Dominion of Rhineland

Victor of the Great Unification War, the Dominion of Rhineland now occupies the entire world.

A History of Our Dominion
"A History of Our Dominion" is a work that encompases the basic history of the Dominion of Rhineland's rise to power, as well as reasoning for the Dominion's actions. Listed here is Archivist Heinrich Oßen's document.

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for our people to dissolve the political bands which have separated them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the united and complete station to which the Hallows of Truth and Illumination and of Truth’s and Illumination’s Goddess entitle them, a decent respect to the sanction of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to unity. We hold this truth to be illumined, that all Humanity is created above the inhuman, that it is endowed by its Goddess with unalienable rights, that are Life, Sanction and the pursuant Rule of All – that to secure these rights, Our Dominion is instituted among Humanity, deriving its justice and power from the grace of Our Goddess – that whenever any Form of Life becomes envious and destructive of these ends, it is the Right of Our Dominion to banish or abolish it, and to institute new Measures, laying their foundation on such principles and organizing their powers in such form, as to it shall seem most likely to effect its Security and Sanctity. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established have been erased for grave and intolerable causes; and accordingly all experience has shown, that Humanity is more disposed to suffer, while evils are suffuse, than to right itself by abolishing the forms to which it is accomplice. But when a long chain of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce it under absolute Divergence, it is Our Dominion’s right, it is Our Dominion’s duty, to throw off such Discord, and to provide new Guards for its future security.– Such has been the patient sufferance of our Goddess; and such is now the necessity which compels Her to alter Her presence in Our Dominion. The history of Our Present Dominion of Rhineland is a history of repeated conquests and triumphs, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Blessing over Humanity. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."

Epoch Paralium: Appendix
Scholars should note that references pertaining to the Epoch Paralium will be limited, at best, and that specific documents and histories concerning the Epoch Paralium are to be found in other anthologies. As the events and history of the specific Epoch Paralium are not to be covered by this history, an immediate beginning will be undertaken at the exile and fall of the Gearheart name, which will proceed through the relative interregnum of the Frontier. –Archivist Heinrich Oßen

The fall of Gearheart name was the first major event marking the close of the Epoch Paralium, a first broken thread foretelling the dissolution of the Empire’s very fibres. Many of the details of this dual descent of the family and of the Empire are lost to the fires of the wars which would follow, for the tradition of recording history was not well maintained through the two centuries succeeding. Even so, I have attempted to faithfully represent the sequence of happenings which felled what was once one of the Empire’s greatest families.

The roots of the name Gearheart were set deeply in the culture and politics of Paralium long before the most notable of its bearers were seen on the earth: the distant progenitors of the family were invested attendants to the Imperial House, and served for at least nine recorded generations in varying positions as cooks, housekeepers, porters, stewards, guardsmen, groundskeepers, handservants and handmaids, kennel masters, falconers, and on; as Paralium began to expand and militarize, the sires of the clan entered military and martial service, defending the capital and provinces, and warring in the Outer Lands, not excluding fronts in Zekrahian, Semisel, and Frontier territory; the other of the Gearheart children were instructed in statecraft and politics, but they formed a limited sum of the ultimate influence of the family.

The Gearhearts of note came at the last century of the Epoch Paralium: General Felix Gearheart, and his daughters, Alexia Gearheart and Artemis Gearheart. The General Gearheart was a natural and successful soldier and strategist, so effective that he was able to subdue the entirety of the desert nation of Zekrah, a victory he would echo with mere intimidation in the highlands of the Semisel Listeners. Though known most for conquering the desert and the cliffs, the elder Gearheart was a formidable political foe, and he was in no way shy in driving his daughters forward in his political maneuvering within Paralium’s borders.

Felix was a powerful and hard patriarch to his family, a general in the field and the home. He pushed each of his daughters hard to learn diplomacy and the matters of the court and parlor that they might find influential husbands in statesmen and legislators of the Empire. The unmistakable advantage of success in the endeavor, of course, would be a nigh immortality of the Gearheart name, a reward which was in his mind fitting in accordance with the legacy of service his lineage boasted. It is a minor tragedy that his stratagem proved a failure in the courses of the lives of both of his daughters, but this is tempered by the immortality of name that they brought of their own.

The older of Felix Gearheart’s daughters was a spirited girl, Alexia. Much of what we know of her comes from secondhand accounts, most notably the translated writings of Fisticuffs Sonoran, a Zekrahian general who suffered defeat at the hands of Alexia’s father. A few other fragments from disparate sources and of equally disparate validity may be found, but they are of lesser consequence. For the extent and scope of this history, it is sufficient to know that Alexia Gearheart proved a natural leader, and she in her short life succeeded in uniting the Frontier under a single banner before passing in circumstances which are unclear and in the end unknown.

Alexia’s sister was a fair and frail child named Artemis by her parents. Artemis’ story is a much more complete picture, and though it must still be said that much of it must be omitted to keep to the requirements of this history, it is much more poetic, even tragic. The other Gearheart girl followed a schooling quite intended by her father, taking teachers from the chamber and salon to become an attractive wife to the powerholders in the Empire. Before the young woman Artemis could be married off, though, she found herself away from the confines of the capital and ultimately to the Frontier, where she took a place in her sister’s house. After the sisters’ name grew to being the essential name of the Frontier and after Alexia passed on, Artemis took up the mantle of the Gearheart house.

Once Artemis was in control of an effectively, though not formally, independent state that was the Frontier, she began the process of expanding its territory. The most available lands for acquisition were inland from the Frontier coast, which was a remarkable and almost lucky situation: as Paralium could not easily act to conquer the coast, much less the lands beyond it, the only challenge opposing Artemis Gearheart’s advance would be found in whatever native obstacles, inhabitants or terrain, were on and in the land. The Frontier doubled in size in the course of but a few years, sinking in across the coast and inland formations with little resistance.

The land settled is worth studying on account of its influence on the feasibility of the actions which the Gearheart family would take following the end of the expansion of the Frontier. The country was not a heaven or an oasis on earth, to be sure, but it was endowed with enough metal and bounty to warrant the name of Ironvale. Iron and other workable metals were quite frequently found in the caves and ravines under the Gearheart banner, and even today there are still mines which are not nearing depletion to be found in the land.

The other intrinsic resource of the ground was coal. The mountainous regions of the entire continent were laden with thick, coursing veins of coal due to early tectonic and geological events which transformed the perennial verdure of the land into the black constellations of burnable matter beneath the crust of the earth. This contextually limitless resource would prove critical to events centuries later to their discovery, and will be discussed in detail in regards to those events.

Atop all of this grew a few choice locations for the development of infrastructural agriculture, which were not to be found by the coast. The eight or nine key areas dotted around Ironvale dedicated to farming were able to grow to a sufficient size over time to provide the entire region with grain, plant matter, and meat. The precise wheats brought to the soil took a number of seasons to adapt to a few of the idiosyncrasies of the earth, but the robust strain to emerge offered good feed for draft animals and livestock, and made a durable bread for sustenance and keeping.

Of these natural resources, metal, coal, and agricultural potential, metal, and specifically iron, was the most unequivocally important. In the line of the fall of Gearheart, iron gave the leaders of the Frontier a distinct and critical power: the ability to break from Paralium. In the years leading to within half a decade of the Secession of Ironvale, the people of the Frontier were, to their regret, dependent on the Empire at least in part for a number of goods, supplies, and materials, including: livestock, metal tools, quality ropes, tanning supplies for leatherwork, and like products. As the Frontier forges and metalwork tradition came into being, good tools were more available, better craft-goods were made, and an independent industry was born of the fire stoked by the bellows.

The Frontier reformed and renamed as the Union of Ironvale, a fully sovereign nation, independent economically, politically, and militarily from Paralium. The government established by the Union was a pluralistic republic; to this, any number of representatives, so long as they sponsored a human demographic with full consent of its members, was permitted audience and sitting. The acting leader of this body was, as status and service would demand, Lady Artemis Gearheart. Under her guidance, the Assembly of the Union of Ironvale existed as a strong and efficacious legislative entity for decades, but it would turn on the Gearheart family as the heirs to the Gearheart name came of age.

The children of Artemis Gearheart each served admirably as leaders and members of the Assembly, to the extent that they could. At some juncture in the Gearheart lines, a disease of an unknown form must have entered, for all of the Gearhearts in success of Artemis were known to suffer from peculiar and, as reported from surviving correspondence between tactless members of the Assembly, grotesque physical deformities. There is also reason to believe that the Lady Artemis herself suffered from this illness in some capacity, but we have no in-tact accounts which would bring light to her individual condition. We may conclude, however, that these exact deformities did not damage the intelligence and abilities of the next of the Gearhearts, for they would fight admirably the judgments to be placed on their name. It may be noted that the cursing of the Gearheart name was soon followed by an unraveling of the integrity of the Union of Ironvale, which shall be explained in more precise detail in a later entry.

The rest of the Assembly, that is, those of its members who were not of the Gearheart clan, grew increasingly distrustful of the Gearhearts due to their manifest condition, so much so that an honest enmity was brewing against the name behind closed doors. This feeling of resentment and vehemence continued to grow and solidify among the huge majority of the Assembly members, which began to go so far as to legislate on matters limiting the economic opportunities and social reaches of diseased citizens, themselves not represented in any significant way in the Assembly; the affected group counted the Gearhearts among its ranks.