Wallowing Era

The **Wallowing Era** was a period of history in Ganit from the 13th to 18th centuries, broadly corresponding to the Garan Faithless period. This period is mainly marked by the rise and fall of nexilism and the consequent alteration of Ganitian biology.

## Anabate wars

As the Cetocracy unravelled, the 12th century saw a series of complex conflicts where Anabate empires, still-underwater syntrophies, and independent post-Pharnean dynasties struggled against each other. At the end of the century, the Onites, Antrites, and Parthenites dominated Ganit as Anabates, even taking control of parts of Gara and Ganon. Their feuds with their underwater cousins severed the surface tribute and leased land on which the great syntrophies depended. Meanwhile, they came to depend on unscrupulous experiments in creating nexile macro-organisms to assemble armies and subjects dependable enough in their intrigues.

Emerging nexile warlords engineered entire populations beyond recognition to serve their power, introducing not just tactically useful traits but also behavior that would create subjects loyal as a matter of basic functions. How this was implemented varied: addictive drugs, engineered obedience or cooperativeness, and grafting features that caused dependence on some service provided by the nector were all used. Many rulers combined techniques to get access to different populations or reinforce control over particular ones.

Despite or because of these efforts, the Anabate states were not granted a respite. Nexile vassals eventually rose up against their crumbling authority. By the early 14th century they had all collapsed to make way for nexile states.

## High Nexilism

The 'high Nexilism' of the 14th to 18th centuries accomplished the Principate goal of making only a small enlightened elite hold any degree of agency in society altogether, albeit in a perverse manner. Nexile subjects, physiologically deprived of any capability to resist, became instruments and technological objects, engineered into increasingly monstrous forms and culled at scales that put the sum of previous warfare to shame; rapid selective breeding was a deliberate state effort as much as a simple reality that everyday circumstances amounted to. Yet they were always dictated by small, mobile groups of dynasts, whose states became increasingly less territorial and accounted more in terms of biomass.

Nectors competed in a form of warfare that required near-total extermination of the opposition's biomass and the imposition of their own macro-organism, which in turn left its own evolutionary footprint on what kinds of modification and nexilism prevailed. By the 16th century there were clear 'pharmaceutical', 'pheromonal', 'obligate-symbiotic', and 'parasitic' ecosystems alongside distinct nexile hosts, which characterized nexile technologies as much as political cultures. Small numbers of houses and circles surviving to dominate large areas also enabled a return of empires and larger political units around this time.

But the Ganitian social model did not expand to the rest of the world (unlike the Great Roving nearly a thousand years before) because the subjecthood of nexile entities was replaced or collapsed too often to support large conquests, while Ganitian biotechnology did not yet enjoy an absolute technical edge over other cultures. The larger dominions that emerged from the 16th century onwards found ecological pressures too: their hosts did not collapse fast enough to stave off famine and other resource stresses, while accumulated haphazard mutations made drones and thralls unstable.

## Rise of the Sigillates

Stumbling attempts by the nectors at trade and conquest with mostly hostile civilizations in Gara and Ganon handed power to the Sigillates, aristocrats in the previous centuries mostly focused on engineering their own forms, and were stable enough to make plans for the long term that the nectors' ambitions of longevity now required.

By this point the nectors had modified themselves to suit the needs of nexile domination into forms beyond human recognition. The 'Wallowing Era' derives its name from the later derision of the perceived character of the nectors. Having been allowed into a common high society, the Sigillates made their criticisms of this state of affairs out of aesthetic and ideal grounds heard, and took it upon themselves to restore Valesian ideals about a perfect human.

Without a population to instigate a revolution with, however, the Sigillates had to build overseas contacts and colonies to then wage wars of conquest and reclamation in Ganit. The nectors themselves had only dwindling resources to draw from, not to mention their perennial dynastic intrigues and how the main instrument of their economic survival had turned against them. By the end of the 18th century, the Sigillates had cleansed Ganit of nexile macro-organisms (or reduced them to localized biomachines) and imported un-nexilized populations from nearby regions to restore human society to how it ostensibly was before the 13th century.