Lyaud

Rusted armour, worn proudly¶

Lyaud has been at war for decades and has nothing to show for it except the reputation of a realm that will not stop.

The glory is a faded banner, patched at the edges, carried by people who know exactly how faded it is and march anyway. Grismere is a capital of enormous public buildings with no money to heat them, of ministries staffed at a third of establishment by men who have not been paid in two quarters and turn up regardless. There is no pretending in Lyaud. There is something harder and stranger, which is a people who have looked directly at their own decline, agreed on every detail of it, and decided that agreeing does not oblige them to stop.

We are not what we were. We are still more than you would like to fight.

Lyaudite recruiting officer, overheard at a provincial muster

The colonies are the meal¶

Everyone in the chancery knows this and nobody writes it down.

Officially each new settlement is an expansion of imperial reach, a strategic acquisition, a link in a chain. Practically it is grain, timber, and one more year of not collapsing. Lyaudite colonial policy is not policy. It is a household under pressure, deciding in what order to sell things, conducted at the scale of a continent by people using the vocabulary of an empire because the vocabulary is all that is left in the building.

The men sent out know it too. That is what separates a Lyaudite governor from an Aethrassian one: the Aethrassian is working off a debt and the Lyaudite is feeding a country, and only one of those can be renegotiated.

Proof, rather than profit¶

The second purpose of a Lyaudite colony is psychological, and it is not a small thing.

A colony is proof to Lyaud itself that it remains a people worth fearing and worth remembering. This makes their governors unusually stubborn about abandoning bad sites, which is a strategic weakness and a national virtue at the same time, and the chancery has never been able to decide which of the two it is looking at in any specific case.

The consequence is a map dotted with Lyaudite settlements that should have been given up a generation ago and have instead been held, at cost, by garrisons that could name every man who died holding them. Rivals read this as bad accounting. It is bad accounting. It is also the reason nobody has yet tried to finish Lyaud off, because a realm that will not abandon a worthless valley is a realm that will certainly not abandon a valuable one.

The two hands still extended¶

Two relationships matter and both are quietly maintained by men who understand exactly how thin the margin is.

Aethrassia holds Lyaud twenty points above neutral, which is worth more to Grismere than any colony it owns. The shared faith of the Sacred Light is most of the reason, and both chanceries treat it with a care that would surprise anyone who has read their correspondence about anything else.

The Sahid Empire is the opposite pole and the origin of the decades of fruitless war, and there is no version of Lyaudite politics in which making peace there is survivable for the man who proposes it.

Governing under this flag¶

Thin support, high expectation, and a metropole that needs the goods more than it needs your success story.

You will be asked for more than you have, by people who know you do not have it, and who are asking anyway because the alternative is asking nobody. Governors who understand this do well. Governors who wait for proper support wait forever, and Grismere will remember only that the shipment did not come.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.