A land not worth the rocks it stood on

Respect your ancestors, they said, not realizing what a bunch of morons they would end out to be. Why they had decided to settle down in such unfavorable environment, no one could make heads or tails out of, now every other place was occupied and they were stuck here. The summers got so hot you could cook eggs outside on a nice warm rock, the winters so cold that temperatures were below freezing for a third of the year. And it wasn't like the land was fertile, or hospitable for cattle either. The terrain wasn't easy to travel by any mode, even aircraft had trouble in such thin atmosphere, and if there had ever been any previous minerals they had been stripped away a long time ago. All that remained were large boulders, sand, icy rivers and a scenery so boring visitors had been known to walk into rockwalls, numbed by the dullness of the environment.

Morons.

Ancestors didn't deserve respect by default, they needed to earn them, and their ancestors hadn't left around anything to earn using. No public infrastructure worth speaking of, no proper private infrastructure either -- running water and sewage was a much later concept. Others who had nothing else bragged of their culture: rich interesting revealing diverse. That was not the case here. The clothes were boring and drab and not particularly distinguished, the food boring and hearty, dance and music would have been something worth having had they, those absolute moronic idiots, not decided that music and dancing were the devil's way into human hearts and banned them. It was unclear why anyone even lived in these lands.

So it was the biggest shock to the inhabitants of these godforsaken lands when they discovered that two of the most powerful nations on Earth were going to war over them. Perhaps there was something of value they hadn't thought of before in their lands, they thought for a moment, and then fell into uncontrolled bouts of laughter, at the ridiculousness of the concept. What they wanted was for the richer of the countries, no, the stupider one, win them over and sink in their money and resources to extract whatever they thought they could get out of it. Armies had for centuries considered the land to be potentially important holding ground for military position, until discovering that the mountains and the winds carried whispers miles and miles away. And any sort of defensive advantage was undermined by the difficulty of the terrain and the ease of approach from all the directions. The only reason the land had remained independent and untouched throughout all of history was every ruler worth their salt was aware of the total and complete uselessness of the place, and knew that spending any resource to conquer would be wasteful. No forts to defend, no resource to protect, no population to subjugate and tax. It was worse than shit.