Kvetya

The Nation of Kvetya is a snowy, northern land known for its dense pine forests and its wholly matriarchal government.  Women rule Kvetya, under the eye of the Great Hive Mother.  They believe that men lack souls, and represent the conglomeration of the "human animal"'s traits, while women are "human people" who have evolved to lead society into the modern age.

How did this happen?:  Kvetya was not always like this.  Once upon a time, during Yurand's Lion War, Kvetya was a simple island north of Megama and west of Yurand, with a sparse native population.  Megama was strong during this time, and took advantage of Yurand's preoccupation with the succession (and subsequent founding of the Dual Monarchy) to claim a large colony with resources that merited investment.  The Megamai swept in, the natives capitulated, the Winged Nobles sent to command the expedition went home (the cold is, after all, bad for their wings) and the garrisons and governors they left behind set up shop and began eking profit out of the island.  Two hundred and fifty-seven years ago, that changed.  Kvetya had become a popular place for refugees and the lost, and when the cry for freedom went up, it was answered.  An outcast druid of Outer Yurand led the people in revolution, and after overthrowing the last of the Megamai yoke, declared himself ruler for all time.  His original name is unknown, but after this he went by the title of Steel-Souled Wolf King.

But what about the amazons?:  Not yet.  Steel-Souled Wolf King was an incredibly powerful spellcaster.  He ruled for one hundred and fifty years as an unchallenged magical autocrat, wielding sorcery that could drive soldiers into berserker rages, turn himself into a great, silver beast with fangs as long as a man's finger, and call forth armies of Kvetyan wolves to defend himself.  Those who angered him were simply banished from the city, exiled as night fell and the wolves came to hunt.  The people huddled in their homes and prayed for the long night to end.  It was, however, not SSWK's magic that led to his downfall, but his traits as a human being.  SSWK saw himself as the alpha of the greatest pack to ever roam the skies.  Consequently, it was his right and privilege to indulge himself however he wanted, and SSWK had an abiding weakness for pretty girls.  He took by force whichever caught his eye, even for a moment, and he kept them forever, even spending vast amounts of money on taking slaves and kidnapping foreigners.  After all, it was unconscionable to let lesser men think they could lay hands on a woman he had bedded, so he never let them go.  As time passed, he only grew worse.  He was terrified in the depths of his soul that another man would steal one of his women, that they might fall in love with someone besides him, that they might betray him by touching another man.  First, he killed or drove away the powerful men of the capital, then he installed his own women in positions of power, using it as a convenient  way to delegate responsibility and leave him more time for his vast harems.  Over the course of his long rule, this left virtually every position of authority that he had cause to hear about directly in the hands of a woman.  Men were banished from the capital entirely, it was said that SSWK could no longer even tolerate having another man in his private playground.

Life under Steel-Souled Wolf King was terrible, especially for the women in his clutches.  He was cruel, vicious, and made no secret of his overwhelming power or what he felt Kvetya was owed for his protection.  Those who resisted were brutally punished, those who informed were richly rewarded by the decadent wizard.  A rapist and a murderer, but who could stand up to an individual that could turn an entire Yurandish army into maddened wolves under his command?

It took a beautiful girl stolen from a Pebble Islander oreship to save Kvetya.  One night, as Steel-Souled Wolf King was partaking of several of his concubines, a captive he had nicknamed "Black Anya" plunged a shard of glass stolen from a broken window into his eye.  Legends conflict on whether he died or fled, but he was never trouble for Kvetya after this.  Anya gathered together the thousands of women in the city, and spoke to them.  She said that a great primal spirit had spoken to her, arranged for her to have a weapon, and had given her a vision to save their island.  The Great Hive Mother had revealed to her that men were animals, dangerous animals that had once had their uses, but that the true course of the human race had always been to evolve past animals and into people...and only women were, in fact, human people.  The job of men had been to support women in developing society, but now they were no longer needed, and she had the example of their former ruler to back her up.  As SSWK had, by now, delegated almost all of his power (besides his ability to kill anyone who opposed him) to his women, the transition was surprisingly seamless.  Black Anya did not age for another fifty years, remaining young and beautiful as she guided Kvetya into its current form.  She did not die, but informed her subordinates that soon she would become another part of the Great Hive Mother, and lay down on her bed to dissolve into moonlight.

Government: Kvetya has a wholly matriarchal government, although it is not caste-exclusive, a woman from any caste can theoretically gain enough renown to be selected to join the Circle, Kvetya's ruling body.  The Circle votes and debates on matters of policy, as well as selecting the Mother from among their members.  The Mother of Kvetya is considered to be the very embodiment of the Hive-Mother's will, with absolute power on Kvetya itself, a tradition dating back to Black Anya.

Society: Kvetya is a caste-based society.  Women are carefully tested as children, then placed in a caste based on their talents.  They may be re-evaluated in exceptional circumstances (a weaver once rose to become a soldier after successfully organizing the women of her village to crush a Wolf Pack, then rose to become a general) but for most, their lot is their lot, and they are taught that this is the way things should be.  Even those who manage to leave their caste for another are still strictly held to their new caste's standards, after all, despite having the disadvantage of not being trained since girlhood.  The doctrine of the Great Hive Mother holds that sacrificing one's individual wants for the community is the highest good.  Those women who serve unquestioningly and loyally will join the Great Hive in death, becoming one with the spirit of womankind and dwelling forever in joy.  Men, they hold, simply feed the ground when they die, like any animal.  A man can achieve a valued status the same way that a loyal dog might, but no more.  Men are not taught to read, to write, or to do more than the most basic mathematics.  Teaching them more is a crime punishable by death.  A man giving orders to a woman is also punished by death.  All goods are communally owned by the state, with a certain amount of credit (called the Allowance) extended to a woman based on her accomplishments and caste.  The Allowance is specific, a soldier's line of credit extends further to weapons, armor and mounts than to clothes and luxuries, while a courtier's line of credit goes the opposite way.  Kvetya coins very little actual money, most of it from its plentiful silver mines, and uses it specifically for transactions with the outside world.

Love and Marriage: Breeding, incidentally, is also controlled by the state.  Men who pass rigorous inspection are housed in state-run stables, with their diet and exercise carefully monitored, living a caged but pampered life supplying seed to women who spend their credit (or are extended an invitation by the state) on getting pregnant.  It is viewed as a vice (akin to being a drunk) for a woman to spend too much of her time with these men.  Loving a man, especially in the more heavily-controlled cities, is seen as a much more serious vice, akin to being caught doing hard drugs.  Loving a man can and has ended the careers of promising Kvetyan women, such as the case of the weaver-general mentioned earlier, when she was an old woman.  A Yurandish captive who had been sent to the breeding stables interrupted her pitch for a prolonged campaign against Inner Yurand by pouring out the jewels, gifts, and letters she had written him onto the floor.  He was executed for seduction, she was stripped of her rank and died in a skirmish with bandits scant months later.  On the other hand, the highest forms of love on Kvetya are the love of a woman for her fellow sisters and the romantic bond between a female student and female  mentor.  Pairings of equals are viewed as less stable, but still acceptable.  Two women can form a contract of bonding, which is not necessarily romantic, but specifies that both of them are leaving their possessions to the other

Amazons!: Members of the soldier caste on Kvetya are trained at war from the time they first are selected.  They have little time for frivolities when every day is spent at archery, battle magic, and training with the sword, the axe, and the spear.  They ride giant, savage owl-like birds native to Kvetya, and they are entirely unmerciful towards male enemies...after all, men have no souls, killing one is no loss to the world.  The greatest strength of the Kvetyan military is the sheer amount of training they do to compensate for their small numbers, including martial secrets that can be learned nowhere else.  A man knowing how to fight, however, is criminal.  Men who learn the ways of combat are executed without question...with one exception, the Dog Packs.

Brainwashing!: Nearly constant.  Girls are raised by their mothers until the age of six, when they join randomly-assigned creches for two years of testing and general education.  This education consists heavily of religious instruction in the doctrine of the Great Hive Mother, and the fact that the men they meet will be illiterate and uneducated up until adulthood (if they even get sent off-island, their only likely way to even see an educated man) reinforces this, as does the fact that girl children are kept separate from boy children.  Obviously, things are worse in the cities than in the country, but the inspectors come through with some regularity.  Once they join a caste, their training intensifies even further until the age of fifteen, when they are considered full-fledged members of their caste.  Boys are put in creches, and assigned labor as soon as they are old enough to work.  Their education consists mostly of having their animal state drummed in, and conditioning to make them meek and obedient.  Ironically, many of the problems men have can be traced directly to SSWK's chauvinism.  SSWK did not permit men to learn magic or receive higher education, because he viewed them as a threat to his own power, but he didn't think women had the will to overthrow him.  Black Anya, during her lifetime, held that the Great Hive Mother had been leading Steel-Souled Wolf King to his own destruction, and the circumstances that made the overthrow possible are held to be a miracle.  Being around a man who can read, write, or do math (say, a certain Jir Harkin) is bound to make a Kvetyan woman uncomfortable and rude, rather than merely gently (sometimes) condescending.

The Great Hive Mother: Originally a minor figure from the mythology of the Pebbles.  The one story she appears in comes from the myth cycle of Novorro-Who-Eats-Livers, in which she is an obstacle in his quest to eat the liver of a great chieftain to cleanse him from sin and allow him to pass on peacefully to the next life.  While there is debate on other islands, it's generally held that the Great Hive Mother is real, based on the strange miracles of Black Anya's life.  However, whether she is a real entity or not, she is not worshipped elsewhere.  The Church of Drift has proclaimed her doctrine blasphemous and declared her a false deity, a god unworthy of worship.  Novorro, incidentally, despite most of his myths being borderline horror stories, is considered a true deity.

The Suitors: The Kvetyans are insular.  They send out ambassadors, but much of their training is in talking to other women, giving them a disadvantage when they meet a male diplomat and assume that he is a servant, or read documents aloud on the assumption that he cannot read himself.  They saw their proposal to the Church of Drift that the Great Hive Mother be immediately proclaimed a true deity of the status of Grandfather Motok as being completely reasonable, even a just compromise, and when it was refused (and by a male bishop), they reached a somewhat less than happy (and somewhat less than accurate) conclusion about the reasons for the refusal rather than taking the Church of Drift's standards into account.  A sect of the Suitors, on the other hand, found a much warmer welcome in Kvetya.  These were a splinter from the cult itself, emphasizing the female form as the ultimate standard of beauty (after all, the Suitors worship the Lady in White, not the Lord in White, but the mainstream Suitors have a slight tendency to be men) and adhering to Kvetyan doctrine that women are superior to men.  They have also gained ground for promising to find a way to allow two women to reproduce without the aid of men.  They identify the Lady in White and the Great Hive Mother as one and the same entity.


Politics: Although it was a Megamai territory once, Kvetya is much closer to Yurand than to Megama.  Kvetya does not accept the legitimacy of the Kings of Inner Yurand, however, and it has been outspoken about this.  They vocally support the Queen, and have made repeated offers to give her troops to "retake her islands from the barbarous usurper".  Such offers have been firmly rejected.  It hasn't all been one way, though, border skirmishes between Inner Yurand and Kvetya are common, and Kvetyans have nothing but contempt for the King (not just because he's a man, but because they see him entirely as a usurper).  Kvetyan ambassadors are essentially a joke among other countries.  Although the Kvetyans try hard to train persuasive, intelligent diplomats for negotiations with other islands, problems arise when Kvetyan philosophy clashes with foreign beliefs, and dealing with men as educated as they are carries its own burden of culture shock.


Dog Packs and Wolf Packs:  There are two sorts of bodies of armed men on Kvetya.  The first are Wolf Packs, bands of brigands and outcasts dedicated to their own well-being and plunder.  These are named for Steel-Souled Wolf King, who they consider their true leader.  Wolf Packs have whatever gear they can make, find, or steal.  Dog packs, on the other hand, are strictly supervised groups of poorly-trained men who are considered expendable.  Men with behavioral problems insufficiently severe to merit execution, or great physical strength, are tagged by the Kvetyan state, branded with the sign of a hound, and put under the direction of male hunters and trackers (when used to hunt criminals) with a female officer in charge.  Mostly, they are used to hunt criminals, shore up a region's defenses, and as first-wave shock troops.  They seldom get armor, and are mostly equipped with short chopping blades and long, crude pikes.