The fruition of a *very* long held plan.
The secession of Gaston has been planned for ages, almost since the fall of Niselur a couple years ago. Not too long after that, I had a neat idea. The Niselurians were all talking about going into exile and re-founding their realm some day, so I offered them a means to do that. Come to Astrum, I said, and found your realm in Gaston. You can build up your infrastructure and populations under our protection, then secede when you are ready. Then after that you can with our help work your way back to Darfix. This seemed much more doable than trying to recolonize a totally devastated Darfix in the midst of hordes of rampaging monsters, far from any human support.
We got a lot in return. The Exiles have been serving as knights and lords in Astrum for probably close to two years IRL, which has been a huge help to us. It took a long time to build up Gaston, and the war with Caerwyn and Averoth set us back immensely when it broke out, but the New Estate system helped a lot with reclaiming it (and more) and fortunately most of the regions we lost to monsters during the war still had good population density when we took them back.
