Military, in Factions
Sundriam
Also known as Sundrium Guards · Sundream Guards
The Sundriam is the standing guard force of Easthills, a large town in the southern Mediata Savannah affiliated with the Arakcadian Congress. Founded around 530 NA, the Sundriam is a professional military and law-enforcement body responsible for the defence of Easthills' walls, the security of its gates, the patrol of its streets, and the enforcement of town council law. The force is immediately identifiable by its distinctive pale yellow underarmour and bright metal chestplates — a uniform that has become one of the most recognisable visual features of Easthills and a symbol of the town's investment in its own security.
The Sundriam walls — the defensive fortifications along the western and southern perimeter of Easthills, manned by the guard force — are among the town's most prominent landmarks, visible from a considerable distance across the savannah approach and representing the practical expression of the town's defensive philosophy.
History
Founding
The Sundriam was established around 530 NA — placing its founding in the early-to-mid New Age, during the period when Easthills was consolidating its position as one of the larger and more prosperous independent settlements in the southern Mediata Savannah. The guard force was created to formalise and professionalise the town's defensive arrangements, replacing the town's older volunteer watch.
The founding of the Sundriam carried a semi-religious dimension. The force's bright yellow uniforms and its name — which echoes solar imagery — reflect an association with light, vigilance, and the protective aspect of the divine that goes beyond purely secular military organisation. Easthills tradition ties the yellow to light and vigilance, though the guard has never adopted a formal creed, and the semi-religious character of the founding is preserved in the force's identity and its relationship to the civic life of Easthills.
The timing of the Sundriam's establishment corresponds to a period in the New Age when frontier settlements across the Mediata Savannah were formalising their civic institutions — establishing councils, codifying law, building infrastructure, and organising defence — as part of the broader post-conflict consolidation that characterised the era. Easthills' creation of a standing guard force fits within this pattern while reflecting the town's particular advantages: its elevated, defensible terrain and its single-entrance geography made a professional wall-and-gate defence force a natural institutional choice.
Structure
The Sundriam operates as a professional guard force under the authority of the Easthills town council. It is not a militia, a volunteer corps, or a feudal levy; its members are full-time, trained guards whose service constitutes their primary occupation. The force reports to the town council, which sets policy, approves appointments, and directs the Sundriam's priorities through the ordinary mechanisms of civic governance.
As an institution of a town affiliated with the Arakcadian Congress, the Sundriam operates within the broader framework of Congress-standard defence coordination. This relationship gives the Sundriam access to information, coordination protocols, and — in principle — mutual support arrangements with the defence forces of other Congress-aligned settlements and with Arakcadia itself. In practice, the Sundriam's day-to-day operations are locally managed and locally directed; Congress coordination is relevant primarily in matters of regional threat or inter-settlement security.
Duties
Wall defence
The Sundriam's primary military responsibility is the defence of Easthills' walls — the fortifications that run along the western and southern sides of the town, covering the approaches that the natural terrain (the hills themselves and the Itumue Mountains to the east and north) does not already protect. The walls are permanently manned, with guards stationed at regular intervals along their length and at the watch-posts that punctuate the fortification line. This continuous presence ensures that any approach to the town from the savannah is observed and that the walls can be defended at short notice.
Gate security
Gate security at the main western entrance to Easthills is one of the Sundriam's most visible and routine functions. The gate is the town's only significant overland point of entry, and the Sundriam controls access through it — checking arrivals, managing the flow of merchants, travellers, and livestock, and maintaining orderly passage during busy periods. The single-gate configuration gives the Sundriam considerable control over who enters and exits the town, contributing to Easthills' reputation as a well-ordered settlement.
Street patrol
The Sundriam maintains a regular patrol presence in the streets and public spaces of Easthills, including the major districts — the Curling, the Markets, the Farmer's Pride, and the approaches to the Marbled Basin. Street patrol serves both a law-enforcement and a public-order function: deterring petty crime, resolving disputes, maintaining the conditions for commerce, and providing a visible civic authority presence throughout the town.
Enforcement of town council law
Beyond defence and patrol, the Sundriam is the enforcement arm of the town council's legal authority. Council law covers market regulation, water rights, public works standards, property disputes, and the various civic rules that govern life in a town of Easthills' size and complexity. The Sundriam enforces these laws in practice — executing warrants, removing trespassers, shutting down illegal operations, and delivering individuals to whatever judicial or administrative proceedings the council directs.
Equipment and identification
The Sundriam's uniform is one of the most immediately recognisable features of Easthills. Guards wear pale yellow underarmour beneath bright metal chestplates, producing a distinctive combination of warm colour and polished metal that is visible at distance and unmistakable at close range. The bright yellow of the uniform is consistent with the semi-religious solar imagery associated with the force's founding and gives the Sundriam a visual identity that is distinct from the guard forces and militias of other settlements in the Mediata Savannah.
The uniform's practical character — metal chestplates over padded underarmour — reflects a guard force designed for the range of duties the Sundriam performs: sufficiently armoured for wall defence and gate enforcement, but not so heavily equipped as to be impractical for street patrol and daily civic policing.
The Sundriam Walls
The Sundriam Walls are the defensive fortifications of Easthills, running along the town's western and southern perimeter. They are one of the town's most visible landmarks — visible from the savannah approach along the Bronze Track and forming part of the skyline that gives Easthills its characteristic silhouette of walls, hills, and mountain backdrop.
The walls cover the sides of the town that face the open savannah, where the terrain does not provide natural defence. The eastern and northern sides of Easthills are protected by the hills themselves and by the rising ground of the Itumue Mountains, making fortification on those faces unnecessary. The wall line is punctuated by guard posts and watch positions, manned continuously by the Sundriam, and the main western gate is integrated into the wall structure as a controlled point of entry.
The Sundriam Walls represent one of the most substantial investments in permanent defence infrastructure among the independent settlements of the southern Mediata Savannah. Their construction and maintenance are matters of civic pride in Easthills and a practical expression of the town's philosophy that security is worth the cost.