[[b]Name and Title of Vassal State:[/b] The Kingdom of Kur-Myrthina
[b]Full name:[/b] The Blessed Kingdom of Kur-Myrthina, commonly known as Great Myr.
[b]Ruler:[/b] King Hesti (IX) Risha Shabbini - the Blessed King is ordained by the religious authorities as the physical embodiment of mortal divine power and so commands an enormous amount of respect from his subjects. He technically functions as an absolute monarch, though imperial oversight, a powerful and established religious administration, and a heavy, overladen royal court has restrained this power for centuries. King Hesti is the thirteenth king of the Shabbini dynasty. He makes his capital at the great port city of Shabbini, historically the third of Kur-Myrthina's six blessed cities - all of them ports that grew rich on imperial prestige. 

His Majesty has thirty-six legitimate children.

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[b]Queen Nalulah Rishe Ibizari, High Priestess of the Ibizar[/b] - Thirty years ago, the Blessed King broke convention by marrying the young Nalulah, eldest daughter of one of Kur-Myrthina's twelve great religious landholders, the Archons, the High Priestess of a mystic order known as the Ibizar. When Nalulah's mother died, she took over the leadership of her order. Aside from their esoteric duties and ritual functions, the Ibizari are responsible for the maintenance of all irrigation and sewer systems in the Blessed Kingdom. In return for this duty, they are afforded a royal monopoly on salt production.

[b]Princess Na-Sabira Rishe Shabbini, Assistant Treasurer of the Merchant Monopoly, Countess of Siltano[/b]

[b]Magister-Royal Pyrus Risha Keltani, Minister of Finance, Grand-Duke of Vix, Grand Chamberlain of the Blue Temple[/b]

[b]Aya 'Mother Silver', High Priestess of the Kur-Indarali[/b] - Leader of another of the twelve Archons, Aya, like all leaders of the Cerulean Order of the Kur-Indarali, is a freed slave. The Order is responsible for the charitable foundations and urban welfare projects that characterise a lot of piety in the monetary religion of the Myrese. Over the centuries, the Kur-Indarali have allowed aristocrats to build vanity or personal projects under the guise of holy charity. But Aya, known as 'Mother Silver' for her open preaching, immediately became a thorn in the side of the royal administration upon her elevation to her post a year ago for demanding investment in real infrastructure projects.
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[img]https://i.imgur.com/L20Gaef.png[/img]

[b]Race:[/b] Myr - the Myrese are a race of humanoids noted for their ‘amber’ skin (in fact Myr skin can range in tone from beige to bright orange) and who without exception have white, depigmented hair. Their eyes range in colour but are most often shades of brown and green, but blue, purple and yellow are also possible. They are noted for their youthful complexions which often last into middle age and short height among other humanoids - females usually stand at around 5 feet (152cm) and males average 5’3 (160cm).

Populations of humans, dwarves, and a particularly significant population of Gaülletics also inhabit Great Myr as well as members of many other races.

The Myrese are known throughout Mycoria for their mercantilism, materialism, and strange adherence to their particular form of piety. Considered useful to the imperial administration due to the strategic location of their island kingdom, its fertile lands, and its pliant population, the islands grew rich through loyal imperial service. Myrese priests are known for the ritualistic nature of their worship. Myrese aristocrats are known for their extravagant taste.

Although they often consider themselves more civilised than many of their continental neighbours - or perhaps because of this - the Myr have been easily bought off by the Empire consistently over the years and in return have shown unwavering loyalty. Their reputation among their neighbours is mixed due to their reputation for collaboration with the Gaülletics, and while it’s common to find their merchants all over Mycoria and indeed the further Empire it’s rare indeed to find settled populations of them outside their islands.

Some in Myr - including members of the powerful religious authorities - claimed that the construction of the Arllánco Canal was an imperial reward for the loyalty of the kingdom. In the last century the canal’s construction has improved Kur-Myrthina’s fortunes even more. 

[b]History:[/b] Kur-Myrthina as a kingdom predates the Empire’s arrival in Mycoria. A unified territory, according to the annals, for sixteen-hundred and eighty-two years, Kur-Myrthina for many centuries existed as a pious but poor island kingdom in the warm seas of the south. Although the land is bountiful and fertile, the islands were prone to violent summer storms, disease outbreaks and raiding, and so for many years although power was ordained by the Blue Priests in the person of the Blessed Monarch the kingdom operated more as a loosely connected series of tribes with competing interests. From this a strong aristocratic culture developed and a strict hierarchical system of understanding caste.

A thousand years ago the Myr underwent something of a maritime revolution and over the next three-hundred established trading posts up and down the coast of Mycoria. Myrese merchants brought huge boulders of ice from the north and then ferried frozen produce to the northern kingdoms and established tentative trade routes criss-crossing the coasts and islands and making river expeditions in their shallow-bottomed Scuttler ships. These ships were no good for long distance travel so while Myrese society grew increasingly urban and advanced their purview did not extend beyond the sea.
 
Myrese merchants were some of the first intelligent life forms encountered by Imperial expeditions. 

The arrival of the men of Gaüllo was an instant revelation in Great Myr. 

Blue is the sacred colour of the Myrese religion, and their priesthood, who wear robes of blue, are known as the Blue Priests. Much Myrese scripture, which is normally in the forms of songs and poems, also contained references to the spiritual purity of the colour blue, both in explicit and allegorical terms. The blue skin of the Gaülletics caused the High Priestess of the time, Shatana of Ylino, to sanctify the arrival of these imperial conquerors as heralding the coming age of Menaya-Allo, the ‘blue rain’, the prophesied period of endless prosperity and eternal life prophesied to be the destiny of the Myrese. The proclamation was convincing enough to the Myrese, who immediately began to profit monetarily from selling out information about other kingdoms and brokering tentative peace deals with native belligerents with whom they had pre-existing relationships in the name of their new Imperial overlords.

As Myrese religion is also built around the worship of material wealth so the accumulation of goods, the unprecedented splendour of the imperial war machine, their fine clothes, and indeed their raw wealth were all interpreted as symbols of holiness by the Myrese clergy. The slightly bemused Gaülletics readily accepted that they could simply hypnotise the Myrese into submission with displays of wealth and gifts. In this capacity, the Kingdom’s religion has been left alone, though often studied by Imperial researchers on sabbatical, keen to understand its strange esotericism and see the gold-tipped spires of the Blue Temple in the capital city Shabbini. The Empire garrisoned a lot of soldiers on the islands over the centuries, helped to fund the construction of its defensive structures, 

Although the religious authorities hold a lot of temporal power in Kur-Myrthina, the civic authorities grow well developed on the imperial model. The Myrese have learned a lot from imperial infrastructure and their own cities, although they contain shocking displays of disease, inequality, hardship and slavery, also feature soaring spires, aquaculture, steam-heated bath houses hewn of marble, and a variety of other public structures. The construction of these monuments is considered a pious act. With the coming of the canal the kingdom's fortunes, long feared to be stagnating, were revived for a century known as the [i]Shining Summer[/i]. Those old anxieties have been revived in recent years as a pervasive fear of the weakening centralised imperial administration heralded by several religious sects as signifying doomsday or the end times. Some of these sects, it is feared, could turn to extremism or violence to spread their heretical views. This has shaken the decadent and byzantine Myrese royal and religious administrations into unrest for the first time in hundreds of years, and finding for the first time no Imperial support, the self-fulfilling prophecy has caused a lot of consternation in the Blessed Kingdom.