The Summer Uprisings

"It was the hottest summer anyone could remember, and the most alive the continent had felt in decades."

_{— Fieldnotes of Maera Liss, itinerant historian and habitual eavesdropper}

In the sweltering summer of -17 PA, something cracked. Not with banners and speeches... nah, that would’ve been too easy. This was slower, weirder. A thousand tiny fractures webbing across the brittle shell of Seriphani occupation. Food strikes sparked in the factory districts, protest chants echoed through the cavernous tram tunnels, communal kitchens reappeared in alleys where surveillance drones once hovered. You couldn’t point to a capital or a battlefield. And you certainly wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t paying attention. And the occupiers? Yeah, they definitely weren’t.
Years of ecological devastation, cultural repression, and industrial overreach had stretched the people of the continent thin, especially those still living under Seripha’s puppet regimes. By -17 PA, the pressure was no longer containable. Uprisings ignited not as grand declarations, but as needs. A need for food. For clean water. For unpoisoned ground. For language spoken freely, and songs sung loud enough to drown out the machines. Farmers seized back the land they'd once been forced to stripmine. Rail lines once used to export stolen resources were repurposed by rebel collectives to move medicine, field tech, and (most importantly) messages. These weren’t military campaigns so much as ecosystems reorganizing themselves. Y'know, rewilding, but social... or something like that.
Amid the disarray, communes and republics started cropping up like they’d always been there. Hell, some had, places like fiery Rostula were far too stubborn to ever fully go under. Others were new, raw, and hella improvised. A water engineer and three friends could wrangle together an entire communal assembly if they had enough buckets and a half-decent filtration system. Councils held in overgrown schoolyards, agreements scratched into scrap plastic, no oaths, no constitutions... just shared need and too little sleep.
Most didn’t even call themselves communes at first. They had more pressing concerns, like not dying. But they shared things: tools, seeds, makeshift logistics networks, and occasionally extremely opinionated poetry. Somewhere in the chaos, something started to take root. Not unified, not organized, but alive.
A Lavennic identity flickered into being—not bound by territory, but rooted in mutual aid, ecological care, and collective autonomy. In hindsight, historians like to pretend this was all inevitable. Coordinated. Strategic. But the truth? It was messy, contradictory, and often half-accidental. Which is to say: it was human. You can retroactively call it ideology if it makes you feel better, but at the time? It was just what worked. It was messy, contradictory, and improvised as hell. Which, frankly, made it more durable than half the official plans.
The Summer Uprisings didn’t topple Seripha, not yet. But they did something more dangerous.
They made Lavenna possible.