Toga is the mountainous western frontier of Aquafa and Van’s homeland, a region whose people are caught between conquest and displacement. Though its clans had defended Aquafa’s borders and shared its language, Zol did not recognize them as Aquafaese citizens; the imperial distinction left them vulnerable to removal from the land they had long called home.

Frontier and Political Status

The Toga Mountains run along Aquafa’s western border, where incursions brought both war and disease. Under the King of Aquafa, the mountain clans had been treated as independent communities with loose autonomy in return for allegiance. When Aquafa became a province of Zol, however, that former arrangement did not secure the clans’ status. The empire classified them outside the ordinary citizenship granted to Aquafa’s incorporated population.

Zol turned to the region only after spending years establishing stable government in central Aquafa. The King of Aquafa sent messengers to the clans offering to negotiate for their safety in exchange for allegiance, but his position as the ruler of a conquered province limited him to pleading for their lives: he had no authority to determine their standing under imperial rule. The episode shows how annexation divided a once-connected population, leaving frontier communities subject to decisions made beyond their control.

Resistance and the Threat of Relocation

Zolian policy relocated lower castes to other conquered territories. For the clans of Toga, failure to obtain ordinary-citizen status meant the prospect of abandoning their homes and trying to survive in unfamiliar places. The Gansa leaders therefore devised a strategy of feigned resistance: they would present a band of formidable warriors, then seek terms by offering submission and service as a vanguard on Zol’s western flank. Their knowledge of the mountains, they hoped, might make them useful as a buffer against Mukonia and persuade the empire to let them remain.

The Lone Antlers made that strategy possible. The band’s men, described as people deprived of ordinary lives, were bound by a vow to serve as the Gansa clan’s shield and give their lives if necessary. Its members were exempt from the clan’s usual rules while serving in that role, and outsiders fleeing calamity could join them as clansmen. Repeated epidemics in the mountains had killed much of the population in some areas; men who had lost families to war or disease joined the band, swelling its ranks to unprecedented numbers. Resistance was thus both a political calculation and an answer to a frontier repeatedly diminished by violence and illness.

Imperial Settlement and Administration

Toga also belongs to a wider system of frontier governance. Poor farmers and herders from the edges of Zol were ordered to settle newly conquered borders, establish Zolian-style communities, raise the crops and livestock preferred by the empire, and mingle with local people. These settlers formed an unarmed vanguard intended to transform conquered territory into Zolian land. Lower taxes and ownership of cleared farmland offered them material advantages, but many suffered from being unable to return to their native homes. Their experience echoes the displacement threatened for Toga’s clans, even as the settlers were themselves instruments of imperial expansion.

The administrative machinery extended into remote territory: Zolian tax officers collected information on nomadic groups in places including the Toga Mountains and recorded population numbers and ages. That information later offered a possible way to locate people hiding in the woods, including Van, though the records were acknowledged to be imperfect. In this way, the same frontier that imperial policy sought to reorder was also rendered legible through tax and population records.

Homeland, Family, and Memory

Toga is not only a contested borderland but a place of personal attachment and loss. Van remembers the Master of the Dance, Yokkina, as a warm presence from his childhood: she teased him, gave him nuts and honey sweets, and once found and rescued him after he fell from a cliff. As rumors of Zolian invasion reached the settlement, Yokkina disappeared and passed her role to her daughter. Some people believed she had fled from fear of an omen, but Van thought she had left for a reason; he regrets that she is gone when he most needs someone to consult.

Van’s recollection makes the political disappearance of a homeland intimate. Toga’s conquest is measured not only in changes of status and threats of relocation, but also in the absence of people who once gave its communities continuity. Across the region’s history, the empire’s categories—citizen, outsider, settler, nomad—determine who may stay, who must move, and how a life rooted in a particular place can be carried into an uncertain future.