Biora is located in the extreme northwest and is surrounded by mountains. It is linked to Cassile through the Kian Pass. Mountains also divide Biora from its coast; cliffs descend straight to the sea in most cases, and there are a few tiny fishing villages on the slight stretches of beach. Climate is cool and normally cloudy. The people of Dabion are fair in color, having pale skin and blond hair. This leads to the scorning of light coloring in the Five Countries after 500, until the mid-700s when it becomes vogue again (especially the wearing of light-colored wigs).
Agricultural plentitude provided wealth and leisure, and the upper classes in this narrowly stratified society began to pursue science as a result. Culture was patriarchal and semi-democratic, valuing reason and scholarship. The universities were civic centers.
From 200 to 495 C.C, Biora is the center of science and education. Scholars and teachers traveled from Biora to the rest of the Five Countries, bringing a highly sought-after method of education, science, and philosophy.
The Common Calendar (C.C.) was introduced to the Five Countries by the Bioran scholars when they first arrived, and replaced the original calendars of the various countries. Bioran language also influenced and standardized the languages spoken by the peoples of the Five Countries.
The Golden Age of Bioran learning lasted some three hundred years, with relative peace within the country, but in the last half of the third century dissent began to arise among the various scholars. This dissent culminated in the Light Controversy in 495.
After Nanian's Prophecy, Biora began to collapse upon itself. Biorans were prosecuted throughout the Five Countries; survivors fled back to Biora, bringing their families, in those cases where some scholars married and had children, as well as some of the new converts to scholarship, chiefly from Dabion.
This influx of foreigners was not well received by the Biorans who had stayed in their native land: abandoned wives and children of the traveling scholars, and men who had not achieved the education that would have enabled them to travel. These people had never experienced other cultures, and racial tension was high. Also, Biora was experiencing a difficult weather cycle and crops were failing, and the natives did not welcome this sudden boom in population.
Effects of Byorn r'Gayeth's Campaign
A small contingency from Byorn r'Gayeth's Bioran Campaign reached and attacked Biora in 538, but the damage was too greatly overshadowed by the country's other troubles to spark a reprisal.
In 541, Dabion established a peacekeeping force along the Biora-Cassile border at the Kian Pass, ending Bioran contact to the Five Countries. Within Biora, the culture dissolved into near anarchy. The two camps that had formed during the Light Controversy were still at odds when they returned to Biora, despite the loss of political control in the Five Countries that had been the real source of their conflict. Suddenly forced into the confines of Biora, their fighting became more severe than ever, jeopardizing the population.
Shortly after the closure of the Kian Pass, the weather cycle turned deadly, with successive summers of drought and winters of severe flooding. This continued for almost ten years and resulted in a dramatic decline in population. The scholars who had returned from the Five Countries, unable to understand or reason away this crisis, fled to the mountains. Conditions there were no better, and forest fires destroyed most of their accumulated books and writings. They were forced to come out of their mountain shelters to pillage in the surviving villages, fighting members of the opposing camp whenever they crossed paths.
As years passed, the scholars forgot their scholarship and the theoretical issues that had torn them apart during the Light Controversy. They remained divided into two gangs, named Wave and Dust for the old wave and particle theories. It became custom for them to live separately from the settlements, invading periodically to pillage and to recruit boys and young men for their gangs. Likewise, it became custom for the women to live in small sustenance communities, struggling to maintain small-scale agricultural activities in the face of the pillagers, and raising children who were likely to join the gangs on adulthood, if they were boys.
Racial conflict remained between the native Dabionians and the immigrant outsiders, although over time the racial stocks began to mix somewhat. In the settlements, women of different races usually tried to live separately, sometimes fighting one another over arable land or water sources. In some communities, such as Kiela with its comparatively fertile land, the female inhabitants resolved that they could live well if they cooperated, and race relations became less uneasy.
In 748, following the failure of the Ikinda Alliance and the economic collapse, the Kian Pass was reopened by Manderan tradesmen and Dabionian officials. This trade mission failed in its objective to find new resources for the Five Countries, as the population at large had never recovered from the loss of crops during the years of drought and floods, and most communities still had little more than subsistance agriculture. Biorans welcomed the chance for aid, though, trading with whatever they could find. The descendants of scholars from the Golden Age still had battered books in their homes, where basements had been built as shelter from the sun during the years of drought. Most of the Bioran population at the time was illiterate and had no need for the books. In this way, the old texts of Bioran Learning found their way back into the Five Countries. The revival of education was a foreign enterprise, and the image of the Bioran scholar that became romanticized in the Five Countries was one of 500 years earlier. Contemporary Biorans were largely ignored.
Communities like Kiela were further inland and had less need for foreign trade, and so they kept their books, many of which were forgotten in basements. The arrival of Tod Redtanner in Kiela brought attention to these books, as the villagers now lived more comfortably and were willing to devote time to their own culture and history.