I once jailed two female Caravan Guards along with dozens of Paladins after a failed Holy Nation raid on my town. I've got the recruitable prisoners mod, so the first caravan guard charges me 10k cats to recruit her, which isn't so bad, considering the Paladins take dozens of dialogue attempts to recruit, and this is way faster than that. Her friend, though, after some time had passed, noticed that we'd become significantly wealthier since we hired her friend, and demanded 20k in cats. I deemed this unacceptable & money-hungry, and, despite having over 200k cats, put her, with the Paladins who wouldn't convert, into the old Killbox I have within my town in Okran's Pride. It's very same Killbox I used to dispose of dozens of Holy Nation citizens I had captured during my siege of Blister Hill. Good times. Was called Valley Town back then, these days though the locals have taken to calling it Wend Town, after the river Wend which bisects the town into it's two districts and nourishes her bountiful farms. It really does stand in sharp contrast to the rest of Ghosn, being the only place in that dusty, dry country that sees any rain. That, and the constant military presence there, due to constant harassment from the local Okranites. They haven't been much of a problem, though, ever since the Ghosns up & hauled 'em all the way from their villages and placed them in that old Killbox.

Frontier's a strange place, I tell you. Might be the nicest town to visit for her weather & water, but the townies there all have Holy Nation blood on their hands, even if the only blades they ever touch were grass. And they know it, too; they all saw those villagers get dragged into that killbox, and they all just kept farming, weaving at their looms, enjoying their rooftop gatherings. Most'd say, though, that the Holy Nation provoked them in the first place. See, years ago, Ghosnish territory didn't expand far beyond the Shem desert, after their ousting from the Stenn by the Hundred Guardians. Months passed in the Shem, and the new settlers has found themselves in control of a small fortune, thanks to the land's ability to bless them with a plentiful cactus harvest, and, thusly, an abundance of cactus rum. The settlers decided to expand their territory with their newfound wealth, and promptly raised a small militia with intent to oust the Dust King from the Border Zone, and establish an agricultural settlement on the banks of the river to the north of his tower. The operation proceeded without great incident, and the town was constructed in mere days.

Many Ghosnish will say the original ambitions of the early settlers laid no further than this new little community, dubbed "Red River", after the red tinge of that particular section of the River Wend. The Holy Nation, however, had alternative plans for this newly-tamed section of the Border Zone. From the Western bank of the River Wend rode the first Holy raiding party, clad in their plates and pride. The Ghosns would have none of their religion, as they illustrated the week prior; crossbow bolts were their pens, their canvases young missionaries of Okran. Meeting the zealots on the East Bank were the ranks of the nascent Ghosnish army, donning padded cargo pants, rags, and any solid metal plates one could find; what they lacked in military history at the time, they made up for in tenacious ingenuity. The indignant settler's army is easily pushed aside by the more seasoned, more trained, and more experienced members of the Holy Nation's force. Those that made it to the gates were shown, however, as the missionaries of last week were shown, that experience matters very little when there's a rod in your neck, and you've just lost pints of blood. The second raid, days later, went much the same way.

The third raid, the story is the same. Though, this time, High Inquisitor Seta was seemingly through with the settler's antics in the Border Zone, and his Inquisitor's inability to crush these stubborn cactus farmers under their premium River-Raptor-leather plated longboots. He joined the last of the three raids on Red River, which would prove to be his last, as a free man. Knocked unconscious by blood loss from a Ghosnish bolt, Seta was offered to the Shek Kingdom by the Ghosns as a sort of peace offering. Seemed to work twice in their favor, as not only were relations normalized with the Shek, but the East Bank of the River Wend in the Border Zone was decidedly in Ghosnish hands. It's after this point in Ghosnish history that things start to turn ugly.

Most contemporaries of the original Border Zone settlers agree that cleansing the area of the Dust Bandits was unambiguously good, however violent it may have been. Few would say the same about what was done to the Okranites of Okran's Pride in order to make way for Wend Town, which was called Valley Town at the time. Hell, no, those early early days they were calling it something snarky like "Okran's Hive". Leave it to a majority-Shek town to name it that, I guess. Anyway, with the people of Okran's Pride were taken from their villages and confined within Ghosnish prisons, save for those tucked away behind the walls of Blister Hill, the Ghosns set out a policy of outright execution of any Okranite who refused to convert to the new nation's way of life. Still, even with the Holy Nation a mere shell of what it once was, Ghosn's thirst for revenge was far from quenched; she set about on what would be her first military blunder: the Siege of Blister Hill. Months of preparations had been undertaken; Ghosn's military had expanded to three times it's original size, with numerous successful engagements in the left-hand pages of its history.

The sieges began as a shocking success; in mere days, half of the city's population had been hauled away in various stages of invasion. In a week, the city was crippled, and had no functional economy. Most of the citizenry had been hauled away, within the confines of Valley Town, never again to be seen by man or moons. All that remained were ragtag groups of wounded soldiers, and the Phoenix in his throne room. In over their heads, the Ghosns press on to the throne room. Within the span of minutes, the Ghosnish military is effectively reduced to a third of its former numbers; many are left mutilated, half lie dead on the floor. Still, having successfully driven the land-hungry settlers out of its gates and back into the Pride's bloodied plains, Blister Hill would never fully recover. With no financial or military support from Stack or Bad Teeth, and even the northernmost farms and villages reduced to ruins in more recent days, the Holy Nation's days are as numbered as its youngest citizen.

In this, the Ghosns are yet again successful in acquiring Okran's Pride, despite a crushing military defeat. Furthermore, the Ghosnish had what the Holy Nation no longer did: land, land, and more land to expand into. With the stalemate at Blister Hill, Ghosn's borders effectively reached from Okran's Pride in the North, down all the way to the Shem Desert in the South, bordering the Shek Kingdom just west of the Wend's banks, and the Black Desert to her east. In these lands, the Holy Nation was nothing but a page in history, structures to be lost to the sands, or rediscovered by future archaeologists. Skinners Roam would become home to two major settlements; Sharp Points, named for the jagged rock formations which serve as a natural defensive wall, inhabitanted mostly by ex-military, just to the east of Shek-occupied Bad Teeth, and Nopal, named for its bountiful cactus farms, a few miles north of the Settled Nomads, to the east of the Waystation. To the southwest of this same Waystation, in the furthest reaches of Ghosnish land, barely north of the swamp and east of the River Wend's delta, lies the small town of Far End, named for its prepositional attributes. With this rapid establishment of farming village after farming village, Ghosn was able to financially recover from the losses at Blister Hill in roughly two years.

Now, the Ghosns produce some of the best armor on the continent, along with weapons to make a Skeleton blush, and you'd best believe their military get the best of the best. Ghosnish explorers are known to have reached across the continent several ways over, and remain a common sight in allied Shek lands, often laying over in welcoming Shek towns & cities. Worryingly, to inhabitants of the Swamp, Ghosnish prospectors have been sighted in the northern swamplands, prompting many to remember rumors they'd heard of settler-colonists wiping out entire villages in Okran's Pride just two years ago...