OK lads, I think we're good to go. For your consideration before I put up the full RP Sunday: [hr] Name: Flag: Location: History: [hr] Name: Jonaçoat Flag: [img]https://img00.deviantart.net/323f/i/2018/265/9/4/flag_of_jamais_by_aaronmk-dcnjgqe.png[/img] Location: [img]https://img00.deviantart.net/a95f/i/2018/259/7/1/thessalocracy_map__territories__by_aaronmk-dcn2d8w.png[/img] History: Jonaçoat was a land of remarkable vistas and a stunning landscape, of rich soil and abundant timber. The earth was ripe with metallic fruits. Old adventurers before the deluge returned to their old imperial masters speaking in awe about a land made by and for the gods. In the days when man was still pious, such a landscape was regarded as the hunting grounds of the great world spirits and they were avoided except only for sacred pilgramages through its verdant valleys at the foot of towering pillars of stone thrust upward in ancient times. Men who returned remarked continuously on the majesty of the marble buttes that shot up to hold aloft the sky, and how the rivers were so rich with raw gold one need only to reach out and touch the pebbles at the bottom of the river beds and they could take out a fistful of raw gold. As piety transformed into avarice and greed the relationship to this territory changed and simple long distance religious appreciation turned to material colonization as the empires before the deluge reached out with their hands to grasp at wide swathes of this holy land fertile in all ways and they began to swing their axes into the trees, bury their mines into its soil, and turn over the law with their hoes and plows. Before long the landscape was no longer that of quiet rectitude in search of a spiritual guidance but became the focal point in shifting political design as blood was spilled over it. Cities were raized and fortresses erected. The marble and white granite butes became a forest of flags as armies contested it in frequent warfare and merchants clattered over its roads seeking and bringing out its wealth in raw materials and the finest wines. The defilement of the Jeweled Lands ma have been one of the reasons the gods sought to eradicate mankind and brought their sadness and their grief upon them, filling the valleys with water until the surf raked against the majestic buttes, swamping farms and filling mines. The farmers and soldiers of the valleys began their climb up into the highlands as their pillars to heaven became rocks at sea and the raging storms began tearing down many. And in a country bristling with fortresses at every high pass all came to them and they filled to capacity. Guard captains become defacto kings as their liege lords disappeared beyond the long gray distance of rain and storm. The storms subsided and the seas again lowered. But not to their old level. As the descendants of the battered and wounded people who had fled returned to their ancestral homes they found their old land a swamp and they believed that there would be none of which was passed down to them in legend. But time, or the gods had other plans; whether in forgiveness or as a second trial. Life did return to the valleys and a depressed people found themselves with new farms, and new forests. The first man to proclaim himself came to settle in the ruins of the fort he called the Castle Jamais. He, Priodoc I would found a dynasty that'd last a century and be filled with its own champions and men of legends. While little more than barbarians, the activities of Pirodoc and his sons would become the basis of songs. The Song of Pirodoc, where the great cannibals of Castle Samoix were exterminated for taking hostage and devouring the family of a local cow herd, whose sole survivor and youngest daughter Rachel would become Pirodoc's first wife. Their son Charlon would embark on a dangerous voyage by boat to nearby islands and is said to have fought men who had become one with the fish and exterminated their kingdom, saving a village of haggard boat people who made him a saint. Diaclordoc who went to bed with twenty women and fathered a hundred children, who were all bastards but became the first knights of his court. The line of Priodoc would come to an end with the passing of Pirodoc III who was shot by a crossbow through the eye at a tournament and slipped from life on his sickbed sixteen hours later, his wife giving birth to his son six months later, but by then the family line had passed from rule. In the intervening generations and centuries civilization reasserted and what was the low barbarity of the Pirodocs became mere romantic memory and the subject of a thousand local fables retold and maintained by bands of troubadours who lauded the Pirodocs for their bravery, or issued their stories as tales of warning for the people. As the lands further recovered from the great deluge and the terrors of the long rains subsided even further into memory, from terrifying story to distant antiquated legends the vintages of the ancient Jonaic returned. Further, the natural wealth of the deep earth returned to the surface as prospectors came to find golden and jeweled nuggets washing up along their tidal beaches and in old stream beds and rocks. The name Jonaçoat came to use as the influence of the old castle, now grand city of Jamais blossomed from an independent polity to the seat of a kingdom. Today, song and romance bloom in the Jeweled Coast, in Jonaçoat. With the tales of the Great Deluge and of the deeds of the Pirodocs joining one another in mutual canon the nobility sees itself as defenders of pious virtue under the auspicious watch of the White Mother. This distinction does not come without its pitfalls, for as easily impressed with the cautionary tale brought by the Deluge there then is too the inspiration of romantic endearment by those of the Pirodocs.