The Republic Betrayed: A Study of Ephia's Well

[Erudiche]

THE REPUBLIC BETRAYED

A Study of Ephia's Well by Domhnall Guivarch, Legate of the Assembly

Dedicated to those innocents whose blood I have spilt.

Dedicated to the Wroth, whose reckoning shall not be postponed indefinitely.

Dedicated to the people of the future. I could not be your midwife. Perhaps I will be your gravedigger.

[Erudiche]

I. The Republican Leviathan

The Republic of Ephia's Well is a Satrapy of the Sultanate of Baz'eel. A Satrapy, known in prior writings as a client state, is a colony which maintains nominal autonomy. In the Well, all property is the property of Baz'eel, which is leased to the Satrapy, which sublets to a deformed and shambolic class of merchants. This Republic was founded as a compromise between the pro-democratic Cinquefoil Rose and the Fourth Legion of the Sultan's Janissaries, using as its constitution a corrupted form of the writings of the Magus Asterabadi. A fool would tell you this is democracy, and they are wrong.

The ruler of the Well is not its People, many thousands of whom are forbade from the rights of citizens and left to suffer in poverty. With that said, it is also true that the ruler of the Well is not its Voiced, that despicable class of villains and thieves. This may shock you, you may wonder how this could be so, if it is so that they vote upon their Legates. To answer this question, we must understand the dynamics of the Republic.

The Satrapy offers 450 of its 500 barrels of Ephian Water to Baz'eel as a tithe. This has recently been reduced for reasons discussed later. Our people go thirsty, our lands sit parched, our Accord scrabble like fiends for the table-scraps of the metropole, as we give away the vast majority of our life's blood. We guard the southern frontier from threat, house and process many thousands of refugees denied access to Baz'eel, and serve as a stomping ground for Ashfolk socialites and merchants, who pollute our streets with Scorch from the laboratories of the Capital.

Ephia does not grow, for Baz'eel grows drunk in its palaces and Yalis off the fruits granted to our land by the Gods. We do not restore life to scorched lands, raise Kula's children from the dusty soil, or build new Gardens in our home. Ephia does not build, for Baz'eel's agents, the Scribes of the Sublime Garden, who bear no loyalty to our home but rather to the Sultanate, conspire to sabotage revenue generating programs and projects and deliberately obstruct vital infrastructure projects. Ephia does not grow rich, for our domestic industry is stunted in favor of the mercantile cartels and adventuring companies who serve as the stratum of the Frontier Economy which Baz'eel favors for our land.

Despite the rhetoric of traitors and infidels such as Qari Alriyh and Nasreen Shabani, it is not the ambition of the Sultanate to develop the Well into a Garden alike that of Baz'eel. It is not the wish to see the Well become a jewel in the Sultanate's crown, or a thriving citadel. It is rather the wish of Baz'eel that the Well remain as it is: a pathetic joke, a hub of impoverished refugees, murdering bandits, and roving slavers. The role of the Well in the Sultanate is threefold: a colony specialized in the extraction of sacred water, a fort to project military influence in the southern wastes, and a springboard for clandestine activities elsewhere in the world, which might keep the hands of the Maribid clean from their many dark dealings in Banafsi, Il Modo, and abroad.

A successful Well is a threat to Baz'eel's supply of free water. It is a threat to their crumbling empire and its rotten foundations. Its many incompetent and traitorous legions, and its bloated bureaucratic and mercantile classes. It is not in the interest of Baz'eel to see a thriving country to its southern frontier. How is this domination maintained? A naïve answer is through the support of the League of Purple, and indeed that coterie of snivelling traitors and murderers is to blame for many of the most grotesque excesses, such as Zaniah Almirah's granting of water more than the tithe to Baz'eel. Yet this is not the root of the problem.

Baz'eel ensures the eternal idiocy of the Well through the clever design of its institutions. Despite the cries of tyranny resonated from the paid agents of Baz'eel in the Leagues of Purple and Gold, the Legates are powerless, little more than puppets. In the Well, the military and law enforcement are provided by Baz'eel's Legions. The civil service is controlled by Baz'eel's Scribes. The economy is dominated by Baz'eeli capital. And the Legates are directly answerable to the Sultan's Majordomo, the chief servant of the Royal Family. A conspiratorial ring connecting the Chief Scribe, Consulate Secretary, Majordomo, and Sorazin Bey rules this Well, and it is by their whim that Legates are created and destroyed, and by which policies are implemented or prevented, with the Legates serving as little more than petty functionaries, cleaning the Accord's feculence from the walls of the Pyramid.

This is not the Democratic Assembly envisioned by the Magus Asterabadi. This is a corruption of his ideals, a marionette show and a shadow play meant to distract the masses and the Cinquefoil Rose from the naked theft and tyranny of the Sultanate. There is no way in which such a system can be reformed or repaired from within, for its very nature and design is corrupt and intended to obstruct the development of the material conditions of democracy, to retard the public education, to force complicity from those bright-eyed firebrands who enter it. It cannot be reformed; it must be destroyed.

[Erudiche]

II. Intriguers in White Cloaks

An election, in the present, vulgar, sense of the word, is a race to see which self-interested cur can bribe, blackmail, and bloviate their way into the Pyramid with a critical mass of cutthroats and Accorded operatives as their back. Luminaries of this corrupt system include the Arch-Traitor Constantine Diakos, the Qadiran fleshmonger Sol Auk, the Qa'immi operative Qari Alriyh, and Marcellus Saenus, the Butcher of Red Hill. I am no stranger to such a system, and indeed am just as guilty as those who I here deplore, for it is not the character of a man but the conditions in which he exists which shall dictate his fate. This is known to Baz'eel, whose Secretary told me once in a candid moment that he sought to bloody my hands, to make me like him and all the rest, a task at which he succeeded.

The League of White has long been split into many conflicting factions, most grappling with the bitter realities of our circumstances. I long took the side of the Populists, of Klard and Gunmper, of evolution and reform, over that of the radicals such as Ghalish, Sayburgh, and Felch. Yet I can say that my foes were in all things correct. The Well is diseased, the Pyramid is corrupt, and if tomorrow the Monochromatic government dismissed the Voice it would be blocked by Baz'eel's dictate.

Since my first days in the League, during the disastrous election of Tabbah 7787, the League of White has lacked moral fibre, courage, and a strong ideological foundation in the works of Asterabadi. At all times did the League betray itself and its principles, did factions rock and cleave the programmatic and tactical unity required to attain power, did the League itself descend to the most grotesque opportunism and political adventures. For the dream of reform, so elegantly articulated by Rosie Gunmper, is illusory. There shall, with the tools of our masters, be no reconstruction. There shall be no water, food, or clothes for all. There shall be no Ideal Republic, no Universal Assembly, no end to hunger or want. There shall be only intrigue and political games played in the palaces while the People starve.

Ricario Cassella, a merchant of Modini extraction, was the last man in whom I expected to see invested the flame of courage and the touch of Holy Providence. He was, to my inspection, a greedy cutthroat devoid of principle, blessed with a sense for the wind's direction and a penchant for backroom dealings. Such a man, I had concluded, would be useful only as a dog on a leash, who might be disposed of at an opportune time, and it was to such an end that I had nurtured his ascent in the League despite the myriad voices of opposition.

Yet I can say that Legate Cassella was perhaps the most true and ardent of revolutionaries we have seen. He recognized, quite clearly, the nature of power in this Well, and sought to advantage a free and strong Ephia by taking control of the natural resources, our right by divine providence, which Baz'eel had gorged itself upon. For this he was betrayed by our League, by the machinations of the devilish Jordan Clearcreek, a Sandstone dilettante and paid provocateur, and also by the so-called respectable moderates Akna Ymir and Khalid al-Hayim. These traitors saw Cassella arrested, brought to the frothing jaws of Baz'eel, and put to death. In exchange, a modest reduction of the water tithe was gifted from the Royal Family, fear in their hearts for the possibility that the Ephian people may some day awaken to the weakness, corruption, and exploitation of the Sultanate's rule.

[Erudiche]

III. A Poor Player's Curtain Call

What is to be done? Reject the Pyramid, my people. Spit in the face of the Legates. Curse the moderates. Burn me at the stake. All these things exist to distract you from the true struggle, the struggle for water, bread, and liberty. The struggle for a Free Ephia. The struggle against foreign tyranny and exploitation, against dependence and imperialism. The dreams of all the Well: of the formidable military outpost, of the thriving economic hub, of the free Republic, can only be realized when our chains are broken. It was once that the Well was the cradle of civilization and the greatest city in all the world, where al-Nasr's glories were spoken of across the Rings. It was once that the Orentid State presided over a rebirth of art, learning, science, and culture. It was once that the Well could repulse the intrusion of Baz'eel, that this crumbling and syphilitic empire was forced to rely on an army of starving refugees and seasoned mercenaries to claim the land.

A free Well is possible. The release of Ephia from her captivity, the great Jubilee, is possible. But it will not come through the ballot, it will not come from subservience to the imposed laws of your gaolers. It will come through struggle, furious struggle, and the realization of all the captive energies of the General Will, long suppressed. It will not be the Saints who build Paradise, but the sinners, the wretches, the black-hearted guilty. Stand among them, for all you need do is shrug, and all this rotten mass will slough off about you.

I write to you for the last time, my beloved people, for it is time for this poor player to disappear now from history's stage. As the curtains fall and I exeunt the stage, let leave my lips:

Order prevails in the Well! This they exclaim, as Gausim straddles his newfound throne and the crowned heads of Ghalish and Sons breathe a sigh of relief. You foolish dogs! Your "order" is built on sand! And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow again the free spirit of humanity shall rise and to your horror proclaim with trumpets blazing:

I was, I am, and I shall be!

[Abala]

Almost the entirety of this work is torn to pieces in the mad rampage of a particular dwarf.