One of the most thought-provoking university courses I took (along with Adam from CoG, as it happens) was on “tragic choices”: situations where societies have to decide on an allocation mechanism for scarce goods with life-and-death stakes. The course’s core text explored among other things the way we select people for military service – and noted that over the course of the 20th century, the US changed its process several times, because the costs of any particular way of choosing who was going to die for their country became hard to bear when our faces were rubbed in it for too long. My vision for Halassur is similar; because IMO there ultimately is no humanly tolerable mechanism for mass-scale harvesting of babies, the Halassurqs have gone through multiple variations of allocation mechanism, and would find it hard to sustain any large-scale mechanism if the western invader ceased to be a pressing threat.
The transition from an overpopulated authoritarian empire to a non-state society would be incredibly bloody and costly, and is I think only likely to work in areas where the geography is less suited to large-scale, centralized agriculture – otherwise you’ll get warlords turning themselves into micro-states again, trying to recapture the glory of the old empire like we saw in Europe post-Rome. You might be able to forge a non-state society across much of the Rim, except (probably) its agricultural heartland.
Only about 2,000 people, the majority of whom are households of retainers on the noble estates. In addition to 300-odd helots, another 230-ish are local town-yeoman households with small farms the local nobles haven’t gobbled up yet, and around 160 come from trader/artisan households. The permanently resident aristoi themselves come to barely 40 people, though the frequent long visits from lowland cousins make for a noble community that might comprise 60-100 people at any given time. When the drovers come back off the Brecks every year, the town temporarily grows by a few hundred people and many thousand sheep.
It’s definitely odd for a district seat to be in such a small and remote town (and that’s a big part of why Hector and Calea get mocked so much when they go to Rimmersford or Shayard City). The Outer Rim has around 107,000 people all told, and most of that population is based in lowland farm country downriver or northeast of Rim Square. Those placid eastern lowlands (bordering on the even richer farmland around Darridge in the Rimhart) have much bigger helot populations on their plantations, much bigger Alastor garrisons to control them, and only a handful of big families like the Pelematou or Keriatou owning most of the land.
As we’ll learn more in Chs 3-4 and Game 3, Stilos Keriatou won the aristarchate of the Outer Rim by being the first major-family patriarch who was willing to base himself on the troubled fringes of the district, on the verge of the Whendward Hills, rather than in his traditional grand family estate in the lowlands.
25-30 years ago, the Whendward bandits were more actively predatory all along the fringes of the Outer Rim. The aristarchs of that time (living mostly in Rimmersford, with visits to their lowland estates) repeatedly failed to stem the problem; their campaigns to restore order were easily avoided by the bandits who would fall back into the woods and reemerge once the aristarchs left. Petty gentry like Memnon de Merre whose land was under permanent threat began organizing self-defense networks and appealing loudly for more effective support. (The noble MC’s grandmother was part of that movement, while her siblings escaped to the Westriding.)
Young lord Stilos Keriatou won the allegiance of this network when he moved his family out to the most remote bit of his patrimony, in the drove road terminus of Rim Square, and began actively pacifying the region. Over a few years of constant pressure and “veneur-style” bandit hunting, Stilos and his allies reduced the bandits to a demoralized huddle in the far wilds, and even reopened the Whendward Pass for a few years (until it became clear that almost no one wanted to use it to get to Szeric anyway, and it lapsed back into de facto bandit control).
The newly elevated Archon Meletos was pleased (especially since it meant he didn’t have to go through the costly and unpopular process of re-basing a Phalangite tourma in the Rim to address the problem). Since he didn’t have patronage ties to any other House in the Outer Rim, he was happy to give Stilos the aristarchate.
One of the reasons the late Lord Pelematou was such a bitter, hateful man – to his family as well as his helots – was his lasting resentment that the Keriatou had forced him to move out beyond the acceptable fringes of civilization in order to sustain his ambitions of regaining the aristarchate for his House.
It’s absolutely intentional, and I’m glad that resonates. Having it be greater by a factor of nearly ten at birth, falling quickly to five and then three as more of the child’s potency becomes actual, feels consistent with the world to me – it’s not just a high number to keep Halassur competitive with the Hegemony in blood phials. 
I’m on the record as a real-world member of a “save the world” movement whose founder was described as rejecting both imperial power and liberationist revolt, and instead opted to start a small transformational community, telling his followers that the goal was to be like leaven spreading through a loaf. That was how to set the world on a better course; the idea wasn’t to give up on saving the world, but to recognize that it was going to take a loooooong time, and that the more shortcuts we tried to take, the more we would end up as part of the problem.
Now, from that founder’s unceremonious execution until the present day, his strategy has seemed obviously inadequate and unjust to many people (including many, many Christians). Especially given that the community he founded didn’t generally center political or economic justice as one of its primary features.
In XoR, I don’t want to neglect the moral appeal of liberating conquest, or the moral cost of leaving people to suffer injustice just outside your borders. The choice to make an exemplary realm on a smaller scale, in the hopes that its success will ultimately transform the wider world more effectively than direct conquest and empire-building, isn’t obviously the morally or strategically preferable one. But I want at least to write a world where it’s not obviously the wrong one. (And where the choice to forgo kingdom-building at all, in favor of joining a pacifist movement whose goal is to “leaven” society without violence over the long haul, is also available – reflecting the choice of the rebel to whom I personally owe allegiance.)
You could pay people generously to give you their unwanted babies. But remember that because of the existence of mullow, there are a lot fewer of those in the Hegemony than there are in our world. So for example, brothels aren’t associated with frequent pregnancy and higher levels of infant exposure, like they were in much of the Mediterranean world historically. Given that, plus the high levels of abhorrence for child-killing built into the society, I don’t think you’d get a lot of take-up for a scheme where you offered huge amounts of silver for babies to kill – and it would crash your legitimacy pretty hard.
Vigil is not accepting new applications to join at present.