Yol

The yols, translated as circuits, were the main polities of note in western Ausarea from the 3rd century BCE to the 7th century CE. In their prototypical form, they were essentially legal and ritual customs observed in a large area spontaneously, guiding the high culture of inhabitants and structuring the conduct of pandalans, whose adventures and enterprises dictated life and imposed order at a more quotidian but also ephemeral level.

The yols' own characteristics, alongside those of the pandalans, reflected the particulars of nomadism as the dominant lifestyle in western Ausarea; to the extent states of a more sedentary nature emerged, they positioned themselves as enforcers of a wider yol, and like sedentary life itself in the region in this period tended to wither away. The most impactful forms of state tended to be the efforts of pandalans to expand particular yols, which accomplished large-scale mobilization, coercion, and conquest but for very brief and specific periods; yet the legal changes they produced through enforcing their particular yol could be quite long-lived. The 'yol world' encompassed Turon, Udia, and the Kataran.

Yols superseded tribal confederacies and kasikan-influenced systems of cultural exchange that prevailed in western Ausarea after the fall of Magal and the collapse of wider Daunic civilization, and the rise of various Kataranic Hangan peoples to the position of dominant culture. In the eastern Kataran it blended with the influence of Serony, and yols were imposed as customs surrounding djih ritual centers, while to the west they took the form of opt-in bodies of law akin to Pastism in the White Order further west in the Pastic world. Pastism likely influenced the development of the yols, and a number of arrangements were even founded by those claimed to be legates.

Tendencies towards stronger, more coercive states and increased competition across the civilized world did not evade the yols, which from the 2nd century CE onwards experienced a surge in standing empires acting as their enforcers, such as the Byggal. The religion of Gradism also promoted and enabled more definite hierarchies overturning the capriciousness of pandalan adventurers. Aza, established in Udia in 229, oscillated between the yol model and banudar-style centralized despotism influenced by Varasan, with one legitimating the other; the yol eventually became accessory to an imperial cult. Tensions produced by this new model of statecraft were exploited by Arpalism, which in the Cremation Wars of the 5th to 6th centuries restored a sense of a universal yol over Ausarea and imposed darskus as its enforcement.