The Beastfolk Theocracy and the City of Stallia

The city of Stallia is the oldest city of The Steppes. There was in fact a time in which the whole of the area presently known as The Steppes was simply called Stallia, but the city is currently a skeleton of itself with a population of just about 60.000 individuals.

The history of Stallia starts shortly after the collapse of the saurian civilization. The remnants of the saurian civilization crumbled when the last warlord, Draknharn, mysteriously disappeared leaving humanity to fend on its own. This event triggered a very turbulent era in which, unfortunately for modern scholars, most existing records were destroyed and very few new ones were produced.

This period is known as the Beastfolk Theocracy. About the one thing modern scholars know about this brief era is that the cult to Draknharn was as omnipresent as schism and internecine wars were, resulting in an accelerated collapse. The current massive beastfolk cults like The Church of the Glorious Draknharn, hierarchical structures in which priests hold absolute power over their subjects, are believed to be remnants of that era.

It is believed that at this time the altered humans known as beastfolk first appeared. This could have been the cause either of some emergent theological concept, a commercial scheme, or a combination of any other factors. With the appearance of beastfolk, it is presumed that, for some compound reason, their current hatred towards unchanged humans followed.

With these events on the background, small groups of outcasts, escapees and renegades started to settle in The Steppes fleeing from the Theocracy.

The Steppes were back then, as they are now to a lesser extent, a barren semi-arid wasteland. No saurian or beastfolk population is known to have ever settled inside this uninteresting, resourceless land, so the runaways were largely left alone and deemed not worth the trouble of chasing. In this manner, the first subtle, gradual migration of humans into The Steppes took place, in which an estimated 10.000 to 20.000 individuals started to create small bordering settlements.

By the time the second migration took place a few decades later, a good chunk of those settlements had combined into the city of Stallia. The first records of this era speak of the Beastfolk Theocracy as a bygone society and provide modern scholars with a similar picture to the one they are familiar with. That is, one of warring clans and constant warfare, but in a greater scale.

As conflict intensified and refugees started to pour into The Steppes, they started to flood the streets of the fledgling and unprepared Stallia.

In response to this compound problem, The Court of All Humans was hastily formed. On the one hand, neither the supplies nor the infrastructure of the city could sustain an influx several times larger than the city's population at the time. On the other hand, those refugees were often closely followed by marauding beastfolk clans in hot pursuit.

The strategy The Court adopted would shape the character of Stallia and lay the foundations of its grain redistribution system. The society was militarized and all \"impractical\" pursuits were set aside. An organism was then created to forward and accommodate new refugees as tenant farmers in the vast flatlands east of Stallia, the area farthest away from Malahs Kovoss and the beastfolk peril, where they would cultivate the land to feed themselves and the military.

This worked well enough to, at the very least, fend the numerous but uncoordinated waves of beastfolk bandits, prevent starvation and, above all, give modern humans a chance to survive. But the old traditions die hard and Crops and Cultivations of Eastern Stallia continue to maintain the widely criticised and ruthlessly enforced grain redistribution system. These past events have also shaped the stallian psyche into a dry, austere and down-to-earth one into which hard labour and historical knowledge are the most valued virtues.

As new cities were founded (more on that in future posts), more lively individuals were glad to leave boring Stallia behind, so the character of those that remained was accentuated all the more. From that point on, the city gradually fell into stagnation and a progressive lost of political relevance and manpower.