History of Neonymphonia
The People of the Ocean
As with all of Novaluna from before the Tempest to after their Tempest, where the history of its predecessor colony XCL-XV Isle Nereis ends, the history of Neonymphonia begins. Once one of Novaluna's main population centres before the cataclysm and a mecca for all things marine, the devastation suffered by Isle Nereis during the Tempest was uniquely acute. Much of the colony's extensive aquatic infrastructure was critically damaged, resulting in massive flooding throughout much of the city and its surroundings and severely crippling its port. With much of the small island's resources and facilities destroyed, and no means of escape possible, disease and famine quickly set in thereafter, alleviated only by relief efforts by the incipient
Hadron Corps nearby. Nevertheless, by 10 PT the remnants of Isle Nereis had lost nearly eighty-five percent of their original number, a demographic decimation almost unparalleled elsewhere in the chaos.
Rebuilding, unsurprisingly, was then to be a long and arduous process. Without even a functioning societal substrate to build upon, the survivors of Isle Nereis were truly tasked with the feat of reinventing themselves from the ground-up. Blessed at the very least with the relative safety provided to them by their Aerinian protectors, those who remained of Isle Nereis began to recoup, slowly but surely. It was then by 50 PT, under the impromptu leadership of an inspiring biologist then by the name of Vari Ie Dea, that the remnants of Isle Nereis wholly reunified into a civilisation anew, finally progressing past the point of mere subsistence and survival. Although they had at that point dubbed themselves the Nereids, such was the event that marked the true founding of Neonymphonia.
Her embryonic country at last afforded the privilege of aspiration, Vari set about addressing a pressing issue; much in spite of Nereid efforts, the resources of Nereis were dwindling unsustainably, and without drastic action the Nereids coud very well face famine once more. Combined with the withdrawal of Aerinian security and the increasing threat of hostile raiders from elsewhere, it was clear that the Nereids could not live on Nereis much longer. With nowhere else to go, it seemed only natural that the aquatically-inclined Nereids take to the sea. First spearheaded were efforts to repair the island's port infrastructure, and it was with these facilities that the Arga, the very first Viosphere, was constructed and launched. With it, the Nereids at last had the makings of a home to serve them indefinitely. By 100 PT, the year of Vari's death, nine more Viospheres had been constructed, and she was forever immortalised in her role as the survivors' leader, retroactively named Aphroarch Varidea, the Green Mother of Neonymphonia.
Consciousness Born
In her final years a recluse who withdrew almost entirely from politics, Vari Ie Dea, in all her wisdom, nevertheless erred in failing to fully establish a self-sustaining institution of governance. In the political vacuum she left behind, the cadre of technocrats she had governed with was supplanted by a faction led by an eccentric, yet charismatic young woman named Ibe Va Ria. A former minor protégé of Vari's, she had proclaimed herself the "true successor" to Vari's leadership legacy and adopted the name Ibvarea to go with this self-apportioned mantle. Though shunned as something of a crank by Vari's circle of former allies, her popularity among the Nereid people and her casting of said allies as staid elites swiftly won her the political capital necessary to establish herself as the leader of the Nereids' quasi-formal government.
Wasting no time in taking advantage of her polity's state of intense social flux, Ibvarea immediately set about enacting her professed vision for Neonymphonia—starting with a rechristening of her nation to commemorate the onset of a new age. An anthropologist by training and a thoroughly canny sociopolitical operator, she was able to begin effecting a wide-ranging host of social and cultural changes, maintaining her broad popularity and loyal grassroots support in spite of an increasingly autocratic and intrusive governing style. During the span of her quiet revolution, she was able to establish not just a new name and new language for her country, but also a new national ethos and identity, one that only fed further into itself as she implemented her final set of policies; bringing the science of psionics as envisioned by the Ante-Tempest Luminarists back in force, integrating it into Nymphonian society down to the deepest level and giving rise to the nascent gestalt known as the Sympath. In accordance with the nomenclature system she had set up, upon her symbolic step-down in 150 PT, she claimed the title of Aphroarch Ibvarea, the White Lady.
In a World Unforgiving
With the beginnings of the Aphreian Selection taking shape, it was merely a matter of having Ibvarea's contingent of Prarthara psionic quasi-clerics locate a worthy successor. Through whatever esoteric, now-lost means they used at the time—for this long predated the modern methodology of the Aphreian Selection—they came upon a headstrong and ambitious Plasamen girl by the name of Elifara, whom they deemed to be the most worthwhile heiress of the Aphroarch office. As with any political undertaking associate with the White Lady, Elifara's appointment was certainly not without controversy; Ibvarea's opponents, still plentiful in Neonymphonia's early days, saw the Aphreian selection as yet another example of the White Lady's "syneidocracy" being a figleaf for her autocratic governance, while Ibvarea's supporters contended that she did not, in fact, endorse Elifara's selection and elevation to Aphroarch Elifea, not least because the youthful new leader preferred to contrast her policies with Ibvarea's.
Much in spite of this, Elifea—who had harboured political ambitions even before her selection—strove to prove herself politically independent of her predecessor, a task she managed to accomplish in rather dramatic style; her first major act of policy, true to her promises, was to establish the Iodhatara Clade of Nymphonian soldiers, and thus the first Nymphonian military, an act considered to be a symbolic renouncement of Ibvarea's ardent pacifism and anti-militarism. More substantially, however, it was also a response to the extensive military buildups of other Novalunar nations at the time, and the oftentimes aggressive overtures they made to other polities. Though considered somewhat of a hawk by Nymphonian standards for even acknowledging the incipient threat, her actions in retrospect are considered canny and foresighted about the trends of her day. Afterwards, in a secondary subversion of her predecessor's legacy, Elifea established the precedent of a more hands-off Aphroarch, transferring much of her office's political remit to the Synedriti and Naiacara and greatly empowering the more properly democratic-syneidocratic elements of Neonymphonia's political system. Though she left the position of Aphroarch in place, by the time Elifea left her post in 200 PT, apportioned the title of the Red Duchess, its de-jure power had been reduced to that of a sovereign symbol.
The First Crisis
For many decades from that point onward, the Aphroarch would not wield such uncontested command of Neonymphonia's fate; yet the first major challenge to that new political norm would come not twenty-eight years into its span, during the reign of Aphroarch Aorea. A quirky and cheery leader whose sunny disposition often belied a razor-sharp instinct for politics, she was initially known for her aptitude in using the Aphroarch's still-considerable soft power and cultural influence to suggest and guide, if not necessarily decree or enact, domestic policy, especially in her reforms of Neonymphonia's economy. Prior to Aorea, Neonymphonia's Gerasa had been heavily oriented towards centralisation and state-direction, so as to be utilised as tools for Neonymphonia's until-then extensive national projects. The downside of this was relative unsuitability towards long-term growth in the general economy or in living standards for most Nymphonians, one Aorea was adamant to rectify through her reforms. Created with popular consultation and passed not by edict but by syneidocratic plebiscite, her reorganisation of the Gerasa's structure and mandate, and opening up of trade lines with other nations for the first time, injected considerable vim into the Nymphonian economy and furthermore contributed to her popularity.
However, the true test of both Aorea's leadership and of the Nymphonian people, their political future in their own hands like never before, came on the twenty-eighth year of her service. That year, the Sympath, now an extensive and immutable component of Nymphonian society, began to suffer from a number of severe, distortive anomalies, serious enough to disrupt the daily lives of many Nymphonians. Investigation into this extremely pressing concern revealed the horrifying and heretofore unimaginable; the Sympath, Neonymphonia's most central aspect of existence, was being tampered with. Psionic-warfare agents from the Praxoid Hive, acting in concert with the Solarian Covenant, were probing the Sympath for weaknesses to exploit, particularly regarding the guidance systems for the Viospheres. Uncovered thus was a plot to remotely hijack Neonymphonia's Viospheres and bring them all to the surface in preparation for a joint invasion, suspecting that the archetypal pacifists would be reluctant even to fight back. While this clumsy attempt to control the Sympath was quickly shut down, the entire situation very swiftly escalated into a diplomatic crisis verging on outright war.
It was Aorea's and her Adonarch's personal ventures to resolve this crisis that netted them further accolade in the popular mind; accompanied by a small coterie of assistants and guards, they initiated close contact with several relatively friendly outside powers—particularly the Hadron Corps—exiting the safety of Neonymphonia and braving several much-romanticised attempts at abduction and even assassination to establish a rapport against the aggressors. By the time of their return, they had convinced the Hadron Corps to assemble a cast of allies—the beginnings of ONI—and declare the crisis a casus belli for initiating protective hostilities against the Praxoid Hive and Solarian Covenant. With the ensuant war brief and victorious for ONI, Aorea was widely praised for finding a solution to the First Sympathic Crisis that did not necessitate Nymphonian participation in warfare and minimised the loss of life; nevertheless, the event had shaken Neonymphonia to the core, bringing it closer to a line it never wanted to cross than it had ever been before.
Peaceful is the Sea
The decades that followed the Crisis composed a period not just of peace, but also of unparalleled peaceful, harmonious engagement with the outside world. Once more under the protective umbra of their Aerine allies, Nymphonians felt less of a need for isolation to preserve and secure their way of life. Aphroarch Nauthalea, successor to the Gold Maiden Aorea, built upon her predecessor's construction of beneficial trade ties by further expanding them into routes by which Nymphonian culture was exported, promoted, and enriched. At the same time, she widely encouraged the domestic development of said culture, both serving to augment one another and build up Neonymphonia's international reputation as a friendly exponent of benevolent soft power. In her hopes to refute the long-held image of Neonymphonia as quite literally a self-obsessed, timorous backwater, Nauthalea largely succeeded, helped in no small part by the Blue Princess' cultivation of her own personal image into something of a multifaceted worldwide celebrity personality.
Nevertheless, it was with her successor Aphroarch, Salaishea, in which Neonymphonia's foreign-relations watershed arrived. Though widely famed in the popular imagination for her amorous nature and creation of the Apsarasa as free-loving cultural envoys of Neonymphonia, Salaishea's biggest impact on Neonymphonia stemmed from her deeply-held belief in the humanist cause, that Neonymphonia should strive to peacefully make better the lives of all people, Nymphonian or otherwise. Along these lines, she was the first Aphroarch to fully embrace the international system of diplomacy, establishing formal diplomatic ties with many other countries, contributing to global humanitarian causes, and even opening up (stringent) routes of citizenship for non-natives to become Nymphonian. While her advocacies were not without opposition, the Nymphonian populace assented with enough vigor to put in place many of her wishes, such were those halcyon days; in so doing, they also set the stage for the rise of the next Aphroarch, and their subsequent salvation.
Blood for Blood
Fortuitous were the circumstances that Salaishea's citzenship reform gave rise to, for had it not, never would have a certain young woman from Vistora escaped the lawless, poverty-stricken warrens of her home sector and emigrated to Neonymphonia, where never would have she met a dashing Nymphonian Manatar with a noteworthy rebellious streak, and never would have they had together a raven-haired baby girl named Tenivrara proclaimed to be the next Aphroarch of Neonymphonia. For not only did these circumstances produce the next Aphroarch, they produced an Aphroarch very uniquely capable of handling the next national crisis to come.
At first, Aphroarch Tenivrea seemed an egregious ill fit for her station; although she accepted the mantle, her mischievous mannerisms, tendency for personal antics and escapades, habit for shirking her regular duties, and general disregard for the dignity and decorum expected of her as Aphroarch called into question the very validity of her selection itself. This was enough to inspire a form of polemicism not often seen in genteel Neonymphonia, with claims circulating that such an august office should never have gone to the daughter of a foreigner; undoubtedly, at times it seemed that neither Tenivrea nor many of her people wanted her in office, a sentiment that reached its peak when she virtually disappeared from Neonymphonia. For ten whole years she traveled the world, absent from and largely unaccounted for at her post, disconnected from the Sympath and communicating with only enough frequency and detail to confirm that she was, indeed, still alive. Never before had the possibility of removing the Aphroarch from office been contemplated, yet though the case for doing so against Tenivrea was found severely wanting, heavily contemplated it was nonetheless.
Inevitably, it was into the tenth year of Tenivrea's mysterious excursion and the forty-fifth of her period of service that it all came to a head. During one of the regular Convergences of the Viospheres, in Tenivrea's time conducted on the water's surface just beside Nereis so as to invite the rest of the world to join them in concordance, Neonymphonia was struck. Sensing a moment most opportune—their Aphroarch absent, their holdings vulnerable, and their ONI protectors spread thin fighting the short-lived but powerful Mourning Alliance (comprising the Altaterra Empire and Oasis Mirage)—a massive naval coalition of Dominion civil-war fugitives, Freewater pirates, and Vistoran mercenaries mustered over the course of Tenivrea's absent decade attacked. Sabotaging the Viospheres' psionic drives to prevent them from retreating into the depths, the nation-sized raiding force immediately set upon the hapless habitats caught unawares; their swift amphibious infiltration of civilian centres turned a conventional military confrontation into a nightmarish irregular engagement for which the Iodhatara were entirely unprepared. Their goal nothing less than the wholesale pillage of a civilisation, for no less and no more than three harrowing days their ships circled the Viospheres in close formation and their raiders brandished weapons at a population held hostage.
Then, Tenivrea returned. For she had not merely been gallivanting about the world for personal amusement; no, she had been preparing for this eventuality, one she knew well in advance would bring her nation low lest she took the steps necessary to prepare herself and her people for it. Though she knew not when nor how until it was too late to preempt it, her arrival was none too soon to stop it, armed with the newest addition to Neonymphonia's arsenal; the Devarchi. Wielding what can only be described as the manifold psionic power of all Neonymphonia, manifest in a single being, in suitably dramatic style Tenivrathoria bodily ripped the invaders from their every edifice of shelter, casting many to founder and drown in the sea. Rallying the beleaguered Iodhatara into a concerted pushback, she managed to repel much of the invasion force out to open waters, where she and the Nymphonian navy proper could safely engage without fear of collateral. Following that reversal, the rest was a rout. Backed by an effective living superweapon, the Iodhatara then soundly crushed the remains of the invasion force, pursued the now-fleeing reserves and destroyed them as well, and killed the entire venture's primary leaders, terminating its prospects then and there.
Retreat to the Deep
Four-hundred years of peace, of almost no bloodshed whatsoever, and then after three harried weeks the blood of a hundred thousand now stained the consecrated waters of Nereis. Never before had Neonymphonia suffered a national trauma so acute. A resounding victory the short-lived war had been, yet it had been at a cost the Nymphonians had never before borne. Few knew even what to think. Among the collective sentiments rolling through the Sympath were grief, anger, and triumph, if bittersweet. Yet a reckoning had arrived, that much was clear, and now the people of Neonymphonia knew of their own capability for violence just as much as their inability to escape it. Tenivrea, herself stricken by her own aptitude and propensity for destruction, withdrew sullenly into her old habits of absenteeism for the rest of her tenure, as the rest of her country took its time to fully register the implications of what had occurred.
What followed was no period of recovery, no era of fruitful convalescence. When it came time for Tenivrea to step down and transfer the mantle of power to the next in line, a bashful, gentle, and devout girl named Dolarara, Neonymphonia looked upon the Aphreian Ceremony with more somber introspection than the customary pomp. Not a day afterwards, and the Black Matron simply vanished, Severing herself from the Sympath completely and departing to a fate unknown, far beyond Neonymphonia's touch. Hailed as a great if mercurial hero in retrospect, all nevertheless settled on the uncomfortable consensus that she had never truly belonged; some indeed speculated that was the reason behind her being the Sympath's choice. Nevertheless, her legacy would, in its own manner, endure.
In the short term, however, it was clear that the Nereid War, as it had been called, marked the end of an epoch spanning two centuries of Nymphonian history. Not long after her inauguration, the newly-anointed Aphroarch Dolarea suffered an accidental Severance under mysterious circumstances, and although her connection with the Sympath was fully restored without any ostensible lasting damage, the event left the woman deeply and irreversibly traumatised. Even beforehand of the opinion that the outside world had nothing to offer Neonymphonia but sorrow and suffering, after the incident Dolarea would tolerate no semblance of exposure to the dangers of the beyond. Before locking herself into a state of self-imposed monastic seclusion, she ordered all engagement with the world to be halted and all Viospheres to submerge indefinitely, in one fell swoop reversing two-hundred-years of flourishing internationalism. Disillusioned by the war, the Nymphonian populace consented, and one by one the Viospheres battened down the hatches and sunk away from the world once more.
For nearly all of the following fifty years, Neonymphonia existed in near-stasis. Bereft of the material wealth trade and contact with the outside world had brought, and under the tutelage of the deeply pious Aphroarch Dolarea and the newly-enervated Prarthara beneath her, the Nymphonians sought solace through more spiritual means amongst the once-comforting, now-lonely depths of the ocean. Where once existed a fervid pace of activity and development in concert with the rushing world above, there was now a contemplative quiescence, as the formerly fluctuant Nymphonian zeitgeist settled on the simpler ways of old. Chief among these was a "Great Reconnection" with the Sympath, by a population some saw as having lost its link with the Sympath's deepest essences. Though the policies that had overnight transformed Neonymphonia into a theocratic recluse were gradually relaxed by the end of Dolarea's reign, it was largely under these circumstances that a certain young woman named Siylvara had been raised. It was also with these circumstances that Siylvara became deeply dissatisfied, a sentiment of no small import. For not only had she been selected as the future Aphroarch of Neonymphonia; Siylvara was, unbeknownst to all but one, destined to be the most important Aphroarch ever to live.
The Resurgence
Against the lofty figures prominent in Nymphonian history, one aspect in particular unquestionably set Siylvea apart from all the rest; a certain indomitable conviction rooted ultimately in herself. Where her predecessors were variously beholden of, servile to, or even dominated by the Sympath, she was the first among her kin to see and regard it for what it truly was, a truth she cryptically kept only to herself yet nevertheless let guide her actions. A clearly remarkable woman even before ascending to the role of Aphroarch, as the sovereign of Neonymphonia she demonstrated herself to be the most seminal individual in the span of its existence. Her very first act in office was to completely rescind the Silver Priestess' isolationism, not just reengaging with the world as Neonymphonia had done before, but so intensely solidifying its restored links with the international community as to make them impossible to reverse. Yet, in the years that followed, Siylvea did not stop at mere trade agreements, diplomatic unions, and visa programmes. Well aware of the geopolitical implications of joining a side in what was at that point clearly a world war in the making, Siylvea nevertheless definitely cast her nation's chips in favor of ONI and the Hadron Corps, joining Neonymphonia's age-old friends in formal alliance for the first time.
In this capacity, Siylvea's genuine nature was most apparent, and perhaps for many, most worrying. Though the Nymphonian body politic, tired and discontented by Dolarea's isolationism by the time of its terminus, largely approved of Siylvea's vigorous rejection of it, her notably aloof and executive manner of accomplishing it served to promulgate worries of a return of the overmighty Aphroarch, not seen since the days of the White Lady. When said de-jure power was officially reapportioned to the Aphroarch following the Fae Reclaim, supposedly as per syneidocratic will, these fears were far from assuaged. As the years passed, and Siylvea's policies, such as the extensive buildup of the Nymphonian military and willful entanglement in foreign politics, grew more controversial, it seemed ever clearer that Siylvea was bent on subverting both the substance and spirit of Neonymphonia from within.
Never was this more apparent than in 477 PT, when Siylvea took the incredible and unprecedented step of, as the aggressor, initiating warfare. As an active contributary to ONI, Neonymphonia had already involved itself tangentially in a number of minor conflicts, and had for the past twenty years conducted extensive cooperative training exercises with ONI allies, yet never before had the Iodhatara been involved in a proper, large-scale offensive war. This changed entirely with Neonymphonia's ONI-sanctioned declaration of war against the Grove Eternal. In the fervid buildup to war with the Black-Green Pact (of the Ash Crest Necronet, the Solarian Covenant, the Praxoid Hive, and Grailsphere) ONI had requested, then demanded with repeated warnings that the Grove Eternal open up the strategically critical Bladed Strait to ONI, Dominion of the North, and Freewater Confederation ships. Their continued and unwavering refusal to do so—on the bases of strict neutrality and protection of sovereign territory, which resonated with hitherto long-held Nymphonian national values—eventually elicited a desperate ONI response. Acting solely in an executive capacity and much in spite of popular disapproval, Siylvea ordered Nymphonian Iodhatara (the only Clade among which she still commanded widespread support) to lead the subsequent invasion of Grove lands to occupy and secure the Bladed Strait for military passage.
For a Nymphonian, this was tantamount to outright warmongering, and it was in the year the invasion began that public opinion of Siylvea reached a nadir no Aphroarch, not even the Black Matron, had ever seen before. Yet nevertheless, she persisted, in the process abandoning her previously haughty governing style and initiating widespread public engagement in an attempt to bring her people around to her side. Exemplary of the grace and erudition for which she was famed, she made her case, clear and simple; Neonymphonia's perennial enemies in the Solarian Covenant, Praxoid Hive, and Grailsphere elicited nothing so drastic, it was true. But the Ash Crest Necronet, once a dormant enigma, now an harbinger of the second apocalypse, could not be fled from. They wielded an army of five hundred million, devoid of pain or fear, absolutely obedient to their omnicidal master, and growing with every enemy felled, and their wish was nothing less than enslavement of the world and destruction of anyone who dared resist. Doubt persisted widely, of course, yet she onward she forged with preparations. For in the thirtieth year of her reign, Siylvea's prognostications were vindicated at last. In 480 PT, the War of the Four-Eightieth began.