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(2x24) Lievus Meij: Part 2, Episode 3

While negotiations with the last independent colony about their membership in the federation continue, Lievus' fears about a sudden reversal in the climate prove prescient, and a terrible year nearly without a summer leaves the growing Ehrban civilization facing a dire food shortage. Being both the most well-established colony and, thanks to Geiana, the most well-coordinated and cooperative, the old temple fares that season the best out of the four, but the others all fall into varying degrees of troubles. Kadia's second colony, though well enough established to materially survive the bad year if its people would band together and work cooperatively for their common good, can't manage to do that, finding food riots and subsequent civil unrest making their problems even worse. To save her people, Kadia is forced to declare a state of martial law over the colony, and to make difficult decisions about how to allocate resources and punish offenders against the state.

In the two newest colonies, things go even worse for the absence of such a strong leader, as families fight for control of the scarce resources and the more magically powerful of them rise up as warlords, or "warlocks", raiding the countryside, taking what they want and killing whoever stands in their way. When the hard year ends, those warlocks remain in control of their feudal fiefs, and as resources become more plentifully available again, they begin to war with each other for control of them; and to war against the first two colonies that had managed to weather the bad season. Kadia and her second colony adopt a fierce isolationism, a "to each their own" philosophy now unconcerned about whether those who have declared themselves enemies out in the country should live or die the next hard year.

But the old temple under Lievus, on the other hand, decides that this has gone far enough, and begins using its superior resources to conquer the petty warlords by force and establish sound government over the countryside again. It does this through an action of the federation of which Kadia's second colony is still a part, but with their diminished population after the hard year, a minority part unable to sway the vote on the matter. The entire federation is to be reorganized under the more centralized leadership of the old temple. That is something Kadia's people will not stand for, and they secede from the federation, which does not recognized their right to do so. Despite their familial relation and mutual desire to avoid this fate, Lievus and Kadia become the leaders of opposite sides of the ensuing civil war that threatens to tear apart what little still remains of the Ehrban civilization on Niarba.

Next: Lievus Meij: Part 3, Episode 1