In the early ages of humanity, everyone lived together in the eastern side of the great continent in peaceful cooperation. Together, they shared the goals of Ragos and Crane to grow strong and wise, so they may survive the mistakes of the people who came before. But the two brothers came to disagree on far too many things for this cooperation to continue. While those who followed the will of Ragos would settle in the north and form the nation of Pyris, someday to be redubbed Heron, those who remained loyal to Crane turned south to start a more civilized society called Eris.
While the people of Eris were conscious of the perpetual threat of Pyrisians, their concerns leaned toward the foundation of a stable society from the very beginning. While various mountain clans clashed for control of the north, the people of Eris had formed the very first government, which was referred to as the Council Republic. Their idea behind this early form of government was that towns would hold local elections to determine the most competent master of every trade. The elected officials would then be entrusted with collaborative power to make decisions on their town’s behalf. Electing councilors based on their trades was meant to offer equal representation for all lifestyles, but the system was far from perfect.
Corruption eroded the people’s faith in the Council Republic early on, but the objections of the citizens were waved off by the country’s growing intellectual elite, who cultivated a sense of mystique by meditating on solitary hills and returning with claims of epiphanies from Crane himself. It was this phenomenon that would change Eris’ future forever, as common people who were curious of the source of the elites’--known also as the Windtalkers-- power braved the hilltops themselves for answers.
Those who came back from these exploratory excursions were truly enlightened, but would not brag openly about their experiences as the elitists did. Instead, they had become even more reserved and distrustful of others. These conspicuous changes in people quieted talk of “communing with the sky” as the Erisians called it. But as the First Age neared its final decades, people had begun to notice those who had completed this ritual meeting together in private. The secrets of these enigmatic rendezvous were uncovered by a lone sworn man, the Erisian equivalent of a knight. He discovered that those who had communed with the sky had banded together to form a ring of spies. Moreover, he discovered that these spies had been in the process of studying the movement of the air itself and how to influence it. When the sworn man released his findings to the public, the people learned for the first time of the birth of wind magic.
The sworn men would chase these spies for years, hoping to bend them to the will of the people. But these spies, who would later go on to be known as the Windlords, were resistant to any authority. While they spied regularly on the other nations for Eris’ benefit, they never pledged their support to the Council Republic as an organization.
By the year 1E281, Eris had settled all of Mortanis’ southern shores, so many of its people had begun to move north, hoping to settle the eastlands once more. There, they found the people of Necros to be hospitable toward their southern guests until the fleet of Akis began to land on their shores. Pressured to turn back by the imperial invaders, the settlers retreated to Eris with haunting tales of Akisian barbarism, which made even the warriors of Pyris uneasy.
As Akisian raiders took control of Necros, and warred with Pyris for control of Coronos, the people of Eris watched anxiously while conflict brewed between the wind talkers and the windlords. The former had maintained a firm grip on their influence with the Council Republic by exerting control on Eris’ flow of information while the latter group had formed a crusade to broaden the flow of information to all. Over time, these differences exploded into a mutual enmity in which wind talkers would slander and stigmatize the windlords while the windlords undermined the wind talkers’ power by sharing their secrets with the public.
These factions would declare a truce when an emissary from Pyris risked her life to cross the eastlands to petition the Erisians for aid against Akis. This was the start of an unprecedented, and never again repeated, alliance between Pyris and Eris which sought to repel the Akisian invaders from Mortanis. The elves of Terris would join this war on the side of Akis initially, which kicked off a time known across Mortanis and Midania today as the War of the Gods.
When this war ended, and the Gods punished the mortals for continuing to fight in their name after they had declared a truce, Eris was the country least affected by the fallout since their soldiers obeyed Crane’s will to lay down their arms without hesitation. So, while the other countries, struggled with the consequences of their stubbornness, Eris was free to look inward towards its own problems, which had grown to their breaking point during the war.
For their contributions during the war, Windlords enjoyed a wellspring of popular support which weakened the threats of the wind talkers. As the wind talkers began to lose favor with the public, their efforts to maintain their power became increasingly desperate and draconian. This led to a great deal of resentment toward the wind talkers that were curbed by the windlords’ continued attacks on their reputations and turned to ridicule. Without credibility, the wind talkers quietly faded away in the hopes of living comfortably on the wealth their lifetimes of exploitation had earned them. This left most of the country stagnating with a severe loss of capital and shared resources. This choice signaled the death knell of both the wind talkers and the Council Republic.
With the voices of the wind talkers long gone, the disenfranchised citizens of Eris advocated, for the first time, the abolishment of the Council Republic and the foundation of a system of governance that benefits everyone. This drive was supported by the windlords, who claimed that the increased freedom the people sought was the will of Crane himself. Some of the order's commanders began to engage in politics for the first time, using a wealth of skillfully acquired information to form logical arguments against the Council Republic.
This revolution would come to its conclusion with the Council Republic’s final election in the year 2E3. The new council of Eris’ capital of Rashara voted unanimously to end the Council Republic, ratify the Gale Accord--which established an open democracy--and name the windlords as its protectors. The Gale Accord, as the foundation of their new society, became the country’s namesake when the people voted to relegate their old ways to the past with a new name--Galeon.
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