Early Origins
The area known today as May’Kar was once inhabited by a variety of peoples, who first traveled to it in search of untouched land. The region was known to be harsh, but communities were established along the Ukor River, which flowed from the northern mountains which bordered it.
The greatest of these communities developed into Prince-led city-states, which controlled the collection and distribution of water into the surrounding areas through advanced irrigation techniques and technologies developed to deal with the arid conditions of the desert. As industry and urbanization progressed, the pollution of river waters became a major concern: All the peoples of the Ukor drew and drank from the same river, and every drop of impurity in the north became a toxin for those in the south.
Tensions grew between these city-states, eventually erupting into outright war. Blood flowed into the Ukor, making the problems worse for all but the northmost cities. The situation was finally brought to a head when a coalition of forces, led by a woman named Tsimfa, laid siege to the city of Saresh. After a lengthy conflict, Tsimfa’s forces took control of the city, and she was installed as its new head.
Tsimfa’s people, being from the southern reaches of the Ukor, were long used to dealing with impure water, and had ingrained in them sophisticated rituals for water storage and purification, promulgated by its priest class. As the new Prince of Saresh, Tsimfa brought her culture and her Habbatt faith with her, and stymied the worst of the pollution that fed back into the Ukor.
Tsimfa’s successor, Prince Kosami, exerted pressure and influence upon the other Princes to make them adopt similar standards of stewardship over the river, backed by the central Habbatt church emerging in Saresh, and pitting detractors against each other by publicly accusing them of befouling the Ukor. Kosami would go on to be crowned the first Priest-King of Saresh, and by the end of his life, established Saresh as a proper kingdom.
The Saresh Kingdom
Saresh thrived under its Priest-Kings, who often lived under a symbiotic relationship with the church. The Priest-King legitimized the church, and the church supported and enforced the edicts of the monarch. Clean water was the lifeblood and the currency of the Ukor, and the church had a great deal of power over who received it.
As time went on, the Habbatt church became increasingly dogmatic. What began as ritualized practices, eventually became a deeply political and hierarchical organization which rewarded compliance and punished disobedience. This began to chafe more and more with the diverse faiths of the people of the Ukor, who shared little common ancestry, beyond that which had been forged through their time together in the desert.
Though improvements in irrigation techniques continued to allow the people of Saresh to expand further out from the river’s path, this increasing theocracy began to drive people into unknown parts of the desert in search of new homes where they might be able to practice their faiths without scrutiny or suppression.
Little could be done directly about the church, which wielded incredible power, but after the first riot in the city of Saresh, which at this point had become a shining jewel in the heart of the kingdom, the then-King Sibbid instituted the Mahsai.
The Mahsai’s purpose was simple on paper: It was a legal court, which existed to mediate matters between claimants of different faiths, to ensure no favoritism was taking place. Many Habbatt church leaders readily agreed to the establishment of the Mahsai, seeing it as another avenue to enforce their will within Saresh, but soon found themselves receiving censures and fines for their actions.
Within a generation, much of the Habbatt’s influence had been stripped away from them, and tensions were eased across the kingdom, which had expanded to encompass most of the peoples living along the Ukor. This expansion was the result of a series of successful campaigns to unify the region, which ended only upon Saresh’s encounter with the fledgling empire of Vandregon far to the south, which rebuffed their advances and retaliated with brutal efficiency.
Saresh, now, had long-outgrown the city from which it took its name. It stretched far into the desert, sprawling into areas that had centuries ago been considered too inhospitable for any life, let alone rich and bustling cities. Needing a new name to present to these great foreign powers, one that showed how thoroughly they have tamed the desert, Sibbid dubbed his kingdom: The May’Kar Dominion.