Ingdor
Ingdor is a free city located on the southeastern coast of Veska , controlled by the nation’s second family: the Dren an Arrus. Beginning life as a small township, Ingdor underwent a period of rapid expansion as Veska heavily drew on Olorian slave labour for the construction of Nix, a heavily militarised fortress city situated on the Khashar pass. Situated on the main throughway into the nation from Ghotharand , it was built to defend against Ghothar incursions into Veskan territory, and as a base from which Veska, in turn, could quickly and efficiently invade Ghotharand if the need arose. As the subjugation and exploitation of Oloris became an increasingly urgent priority, the city became of fundamental strategic importance. Ingdor lay on the estuary of the Vust river, itself a tributary of the Jhgak, a significant Olorian waterway. While the Veskan navy would have few issues sailing up the Lorean Delta, the terminus of all Olorian rivers, the Olorians would simply retreat up the tributaries where the water was too shallow for the Veskan ships to follow and wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Veskans.
While it is likely that if the initial settlements on the Lorean Delta had been reinforced, Veska could maintain a foothold in Oloris; but doing so would have been very costly at a time where expensive infrastructure projects, such as the construction of Nix, were being undertaken. The exploitation of Oloris would have been severely limited without a way to establish control over the rivers.
Once the decision was made to invade Oloris it was determined that only a two pronged attack would suffice. One by sea, forcing the Olorians up their tributaries, and the other by river, to cut off any escape and to subjugate settlements which could provide Olorian guerrillas with supplies and sanctuary. Since there was fierce competition for control over the Lorean Delta between Veska and Ghotharand, Veska’s generals determined that the best way to transport slaves would be through rivers which flow through Veska from Oloris, minimising the impact of Ghothar disruption on Veska’s enslavement of the Olorians.
As a seaport with an estuary formed by rivers that flow from Oloris, Ingdor was the perfect place to establish a slavery hub. It was deep enough in Veskan territory to minimise the risk of Olorian or Ghothar retaliation, and close to Veska’s major trading ports, while being connected by river to Oloris, combining the qualities of a well-connected trading hub, a well-situated riverine navy base and a shipbuilding centre. After the expansion began disastrously under the auspices of the Moraks of Arrus (the noble family that owned the township), the task was delegated to Loricatus Dren, a well-respected but ambitious and unscrupulous merchant with decades of experience in the shipbuilding trade. Dren rationalised the project with ruthless efficiency, conscripting the local population into constructing a vast prison camp and bribing high ranking officials in Kraul to pass laws designed to create a vast influx of prisoners that could be transported en masse to Ingdor as cheap labour. Dren appointed himself warden of the prison ensuring that he retained sole jurisdiction over his workforce allowing him to enrich himself long after the completion of the project as he had the power to extend sentences; indefinitely.
Since he had access to what was, in essence, slave labour, he was able to undercut his competitors significantly, allowing him to expand his firm to the point where he could more efficiently fulfil state quotas for production, thus ensuring that he was always in the prime position to receive contracts. Buoyed with state subsidies and cheap labour Dren established a monopoly over the shipbuilding trade and dockside infrastructure, making him obscenely rich. Understanding that slave labour would only be efficient for the initial phase of construction Dren invested his newly acquired wealth in higher wages and benefits, offering attractive packages to shipwrights and labourers, and building tailor made accommodation causing the city to swell with a wave of voluntary migration. As word of Ingdor’s prosperity began to spread Dren was able to supplement his prison labour with indentured servants drawn from the desperate and downtrodden of Aestis, as well as Olorian slaves.
Following the successful construction of a formidable riverine navy and the infrastructure necessary to hold and process thousands of slaves at a time, Dren was appointed the permanent administrator of Ingdor; a position he solidified through his marriage to Dita Arrus, the youngest daughter of the ancestral masters of Ingdor. The remaining members of the Arrus family fled Veska renouncing all claim to their ancestral seat. Thus, the Dren an Arrus dynasty was formed, quickly establishing itself as one of the most powerful noble families in Veska and legally securing Ingdor as a personal fiefdom transmitted down his bloodline as family property.
Since the decline of the Olorian slave trade, and the growing perception of it as a shameful stain on Veskan history, particularly among Veskan intellectuals, Ingdor has maintained its prosperity by undertaking a number of massive infrastructure projects. The most notable of these is Khoshar, an underground stronghold carved deep into Mount Jarask, and Svan’s Point, an ornate and imposing lighthouse of such magnitude that on a clear day it is said to be visible from Kraul.Khoshar’s construction has been ongoing for eight hundred years and reaches deep into the mountain. Its vaults of grain, known as the Font of Worlds, are to agriculture what the library of Harenis is to knowledge. They are said to contain every known seed and sapling in Aestis, with enough provisions to withstand a siege for ten years. If Veska was ever so desolate that not a tree or plant grew, the Font of Worlds would have the power to rejuvenate its fertility.
The stronghold is powered by several underground rivers diverted towards great watermills and forges; every day, several thousand tonnes of stone is cranked up by excavators powered by waterfalls harnessed by waterwheels. Consequently, the landscape is dominated by great spoil piles and slag heaps which have accumulated over the centuries. Even these byproducts of Khoshar’s construction are fashioned into defensive mounds that would slow and divide an invading force, and limiting its ability to assail the stronghold with siege weapons. These structures also feed a burgeoning shadow economy that is thought to have grown out of the endemic corruption that so often surrounds large scale infrastructure projects. The most visible manifestations of this being the tinkerers and scavengers, who seek out a living from scraps and waste, and corrupt officials who bribe the administrators of upriver towns to accept large quantities of industrial waste.
Ingdor is a mire of venality, criminality and corruption; a nexus of cheap labour and exploitation. This criminality is tolerated so long as it does not disrupt the great works, the transformation of the city into a stronghold. Even the emergence of a black market has a calculated role in times of tribulation, for it is very often the administrators who have a hand in the numerous criminal syndicates which form the uppermost veneer of the city’s dark economy. In a siege, since the natural response of such organisations is to hoard all the food and sell it at extortionate prices, the city’s administrative classes stand to profit significantly at the expense of Ingdorian workers who, would be allowed access to food, but only on the condition that they accept another decade or so of indentured servitude.
The Dren an Arrus family have sought to use crises as catalysts for their further consolidation of power, producing them with enough regularity to place the city and its inhabitants in a state of perpetual precarity; a precarity which has produced some of the most successful and unscrupulous criminals in all of Veska. There is no one single locus of criminality in the city. Few syndicates would survive if they had a single base of operations that was the source of all activity. Rather the ones which survive, and flourish are networks which, although they may have a degree of central control, are not centrally structured. Undoubtedly some nodes in these networks are more important than others, but great care is taken to ensure that none are truly indispensable.
The most powerful syndicates of Veska recruit from outside extensively. Half their activity is spent on image management, creating a reputation formidable enough to attract the most talented thieves and criminals from all over Aestis to try to ensure that no single figure is irreplaceable. If Ingdor was founded on a single ideal it is that of the infinite expendability of human material. For Dren, now entering old age, a structure which is infinitely replaceable is infinitely impregnable. His vision of Ingdor was of a city that constantly devoured itself only to reconstitute itself through the digestion of its own viscera. It was for this reason that Dren incorporated an ouroboros into his family crest.
He ultimately strives to integrate within the city a criminality that operates as an autophagic process, whereby the renewal that follows from its perpetual self-devouring is the refinement of the autophagic process to the point where it is no longer forced, but a perpetual motion that takes on the quality of a law of nature. Dren aimed for a process which would only be intensified and refined by the extremity of its violence which would, from cycle to cycle lose its potency, so that it itself is decomposed into the fuel that ensures the continuation of the cycle and the fortification of the city’s indifference and imperviousness to it.
The deliberate and systemic intensification of violent forces against Ingdor’s inhabitants had earned it the reputation of one of the most dangerous cities in all of Aestis alone Veska. However, this reputation has done little to deter the influx of people into the city. While its precarity poses a great danger, it also poses great opportunity, since there is no fixed social order. Although the dynamic between oppressors and oppressed, victims and perpetrators in Ingdor has an intensity rivalled only by Mordikhaan and the Oboline in [Arc, the dynamic between oppressed and oppressor is far more fluid. Although the roles stay fixed, as does the class structure, the individuals occupying those roles are constantly changing, a man who is oppressor one day can very easily find himself being tortured by one of his victims the next.
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Type
City
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