consul. That is not, however, the case today; the current consul, Dang Thu Dan, has a firm grasp on the reins of power and keeps the ministers effectively under his control.
Even when, as now, the cabinet as a whole is subordinate to the consul, each minister still has considerable latitude regarding matters of their own province. There are seven ministers in the cabinet: the Minister of Defense, the Minister of the Exchequer, the Minister of the Exterior, the Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of the Land, and the Minister of Secrets. Each minister controls a ministry comprising thousands of government officials who ultimately answer to them. While most of these ministries serve similar functions to namesakes in other nations, the Minister of the Land and the Minister of Secrets are Blaithan innovations. The Minister of the Land deals with relations with the land in general, but due to Blathe's embrace of landreaving this is generally an antagonistic relationship, involving studying how best to draw upon the land's nolent powers and stave off its retaliation. A few Ministers of the Land have made efforts to reach out to Vlastach and make attempts at appeasement, but rarely and with little success. The primary province of the Minister of Secrets is magic aside from landworking and landreaving, these two falling within the domain of the Minister of the Land. Aside from considering applications of elemental magic and other arcana, the Ministry of Secrets also concerns itself with other planes and with the study of ancient telesmata.
Currently, probably the most influential minister, and the only one to come close to challenging the consul's power, is the Minister of the Exterior, Ngori Kedali. Traditionally, the Ministry of the Exterior has dealt principally with relations between Blathe and other nations—with trade, with espionage, and, when applicable, with war (on foreign soil; the Ministry of Defense deals with battles within Blathe's own borders). Kedali, however, has opted to expand her remit to encompass exploration of the neighboring veigur—which, after all, is certainly exterior to Blathe. She has sent multiple expeditions into the Voidwood to explore it and study its contents and eventually make its way to the other side, and has even spearheaded the construction of a road that penetrates some distance into the wood and has so far remained in place and traversable despite the wood's mysteries. (The road has no official name, but is widely called Ngori's Road after its originator.) The Minister of Secrets, Jaco Edian, has strenuously objected to Kedali's project, insisting that investigation of the Voidwood should fall under his sphere of operations, but he has thus far not posed much of a hindrance to her activities.
Magic
The form of magic that Blathe is best known for, of course, is landreaving. Like landworkers, landreavers ultimately get their power from the land, from Vlastach itself. Unlike landworkers, landreavers are not given this power in exchange for service to the land. Rather, they have found a way to tap Vlastach's power against the land's will, to draw on its abilities whether it wants them to or not. Unsurprisingly, Vlastach resents and abhors this usurpation of its powers, and considers all landreavers enemies of the land. It is because the government of Blathe openly supports and harbors landreavers that Vlastach holds the nation of Blathe as a whole in extreme disfavor.
Stereotypes notwithstanding, not every citizen of Blathe is a landreaver, but there are certainly more landreavers in Blathe than in any other nation, and perhaps more landreavers in Blathe than in the rest of the world put together—though this is dubious, and difficult to either verify or falsify, given that landreavers elsewhere often try to keep their nature a secret. Perhaps one Blaithan in two or three hundred is a reasonably accomplished landreaver; perhaps one in forty has at least some small skill in the arcanum.
Other forms of magic, however, are not unknown. Blathe has about two thirds as many elemental mages as it does landreavers, though this counts a good many Blaithans who dabble in both elemental magic and landreaving. Even landworking is not unknown in Blathe, though Blaithan landworkers are as secretive about their activities as landreavers are in Grower countries, so their numbers are hard to estimate. Some landworkers in Blathe actively work to bring down its reaver-supporting government from the inside; others do their best to just keep their heads down and serve the land in their own ways, and help out those few fellow Blaithans who would rather get blessings willingly from the land than wrest them from it by force. The rumors that the Blaithan government has officially outlawed landworking and actively hunts down landworkers within Blathe's borders and sentences them to exile, imprisonment, or death, are false—but the general antipathy between landworkers and landreavers still means that Blathe is not a safe place to openly practice landworking, if only because landreavers might expect landworkers to seek to destroy them in service to Vlastach and might therefore decide to make a preëmptive strike first.
Furthermore, while they are still far outnumbered by landreavers and even by elemental mages, Blathe is home to more scarmages per capita than any other nation outside Eghelot. Perhaps the scarmages think that if one widely distrusted arcanum thrives in Blathe, then it could be they can freely practice their own widely distrusted arcanum here—and for the most part they are right, since the Blaithan government seems to have no animosity toward scar magic, and scarmages in Blathe do not face the persecution they are often subject to elsewhere. There are also rumors that explorers in the Voidwood have either developed or discovered yet another arcanum, but if this does exist then it has not been widely disseminated.
History
For thousands of years, since the First Demon War if not before, the land that is now Blathe was inhabited by a people called the Xohec. While not possessing high magic or technology by today's standards, the Xohec nevertheless managed to eke out a living in this inhospitable land, making heavy use of irrigation and crop rotation and finding valuable uses for local flora and fauna. The area was officially annexed first by the Oguchi Empire and then in turn by the Heäthalen, but neither made much headway in settling or developing the territory. After trying and failing to use familiar methods of agriculture in the caliginous land or to find resources worth their while to extract, both empires more or less decided the area wasn't worth the trouble, and as long as the original inhabitants didn't object too strenuously to the empires claiming dominion over them, the empires were mostly content to leave them to their own devices. That isn't to say the Xohec suffered no negative consequences from the imperial presence; the halfhearted attempts that were made to settle the region did displace many of its inhabitants, and certainly in both empires the Xohec were seen as second-class citizens with limited rights, were often exploited by imperial immigrants, and were frequently persecuted due to their unfamiliar customs. Still, they got through the occupation with most of their traditions and territory intact, and the Xohec way of life outlived both empires.
The same was not true, however, of the Gnirut Empire, the next to lay claim to the land. Unlike its predecessors, the Gniruthi did insist on imposing its ways on the Xohec, and if that failed on displacing them by more transigent subjects. The empire razed the Xohec's settlements and built new cities of its own; tried to plant crops that were poorly suited to the area and ruined the Xohec's existing fields in the process; outlawed Xohec traditions and gods and tried to force them to adopt Gniruthi customs. While the Xohec did resist, and they did manage to curb some of the Gniruthi's worst excesses and save some of their most cherished relics from destruction, they were too few and too lacking in resources to expel the invaders completely.
The Xohec's salvation came with the arrival in the area of a large multicultural company of dépaysés who had fought in the Second Demon War, whose homes had been destroyed and who had nowhere to return to now the war was over. Seeing and sympathetic with the Xohec's plight, they decided to aid them in their struggle against the empire. Even then, the freedom-fighters were overmatched by the might of the empire, and to tip the scales they resorted to desperate measures, and found a way to take more power from the land than it would willingly give—and thus landreaving was born. This new source of power, in combination with the skills and tactics the veterans had honed in the war and the powerful telesmata and other magics they brought with them and the continued efforts of the resourceful Xohec, was finally enough to turn the tide and compel the Gniruthi to abandon this colony.
With the empire expelled, the war exiles stayed to help the Xohec rebuild and recover, and, with nowhere else to go, settled in the area themselves. The Gniruthi's constructions were either demolished or reclaimed and reconstructed—the current government headquarters of Blathe, the Chastened Palace, was the residence of the Gniruthi governor during the occupation. The Xohec had lost too much to entirely return to their former ways, but they and the newcomers mixed and combined their cultures into a novel synthesis.
When a few centuries later the Blotesian Empire sought to annex the area, the descendents of those who had driven out the Gniruthi had not forgotten the lessons they had learned. Landreaving, having proven itself a useful weapon against the Gniruthi, was brought to bear once again, and the people fended off the Blotesian advances. However, it was not an easy victory, and many of the land's inhabitants came to the conclusion that if they were to retain their hard-won independence, they would be better off organizing and forming a centralized government. Thus the nation of Blathe was born.
During the coming centuries, Blaithan landreavers continued to develop their new arcanum—there were those who were uncomfortable with such a blatant assault on the land itself, but the fact that the practice had played a röle in their liberation led most people of the area to accept it as at least a necessary evil. As other nations learned of the practice and came out against it, the people of Blathe defensively clove to it all the more; given their history of persecution, they were by now predisposed to resist other nations' opinions of them. The arcanum eventually spread elsewhere, as Blaithan landworkers traveled or settled in other lands, and as people of other nations learned it, but Blathe would have lasting infamy as the birthplace of landreaving, and as a safe harbor for its fell practitioners.
Economy and foreign relations
Blathe is, of necessity, fairly self-sufficient in terms of resources. It enjoys little trade with other countries; Grower nations understandably want nothing to do with it, and even most Crafter nations are leery of inviting the land's wrath by becoming too friendly with Blathe. Its only significant trading partners are Caphavia and Gethel, trade with the former conducted primarily over land through the Carven Lands, and with the latter primarily over the High Sea. From Caphavia, Blathe imports mostly grain, meat, and weapons, from Gethel, wood, grain, and seafood. To both, Blathe exports minerals and metals mined in its mountains; a variety of fungi with culinary or alchemical uses, and assorted crafts and manufactured objects. Despite what other states may fear, thus far for whatever reason Vlastach does not seem to have overtly punished either Caphavia or Gethel for their commerce with Blathe, but other nations remain reluctant to press their own luck.
While nearly every other nation on Vlastach to some extent regards Blathe with a combination of mistrust and dread, Blathe has managed to avoid making any enemies so oppugnant that they're likely to commence armed hostilities. Mostly, Blathe makes an effort to keep to itself and have as little to do with other nations as possible, in the hopes that they'll continue to see it as a thorn to be kept at arm's length and not engaged with rather than as an immediate danger to be actively quashed. This was not always the case; three hundred years ago the Ministry of the Exterior famously embarked on the building of a great road extending southwest from Blathe's western border. A great show was made of parading troops and caravans up and down the road to make it seem heavily trafficked. The idea was that travelers and merchants of other nations would see the road as convenient and behovely and start using it themselves, and that this would result in increased trade with Blathe and ultimately with an amelioration of its relations with other nations. What happened instead is that other nations saw the road as a threat, and a potential vector for invasion, and the project was soon abandoned. Today the road still stands, but it is seldom used, and even most of those who happen to be traveling in the direction the road leads avoid treading upon it. Originally called the Urloch Road, it is now better known outside Blathe as the Road of Defiance,
Though most foreigners prefer to give Blathe as wide a berth as possible, if anyone from elsewhere does decide to make their home in Blathe they will generally be welcomed with open arms. Blathe has an extremely liberal immigration policy and admits anyone who arrives without apparent hostile intentions, expediting their integration and settlement as far as possible—a process mostly under the purview of the Ministry of the Interior. It is largely because of this policy that Blathe is today one of the most multicultural and multiethnic nations on Vlastach, rivaled perhaps only by Osrodica, Eshilah, and Kek. However, Blathe's warm reception of immigrants extends to refugees from other nations, and this is the one thing outside of its tolerance for landreaving that most sours other nations' opinions of Blathe. On many occasions an influential enemy of another land's leaders has found asylum in Blathe, and the government of their homeland has demanded their extradition. Blathe has always refused those demands, risking the wrath of the requirants, but so far its diplomats have managed to forestall further escalation.
Culture
Many immigrants to Blathe largely keep their own customs, and in most every sizable town of Blathe there are ethnic and cultural enclaves. To the extent that Blathe has a common culture, it is a syncretic one, combining what was remembered of the Xohec traditions before their decimation by the Gniruthi with some of the customs and mores of the outsiders who had helped them throw off the empire's yoke, and then with some elements added from other recent immigrants. In general, Blaithans put great stock in freedom and independence while also, some would say paradoxically, cherishing community and coöperation. They value the free exchange of ideas, and Blathe's largest cities have excellent universities especially distinguished in their development of philosophy—although Blathe's pariahism among other nations means they see very few foreign students.
Blathe is also one of the most religious nations of Vlastach. In most nations of Vlastach, as the power of the land rose that of the gods declined; in many nations the gods are all but forgotten except during the annual Festival of the Gods. In Blathe, however, where the people have less reverence toward the land, worship of the gods has more strongly persisted. While Blathe has no state religion, many of its inhabitants do worship gods, and its cities have many temples which receive no state sponsorship but are amply funded by their faithful. Many worship the Xohec pantheon that long predates Blathe's nationhood; others hew to the gods of their ancestral homelands even when those gods are little remembered there.
In defiance of the country's lack of natural sunlight, the buildings and settlements of Blathe are filled with artificlal light. A typical city of Blathe is a riot of light in rainbows of colors, some created through landreaving, some through elemental magic, and some through candles and other nonmagical means. Many windows in Blathe are made of stained glass, often in intricate patterns. Such is Blaithan artistry with stained glass that this would no doubt be a popular export were more nations able to trade with it; as it is, Caphavia makes such extensive use of Blaithan glasswork that most people of other lands assume that Caphavia itself has a thriving tradition of stained glass craftsmanship and don't realize that almost all the stained glass in Caphavia is actually imported from Blathe.