Ehrenfest (Duchy)/History and Story

Spoiler from Part 4 Volume 4

About 200 years ago the family of Eisenreich were declared traitors to the King and their duchy was crushed. After redrawing the borders of the duchy to their current state, the King appointed the Ehrenfest family as the lords of these lands. Wanting to make sure not to be associated with traitors, the first Aub Ehrenfest did not retain any of the Giebes appointed by Aub Eisenreich and instead filled the ranks with his own trusted allies.

When Drewanchel invented the sanitary slime magic tool 80 years ago, Ehrenfest was among the bottom five duchies in ranking and accordingly had to wait a long time for the privilege to buy this technology. When they were finally able to aquire it, it came at a rather inopportune time, since it was right after Lady Gabriele of Ahrensbach had forced through a marriage between her and the second son of the Fourth Aub Ehrenfest. As a result of the politics surrounding the marriage, Gabriele's husband was given the title of Count Groschel and left the city with his family to take up residence in his new domain, taking all of their mana with them. This negatively impacted the archduke's family so much in mana capacity that they could not make full use of the new technology right away due to the high mana cost of using creation magic to make a sewer sysytem. To keep up appearances they first re-made the dormitory at the Royal Academy, since this was the place where the majority of interactions with other duches happened. It took several years to finally be able to establish a sewer system for the archduke's castle and several more years for the rest of the noble's quarters. Due to higher priorities the establishment of a sewer system for the lower city was pushed back time and again until most people had already forgotten that such plans ever existed, particularly when the people involved in drawing up the original blueprints started to die off from old age or other causes. And so the plans lay tucked away in the Aub's personal storage for decades, only being rediscovered recently by scholars in the employ of Lady Charlotte, one of the seventh Aub Ehrenfest Sylvester's daughters.

Several years ago there was a coup within the Sovereignty. Though Ehrenfest formally stayed neutral in the conflict and thus didn't suffer any losses in the fighting, many nobles from the region died and others moved to other territories. Furthermore the new king also enacted a purge of anyone believed to be affiliated with the brothers he had been fighting, even in the neutral duchies. Due to this, Ehrenfest, like all duchiers of the Sovereignty, is suffering a severe shortage of mana, causing much difficultty. Many nobles who had been sent to the temple were called back to their families and many of those remaining were called to the main temple in the Sovereignty, in turn causing a secondary mana shortage in the temple.

While Ehrenfest had several outstanding nobles in the past, almost all of their accomplishments stayed on an individual level and failed to raise the the duchy as a whole. Some of the individuals mentioned are Professor Hirschur who's scientific discoveries baffled even Professor Gundolf and the former blue shrine maiden Christine, who's incredible skill with the harspiel left an eternal impression on those who heard her play, including Prince Anastasius.

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