The Free State of Aber

Founding date:1782

Total Population: 

Capital: Aber

Leadership: Train Lord Raedaer (de facto), elected parliament (official)

Terrain: Principally farmland, interspersed with savannah and low-lying marshes

Nationality: Aberite

Affiliation:  Aspiring Crusader

Allies: Unknown

Notes of Interest: 

When Train Lord Raedaer’s spearheads crossed the border between Western Arnyara and Creevin, they saw themselves not as a conquering army, but as triumphant liberators reclaiming what had been thought lost forever since Creevin’s absorption of Eastern Arnyara in 1642. 

Though Western Arnyara and its breakaway province of Aber had been bitter enemies for fifty years before the latter’s victory in the 3rd Aber/Arnyaren War in 1583, the ensuing extensive intermarriage between the two nations’ first families and the renaming of Aber itself to Eastern Arnyara made them once again kin in fact, if not in sentiment. In the bitter two centuries of national decline that followed, however, Aber became in the Western Arnyaran imagination something more than it had ever been in reality. Compared to the waterless deserts of Western Arnyara, it was a paradise, with arable land and water so plentiful that it had to be dammed up, and thanks to the weakness of the useless First Families ensconced in Glasda and bought with Creevish money, it was a birthright denied the long-suffering Arnyaran people. No quar felt this more keenly nor worked to rectify this than Train Lord Raedaer, and his rise to sole leadership of the Foskyldae was due in no small part to his reputation as the foremost champion of the Return Movement.

Raedaer found a powerful ally in Campryg Loeck, the standard-bearer of the Crusade in the west. Their secret concord permitted the Foskyldae to move through Maer Braech to bypass the fortifications on the Arnyaran-Creevish frontier in return for an Arnyaran invasion of Coftyr. The Train Lord, eager to break free of the strictures of the past, could now be confident that his devoted but as-yet unblooded rhyflers would not expend their strength in forlorn hopes and the unending grind of siege warfare, as so many millions of other quar had throughout the endless bloodshed of The Long War. With surprise on their side and the support of arguably the most powerful Quar in the west, Raedaer was well-positioned for his long-dreamed of redressing of ancient wrongs.

It was the great Alykinder himself who disrupted the perfection of the plan by dying, unknowingly doing with his last breaths what he had done so many times to so many other Quars’ plans over the past twenty years. Taking advantage of the golden moment of confusion that followed, the Foskyldae erupted across the Creevish border six months earlier than agreed upon. There, they found themselves facing a multitude of foes: the Creevish; the Coftyrans; the Fidwogians, and the age-old bane of every military plan in history, the steadily accumulating friction that follows closely in war’s wake. With the supply lines from Western Arnyara choked off by the Royal Coftyran Expeditionary Force, operating in conjunction with Creevish partisans, and having lost the trust of Loeck and his Crusaders first by his premature descent upon Creevin, and latterly by advancing far beyond the agreed-upon stop line, Raedaer’s situation was beyond dire. 

The Train Lord, however, had not ascended to the lofty heights of his position for lack of cunning, however. Western Arnyara remains a barren land, more a place the Foskyldae returned to periodically for lack of anywhere else to go than a true homeland, and the torrent of exuberant Arnyaran settlers flooding into Creevin, more than a hundred thousand strong and still coming, left it less hospitable than ever before. With the most ardent supporters of the Foskyldae now within the borders of Old Aber, the ineffectual central government of Western Arnyara began to falteringly reassert its power. As Raedaer said in his radio address announcing the formation of the Free State of Aber, “We have not left home, we have come home.” The weaklings claiming to rule from Glasda were welcome to the wasteland that was Western Arnyara, just as all true Arnyarans were welcome to the fertile paradise of Aber, to fulfill the dreams of their ancestors. Despite Glasda’s effort to suppress the news, they were powerless to stop Raedaer’s pronouncement in pamphlets and on phonograph records carried by clan caravan to any quar in Western Arnyara who cared to learn of it.

Equally important to the Train Lord, the word soon reached Loeck in Maer Braech. The Free State of Aber is, on its face, the culmination of Alykinder’s dream for all of Alwyd: a new, free nation, ruled not for and by the First Families, but instead its people. The mayors of many villages have already been elected by their constituents, and Raedaer has promised that once the war situation permits, the quar of Aber will choose their own leader by the ballot. Cynics note that this is an easy promise for the Train Lord to make, as his victory, should he choose to run, is a virtual certainty. Creevish propaganda leaflets have made much of the fact that no one has ever held a national election before in Alwyd’s recorded history, with the strong suggestion that whoever counts the ballots will decide the winner. But none of this changes that this is something profoundly new. How Loeck will react is yet to be seen, but the effect on the newly-minted Aberites has been electric. Raedaer has been deluged with unsolicited designs for national flags, proposals for patriotic holidays, and suggestions for official national dress. 

Amidst the rejoicing and excitement, however, some Aberites who were once Creevish have been conspicuous by their displeasure. Famously independent, the quar of the region had long lived with little reference to the dictates of the crown, to the point where some suggested that Loeck permitted the Arnyaren invasion as a kindness to the Dowager Mauvn, and the Train Lord hoped that with no love lost between the inhabitants of the Elghmore Valley and Invevenverta, that they would soon cleave to the newborn Free State. While for many this has been the case, aided in no small part by the novel prospect of voting for their leaders, this has not proved to be a universal sentiment. 

The initial Foskyldae advance into Creevin relied upon massive firepower to smash through Creevish defences, both real and imagined, and in the latter category were many of the trench highway’s “crater-towns”, some turned to makeshift strongpoints by partisans and the Trench Watch, and some still occupied by their civilian inhabitants. Compounding the ill-will this engendered, the follow-on waves of Arnyaren settlers were not gentle with what they regarded as usurpers living in their stolen homeland, and many a Creevish family found their home “reclaimed” by Arnyarens who had never before laid eyes upon it. With nothing else to lose, many of these embittered survivors of the liberation of Aber have taken up arms, some in hopes of restoring the status quo ante bellum, and some merely to inflict as much hurt upon the invaders as they can while they still draw breath. In many cases leavened by long-service professional soldiers from the RCEF or the Trench Watch, several of these bands have proven to be more than a match for Aber’s hastily-organized and poorly-trained constabulary, necessitating the withdrawal of a full train of rhyflers and their attendant vehicles from the front lines. 

More sordidly, Creevin has long been witness to simmering tensions between different political factions or between clans, and with the disruption caused by the invasion, some have chosen to settle what scores they can before the confusion abates. Scarcely a week goes by without some act of violence attributable to long-held hatreds, and the Foskyldae’s local commanders often find that informants guiding them to “partisan strongholds” are simply using them to definitively settle some mundane internecine squabble.

Riven by internal strife and surrounded by the war which birthed it, the Free State’s future hangs in the balance. Much will depend on Galo Loeck’s reaction. For now, Train Lord Raedaer and his new nation must hang on as best they can, and wait.