Around 2876 SD, a century after the Neferati raised Tarkhetan on the Needle, the young empire had a problem trade alone could not fix. The chokepoint city it had built on the strait drew in more mouths than the thin hinterland around it could feed. The grain it needed grew east, in the lowlands of Enymu. So the empire sent for it, and came away with a treaty.
It was a treaty, not a conquest. No imperial army crossed the Enymu border, then or since. What crossed was a delegation, and what it carried was an offer the lowland king could refuse only in theory. Enymu is landlocked but for a short stretch of harborless coast, and every road from its fields to a paying market runs through ground the empire already held or could close at will. Sign, and Enymu's harvest moved freely to the largest buyer in the region under imperial protection. Refuse, and it rotted in the barns where it grew.
King Aldric I signed. The terms founded the arrangement and, in time, the dynasty that still keeps it. Enymu would supply Tarkhetan's bread, and the worth of that bread would be settled each year at the Grain Exchange in Aldrichold, where the empire's licensed merchants graded the crop and named its price. This was the exploitation, and it was structural rather than cruel. No one was driven off the land. The fields stayed in Enymese hands and the farmers kept farming. Only the price was the empire's to decide, and across four centuries the decision has rarely fallen Enymu's way.
The Exchange grades the wheat and names the coin. Enymu only grows it. — a saying among the grain factors of Aldrichold
The compact has never been renegotiated and never formally broken. King Aldric IV upholds it as his fathers did; how it sits with him, and with the kingdom under him, belongs to his own entry and to Enymu's. What the bargain bought the empire was cheap bread in perpetuity. What it bought Enymu was a grievance that compounds one harvest at a time, and a generation now grown up asking why a price fixed under a closed-road threat five centuries gone should still govern this year's wheat.