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We're not barbarians, now. Sit down and have a meal.

Khyth Vaaxa is the sole nation and civilized entity known within all dimensions of Axocora, though their territory is currently limited to one specific region of the Evervoid. As an ancient political entity of nearly three thousand years, the governance and structure of Khyth Vaaxa have changed dozens of times, spurred by needs of the age or slow cultural revolutions. After the horrors of the Moonless Age, the consistent push to bend either the citizens or the law to prevent another civil war has made the foundational lever that moves the nation's history.

The nation is, due to the drift of the Archipelago and the corruption of Khythis specifically, constantly bombarded with external natural threats. War is foreign as a concept, relegated to ancient history, but militarization is a necessary component of Vaaxan life to defend against the homogenizing forces that call the Evervoid their patron.

Demographics

About a hundred thousand toxelugh exist within Khyth Vaaxa, all located on its sole territory of the Great Beast Archipelago. All flavors of occupation and age and personality coexist here, driven by their needs and eternal struggle against the infinite hostile Wilderness to be the best versions of themselves possible.

Around twenty percent of the citizens of Khyth Vaaxa are Attuned to one of the Nine Lights, though only around eleven thousand of them take up membership with the Ae Lugh.

Culture

Khyth Vaaxa's culture, beyond the imposed limits of its faith and law, is a careful balance between individual expression and freedom and the necessary collective traditions that bind toxelugh together. Given the more solitary nature of the species, personal property and space are highly valued.

The religiosity of the toxelugh would make one think at first glance that their culture is a monolith overseen by the church, but this is far from true. Thousands of years of the Oracles' presence has yielded mostly edits to the slowly-growing corpus of holy doctrine. Philosophies beyond what is spoken about in the Ketem liturgy are rampant and encouraged, the speculation a pastime and experimental ground for new ideas that the Great Mother Herself has not spoken on.

Gender as it is conceived in Khyth Vaaxa—its primary axis, at the very least—emerged from a synthesis of one of these philosophical debates and previous notions of "personal loci", a holdover framework for personality that is begrudgingly allowed by the church. Originally thought of as a fad, the dichotomy had to be defanged of potential heresies—dualist pseudotheism—before it was incorporated into the Ketem Doctrines.

Tradition is an incredibly important thing to the people of Khyth Vaaxa. This often comes in the form of family lines, for those who have an ancestral claim to fame. Professions are usually taught parent-to-child, but the majority of Vaaxan toxelugh aren't born "locked" into a role. Faithfully studying a skillset through an apprenticeship is much more common. For those who seek fulfillment in the mind, academic studies and dedication to archival of the collective knowledge of the people is a core part of building and maintaining tradition.

Cuisine

Khyth Vaaxa's food infrastructure is vast, spanning much of the Great Beast Archipelago and sourcing ingredients from the vast majority of climates found in the wider Evervoid. Originally very poor in variety, the empowering of the Ae Lugh to explore the Humming Wilds has led to a steady expansion of civilization's ability to cook. These efforts were greatest encouraged during the age of Knife Sawtooth's tenure in the Council of Grandmasters, during which several new spices and edible roots were discovered.

While the majority of toxelugh are unconcerned with the effects of various dishes on their bodies,^{[note 1]} there are some cuisines for the discerning that focus on one direction or the other. The flavor profiles of many dishes are more influenced by the regions in which they are primarily made, limited by types of local ingredients and storage methods as they are.

The variety of foods produced within Khyth Vaaxa—plants, spices, meats both terrestrial and aquatic—has given a constant abundance to the people. Even as some seasons have very little voibric, or other regularly-harvested crops periodically run out, there is never a time of famine so long as people are able to farm.

↑ Toxelugh are sexually dynamic creatures, with primary and secondary sex characteristics affected by diet.

Religion

Religion has, for much of the toxelugh's seven thousand year history, defined large portions of their culture and civilization. As learned from the fall of the Half Moon Empire, a poorly-managed faith can lead to the collapse of fragile order, and toxelugh civilization will always be fragile. Religion is a powerful tool, and the defining pillar of the nation's longevity is its flagship faith's dedication to order.

Ket Maragh

Ket Maragh is the religion of the state, and therefore the religion of the whole Archipelago. Its foundational belief is that of the benevolence of the Archipelago's residing divinity, the deceased goddess known as the Great Beast Lugha. Life and livelihood under Ketem faith urges strong bonds with others and well-socialized families, to eventually strengthen and grow the mind of the dead god until She can become lucid once again.

Ketem churches are multi-functional buildings and dot the Archipelago widely, even into regions that have since become uninhabitable. Thousands of years of architectural development and ruin have left some of the older ones in a permanent chimeric state, which is of course levied as a symbol of the eventual revived Lugha. Churches serve as a place of worship, but also as local treasuries and aid centers, places to seek legal advice or shelter, and community social hubs for some occasions.

Lucidity and the ability to create order are utterly sacred to the followers of Ket Maragh, both ideas that contradict the rest of the infinite Evervoid. The drifting Darkshine flora that threatens the intellect of the toxelugh is beyond an existential problem, slipping into ideas of holy siege against the body of their goddess. Because the threats to the people of the Archipelago are endless, Ketem doctrines and urgings to improve one's ability to protect the homeland from their influence are evergreen, neatly woven into the core pillars of toxelugh culture as a whole.

Government

Congregation of Will

The Congregation of Will is the largest branch of Khyth Vaaxa's government, managing logistics and law in cooperation with the Blue and Gold branches of Ket Maragh. They have dozens of smaller Committees dedicated to the documentation and management of resources across the Archipelago, the systems of education, land ownership, civil disputes, and much more. The Council of Representatives at the top of this Congregation is made up of one elected member from each Committee, making a more centralized network for internal management and information sharing.

One of the Congregation's main duties is to discuss, vote on, and write rationale regarding the various bills brought to light by the Chamber of Petitions, who gathers common issues into written proposals in collaboration with Ketem Confessors. These bills become preliminary laws for further review by other branches of government, which have a tested period that can be ended via a Common Veto of the people, provided 5/9 of the eligible population votes to rescind the law. If the trial period passes with no common veto, it is entered into the Constitution of Common Vow, which constitutes Khyth Vaaxa's mundane law. The duty of ratifying these bills falls to the Chamber of Will, who work with their resident Ketem Orators to determine the final wording in accordance with divine law.

Overturning laws in the Common Vow, as well as overseeing civil and criminal cases, falls to the Chamber of Discernment and their subsidiaries. In tandem with Ketem Orators, they oversee challenges to existing laws, decennial referendums and amendments to the Constitution of Common Vow. The Chamber of Discernment itself contains the High Court of Khyth Vaaxa, which oversees era-defining appeals and governmental criminal cases. The Lower Courts are managed by the subsidiary branches known as the Chambers of Civil Ordinance and are broken up by region and jurisdiction—civil, criminal, bureaucratic.

Ae Lugh

The Ae Lugh are both an acting executive branch of the Vaaxan government and its military, though their power over the former is heavily limited. Making up a substantial portion of the populace, it is something of a stretch to call them all government employees.

The idea of military for the only nation in the known world is one that protects from more dangerous inanimate threats. They are guardians against the tides of Darkshine-infested Wilderness that regularly threaten the safety of Vaaxan citizens, as well as an inward-facing law enforcement structure.

Ae Lugh governmental roles are primarily limited to the Council of Grandmasters and their personal cabinets. As the executive branch, they collect information on incidents and legal happenings and issue orders to the Ae Lugh to take action. Their undersecretaries work with teams from the legislative branches to build the regulations around the uses of the Nine Lights and military law.

All members of the Ae Lugh—by virtue of their being Attuned—are legally recognized as psychically blind, and given protections that shape a large portion of accessibility laws, particularly on identification. Some challenge their role as intranational law enforcement based on this psychic blindness, but such protests are both illegal on a discriminatory basis—as Attunements cannot be broken and are thus involuntary factors—and heretical under the Dialogue of Chromatic Claws, which states that the Ae Lugh are aligned with such power to repurpose them towards an executive role.

Religious Influence

While not directly stated as part of the governmental structure of Khyth Vaaxa, the church of Ket Maragh is functionally another branch of its administration. Its own hierarchy within the clergy is carefully structured to allow for subtle control of the population and their behaviors, as well as forming the information backbone of the whole of civilization. This manipulation of the peoples of the Archipelago is done out of a desire to prevent another collapse like the Moonless Age, where repressive religious practices led to mass psychosis and revolts that turned into a century-long war.

Ket Maragh was originally a theocratic church-state, and though still loath to give power to much else, has loosened into a more cultural and spiritual role and given governmental power mostly to the laypeople. The Black Branch, which forms the upper echelons of the church, will not entertain any ideas of other faiths, however. The ultimate fear for the Ketem clergy is that the faith that has persisted for almost three thousand years will be supplanted by a much more chaotic and unstable faith, which will return civilization to ash in its poor management.

The church has its fangs sunk into every branch of government still, though not without mutual desire. Ketem religious law and mundane Vaaxan law must be aligned to prevent instabilities, and so the Chamber of Will calls upon Ketem Orators to aid them. The creation of law and bills requires knowledge of what people wish to see done, and so the Chamber of Petitions works with the Blue Branch's information networks to compile such things. The Ae Lugh need information similarly to direct their orders, and so rely on the existing infrastructure of the Confessors and the Shadows.

Calendar

The concept of timekeeping at all in the Evervoid seems ridiculous. There are no universal cyclic elements to track, no synchronous measures which can be understood in nature. Everything is continuous and asynchronous, to the point that it looks eternal. Change and drift are irregular and slow, but on large scales all nature seems to smoothly fill in the gaps like flowing water.

Order, imposed and artificial, measured by one historical event and held to that standard with machines, forms Khyth Vaaxa's imposure of time on the eternally self-similar. The base unit from which all else is divided is the Year, a period coincident with the time between the nation's first crop of Voibric being planted and harvested. This measure of time is not exact to every harvest, but it roughly approximates the average.

This year is then broken up into twelve months of thirty days. These breakings, alongside other intervals like the antiquated three-day shift and the six-day week (from "Whiecel", meaning a complete cycle of work and recuperation), make useful markers for interpersonal relations. Each day is broken into twenty-four hours, a number chosen for its great divisibility and therefore practical usage. Even length and factorable units were the basis for the new standard calendar, though the numbering of the years changed after the first Attunement.

Specialized machines in centralized locations function to tell the time, carefully tuned to fractions of years, months, days and hours. These were some of the first engineering projects of the young Khyth Vaaxa, and the Great Clocktower of Tagth Maragh stands as the oldest continually-functioning instrument of time in civilization. Clocks do not measure time, but rather create the framework upon which it is measured.

Historical records are difficult to date due to the much more nebulous timekeeping of the past, particularly during the Dark Ages and before. However, there is a clear line of emergence of the systems involved with dates.

Before Khyth Vaaxa, before most civilization began, the idea of timekeeping was theorized by the ancients in their pursuit of agriculture. Voibric, the first domesticated crop on the Archipelago, was massively important to the first societies of toxelugh rising out of the Silence's feral curse. Normally all crops of it grow out of sync, continuously sparse in harvestable grain, but the clever farmers planted whole fields at once, and so the crop was greatly abundant all at the same time. This ancient measure of time, arising from this new artificial order, was called the "Ghearwest". They varied in length and had names instead of numbers, given for notable events that occurred during the growing period. The time unit of the "shift" also began at this time, an informal period that determined when groups would be swapped between work and rest. They were roughly three days long, according to scholars, but most modern toxelugh only work for a few hours at a time. All other measurements of time were rather vague and poetic, describing the growth state of the voibric at the time designated.

A few millennia later, another civilization noted for moon-worship sighted a great collision of two, which sent one spinning at a noticeable rate. They set a more standardized calendar by nine of these rotations, which happened to be close to the growth period of voibric. This standard lunar calendar was organized around the "Gear veht", as well as "moonings", what would later be reanalyzed as months. However, the variance within voibric's own growth period was an issue for this system. As they enforced harvest on the turn of the gear veht, many crops were undergrown or already over-ripe and wilting.

The Dark Age saw the fragmenting of timekeeping, as the battle between micro-states gave each a good agenda to rework the system of keeping time for strategic purposes. Khyth Vaaxa would ultimately arise from the monastic proto-Ket Maragh order that claimed victory and hegemony over the Island. Instead of war strategy, which most burgeoning nations would base their calendars around, the new civilization would create a system that allowed greatly flexible order. "Shifts" had become more obsolete as quick naps became culturally dominant to stay as consistently active in wartime as possible, so third-shifts, days, were used as the primary small unit. For work-shifts within these days, 24 hours was considered a nearly perfect number, as it is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 12. A harvest "season" exists, but is not enforced to a specific date.

Economy

Khyth Vaaxa operates on a mixed economy, with careful governmental regulations managing an intramercantile and fragmentary capitalist structure. The regions of the Archipelago are useful to this structure, forcing both specialization from their environmental factors and centralized transportation through the Black Gates. Khythis' economy out of all the islands benefits the most from this structure, as its centrality enables vast markets and shopping districts from across the Archipelago to appear.

The Archipelago's various infrastructure centers—government buildings, transport networks like the Black Gates, and archival centers—are all necessary to hold the delicate balance of the nation together. Jobs in these sectors call for high skill and dedication, but pay generously with taxes levied from their services and subsidies from the Congregation of Will's treasury.

Currency has generally followed a coin-based system since the widespread availability of mining technology, though with limited area the Archipelago has been careful to not overproduce. This has been a problem through most of history, with Ae Lugh island-destroying operations often having some effort to extract coin-metals mixed in. Extensive quarrying operations from Rias Eirn in the Stardawn allowed Khyth Vaaxa to secure a large wealth of exotic metal to work with, so modern currency is often inlaid with these rarer metals as a measure of security. These form the New Aur, the primary currency used for high-value transactions. The Old Aur, usually just called the Aur (₳), is the currency most often used by regular people, and is in fact the backing currency for the New Aur.

Barter economies do still thrive in smaller towns and regions further from quarries, as well as throughout marketplaces, due to the subjective value they hold and the ease of business-to-business trade while stationed as a merchant. While legal and protected as a legitimate form of trade, barter is somewhat disliked by the Gold Branch of Ket Maragh for their difficulty to track for accounting purposes.

History

Khyth Vaaxa is the longest continuous nation the Great Beast Archipelago has seen, with its history approaching nearly three thousand years. Detailed below are some of the most influential points in the nation's history.

Birth in War

The Moonless Age was wrought by a critical mass of despair. Not hopelessness nor rage, no emotions that base, yet baser than both. Nearly seventy years of total psychic prohibition had shorn a fundamental part of life from toxelugh life. Imagine, being able to see light flickering just past your eyelids, but having them sewn shut. Told you would be best off blind. How many years could you take that, before tearing through the thread to see the light of day?

Oh, the wars were terrible. Faith in faith itself was broken, faith in politicians even more so. And so the people of the Island shattered sickle and rake upon each other like beasts, fueled by a terrible flame of unstable ideology and learned technology above that prime limit of violence. Eighty long years of bloodshed. The independents had no great power such as the Lights. They were quickly slain for returning to the nature of their species. In rejection of the order that caused the shattering, they fell first. So the militias and states remained, and the desperation to make sense of it all spurred religion back to life. Dozens of them, of earth and sky and bone and water and flame. Who would stand victorious, for their superior ideal? Who would triumph by debate and unify the world?

No such thing. Violence and killing, that is all which determined victory in the day. And the victors, strategists and masters of communion and reverends of the moon of Death that they were, used this to their growing faith. The warrior-monks the decay-venerators latched themselves onto gave good seeds for synthesis, and as the bones under the earth were uncovered by the spectacular bloodshed, they sowed. The greatest and foremost among the dead, silent but still Remnant. A Goddess larger than the mind could make out, slain and rotting by a foe beyond. This was half of the victors' life: Ket Maragh.

They pulled the warriors in by the reins, gave meaning and philosophy to the bloodshed, justified the cause of unity across the Island, dared to pretend that a peaceful age would ensue. Lying while preparing lies to make that lie true. Moving in the shadows, learning evermore. Honing a blade unseen by the front lines.

And so the last banner fell, and the Ketem Oracles of the first generation stood atop the bodies and gave their fateful founding, feeding the crop for the first year with the spoils that reddened the land until the time the Lights made themselves known. Khyth Vaaxa, established as councils of councils to recover and replace knowledge, order, supply chains, anything and everything necessary to prevent another collapse, was founded. The Ae Lugh, ascendant from the greatest of the war strategists and their loyal warriors, were placed to keep the order of law and snuff out dissent before another war could set the world back further again.

Turmoil to Establish Order

The first century was horrendous. Still boiling from the memory of wars, of ideals for freedom, thank the Beast none recalled the times before the Empire fell, repression under the new Order was hardly unchallenged. The Oracles communed with the Mother, did their best to see into the hearts of their people, to convince them that unity and order were not the harm the Half Moon had done. Many people were slain for rebellion, and trust eroded.

Crops were bare many times, supplies weak, people poor. Urgings for faith and unity were grim and pathetic. The Oracle Kashis Vologhoinn, later known as the Oracle of Dry Tears, expressed in a sacred Dialogue that she felt the touch of slow disintegration of society. Motions within Ketem subfactions towards material needs and aid accelerated slowly after this Dialogue, likely spurred on by the shrewd Oracle. This was the origin of the more practical of the Branches, the Gold and Blue. Building these foundations gave the vulnerable the push to trust the church absolutely, a boon that informed the omnipotent grip Ket Maragh holds over the Archipelago.

Elemental Political Upheaval

Then came the Lights, beings beyond Lugha's dominion and power. The implications of these... godlike sources of power struck fear into the state. So much relied on an order that could organize itself on common ground. The faith had little way to accommodate the new power, and the state was under fire for discrimination on the basis of the Lights for decades. Many positions relied on aura-reading, including mercantile ones, and so any who did not see fit to use their strengths within the Ae Lugh were shunned from work they desired. The closest Khyth Vaaxa came to brutal civil war was in the 120s CE. The descendants of Khythis Allseer who sought a peaceful life had built enough resentment for civilization's forcing of their role to begin a coalition, the Union of Light Spurned.

The First Light was regarded as a blessing by this time, but one inundated with specific purpose by the Great Beast. To go against this seemingly ordained warrior role to squander its potential was, culturally speaking, transgressive. The Union argued that being born into such a power is not something they chose, and the right to self-determine overruled the half-blind blessings of mute outer gods and the role merely assumed to go along with it. They were branded, rightly at the time, as heretics, defiant in the face of the Great Mother.

The people in charge of Khyth Vaaxa's executive branch saw their rebellion as something to put down, destructive to the ideas civilization was founded on. The high Chambers of the Congregation of Will were not as easily swayed by the Union's aggressive marches for the ability to deny the will of Lugha, and were willing to pass further restrictions on manner of protest to silence them.

The Ae Lugh of the time were set upon the Union of Light Spurned, killing several of them in a massacre that could hardly be called due process, even by the more nebulous standards of the time. People with no strong opinion began dividing among their sympathies, and counter-riots began to take a death toll. The Ketem church was deafeningly silent through this time, unable to make an orthodox statement in favor of either side.

It happened that common people were smart enough that decade to cause bottom-up change in the government, petitioning through the Chamber relevant for laws banning psyche-requirements for various careers, one after another after another, under basis of false trials and unfair sensory discrimination. Most of these complaints were completely fabricated, but they brought enough concern that the Chamber of Will had no choice but to consider them. On the basis of the Union riots, the speaker moved to dismiss the aggregated bill, but this was the chance given to the otherwise muted powerhouse of politics: the church.

It was the resident Orator there, Lamrad Ironcloth, who insisted the Chamber set aside external political happenings and focused on the actual content of the bill. Lamrad was himself a sympathizer with the Union, but had only attended their happenings undercover. His identity was scarcely known even within the Union. Begrudgingly, the Chamber deferred. The arguments for and against were presented, but without the external opinion on the people suspected to have submitted the petitions in the first place, there was little resistance to be had. The Ketem stance was officially documented as such:

We find that though Psyche is our great Gift from the Mother, all are returned to Her in death, and thus no fragment of Her Will shall be held lesser than any other. Such it is spoken in the First Dialogues, such is it written in the First Scriptures. Judgment by use of Psyche is to judge one's purpose in life to be dependent on Her Gift's weight and shape. These judgments have not been spoken nor written, and to deign a firm may pose such judgments that God Herself dares not is counter to Her will.

Even so, the first bill barely passed, after heavy amendments and an extreme length of time to adapt. The Union used this case as their flagship argument, giving the argument that the Ketem position was to support them. Many more hearings followed, cases against those who believed they could raise a Common Veto of the law and had held off from changing their policies. It was a slow process until an Attuned Ae Lugh Master presented a case themself, having been denied a position they intended to take to expand their skills on the basis that they could not perceive aura.

The case, however, was not a wrongful denial of employment. That portion was uncovered during the murder trial of that business' owners. The offender, Torran Goldsower, called the act "a measure to save the time of others seeking their right to work" and was found guilty. The business itself, however, was found in contempt of lawful orders. Though Torran themself was sentenced to years in prison, the Ae Lugh were sent to investigate and punish those who still disobeyed the new Auric Equality Act. Harsher laws were passed in response to the findings, especially as more of the Ae Lugh were Attuned and saw the fiscal ignominy in which they were regarded.

The only place remaining where Psyche was left required was the church, where it still remains. An open link to the Great Beast's mind is, according to law, required for any position there, and it is thus exempt from the AEA.

Rias Eirn

The year 944 saw the development of interdimensional rifts break through with an immensely powerful discovery: the Stardawn. What began as a show of power to experiment with the wrath of shifted Lights had turned up a fully habitable dimension. Six years of toil into creating the first Dimension Gateway produced the link to the Stardawn that persisted in the center of what would become Rias Eirn, with teams of Space-Attuned workers pulling each other back out and memorizing the right "refraction" to access the Stardawn.

In 950, the Gate opened up, and while the Lights were mutant and strange to wield and direction seemed to defy those who wandered off the path, colonists began pouring into the new territory. No Darkshine to steal their minds. A blinding thing they would come to call the Sun, brighter than the palest moon at its closest reach. Expanse of land that seemed endless, filled with new and strange metals. This is where Rias Eirn started, Khyth Vaaxa's only territorial expansion.

For eighty long years, the new colony thrived. Thousands of toxelugh migrated to the endless free wilderness, and though they often lost their path, their children became excellent wayfarers. The future of civilization seemed bright, open. But freedom and what some would call luxury began to take root in the third generation. The convention of names to reflect a purpose had begun to wilt, distant from the Beast as Rias Eirn was. The church's influence waned in the colony without the original fear of mind-loss, and diligence in study too began to fail. Now free to explore and spend much time alone without threat of the soul-death, society shifted dramatically. Traditions broken by a scarce few in the second generation, allowed for the sake of adapting to the new dimension, now struggled to enforce themselves. Outside the Gate-city of Raulach, word of even blasphemous interpretations of the faith made its way back to the mainland.

Some immigrants suspect that the Cataclysm of 1038 CE was orchestrated by the Ketem church and the wider Vaaxan government to enforce hegemony, but the scale of it casts doubt upon that theory. An immense storm of elemental fury beseiged all the explored area of the Stardawn, rife with stellar lightning and fueled by every island it crossed. Of the roughly thirty thousand inhabitants of the dimension, only a fifth made it out alive, mostly from Raulach itself. The Gate was destroyed to prevent the Cataclysm from breaching into the Archipelago, forced into inactivity for a long twenty-eight years. All in all, it certainly was effective at banishing or killing off the more "deviant" populations of the new culture, and preserving as much Vaaxan order as possible.

Rias toxelugh now struggle to find their way in the Evervoid, struggle to fit in under the dim eternal night and the seemingly claustrophobic society they now find refuge in. The Lights fit well with the legends they were taught, but lacked the intuition of the Stardawn's own versions of them. A scant few have special use now, though, as emissaries of the Voyager Project.

[1] Toxelugh are sexually dynamic creatures, with primary and secondary sex characteristics affected by diet.

[note 1]

@@ Line 61: / Line 61: @@
 About a hundred thousand '''[[toxelugh]]''' exist within Khyth Vaaxa, all located on its sole territory of the '''[[Great Beast Archipelago]]'''. All flavors of occupation and age and personality coexist here, driven by their needs and eternal struggle against the infinite hostile '''Wilderness''' to be the best versions of themselves possible.
-Around eleven percent of the citizens of Khyth Vaaxa are '''[[Toxelugh#Attunement|Attuned]]''' to one of the '''[[Nine Lights]]'''.
+Around twenty percent of the citizens of Khyth Vaaxa are '''[[Toxelugh#Attunement|Attuned]]''' to one of the '''[[Nine Lights]]''', though only around eleven thousand of them take up membership with the '''[[Ae Lugh]]'''.
 == Culture ==