The continent of Norzelia plays host to a wide gamut of peoples, cultures, and ideologies. Some, like the Holy Order of Hyzante with its rigorous religious policies, rule vast swathes of land and hold sway over thousands. Triangle Strategy goes big with the nations of Glenbrook and Aesfrost as well.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are the Roselle. Not only do they lack any sort of political representation, but the majority of their population is kept in awful squalor beneath the Hyzantian heel.
What led to this? And who are the Roselle, truly? Let us explore this most enigmatic group through dual lenses: first by way of Hyzante's claims, and then the painful truth.
The Goddess' Teachings
Hyzante is ruled by an elite order known as the Saintly Seven. Per their will, the citizenry believes nigh-universally in the formal stance that the Roselle are descended of sinners whose grievances against the Goddess (Hyzante's foremost holy figure) have led to their forced servitude today.
The Roselle, it is said, were cruel manipulators whose greed knew no bounds. They sought complete control over salt – an all-important resource modern society believes can only be found in a single lake at the heart of Hyzante's capital – and for their villainy, they were enslaved.
The Roselle's "justified" enslavement was backed by the Teachings of the Goddess. The Goddess, whose lakeside Source was ravaged by Roselle's tyranny, placed the aggressors in multigenerational tortuous squalor with the promise that they might still find salvation in her generous heart should they toil away until their very deaths.
And so the Saintly Seven insist, and its tidily ignorant people thus believe, that it is nothing short of divine providence for the Roselle to mine the Source's salt. By nature of their virtue, then, the Hyzantians enjoy the very salt monopoly their Roselle bogeymen were persecuted for seeking.
Orlaea's Rebellion
Although the Roselle were powerless to prevent Hyzante's machinations, their true origins were passed down verbally through the centuries to prevent their culture from being universally eradicated. In the final decades preceding the events of Triangle Strategy, however, the story has all but been forgotten. Time has played its dark role on the people's memories just as Hyzante had hoped.
A certain woman named Orlaea, last keeper of the histories, led a rebellion against Hyzantian oppression from the very bowels of the Source. Born a slave, she would ultimately die as a concubine of Aesfrost's Grand Duke Zigmunt. To say Orlaea lived quite the life would be an exercise in understatement, and well worth further exploration.
But the broad strokes are thus: Orlaea led a fraction of the Roselle away from Hyzante, most of whom founded a village in the present-day Wolffort Demesne. After being taken in by Aesfrost, Orlaea gave birth to a daughter named Frederica. In the hopes that Frederica might one day free the remaining Roselle from the wicked grasp of the Goddess' Teachings, Orlaea crafted a diary telling the full tale of her people's origins and the real reasons for their plight.
The Real Roselle
It is Orlaea we must thank for recording the legend of the Roselle's true history within her diary, and accordingly, the plot of Triangle Strategy itself which dramatically confirms her claims.
The Roselle were not warmongers. In fact, they were failed peacemakers. Long ago, Norzelia was a landmass still beneath the sea. The peoples who would one day come to claim its verdant valleys, scorched sands, and glacial northern reach were all inhabitants of Centralia, a place where ample salt was drawn from a word we in the real world know well, but Triangle Strategy's fictional characters find alien to the tongue: "ocean."
When an unspecified cataclysm occurred (given the strikingly realistic elements which comprise Triangle Strategy's ostensibly fantasy-epic setting, it is possible this so-called cataclysm was merely a matter of extremely swift continental shift), many Centralians migrated north into the newly-risen Norzelia. Here, where the only known salt was at the lake future generations would christen the Source, war inevitably broke out for its control.
Aware of this bloodshed, the Roselle arrived as pacifists seeking to establish a common ground between their descendants. As Orlaea described in her diary of past occurrences:
"They knew that the salt still remained, even without the sea. It merely crystalized and sank deep into the earth... After all their searching, they unearthed a giant crystal... No, a very pillar of salt. They showed it to the people of Norzelia, told them that salt could be found beneath their very feet."
Alas, this knowledge was a direct threat to the burgeoning Hyzante's ambitions. The Roselle were slaughtered, their good-hearted efforts lain to waste with their corpses. Only through verbal accord did a fraction of the truth live on. Even the very pillar of salt they brought to the Norzelians as evidence was malevolently transformed into a partial foundation of the Goddess' Statue which hovers high overhead Rosellan slaves as a reminder that their penance is divinely ordained.
The fate of the Roselle is determined in large part by player actions throughout Triangle Strategy. In some routes, their horrendous mistreatment continues on past the end credits. In others, the legend of Centralia is proven, the Roselle themselves liberated from their harsh injustice. In every route, however, Frederica, daughter of Orlaea, learns firsthand that salt exists within the ragged earth and the Holy Order of Hyzante is a civilization built upon the ashes of her ancestors.