Tallhold

A tallhold (Fengese: 高壘, : Gāolěi, lit. "tall walls") is a large, multi-family communal settlement historically prevalent in Serica, designed to be easily defensible typically through fortification or use of natural obstacles, such as hills and mountains - thus the namesake of the structure. These structures are prototypically associated with the Fenitic people extant especially in south Serica, where they served as hubs of community life and activity in given localities. Given their centralized and defensible nature, tallholds generally served as the seats of Fengese political aristocracy throughout much of its early history, the nerve centers of Fengese civilization. Today, tallholds have largely faded from prevalence, superseded by the development of modern urbanized cities which outgrew their static fortifications.

The exact date of the tallhold's conception is indeterminable, archaeological evidence indicating that it has existed for as long as the need for defensible settlements existed in Proto-Serican civilization. The earliest tallholds were entirely natural, sedentary settlements which were constructed in defensible positions in mountains and caves - geographical features especially common in the valleys of the Fengquan River which cradled what would become the Fenitics. Constructed settlements became more prevalent with the development of a cohesive political culture in Fenitic societies, as city-states were established around the shrines of the pyrolatric cults which informed Fenitic traditions and norms - it is from these city-states that Infernalism emerged, from the ennoblement of the city of Taosongya. The heavily fortified settlements recognizable today as tallholds would not emerge in full until the Horsemen Migrations of the 9th century BCE, when the nomadic Khatagin people migrated southwards into the South Serican Plain. Incentivized by the need for collective defense against constant raids by the tribal nomads (heightening tensions between the Fenitics themselves given contemporary conflicts notwithstanding), Fenitic communities consolidated evermore into clustered strongholds: every settlement eventually fortified themselves, from the rural villages with their simple s to the ennobled citadels with their high walls.

The prevalence of tallholds in south Serica both produced and was a product of the communalist traditions of the Fenitic people. The tallholds served as the seats of power of the numerous Fengese clans, kinship clans which were part of an interconnected patchwork of familial pacts and alliances, whose interactions with one another defined the decentralized political landscape of old Serica. In spite of the efforts of central authorities, most significantly during the Long Usurpation, to properly unite these disparate clans into a coherent and centralized political hierarchy, the clans remained impossible to dislodge, their eventual rejection of central authority at the Revolution of the Hundred Shrines contributing majorly to the empire's collapse in the Great Fragmentation in 1303 - the tallholds would come to represent the incessant localism and feudalism of contemporary Fenitic society. From the shattered remains of Fengjiang, the houses rose to the forefront of Fengese politics again, mobilizing their connections in bids to replace the empire as hegemon over south Serica. This absence of central power and thus culpability only exacerbated the senseless brutalities of the time, the countless independent houses and their tallholds becoming protagonists of the fractious and sectarian pandemonium of the early Fragmentation. Amongst all this, the tallholds also came to represent the nascent Infernalist hierarchy (independent from imperial influence), as inquisitors rallied and fortified their monastic communities to resist secular encroachment - the tallhold could be said to be the early model of the pyre temple.

It was only with the adoption of gunpowder technology - products of the intellectual Elucidations of the 1400s - that this status quo of tallhold despotism could be challenged. Where before the tallholds were practically impregnable considering their sheer rampancy and the monumental costs associated with besieging every single one of them, the cannon would render the previously renowned walls of the tallhold gradually obsolete. The time of tallhold feudalism would come to a decisive end in the coming centuries, as the irrelevancy of their fortifications paved way for the massive territorial conquests and centralizations of the Five Great Houses, eradicating the petty despots of minor houses for the vast dominions of the Great Houses. In the face of obsolescence, the oft-fabled walls of the tallholds were dismantled to make space for the growing needs of urbanization.

In the modern day, tallholds are a relic of the past, existing in Fengese media insofar as a reminder of a much more decentralized, chaotic and dyscephalic past where the absolute ascendancy of the Infernalist faith had not yet been instated throughout the region. Beyond that however, the prevalence of the tallhold across much of Fenitic history has made it something of an architectural staple, its defensible and more significantly, communal style of construction popularized in both modern Fengese and Infernalist architecture. Nearly all of the oldest cities of Fengjiang, especially in the central Fengese heartlands, were originally tallholds, though are practically unrecognizable as them nowadays given their historical dismantlement. Today, the great gees recognizable to the modern Pyrosphere as the beacons of the faith number among the only tallholds that have escaped destruction.