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Thread: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Other significant Hyperborealic peoples of Muataria
    The Saor may have been one of the largest and most prominent of the Hyperborean populations that migrated to Muataria during the Great Cooling, but they were by no means the only bunch of barbaric Arctic humans to do so. Some of their most numerous and historically significant fellow Hyperboreans on Muataria include the following:

    The Felathabi
    Of the non-Saor Hyperborean peoples that settled in southern & western Muataria, the Felathabi (or 'Falathai', as the Allawaurë called them) are among the best-attested. They lived chiefly on the southern coast of the continent, putting them in close proximity to the Allawaurë - indeed, it is widely believed (and Allawauric stories do indeed declare) that they led the charge to displace the natives from the mainland and to their island colonies at the end of the Bronze Age - and the Saurii, and have a reputation for having been an especially violent lot even by Hyperborealic standards. The discovery of bloodstained Felathabi artifacts near and beneath Aidolos, coupled with similarly obviously war-damaged Allawauric equipment, suggests that the Allawauric tales of how these Felathabi had been the ones to overrun the jewel of their Bronze Age civilization and were later expelled by the returning Aidolians sometime in the early Iron Age are true.

    All this said - they did, however, also exhibit greater urbanization and a more complex social organization than their fellow non-Saor Hyperboreans, the Lakani and Speraca.

    Range of Felathabi artifacts & settlements, c. 10,500 AA

    Felathabi language
    The ancient tongue of the Felathabi exhibits significant influence from the Allawaurë and the Knauriiete, some of whose populations they probably overran and formed a socio-linguistic superstrate over in the chaotic interval between the Bronze and Iron Ages. 'Felathabi' itself is one of the few words in their vocabulary that does not appear to have a smudge of influence from the 'civilized' nations of the Muataric Sea, and meant simply 'sword-bearers'.

    Modern speech Proto-Hyperborealic High Allawauric Felathabi
    Man, men Ghuz, ghuze Kat-sos, ma'kat-sos Kegus, kegusai
    Woman, women Aghuz, aghuzay Kal-oite, ma'kal-oitei Aghait, aghaitai
    Sword Fel Makhal Fel
    Spear Sewo Enkhi Senki
    Iron Iwat Sikin Ikit

    Felathabi society
    The Felathabi, like most other Hyperborean peoples in this time period, were fragmented into many smaller tribes. However, apparently following the Pre-Hyperborealic model of urbanized settlements and states in their own way, Felathabi tribes did not spread out over a broad area in tiny villages like their fellow northrons, but instead congregated around the fortified citadel (built on a hilltop or promontory wherever possible) of their kings. These settlements varied in size between twenty to over a hundred hectares, depending on the tribe's own population and power, and shared a basic construction plan: they were enclosed by a wooden wall built atop earthen ramparts and lined with roofless watchtowers, with one or more zangentor-styled gates protecting the town's entrances, and that wall in turn was encircled by a ditch. All the tribesmen who could live behind the walls did so, apparently without regard to status. And while the majority of every Felathabi tribe lived in huts of timber & thatch, those who could afford it sheltered in round hovels of stone: while neither visually attractive nor particularly spacious, these at least couldn't be easily destroyed by fire and strong winds. The kings, their families and retainers/servants lived within the fortified 'palace', essentially a larger round stone hovel, around which the town was built.

    Recreation of a Felathabi stone round-house

    Speaking of kings: the Felathabi social hierarchy was still ruled by hereditary despots, in keeping with broader Hyperborean tradition. Each tribe had not one but two kings, who claimed descent from the legendary heroes who founded the tribe back in Hyperborea. They passed their throne to their oldest living patrilineal relative upon their death, rather than from father to son or by election. These kings were supported by both the martial Felathabi aristocracy and a small priesthood (sesalai) which, strangely, actually was elected by the free men of the tribe: the only credentials to become a Felathabi priest, or sesal, was to be sufficiently learned in the tribe's lore and to reflect the virtues that their founding heroes were best known for, which inevitably included martial valor and strength (usually demonstrated with heroic deeds on the battlefield). Besides communing with the spirits of these long-deceased heroes, the sesalai apparently wielded tremendous power in Felathabi society; they didn't have to kneel before their kings, could force the kings to declare war, and could even indict, depose and execute kings who were thought to have offended the spirits of their heroic ancestors. As the Allawauric chronicler Soton of Digenon noted in his writings:
    Quote Originally Posted by Soton of Digenon
    The Falathai claim to have kings, but treat these sovereigns like metoikoi [military commanders]. ... It is their priests who rule their tribes.
    Two tribal kings of a Felathabi tribe in battle panoply, c. 10,500 AA

    Beyond the unusually powerful and martial priesthood, the Felathabi upper class also had a more conventionally aristocratic side to it in the form of the kolethitai, or 'equals'. This was the militaristic aristocracy of these Hyperboreans, men who had sworn oaths of service to the kings in their own blood and trained from childhood to be the most formidable warriors in his employ. In return, the kings granted them the right to essentially collect their own salary by dividing the tribal lands beyond their capital's walls between these men: they were thus part quasi-feudal lords, part tax collectors, and part elite fighters. These land grants were hereditary, and could only be revoked by the unanimous agreement of both kings and a majority of the sesalai after a public trial in which the patriarch of a kolet family was found guilty of a capital crime. Each family of 'equals' seems to have armed and attired its members for war at their own expense, which was to say, the expense of the freemen and peasants they worked to the bone in their fields.

    Kolethitai partying in a captured Allawauric palace while dressed in plundered Allawauric robes, c. 10,010 AA

    The kolethitai were also charged with raising and maintaining soldiers in service to their kings. The average Felathabi soldiers or stradai were thus volunteers, men of common birth and poor to middling means who agreed to drop whatever trade they worked at previously to spend the rest of their days either in battle or training for battle. They were fed and housed (usually in a stone-and-earthen communal barracks, located outside of the town walls) at the expense of the man who recruited them in the first place, not the kings; thus, should the tribe's king or kings offend their nobles in some way, well unfortunately for them those nobles would have a private army of retainers more loyal to them than their overall sovereigns to count on.

    Stradai in their barracks as depicted on a Felathabi urn, dated to 10,488 AA

    The lowest orders of Felathabi society were, as was the case in most other places, the commons who peacefully worked for a living. The majority of Felathabi would have been subsistence farmers, heading out past their walls every morning to till and/or harvest their fields and then returning to their homes in town at sundown. Others worked as craftsmen and smiths, forging iron tools for the community or iron weapons and wooden shields for war. Traders were few among the Felathabi, who looked down upon those that engaged in commercial enterprise as men who neither fought for a living nor produced anything; they just moved the goods made by others around. And of course, there were slaves, who were considered the private property of their owners and could be bought, sold and mistreated at will.

    Felathabi kolethitai and royals were known to have subjected their children to rigorous eugenics and a brutal training regime from as soon as they could walk. Deformed and sickly infants were left to die of exposure, thought to have been a continuation of a Hyperborean practice back in their homeland during severe winters (or, obviously, the Great Cooling) when families could not afford to have 'useless eaters' taking up even a morsel of their limited resources - and because such infants were unlikely to grow up to become effective warriors. The training regimen mandated for those children who did survive involved: being purposely underfed and encouraged to steal extra food, but also being beaten black and blue if they were caught stealing; sparring with other boys at least twice daily; long stretches of jogging; and learning how to make one's own clothes out of animal hide or wool & beds out of reeds. At the age of twelve they would kill for the first time - they were to slit the throat of a wolfhound puppy they'd been assigned to raise from the age of eight - and at sixteen they were directed to kill their first man, a randomly chosen slave of the tribe, and bring his or her head to their instructor (usually their father), at which point they would be considered a full adult and warrior of the tribe. The end goal was to produce a breed of strong and ruthless warriors with a high pain tolerance who could live off the land on their own, fight and march for extended periods without tiring easily, and take the initiative on the battlefield instead of mindlessly waiting for orders from their superiors to do X or Y; mighty warriors were a tribe's mark of prestige, not necessarily wealth and territory (though acquiring plenty of both tended to require having many skilled warriors on hand anyway).

    Among the Felathabi, the most attractive women were not said to be the most graceful and waiflike, as was the case among the Lakani, nor the busty and wide-hipped type, as was the case among the Allawaurë, but the tallest and most physically fit. These women were thought to give birth to equally tall and formidable offspring, making them the most socially desirable matches. It is also known that to achieve this ideal body shape, even upper-class Felathabi girls and women would exercise rigorously and hunt alongside their menfolk. However, contrary to popular belief (first recorded by the Allawaurë), Felathabi women generally did not fight alongside their men; they did accompany their husbands, brothers and fathers on campaign, but remained behind at camp when battle was joined and only took up arms to defend themselves. In other words, they were little different from other camp-followers the world over, beyond being more physically fit and thus perhaps more dangerous to any foe that decided it was a good idea to try ransacking a Felathabi encampment.

    A wife of one of the kolethitai taking up a sword to defend herself from enemy raiders

    Some historians have theorized that the harsh training regimen of the kolethitai and Felathabi society's favoring of strong, willful women influenced the Istorian damkhaboi​ or 'auxiliaries'. While theoretically possible, there has been no hard evidence to suggest an answer, one way or another; certainly though, the fact that Istoria was one of the Allawauric colonies furthest away from where the Felathabi settled should be considered. It's even possible that things happened the other way around, and the Felathabi were the ones who - if they didn't adopt their policies of eugenics and training children from youth to fight - at least 'refined' their techniques under Istorian influence.

    On a less serious note, the Felathabi were also one of the Hyperborean peoples to have given up on wearing the trousers popularly worn by all Hyperboreans by about 10,500 AA, their men having overwhelmingly switched to a simpler take on the Allawauric chiton: a sleeveless, practically formless rectangle of wool, pinned at the shoulders and featuring a man-skirt instead of pants. Because of this, the Allawaurë specifically did not name them as one of the sherlōni ('trousered ones'), and their Lakani neighbors to the north & east mocked them as torēlaia or 'the skirted'. It is speculated that the Felathabi made the switch due to both extended contact with (and thus, influence from) the Allawaurë as well as the rather more practical reason of living in a hotter part of Muataria than the other Hyperboreans; after all, the southwestern shoreline they inhabited was closer to the equator than the northern riverlands and forests.

    Felathabi religion
    The Felathabi practiced hero-cults, which can be best defined as a Mainstream faith with many local variations, a Martial soul and an Ancestral focus. They still had proper gods that they brought over from Hyperborea and still venerated on Muataria, of course - chief among them Enalos, the (literally) bloodthirsty god of war & father of the gods who regularly flew into berserk rages, incites a similar bloodlust in men, rejoices in slaughter and grants immortality to the fiercest of warriors so that they may serve him in the clouds; Poitia, Enalos' chief wife, the mother-goddess of fertility and the hearth; and Hyemos, the cunning trickster-god who directed the Felathabi to the shores of Muataria in the shape of a six-legged, six-winged horse. However, these gods were treated as distant entities, removed from the cares of mortals and chiefly using & promoting them for their own purposes rather than out of anything resembling goodness in their hearts.

    Modern artist's depiction of Enalos, drawing on second-hand descriptions from Allawauric records

    Instead, the main recipients of Felathabi worship were their heroic ancestors: the mighty and dauntless men who founded their tribes back in Hyperborea, and/or led them to Muataria, and who carried the blood of the gods in their veins but were nonetheless still mortal and thus inclined to care for their descendants. Upon their death, the hero was thought to have achieved immortality by the grace of Enalos as a reward for their unrivaled strength, ferocity and cleverness in life, and to have actually ascended into the heavens as demigods instead of dying and being buried beneath a tumulus like normal Felathabi. Every Felathabi tribe had at least one such ancestral hero-patron who was worshiped in the tribe's own (often brutal) way, and it was to these hero-gods that their purported descendants prayed & sacrificed for strength, courage and prosperity. For example, the Akathitai of the northern hills worshiped their founder Akathor, Breaker of Mammoths by beating and scourging slaves bound in outfits of hide & wicker after imbibing massive amounts of undiluted wine; the clans of the Skadai in the east each offered up a champion on the autumnal equinox, and these champions would then fight to the death in the name of the tribe's founder Skadudos, with the victor's clan being considered the favored of said hero-god until the next bloody ceremony; and the Ebrathai on the southern coast more conventionally sacrificed strong bulls to Ebros the Iron Bull in temples illuminated by sacred fires.

    A ruined shrine to Akathor, hero-god of the Akathitai, located in the foothills where they lived, whose oldest stones have been dated to 10,324 AA

    Felathabi did not generally worship at temples, with the exception of some of the southernmost 'civilized' tribes like the aforementioned Ebrathai. Instead, they revered their heroes at shrines in the wilderness (frequently housing relics that were said to have once belonged to the hero, before his death/ascension) and at the tumulus-tombs where their remains were said to have been buried after being transported from Hyperborea: the former were tended to by diviners of either sex who were said to be able to commune with the heroic demigod & to wield other fantastical powers, such as that of prophecy, while the latter was guarded by the tribal sesalai (priests) and their acolytes. Even the more 'civilized' Felathabi do not seem to have had an especially organized priesthood: older diviners simply took a single child they believed to have magical powers under their wing, and were succeeded by this apprentice upon their death, while the sesalai were elected by the free men of the tribe.

    A diviner of the Ebrathai, c. 10,500 AA

    Felathabi military
    The organization of Felathabi tribal warbands was not, at its core, all that different from the three-tier organization of most other Hyperborean peoples' armies: a small core of elite heavy troops drawn from the ranks of their society's top class, backed by a larger pool of decently equipped volunteer retainers and an especially large mob of poorly-armed & disciplined conscripts or lesser volunteers. Where they differed most from more 'barbaric' Hyperboreans was the complexity of their tactics, no doubt a result of trying to counter the advanced phalanxes of their Allawauric and Sauric neighbors.

    Felathabi kings, their handpicked retainers (the akazonai) and the kolethitai were the most heavily armed and armored of their people and consequently formed the honorable dead-center of their armies, as befitting their high status in their tribes. Their panoply strongly resembles that of Allawauric enkodai: a bronze helmet and cuirass of the muscled or plainer 'bell' types, greaves and gauntlets. They were armed with heavy iron spears that resembled boar spears, straight one-handed longswords clearly made for slashing (called the fel or literally just 'sword', hence the name of their people), and round bronze-coated shields with an iron rim; combined with their heavy armor, it is clear that these men fought in close order as elite heavy infantry, typically as a dense square resembling the conventional phalanx if the reports of their enemies are to be believed. The Felathabi did seem to favor open-faced helms over the close-faced ones used by Allawaurë of this period though, and modern historians and armor-makers have reached a consensus that their gear was generally of worse quality than the stuff made in Allawauric forges.

    A warrior of the royal akazonai or the kolethitai

    The stradai, or professional warriors sworn to the noble kolethitai, wore much lighter armor than their superiors, consisting of a simple bronze helmet. They wore loose, brightly colored (often red) chitons into battle to maximize personal mobility at the expense of protection, counting on speed and ferocity to win their battles rather than the ability to take many hits before falling. They fought with an iron spear like that of the kolethitai, but used a curved shortsword rather than the longsword of their betters, and their shields were not bronze-coated. They reportedly had more discipline than many other Hyperborealic warbands, being capable of forming an assault column that rapidly advanced to crush through a single point in the enemy's defenses (and from there, collapse the rest of their lines) when on the offensive and a dense defensive square when not attacking according to Allawauric sources (who frequently compared them to a marching column of soldier-ants), but favored aggressive tactics like the former over defensive ones. When not fighting set-piece battles, their light armor, mobility and discipline made them excellent foot raiders. As mobile and aggressive medium infantry, they had few equals on the continent, and their masters would bilk this reputation when offering up companies of their stradai as mercenaries to the civilized world.

    Three stradai of the Akathitai tribe on guard duty

    As said before, both the kolethitai and stradai ultimately made up a minority of Felathabi armies, however. In times of war, each individual non-slave family was obligated to contribute a man to the tribe's defense, regardless of status or willingness. These levied commoners, or karkazenai, did not tend to be especially effective or motivated troops and largely fought as unarmored skirmishers, armed with slings, bows and javelins in the style of Allawauric hylatistai. Braver karkazenai, or those who simply hoped for a greater share of the plunder after the battle was over, stood by the kolethitai and stradai in the battle-lines with homemade iron spears and wooden shields, made to be taller and heavier than the round shields used by the proper Felathabi warriors to compensate for their often-poor construction; these were known to the Allawaurë as the 'corcasenai enkodai', or 'common-born spear-bearers'. In battles the non-enkodai karkazenai were assigned to form a skirmishing screen ahead of the kolethitai and stradai, and would retire & play no further part once their betters had closed in for the melee - and that's if they weren't simply left behind to guard the camp with the women while the real warriors fought.

    Reenactors portraying a pair of karkazenai being rewarded by their king after a skirmish

    Like other Hyperboreans, the Felathabi also brought two beasts of war into play on Muataria. Firstly, they still had the fabled Arctic wolfhound to accompany them into battle as late as 10,500 AA, though these big dogs were less numerous and prominent in their ranks than with other Hyperboreans who'd more closely stuck to their barbaric roots; they also tended to be deployed as one large pack set off to rush at the enemy at the start of a battle, instead of fighting directly alongside their masters throughout the entire engagement. Secondly, they had horses, and were among the first Muataric Hyperboreans to use them offensively. While the kolethitai and stradai still purely fought on foot, at most only riding horses to the battlefield and dismounting before the actual battle was joined, among the karkazenai those who owned a spare horse or two were known to ride them into combat, either unarmored or wearing only a simple helmet for protection, and from their steed's back they would fling small javelins or large iron darts at the foe. If engaged in close quarters, they defended themselves with a light ax or long dagger, but without proper saddles and heavy armor they really were no match for anyone other than an equally ill-equipped horseman in melee. These lower-status horsemen naturally typically functioned as scouts, outriders and skirmishers; they were in no way suited to charging an enemy formation, after all.

    A Felathabi mounted skirmisher on the move, c. 10,500 AA

    The Lakani
    A more northerly Hyperborean people than the Felathabi, the Lakani (or as the Allawaurë called them, Lachenai) settled in the lush central riverlands of Muataria. The excellent soil of this region, coupled with the ease of irrigation thanks to the preponderance of rivers and lakes (the latter of which gave this people their name) throughout the area, meant that the Lakani experienced a population boom soon after they settled down and became one of the most numerous Hyperborean peoples. This in no way meant that they'd lost all connection to their barbaric roots, however; indeed they were noted as being no less socially disorganized nor eager for bloodshed as other Hyperboreans, and frequently warred among themselves or with the Saor they neighbored - though, as was the case with tribal barbarian warfare, they also made peace fairly easily, and it was not unheard of for yesterday's enemies (fellow Lakani or not) to become tomorrow's friends among these Lakani.

    Range of known Lakani settlements by 10,500 AA

    The Lakani language
    The Lakani language exhibited a small degree of Allawauric influence; no doubt the result of trade with that particular downriver civilization, this influence is nevertheless greatly limited compared to what had happened to the Felathabi tongue to their southwest. Also unlike the Felathabi language's Allawauric influences, the traces of Allawauric in Lakani are clearly Classical as opposed to dating back to the High Allawauric period, meaning that they must have only begun interacting with the Allawaurë long after the start of the Great Cooling and their migration to Muataria. Some Lakani names also appear to have Saor roots, such as Farnas (believed to be derived from the Saor Fairn), a natural consequence of living alongside the Saor - particularly those who spoke the Mange dialects - and intermarrying & trading with them.

    Modern speech Hyperborean Classical Allawauric Lakani
    Man, men Ghuz, ghuze Kasos, kasoi Gue, guesa
    Woman, women Aghuz, aghuzay Kaite, kaitai Agaitu, agaitati
    Iron Iwat Sicos Ikisa
    Hearth Kerzet Estoba Kerest
    Horse Hurat Sogo Horaga

    Lakani society
    The Lakani were never united into a single cohesive empire, but like most other Hyperboreans of this time period they lived fragmented into a hundred tribally-based petty kingdoms that alternately fought, married into and traded with one another. They were known to live in sprawling settlements: the tribal kings, their close kin and their retainers lived within a stone-walled hillfort, while the clan patriarchs and their own families lived in houses of stone and timber scattered as far as the eye could see from said hillfort's towers, and the majority of the populace in turn lived in wooden hovels and worked on plots of land surrounding their clan elders' far nicer homes.

    Each of these minor kingdoms was ruled by a single king called a selax, who seems to have functioned both as a war leader and as a religious figure presiding over ceremonies of great import, elected for life by the nobles of each tribe: the hereditary chieftains of the tribes' constituent clans, whose position was passed from father to son, and their kin. These kings did not wield absolute power, and the tribal nobility seems to have disregarded their orders in war and peace whenever they felt like it; if the king felt he needed to impose his authority upon them, he'd have to do so with force. Similarly, they could certainly name someone - usually one of their sons - their preferred heir, but upon their death, there was no way to guarantee that the tribe's leading men would actually elect that chosen heir to succeed them beyond ensuring that he was in their good graces.

    A selax in his gilded armor, c. 10,500 AA

    The tribal aristocracy, or géntóna, were (as one might guess from the above description) the true power behind every king's throne across the lands of the Lakani. Clan patriarchs wielded absolute power like whips within their extended families: they arranged marriages, arbitrated legal cases, determined how to carve up newly conquered or granted lands, and expelled clansmen under pain of death from the clan's lands & welcomed them back at will. The closer in blood to a patriarch one was, the more powerful they were expected to be in the clan, as well. These aristocrats ruled over not only a mass of lesser clansmen, but also retainers and slaves. All of a clan's land, outside of the portions sliced off and handed out to loyal retainers, was considered the property of the clan as a whole instead of a single individual: however, due to the fact that patriarchs wielded virtually absolute power within their clans and were considered unquestionable leaders, this de facto meant that the clan's territories were his territories. Clansmen had no private property beyond their own non-land possessions, and lesser clansmen were essentially considered sharecroppers on their betters' soil.

    The fortified hilltop house of a Lakani clan patriarch, c. 10,500 AA

    Beneath the géntóna, there existed - like in many other Hyperborean societies - a 'middle class' of professional retainer-soldiers, sworn to a clan's patriarch or another high-ranking man in the clan. Initially composed entirely of volunteers from the landless younger sons of the clan, lesser clans and the ranks of bastards (those born out of wedlock, even to recognized concubines, were not considered members of their parents' clans), by 10,500 AA these skála (literally just 'warriors' in the Lakani language) had evolved into a distinct social stratum of hereditary small landowners, who owned their own farms and exercised a great deal of personal & familial autonomy from the clan leaders to which they were sworn; these men consequently lived in two-story thatch-and-timber homes nicer than the pithouses of the commoners, possessed not-inconsiderable herds of sheep and cattle and pigs of their own, and typically had a small number of servants and slaves on hand to assist them. They were, however, still expected to serve the clan in battle until they died or grew too old & feeble to hold a sword, and their sons too were expected to follow in their footsteps or else find themselves thrown out of their farm by the rest of the clan's warriors.

    Skála fending off a raid on their master's town, c. 10,500 AA

    The majority of a Lakani tribe were still the free common clansmen (usually referred to as guesa, '(the) men'), of course. They owned no land - outside of the plots assigned to the skála, a clan's land was considered the property of its patriarch - and consequently lived lives that were little different from rural Hyperborean peasants elsewhere; most would probably have lived in crude pithouses, hovels dug into the ground and covered with a flimsy roof of thatch, and spent their days as subsistence farmers until and unless they were called up to fight by their clan elders and tribal chieftains. Owning a horse or more than two cows was considered a sign of great wealth among the common Lakani peasant-clansmen. To fend off raiders and wild animals, many Lakani peasants kept fire-hardened wooden spears and (particularly those peasants rich enough to have a spare pig or goat to trade) cheap iron swords at their homes, which was considered normal and acceptable by their betters so long as they broke no laws; it could be said, therefore, that befitting the Lakani peoples' warlike nature even their peasants were better-armed and more eager to fight than those of the civilized nations, though being untrained rabble they were still not all that useful in war.

    Common Lakani clansmen working in their village, c. 10,300 AA

    Finally, at the very bottom of Lakani society, there were of course the slaves, who lived in a separate timber hovel (when owned by richer men) or directly under their master's roof (when owned by a commoner). Whether taken in war, sold into chains to pay off their own or a family member's debts, or born into the role, slaves were uniformly considered the property of their owners under passed for law in Lakani lands, had no rights and could be bought and sold within the tribe or to foreigners (including other Lakani tribes) like chattel. However, masters were obligated to free a slave or slaves who saved their life, and slaves could accumulate private property and buy their own freedom from more lenient masters.

    Recreation of a Lakani peasant's shack, under which any slaves he owned would've slept too

    Lakani religion
    The Lakani religion, or To-Medna ('The Way') as they called it, can be best defined as a religion of Martial soul with an Ancestral focus. It was not an organized religion and does not seem to have had a priesthood, though there is little doubt that the Lakani had their share of wilderness-prophets and wise women who dispensed medical herbs and stories of gods & heroes. Instead, the Lakani seem to have revered their gods atop and around open hills, sometimes the very same kurgans under which their noble dead were buried. Tribal kings and clan patriarchs led religious processions around an altar, which may have been gilded and encrusted with gems depending on the tribe's wealth, on which a fire was lit; and many Lakani rituals, if their carvings and the stories of their neighbors are to be believed, involved the ritual sacrifice of animals. Each of their gods seems to have had their own special sacrificial animal, though few of their names have survived to be heard by modern ears:
    • Bazamos, the sky-father and king of the gods, who created the world and mankind with his consort Senalata. It was to him the Lakani prayed for justice and victory in war. Depicted on Lakani carvings as a bearded old man crowned with lightning bolts, carrying another bigger thunderbolt in one hand like a spear or lance, and riding a winged horse. Horses were sacrificed to him.
    • Senalata, the earth-mother and queen of the gods, wife of Bazamos and premier goddess of compassion, motherhood and the fruits of the earth. Prayed to for mercy, love, successful childbirths, bountiful harvests, and commonly depicted as a fat, smiling middle-aged woman dressed entirely in fruit and leaves. Hens were sacrificed to her.
    • Kogai, eldest twin son of Bazamos and Senalata and the chief war-god of the Lakani. He wasn't associated with cunning strategy or honor in war, but the brutality of battle and butchery itself, and was depicted as a great bull-headed monster of a man wearing nothing but a bloody loincloth and carrying an ax in Lakani carvings. Naturally, he was prayed to for victory in war, and honored with the sacrifice of bulls.
    • Thirdos, the younger of Bazamos' and Senalata's twins and a god of law, peace and order, in contrast to his chaotic and bloody-minded brother. Originally depicted as a man with a shepherd's crook in one hand and a rod of bound reeds in the other, later Lakani carvings (likely made after coming into contact with Allawauric influence) depict him as a robed and bearded middle-aged man carrying a solid rod and scales. Prayed to for justice like his father, as well as for peace and retribution. Lambs were sacrificed to him.
    • Sirenos, a son of Bazamos & Senalata and god of health and the human spirit. Depicted as an emaciated but upright figure, who gave all of his vitality to men that they may live longer than fireflies did and grow capable of mighty deeds. Roosters were sacrificed to him.
    • Lygda, one of Bazamos and Senalata's eldest daughters and a goddess of the hunt & fertility, depicted as a beautiful young woman in men's clothes with a bow. Her hands helped her mother and siblings bring new gods into the world, but also held a bow with which she could slay deer moving as quickly as thought itself, and she herself took on many mortal lovers of both genders. She was prayed to for romantic success, fertility, the curing of impotence, and victory in battles both on the field and in the realm of love. Geese were sacrificed to her.

    Notably, these are not the native Lakani names given to their gods, but Allawauric translations of the original Lakani names. Said originals remain lost to history.

    Lakani géntóna mourn the clan patriarch atop his kurgan, led by his son and said son's wife, c. 10,350 AA

    Among the more unsavory religious practices of the Lakani was human sacrifice: before formally going to war with a rival tribe or foreign nation, it was customary among the Lakani to ritually sacrifice a captive of that tribe or nation to Kogai, their war god. Lakani warriors also engaged in gladiatorial death-matches with one another before the gods & their community to resolve disputes or simply win further glory for themselves. And the Allawauric observer Katalon of Digenon had this to say about the Lakani rite of fertility:
    Quote Originally Posted by Katalon of Digenon
    After locking their young in their homes, ostensibly for their own protection, all the grown men and women of the village consumed so much unwatered wine mixed with honey that I thought they would drop dead. ... This throng of madmen and wild-women danced, sang, laughed, hooted and howled as they trampled through their own village, deaf to the wailing of their frightened children behind their own doors. From the rooftop where I hid, I witnessed them fornicate and fight in the streets as they pleased. When an argument broke out between two men over some matter I could not make out, one gutted the other with a knife he'd hidden in his trousers, and the crowd carelessly trampled his victim with no regard to his screams. Indeed, any who collapsed out of exhaustion was simply trodden underfoot to their death by men and women they grew up and worked with. ... When the dawn broke and the people of the village sought water with which to clear their heads of the past night's revelry, I saw that they seemed to pay no mind to the dead in their path. "Any who perished the night before, died because Senalata willed it." Was all the elder of this village, this clan of barbarians told me when I inquired about the matter...
    Artist's imagining of the sacrifice of a rival Lakani prisoner at a pyre, c. 10,450 AA

    Lakani military
    Lakani warfare was less organized and more viscerally barbaric than that of the Felathabi, though their martial organization was still done along the tripartite 'levy-retainers-king's household' Hyperborean lines at its core. Their key differences from the Felathabi was their greater usage of cavalry, aided in no small part by their earlier adoption of the saddle from eastern traders & explorers, and their emphasis on speed and ferocious offensives over discipline. As usual, the bulk of a Lakani warband would have comprised of the tribal levy, called the 'benda-guesa' ('bound men') in their tongue. These were the lower-status men of a tribe, all volunteers who would frequently paint their faces and arms to make themselves look more intimidating to the enemy: the Lakani had no desire to conscript their own, for they believed that having a warrior whose heart wasn't truly in the fight in your army would be worse than not having him at all. Thus, while unarmored and poorly equipped with home-made javelins (often just pointy fire-hardened sticks), a crescent-shaped wicker shield and a long knife or woodcutting ax, these men could at least be counted on to be more enthusiastic fighters than the conscripts of the Felathabi and southern civilized nations. The benda-guesa, being volunteers from the fields & mines who were motivated by thoughts of personal glory, enrichment via plunder or (at their most benign) protecting their villages and possessed little to no formal training in war, were a notoriously undisciplined bunch, and without a firm-handed tribal king to direct them, their basic tactic was just to fling their javelins at the foe and charge in with their hand weapons, hoping to their gods that such foolhardiness would actually work: no complexity there.

    A spear-armed benda-gue from a better-off peasant family, c. 10,300 AA

    Some of the benda-guesa fought with hunting bows they brought from their homes: not many, for the Lakani looked down on those who fought as archers (among their people, shooting a man to death wasn't considered nearly as honorable as carving his heart out from his chest and showing it to him in close combat), but enough to provide the Lakani armies with their only dedicated missile component. Needless to say, long-range warfare was not a strong suit of the Lakani.

    A javelin-armed fighter of the benda-guesa, c. 10,300 AA

    The skála, as professional warriors in service to the leading men of the clans, were much better-equipped and trained than the benda-guesa, as were their aristocratic masters. Since they didn't have to farm to feed themselves or build & maintain their own homes (thanks to their overlord/subjects doing that for them), these men were free to spend their days drilling and beating up one another to both hone their skills and show that they were the toughest men in the clan/tribe. The skála were known to wear tall helmets of iron or bronze, coupled with iron chainmail (particularly towards 10,500 AA) or rawhide and (especially common among southern Lakani, who lived closest to the Allawaurë) linen cuirasses, and to fight with heavy iron-headed thrusting spears, iron-rimmed round or rimless crescent shields painted with the colors and symbols of their clan, and one of three types of bladed weapons: a smaller, curved shortsword specialized in getting around an opponent's shield and hooking into the flesh of their arms, sides and back, a straight-bladed longsword of the Saor style (no doubt picked up after centuries of living in proximity, and fighting, with the Saoric Mange tribes of the riverlands) or a glaive with a heavy, curved iron blade referred to by the Allawaurë as 'sickle-swords', wielded with two hands and most effectively used to carve up even a heavily armored opponent like a turkey. Those who wielded the sickle-sword favored smaller, lighter and totally rimless shields over the larger variety used by the short-swordsmen, for they could simply strap such shields to their wrists or shoulders and thus properly wield their deadly weapon without totally sacrificing a shield's protection.

    A pair of skála, one with a Saor-style straight longsword and the other with a classic curved shortsword

    Starting around 10,400 AA, there was a notable military development among the Lakani: many of their skála, even a majority in the richer tribes that could afford to buy or raise stronger and taller war-horses, started fighting on horseback. While horses were in use among the Felathabi, those southern barbarians used cavalry purely as scouts and the occasional skirmishing force, if they didn't just ride the horses to the battlefield and then dismount to fight; among the Lakani though, mounted skála directly fought in close combat, and provided a devastating shock element to their unruly tribal armies. Lakani cavalrymen switched out their thrusting spears for a combination of javelins or iron darts and longer, lighter lances with hollow shafts made of cornel rather than ash or oak, which would break upon impact and hopefully leave the sharp end buried in an opponent's chest, leaving the warrior free to switch to his sidearm for the melee - similarly mounted servants would carry their lance for them while they first engaged the foe at a distance with their javelins and darts, only giving their master their greatest weapon when either they'd exhausted their supply of missiles or ordered to close in on the foe by a superior. For said sidearm, the mounted skála uniformly used (in conjunction with an iron-rimmed crescent shield) a slightly longer variation of the classic Lakani curved shortsword, 50-60 cm/20-25 inches compared to the 30-40 cm/12-16 inches for the infantry sword; shorter than a Saor longsword but still long enough to be an effective cavalry weapon, and not nearly as unwieldy as the sickle-sword would've been when fighting from a saddle.

    Skála cavalry charging, c. 10,495 AA

    All this said, the lack of stirrups & barding and the fact that even the finest warhorse of this period wasn't exactly a 16-18 hand destrier did hamper the effectiveness of Lakani cavalry: they were great at obliterating a disorganized or undisciplined opponent, making mincemeat out of light and medium infantry, and in flanking maneuvers, but were still unable to crack a skála or Saor shield-wall, much less an Allawauric phalanx, with a frontal charge. Accordingly, wiser Lakani warlords did not heed their proud horsemen's demands to lead charges from the forefront at full gallop, but instead assigned them to circle around the foe's flanks, rush through gaps in their defensive lines, or at least wait until the rest of the army had drawn its opposing counterpart out of formation instead of simply bullrushing the enemy head-on.

    The selax fought with the protection of his own elite household skála, usually referred to as athe-skála ('high warriors'). Typically drawn from the younger sons and brothers of clan patriarchs and their own brothers or cousins, the athe-skála wore various status symbols to distinguish themselves from the common(er) warriors; gilded helmets with dyed plumes, brass coating for their iron mail, and even limited barding for their mounts in the form of a simple, sometimes also brass-coated iron chanfron. These royal guardsmen fought almost or entirely mounted, and would charge with their liege either at the beginning of a battle (to win maximum glory, and/or if their king just had more guts than brains) or at a critical point when he commanded it of them. As they were solely loyal to their king and not a potentially reckless/glory-hounding géntón, and had enough glory just from being around the persona of a tribal king, the athe-skála were usually the best-disciplined bunch in a Lakani army and could be counted on only to strike when their intervention would prove most decisive. Quoth Katalon of Digenon, once more:
    Quote Originally Posted by Katalon of Digenon
    Now these wildermen of the lakes were a different breed than those we call the Falathai and Saurenoi, not only in peace but in battle. For there are some among their number who are neither man nor beast but both, thunderers with the mind and upper body of men but the lower body of a horse, this I so swear: no man could have so masterfully combined skill-at-arms and mad rage while moving atop a horse's legs that they possess. When my uncle Eion marched forth to put a stop to their raiding with one thousand of Digenon's strongest spears and two thousand of our Falathai allies behind him, we were prepared for the screaming painted warriors of the Lachenai, the curved swords and sickle-swords of their gentlemen alike, and even the rush of their horsemen. Their blood-curdling cries, painted faces and ability to tear off limbs with a single blow of their curved swords may unnerve lesser men, but I was fully confident that against our phalanx they would shatter like the tide against a sturdy rock. And I was right to feel so, for that is what eventually transpired. Not even the thousand-and-half Saurenoi who came as allies of the Lachenai, men of the great tribe called 'Mangai' whose king was tied to the master of the Lachenai by marriage, could save the day for them.

    ...

    But when the battle was nearly won, our pursuit was shattered by a cavalcade of braying centaurs in gilded helms and mail, led by one who must have been the king of these particular wildermen. That, we were not prepared for. This counter-charge occurred when our warriors were out of formation, driven to chase down the fleeing enemy foot and horse alike and to seize as much plunder as we could, and thus we were not expecting such an onslaught in these last minutes of the battle. It is doubtful if we could have stopped them even in phalanx formation, for it is one thing to fight men on horses, but half-horse monsters? It is to my great sorrow that I must report we were thrown back with heavy losses, my uncle among them - I saw one of the Lachenai drive a lance through his face and tear his head off his shoulders even as the shaft cracked - and though we held the field we could not pursue the Lachenai any further. The Saurenoi say there are others of their kind who live beyond the great northern mountains and on islands far to the west, who are madder still than themselves and these Lachenai put together: but this I find hard to believe, for to be so vicious and barbaric they would truly have to not be men, but more monsters spawned from the loins of Charos.

    ...

    Raiders struck the villages at our frontiers once more. The survivors have no doubt they were Lachenai. Uncle Eion's sacrifice and that of near three hundred of our citizens two seasons ago appears to have been in vain, and the lords of the city are in no mood to try challenging the accursed wildermen in the field again, not with the citizenry already so bloodied and paralyzed with fear over the prospect of battling the centaurs of the lakes once more. I fear it will not be long before refugees from the countryside add to the squalor of Digenon.
    A warrior of the athe-skála with a sickle-sword, notably wearing a gilded helmet

    Arctic wolfhounds still faithfully fought with their Lakani masters, with those belonging to wealthier clansmen being suited up in rawhide coats for protection. Unlike the hounds of the Felathabi, those belonging to the Lakani fought in the old Hyperborean fashion: directly at the side of their owners, eagerly tearing into the legs of opposing riders' horses and the flesh of their foes, and always ready to protect them (or at least their bodies) with their lives should they be wounded or even die on the battlefield.

    As one might guess by now, Lakani warbands were not known for their discipline or subtlety. More often than not, they would just charge at a foe, screaming and with weapons & standards waving in the air, where every man sought only to outrace those next to him into the enemy lines and gain the glory of shedding first blood; a race that the mounted skála would inevitably win, though against a foe that didn't immediately start wavering in the face of an onslaught of howling horsemen they'd often squander the true power of a cavalry charge by 1) doing it at the very start of a battle and 2) not doing in an organized line-formation. The slightly more civilized tribes of the southern Lakani preferred to combine basic hammer-and-anvil tactics with the Hyperborean classic of an infantry shield-wall backed up by the inferior levy: while dismounted skála formed said shield-wall, often a shallow formation only 2-3 ranks deep, with the benda-guesa firing arrows and flinging javelins from behind them (and rushing forward to fill any gaps in the wall as needed), the cavalry would wait in the wings. When the enemy had been engaged by the Lakani infantry, they would trot forward and maneuver into a position from where they could rush the opposing formation's flanks and rear; fairly simple tactics for cavalry, but effective against both rival Lakani tribes and the Saor, even the foot-bound Allawaurë on occasion.

    The Speraca
    The Speraca were the easternmost of the three main non-Saor Hyperborean peoples in Muataria, dwelling to the southeast of the Lakani and with the Hasbana River (and by extension, the 'Illamites) marking their southern border. Dwelling amidst temperate hills & forests and nurtured by the northern tributaries & distributaries of the Hasbana, their numbers boomed to become one of the largest Hyperborean populations on Muataria alongside the Lakani & Saor by 10,500 AA. They were also arguably the most 'civilized' of those Hyperboreans, organizing into large tribal confederations that later evolved into kingdoms of walled towns & villages (admittedly, none as large as the largest Felathabi towns) bound under dynasties of kings and developing their own cuneiform writing system under the influence of the Mun'umati to the south. By 10,500 AA, the Speraca had consolidated into several large and small kingdoms throughout the hills and river-valleys of southeastern Muataria, with the old tribal identities forming the backbone of these new kingdoms' own.

    Extent of Speraca kingdoms and tribes, c. 10,500 AA

    Speraca language
    The Speraca language exhibits little Allawauric and Saor influence compared to its western neighbors, instead drawing many loan-words and sound changes from the Shamshi and 'Illami to the south. Indeed, further east the regional Speraca dialects appear to have had even less than the already nearly-negligible Allawauric and Saor influence of their western cousins, and start to truly resemble a new Mun'umati language. Also, as mentioned a ways above, the Speraca developed an abjad cuneiform writing system derived from the Mun'umati and, in turn, the 'Awali who inspired said cuneiform in the first place.

    Modern speech Hyperborean Shamshi 'Illami Speraca
    Man, men Ghuz, ghuze Mat, umatak Bat, bat'i Gusat, gusati
    Woman, women Aghuz, aghuzay Mari, marisa Bil, bil'isa Ahura, ahuria
    Horse Hurat Jabil Hebil Hubal
    Iron Iwat Idad Irazil Iwadi
    Robe Rog Reba' Rab'ot Regut

    Speraca society
    The social organization of the Speraca lay somewhat between that of the Felathabi and the Lakani, in their own way: they didn't live in and around large towns like the Felathabi did, but nor did they live in spread-out collections of tiny villages or even individual households like the Lakani. Instead, most Speraca lived in larger villages huddled around the hill-forts of local aristocrats descended from their old tribal elders and their kin, which in turn were organized into larger kingdoms governed by kings who claimed descent from the old dominant tribe's founder, usually a hero of half-divine heritage. A natural consequence was that their society was much more stratified than the 'freer', more egalitarian and less organized tribes of the Saor, Venskár and even the Lakani and Felathabi, something which a number of modern scholars argue was the result of the influence of the more aristocratic and hierarchical Mun'umatic societies of 'Illam and the Shamshi kingdom (the latter of which was, in turn, heavily influenced by the extremely stratified 'Awali they'd conquered).

    Speraca kings, called the Relit (pl. Reliti) in their tongue, were what a future observer might recognize as quasi-feudal monarchs. They did not wield absolute power, nor did they claim that their divine heritage necessarily compelled their vassals to follow them, but instead they had to govern with the consent and advice (welcome or otherwise) of their banner-men. Arguably they had no choice, for no single Relit could hope to afford a large enough army to suppress his uppity vassals when they had no coinage, taxes were collected in kind and trade was conducted purely through barter. Thus the Relit was more a first-among-equals figure, rather than an empowered king: he was expected to preside over assemblies of his bickering lords, commune with his godly ancestors to bring favor upon his kingdom, dole out decisive votes to break arguments, administer justice where he can and lead the kingdom's armies into war. Speraca ideals of honor, following Hyperborean tradition, demanded that the Relit lead from the front and be the first to jump into the fight: not doing so would be cowardly conduct, reflecting poorly on the Relit and his family. A Relit who brought shame upon his name and that of his dynasty, who failed to respect the rights of his vassals, or who failed in calling upon the gods to bless his people could easily be considered unworthy of retaining his throne, and be deposed in favor of a blood heir or even a new dynasty entirely.

    A deposed Relit is brought before his successor; the noble who has usurped him with the aid of other nobles, c. 10,450 AA

    The true power in any given Speraca kingdom consequently rested not with the Relit who officially ruled his polity, but with his nobles: the Harkani, singl. Harkan, or landed nobility. Descended from the prominent clan elders of the tribes from which the kingdom sprouted and their extended kin, each Harkani family owned slices of the kingdom's territories in allodium - that is to say, in their own right, and not by virtue of their king granting it to them - and were practically the absolute masters of anyone who lived within their demesne. They were in charge of collecting taxes (read: sending armed retainers to harass their subjects into turning over as much livestock & crops as they wanted), enforcing justice on a local level (which was to say, they were free to impose their own arbitrary rulings and anyone who contested their decision would have to do so with arms) and mustering soldiers in the name of the Relit (that's to say, maintaining private companies of warrior-retainers and drafting their peasantry when the need arose). Oft-characterized as a haughty, willful and greedy bunch who were only loyal to their nominal overlords so long as it suited them, the Harkani ruled over their fiefdoms with virtually complete impunity, and engaged in savage feuds with one another when not united in the face of an external enemy (and quite often, even then). Some Harkani were better than others, of course, but it cannot have been without reason that the Istorian chronicler Mousalon wrote the following on them in 10,488 AA:
    Quote Originally Posted by Mousalon of Istoria
    The Sperakhai are said to have congregated into kingdoms ruled by singular kings, but I see little evidence of this. The authority of Sperakhai kings do not seem to extend past their walls, for in the rest of their lands, it is lords who rule with the spear and the ax from atop their stone holdfasts that truly govern the bulk of the kingdom. And oh, how they govern! They are all too happy to strike down any man who fails to offer sufficient tribute when their retainers come knocking on doors with armored fists, who fails to fall in line when the call for conscription goes out, or who fails to simply pay them obeisance when it is demanded.

    These so-called 'nobles' are similarly too eager to war with one another over the silliest of slights, and it is inevitably their subjects who suffer the depredations of their warbands, which wander from village to village putting shacks to the torch, men to the sword and women and children into chains. They kill and enslave foreign neighbors and their own alike without mercy, respect no law but that of the sword, wrap themselves in finery and gorge on fattened ducks while their people have barely enough to eat from day to day, and will set aside their differences to dethrone their supposed sovereign should he try to bring them to account for their myriad crimes.

    ...

    To these northern barbarians, 'freedom' and 'rights' are but synonyms for the power of the mighty to do as they please unto anyone weaker than them. Small wonder we have abolished such things for the greater good within great Istoria: I dread to think of where we would be if we had been more like these savages. As it stands, I can certainly sympathize with any among the downtrodden of the Sperakhai who yearn for their kings to exercise as much authority as our wise Scholarch. Better to be ruled by one tyrant than five hundred, each trying to outdo the one before him in avarice, cruelty and capriciousness...
    A Harkan and his wife in conventional Speraca aristocratic dress, c. 10,500 AA

    These nobles were in turn supported by a class of martial retainers, as was the case in many other Hyperborean societies. Called the Weryanni (literally simply 'warriors'), they were originally volunteers, often landless younger sons and brothers of free men, who - also like their counterparts in other Hyperborean cultures - agreed to fight a Harkan's battles for them in exchange for the Harkan providing them with a roof over their head and three hot meals a day. However, among the Speraca it was not uncommon for a Harkan to grow so weary of providing for his retainers that he granted them slices of his lands to live on & lord over, and over time these grants became hereditary. Thus by 10,500 AA it would be more accurate to call the Weryanni a hereditary military caste of sorts, men who were trained from childhood by their fathers and uncles to fight and who also governed smaller fiefs as vassals of the Harkani. Harkani would, in turn, delegate the responsibility for tax collection and the enforcement of local justice on the individual Weryan's assigned fief to the Weryan himself, effectively granting the Weryanni as much power over their common subjects as the Harkani would've had if they'd retained the Weryanni lands for themselves.

    Ruined residence of a Weryan, made of mud-bricks and dated to 10,472 AA

    The unfortunate majority of the Speraca were common laborers, called Babbari in their own tongue. They were the ones who tilled the lords' fields, slaved away in the ironworks and mines, made pottery and tools, and got conscripted to work on any great project their overlord puts his mind to. Most Babbari would've lived in multigenerational households, a dozen or more people crammed in a shack of mud-brick and/or timber who had to carefully conserve & share their crops and livestock lest the lord's tax suddenly go up and had little hope for improving their lot in society. The Babbari were oft-supported in the fields and mines by slaves, chattel taken by their lords in wars or bought in the markets of distant towns, but unlike Felathabi and Lakani commoners the Babbari had little chance of owning even one slave of their own: they were too poor to do so, or even own anything beyond the clothes on their backs and their tools, for technically even the very ground their houses were built on belonged to their Harkan master rather than themselves. As one might guess, they were hardly better off than those slaves, save that theoretically Harkani couldn't rape, murder or beat them with impunity, for they were still technically free men of a sort and enjoyed the protection of the kingdom's laws. Theoretically.

    A Babbar herder enviously gazes out at his lord's hill-fort, c. 10,320 AA

    By 10,500 AA, three Speraca kingdoms had grown so large and powerful as to eclipse the rest, and accordingly described as 'the greatest of the barbarian kingdoms' by Allawauric chroniclers. Among the Speraca, these particular realms were apparently referred to as the 'Three Sons', for all of their founding dynasties were - admittedly like many other Speraca royal houses - said to have sprouted from the union of the god Shihun, father and heavenly king of the rest of the Speraca pantheon, and mortal women. All were originally centered along or near the northern banks of the great Hasbana River, or at least its closest tributaries and distributaries. These were:

    Major Speraca kingdoms, 10, 500 AA


    Gold - Sherdet
    Pink - Ekesa
    Green - Quwat

    (the colored circles, naturally, are the eponymous capitals of the three kingdoms)

    Sherdet: The south-westernmost of the Three Sons, and the one most heavily influenced by the Allawaurë (particularly the city-state of Lelagia). Originally founded by a man named Zidar who claimed to be the son of Shihun and a fisherwoman around 10,170 AA, this kingdom did not become truly great until the deposition of the Zidarid dynasty about a century and a half after its founding by Telepenu I, a Harkan who had lived in Lelagia as a diplomatic envoy, could speak Allawauric fluently and traveled as far as Istoria to study in his youth: Telepenu was probably not even his birth name, but one he adopted as a translation of the Allawauric Telepanos. Besides expanding Sherdet's port and firmly connecting his kingdom to the greater Allawauro-'Illamo-Shamshi trading network, Telepenu also discovered massive gold and silver mines in the northwestern reaches of his realm, which he naturally used to enrich his kingdom and pay for a vastly larger army than any of his rivals could hope to afford. He and his descendants, the Telepenids, expanded the kingdom north and west, beautified their capital and famously lived in the largest and most decadent of all known Speraca palaces in Sherdet itself, which was built with the help of Allawauric engineers and featured lush gardens, fountains and gold-veined marble pillars.

    Ekesa: The middle of the Three Sons, Ekesa's oldest foundations have been dated back to 10,222 AA. According to its founding myth, the first stones in the town were laid down by one Tallu, son of Shihun and a farmer's daughter, with the aid of giants. Crisscrossed by some of the Hasbana's largest northern tributaries, Ekesa grew to become a prosperous and very populous kingdom, not as wealthy as Sherdet but certainly blessed with more manpower than either of its neighbors. On a less pleasant note, Ekesa appears to have enjoyed less political stability than either of its neighbors as well, with the Tallids being overthrown around a century after the city's founding and three short-lived dynasties ruling through the 10,300s until the kingdom stabilized under the Hapallids, whose founder Hapallu was the last early Ekesan monarch to usurp the throne. Having overcome their earlier instability, Ekesan armies under the Hapallids brought many of their less numerous neighbors to heel until the kingdom had reached the borders it possesses on the map above, and they were described as being both allies and ('terrible') foes 'as numerous as dandelion seeds in the late summer wind' in the 'Illamite Qabal (1 Stewards 26:6-19).

    Quwat: The easternmost of the Three Sons, and the youngest. Quwat (the place, not the kingdom named after it) was a mountain fortress dated back to around 10,280 AA, supposedly founded by Hulur - the son of Shihun and a goatherd. Although poor, the mountain- and hill-folk of Quwat were consistently described by neighboring civilizations as savage, fierce and loyal fighters, alone among the Three Sons as having remained most faithful to their Hyperborean roots, and it is true that Quwat appears to have experienced much less instability than the other two Sons of Shihun: the Hulurid dynasty was never overthrown, unlike the Zidarids and Tallids who respectively founded Sherdet and Ekesa. The Quwati expanded into the river valleys below them with fire and iron, and from there regularly made war upon Ekesa, 'Illam and even the Enezi: indeed, in the Qabal they appear as a much more intractable foe to the 'Illamites than the Ekesans. Curiously, the Quwati language appears more heavily influenced by their Tawaric substratum than the Sherdeti and Ekesan tongues, which respectively possess many more loan-words and morphological changes from Archaic/Classical Allawauric and 'Illamite/Shamshi instead.

    Speraca religion
    The Speraca religion, named after its chief god Shihun, can be best defined as a Mainstream faith of Statist soul with many Local variations and an Ancestral mentality. The Speraca believed above all in Shihun, the king of the gods, creator of the world and font of laws, a god of paternal authority and order: their kings invariably claimed descent from his countless sons with mortal women, which Shihun's priests claimed made them and their descendants into demigods. This divine heritage formed part of the basis for their rule: few mortals should dare contradict men in whose veins whom the blood of the gods, and particularly the king of the gods, flowed, after all. Of course, since mortal kings could hardly actually bed goddesses, their divine blood would grow diluted and wane over time - making for a perfect justification in the hands of unruly aristocrats to depose a king they don't like, who need only claim that their overlord's godly blood has run dry and been turned entirely into mortal muck, necessitating his replacement by somebody with more of Shihun's blood.

    Ivory statuette of Shihun, dated to 10,436 AA

    Other gods in the Speraca pantheon, from whom divine descent was also claimed (albeit more rarely than Shihun), included:
    • Sashka, Shihun's wife and the goddess of fertility, motherhood and wisdom. She has been depicted as a beautiful and nude young woman, a pregnant matron in an immaculate white robe, and a haggard old cloaked crone leaning on a staff; in other words, she represents the ideal female form as envisioned by the Speraca in youth, middle age, and one's last years. Like her husband, she isn't exactly a faithful partner and has given birth to her share of demigods, who went on to found Speraca kingdoms of their own.
    • Sharu-Gan, the only son of Shihun and Sashka, god of the sun and the moon. He is depicted as a man who rapidly ages as the sun moves through the sky, going from a handsome young lad in a spotless robe at dawn to a toothless old man at sunset and dying shortly afterwards. He comes back to life at midnight without fail, and grows from an infant under the moon's light to a young man by dawn, a cycle which he repeats every day and night for all eternity.
    • Kushai, brother of Shihun and god of war. He is depicted as a man clad from head to toe in bronze and iron scale armor, wielding an ax in one hand and a tower shield in the other, and carrying the severed heads of his most prized kills (man and monster alike) on his belt. Despite his fearsome appearance, he is revered as a god of strategy as much as one of brutal personal combat.
    • Mamut, brother of Sashka and god of pestilence & death. He is said to reside beneath the earth, where the souls of all who die after having led unworthy, rebellious lives burn atop pyres to illuminate & warm his cold, dark halls for all eternity; those who die in loyal service to their rightful lieges and/or enforcing the laws, though, will ascend to feast and slumber in eternal happiness with the rest of his family in the clouds. He also sends plagues to thin out man's numbers should his sister bring too many new souls into the world.
    • Uruyanu, a massive serpentine dragon with fiery eyes, electric whiskers the length of a mature oak, and scales as black as coal. Also known as the 'Father of Lies' and 'Father of Chaos'. Not actually a god, it is instead a demon of chaos and mad violence that was butchered by Shihun and Kushai to save early humanity from its rampages. It is said that every winter solstice, Uruyanu returns to life and has to be killed by the gods once more before it wreaks complete havoc on the world.

    The Speraca worshiped at temples built of stone, and apparently dedicated one day of every month to a specific god. At the end of every week, priests in multicolored robes preached the importance of following tradition and the law to the letter, conducted rituals to appease the gods with offerings of incense, unwatered wine, crops and choice animals over a central altar, and gave out free bread to all attendants. Upon midsummer, a great week-long festival was held to honor all of the gods, and the Relit himself was expected to lead the services. This was done because, as one thought to have divine blood, he was believed to be able to communicate with his godly ancestors and beseech them to favor his kingdom even more effectively than the oldest and most wizened priests. To a modern eye, it would seem that Shihunism's raison d'être was to instill & reinforce loyalty to the Relit and the Speraca social system among commoners, impressing them with lavish rituals and free food as part of the process.

    The ruins of a small Speraca temple, dated to 10,385 AA

    Speraca military
    Reputed to rely even more on brute force and numbers rather than elegant strategems than their fellow Hyperboreans, the armies of the Speraca nevertheless still followed the basic tripartite 'levy-->retainer-->noble' hierarchical model of Hyperborean military organization in this period. The bulk of the Speraca armies were conscripted Babbari, disparagingly referred to by their superiors as Hituri ('arrows') by Speraca nobles - an indication of just how expendable they were considered. Unarmored and poorly trained, the greater wealth of the Speraca compared to most Lakani and Felathabi tribes did result in them nevertheless having a greater deal of uniformity relative to the tribal levies of those western Hyperboreans: those Hituri who were experienced hunters or otherwise displayed stunning competence in archery in spite of their lowly status were outfitted with war bows at their master's expense, while all others were given simple light spears and tall but thin tower-shields of wicker to work with. The Hituri had the simple but grim task of trying to pin the enemy beneath their weight of numbers and, if nothing else, exhaust their foes' sword-arms with their limbs while their betters did all the glorious work of actually winning the engagement.

    A lowly Hituri spearman with his assigned weapon and shield, c. 10,400 AA

    The main killing arm of any Speraca army were its Weryanni or warrior-caste, of course. Weryanni were required to maintain armor and weapons of acceptable quality at all times, and their equipment could vary quite widely from tribe to tribe & region to region: the Weryanni of the western Speraca kingdoms were known to have donned bronze helmets and cuirasses in the Allawauric style while still favoring a combination of weighted javelins and swords or axes over spears, while those hailing from the eastern kingdoms resembled Shamshi and 'Illamite warriors with their padded clothing and lighter, chiefly iron armor. Still, regardless of origin, the Weryanni traditionally functioned as heavy mounted infantry: they would ride to battlefields on horseback, then dismount to actually fight as elite shock troops. These were the men a king sent in to break up enemy shield-walls, or to maneuver around the battlefield on their horses and then dismount once more to attack weak points and gaps in an opposing army's line.

    Western Speraca Weryanni storming a rival king's holdfast, c. 10,500 AA

    The Harkani and the kings who reigned above them remained the best-equipped warriors in a given Speraca army. Nobles were known to have worn scale vests, made by sewing scores of bronze or brass-coated iron scales onto a felt backing, and helmets as tall as those of the Lakani, while kings wore long cloaks onto which gilded iron scales had been sewn instead. They seem to have chiefly fought as horsemen, having been reached by the saddle ahead of even the Lakani thanks to their close proximity to the horse-riding Mun'umatic nations, and were accordingly the best troops in a Speraca army not just because they'd been trained from childhood in the arts of war or had access to excellent equipment, but also because of their far superior mobility over their social inferiors in the infantry: that said, while generally better-armored than Lakani horsemen, Speraca Harkani used shorter lances, and thus perhaps traded some of the initial force of their charge for greater survivability in the melee that followed. A well-timed rush of these heavy horsemen into an opposing army's flank or rear could easily turn a battle around - though, like the Lakani cavalry to their west, the Speraca of this time period suffered from a lack of stirrups and especially large, robust warhorse breeds, meaning that their charges still weren't as devastating as they could be.

    A Harkani heavy cavalryman with ax, c. 10,500 AA

    Like other Hyperborealic peoples, the Speraca brought Arctic wolfhounds onto Muataria with them, and even as their society grew more and more intensely stratified, their ancestors' best friends remained one thing that lord and peasant alike had in abundance. Speraca warhounds fought in the style of those owned by the Lakani: directly at the side of their masters, rather than being deployed in a single great onrush at the beginning of battles in the Felathabi style. The Speraca apparently experimented with armored coats, made of iron or bronze scales riveted onto leather, for their wolfhounds, but these must have been both prohibitively expensive to produce and a major drain on the hound's agility and stamina; hence why, outside of the dogs belonging to kings, Speraca warhounds still chiefly fought wearing spiked iron collars and/or rawhide armor like those belonging to many other Hyperborean warrior households.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; December 03, 2017 at 08:31 PM.

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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

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  3. #63
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Survivors: The Irari
    The Hyperborean invasion effectively ended the Tawaric civilization on Muataria - well, outside of a few pockets where the Tawarë were able to hold out, usually mountainous areas or (as in the case of the much more successful Allawaurë) islands where the iron-armed invaders from the 'roof of the world' couldn't easily reach them. The Irari fall under the former category, being not a single Tawaric tribe but a loose conglomeration of as many as sixteen tribes who were displaced from their homes by the first waves of Hyperborealic invaders, and as a result holed up in the northern corners of the mountain range known to their distant Allawauric cousins as the 'World's End' for protection. They appear to have formed a confederacy for self-defense against the Hyperboreans quite early on, no later than 10,100 AA, and to have further solidified into a single large realm called the Kingdom of Arbin.

    According to legend, this process was finalized when in 'the year of the dragon's splendor' (thought to be 10,488 AA), the confederacy dissolved into civil war between the dominant tribe of the Geq'ireebi and their dependents on one side, and the tribes still opposed to their continued ascent & centralization of power in Arbin on the other. As the official retelling of the Irari goes, Garda of the Geq'ireebi, a virtuous and heroic warrior who had amplified his strength by drinking the blood of a great bear, was rightly elected Mebrak - supreme warlord - of the Irari that year by the elders of his tribe and their allies (who by this point comprised a majority of the Irari leadership) in accordance with the customary laws of the Irari; but there remained some eight (out of twenty-two) tribes that were determined to resist Geq'ireebi domination, even if it meant weakening their alliance in the face of the Hyperborean threat. Rallying under the rival warlord Aja of the Kachani, they denounced Garda as a tyrant in the making and those who elected him as spineless fools willing to serve as thralls of the Geq'ireebi for protection, as opposed to dying as free men on Hyperborean blades if need be. The ensuing Irari civil war appears to have gone by quite quickly and to have been a war of large skirmishes or small battles instead of extensive raiding & small-scale actions, as both sides knew that a protracted struggle would render them vulnerable to being overrun by the dreaded Hyperboreans.

    Garda of the Geq'ireebi, uniter of the Irari, c. 10,488 AA

    A year after the fighting had begun, Garda's and Aja's armies met at Hoba Ts'ner - the 'valley of tears': its exact location is unknown, but it is thought to be somewhere to the west of Arbin. Here, Garda vanquished Aja, killing him in single combat and trapping his men within the valley. He didn't kill or enslave them however, instead lowering his sword and calling upon them to set aside their selfish fears of his tribe's dominance to instead work with him against the Hyperboreans. To this they agreed, and Garda promptly used his newfound authority to consolidate the Irari confederation into a proper kingdom with himself at its head, making the position of Mebrak hereditary (essentially turning it from the office of just a war-leader into that of a king), and assigning the members of the clans that most faithfully supported him to both take charge of local defenses in the lands around their homes...and to lord over everyone else living under their jurisdiction, empowered by his word and the right to maintain private armies on their own dime (well, woolskin and food supplies, more accurately). Garda's hometown of Arbin was made into the formal capital of the Irari, and the cave from which the great Gaq'inul River flowed became the core of the palace of the Gardani kings. Thus did the fairly decentralized and egalitarian Irari confederacy come to an end, to be replaced by the more centralized, stratified and even more overtly militarized Kingdom of Arbin.

    The Gaq'inul River as it flows down from its source, around which Arbin was constructed

    Extent of the Kingdom of Arbin, c. 10,500 AA


    Red - Arbin

    (it can be assumed that these were the maximal borders of the original Irari confederacy as well, considering it did not appear to have lost much, if any territory to Hyperborean encroachment during its brief civil war)

    Irari language
    The Irari tongue appears to be a descendant of several smaller, regional Tawaric languages, some of which had no obvious relation to one another: a reflection of how the Irari themselves were a mashup of several disparate groups of Tawarë. The term 'Irari' itself was their word for 'natives': naturally, they used it to refer to themselves as the rightful native dwellers of Muataria, and by extension implicitly condemned the Hyperboreans in general as interlopers trampling across their home soil. The Irari also appear to have developed their own cuneiform alphabet after the transformation of their confederacy into the Kingdom of Arbin, as evidenced by the discovery of burnt and cracked or broken oracle-bones with questions engraved onto them.

    A notable sound change in the Irari language was the elimination of the '-ai'/'-ei' sound associated with the character ë, in favor of a straight '-i' sound; hence why their name is typically spelled Irari and not Irarë.

    Modern speech Irari
    Man, men K'ai, k'aik
    Woman, women K'al, k'alik
    Natives Irari
    Revenge Hendera
    Snow Uyar

    Irari society
    Little is known about early Irari society, owing to the utter lack of a writing system on both their part as well as that of their neighbors. It is deemed likely that they lived as the Tawarë in general once had throughout their early history, huddling in villages of stone and timber buildings built along the mountainside or atop hills (with a meeting hall, temple and graveyard as the centers of their communities) and surrounded by at least a palisade with watch-towers for protection. Farming was a no-go in their alpine northern refuge, especially once the Great Cooling had set in, so most Irari would've worked as pastoralists instead: they raised herds of primarily goats and sheep, whose meat & milk fed them and whose wool clothed their bodies in the cold of winter. The shepherds & goatherds also would've had to defend their flock from wild beasts with staves and bows, experience which served them well in their state of perpetual warfare (or at least, constant back-and-forth raiding) with their Hyperborean neighbors.

    Tawaric ancestors of the Irari fleeing the Hyperborean advance in the lowlands, c. 10,010 AA

    An Irari herder hails his neighbors, c. 10,150 AA

    The biggest exception to this rule was the Irari tribe which lived at the source of the river they call Gaq'inul, or 'unfrosted'. These 'Geq'ireebi', or 'river-children' as their tribe called itself, could and did farm outside of the winter & early spring, cutting terraces into the mountainside where they grew hardy rye, barley and oats and where they could also sustain modest flocks of chickens and herds of cattle & pigs like more southern peoples. By 10,400 AA, the core of the Geq'ireebi lands had sprouted into a mountainside town called Arbin (literally just 'source', as in source of the river) and their terrace farms were known to have had both water channels and reservoirs further cut into them - not a bad feat of engineering for a bunch commonly thought of as uncivilized native yokels who were barely clinging to existence in their mountains. Arbin itself was easily the largest of all known Irari settlements, its population buoyed by their remarkable agricultural system, and from this base the Geq'ireebi came to dominate the other tribes of the Irari confederacy in fairly short order through their sheer numbers.

    A Geq'ireebi farmer buries some loot away from the prying eyes of his peers

    The early Irari confederacy seems to have been led by village and tribal elders who were elected by all freemen beneath them for life terms, and there existed very little social stratification in their society compared to the new Hyperborean arrivals (or even other Tawarë, such as the Allawaurë living far to the southwest) - it seems that, beset by Arctic invaders in the cold & foreboding northern tip of the World's End mountain range, everyone was more or less equally poor. In a primitive form of representative democracy, the elders elected a 'Mebrak' (literally 'war-leader', usually translated to 'warlord') who directed the tribal warbands of their people in war, but otherwise appears to have had no influence on the tribes themselves. However, starting around 10,320 AA, it appears that more and more of the Mebraki hailed from Arbin, a sign of that settlement's (and their tribe's) importance beginning to eclipse the rest of the Irari.

    Substantially more is known of the early Arbinites than the original Irari Confederacy. The Mebrak, now unelected and transmitting his authority from father to son, reigned at the pinnacle of society as no mere war-commander, but a king in fact and name both. His word was the law, and any who disobeyed faced banishment, imprisonment or execution at his hands. He was supported by a martial aristocracy called the zaneuri, or 'commanders', who were further divided into three ranks:
    • Ageuri, the two greatest nobles in the realm and the chief lieutenants of the Mebrak. One was the Ageur ale-Dzena, 'master commander of the left', who commanded the lords and free-men living on the western slopes of the World's End in the name of the king, and the other was the Ageur ale-Chisba, 'master commander of the right', who led the people living on the mountains' eastern face against the Hyperboreans living below them and even the occasional stray Suufulk or Yahg raiders. The two great Ageuri families were descendants of Garda's younger brothers: the middle brother Jopa was granted the hereditary office of Ageur ale-Chisba, which his descendants the Jopini held after his death, while their youngest brother Upila was made the first Ageur ale-Dzena and succeeded in his position by his heirs-of-the-body, the Upilini dynasty.
    • Zaneuri, proper landed nobles descended from the clans that most closely & unwaveringly backed Garda as he seized power, who oversaw collections of farms and ranches from their mountain fortresses. Despite their hereditary status and position of preeminence above the rest of society, the Zaneuri still lived quite spartan lives compared to much of the nobility of the south (Hyperborean and Tawaric alike), in no small part due to the isolation of Arbin from the great trade routes of the Muataric Sea & its shorelines. They were charged with coordinating the defense of the territories they'd been assigned to for as long as their family line remained alive, and lived on a cut of their vassals' taxes.
    • Sakhi, minor nobles who lived in towers not much fancier or more comfortable than the hovels inhabited by their subjects. These 'captains' were responsible for taxation, law enforcement and the levying of soldiers on a local level, and were required to hand over between a tenth and a fifth of the taxes they collected (in kind of course, for the Arbinities didn't have coinage) to the Zaneur directly above them.

    The Mebraks of Arbin turned the mountain cavern from which the Gaq'inul first flowed as a waterfall into their home. In accordance with traditional Irari fashion, the Palace of Arbin was fairly austere and unornamented, decorated chiefly with great carvings of the gods or legendary events. Stairs were cut into the stone tunnels, stalactites and stalagmites removed where needed, and hearths & lanterns lit up respectively with logs brought up from below or animal fat to provide heat & warmth throughout the night and winters. Almost needless to say, despite its austerity and the relative poverty of the Irari kingdom as a whole, the place was truly nearly impregnable: the only known way in was the main entrance, a gap that maybe ten men abreast could enter at a time (and could thus be defended by a ten-man shield-wall), and the subterranean lake from which the Gaq'inul flowed ensured that in the event of a siege, the defenders would never go thirsty. Slaves would've carried and heated this fresh water whenever the Mebrak or his kin wanted a hot bath, as well.

    A section of the Palace of the Mebraks in Arbin

    Beneath the Mebraks themselves, Arbinite nobles preferred to live in stone hold-fasts of varying size called mehri, uniformly built on hills or other promontories for maximum defensive advantage; while these forts' size and defenses were naturally dependent on their owner's wealth and status, they were all quite austere and utilitarian in design, with little evidence of there having been much ornamentation in the early Arbinite period. They were typically divided into three to five floors, with the first floor being both a mess hall and a first line of defense centered around a great hearth (which the inhabitants obviously used to cook their food and warm themselves during the cold of autumn, winter and early spring), the second being the armory, and the third & above floors being the actual living quarters of the lord and his servants/slaves.

    A well-preserved mehr dating back to 10,494 AA

    In a development that ironically mirrored the way their new Hyperborean neighbors had their own societies set up, the Irari appear to have developed a middle class of professional warriors between their nobility and commons. In their case, these men were called the zolebi, or simply 'fighters'. As was the case in many other Hyperborean societies, they were usually volunteers of common birth, the younger sons and brothers who weren't due to inherit anything and thus pledged themselves to the nearest Sakh or Zaneur for the privilege of warming themselves by his hearth, eating his food & living under his roof. In exchange, they would fight at his side when need be, which was often. Unlike their counterparts in Hyperborean societies, zolebi were not expected to ever be granted land of their own unless they married a close female relative of their master or were elevated to the rank of Sakh by the Mebrak himself, and remained purely oath-sworn warriors in their chosen liege's service until they either died in battle or were released from their duties for whatever reason (ex. growing too old to fight).

    The overwhelming majority of Arbinite society were naturally still the commons: subsistence farmers, pastoralists, smiths, carpenters, miners and the like, who carried the weight of their lords and the war against the Hyperboreans on their backs. Nonetheless, they were termed the plaba'ik or 'free men', and thus enjoyed certain rights under the customary laws of Arbin & the Irari: they couldn't be enslaved except to pay off a debt; even when placed in debt slavery their condition couldn't be transmitted to their blood-kin; an aristocrat who murdered, maimed or otherwise mistreated one of their number was still to be judged without care for his rank; and they had the right to elect village elders who could negotiate on their behalf with the local Sakh over taxes & arbitrate in any disputes between fellow plaba'ik that didn't involve murder. Due to the remoteness of their homeland and the whole 'surrounded by hostile Hyperboreans' issue, the Arbinites never did develop a robust class of traders: their idea of commerce amounted to individual traders or small caravans heading out across dirt or wooden roads or mountain tracks to barter goods with the next Irari village over, not extensive trade with foreigners for exotic goods. Further beneath these commoners, the Irari also kept slaves, either taken in war from their bad new neighbors or born into servitude, for hard labor and their owners' entertainment alike.

    An Arbinite peasant teaches his youngest son how to sharpen a knife while his two eldest march off to become zolebi, c. 10,500 AA

    Curiously, Irari society appears to have jettisoned the relative egalitarianism that defined other pre-Hyperborean Tawaric societies (and still did even after the Hyperboreans came, in the case of the Allawaurë at least) in favor of a more rigidly patriarchal society. By the time of the Kingdom of Arbin, there were no more women in the ranks of their leaders; only patriarchal descent counted for the identification of one's clan & tribe; women could possess no property in their own name; daughters could not inherit anything before sons; and the Irarë came to prize masculinity to such an extreme degree that they not only tolerated but aggressively accepted male homosexuality and pederasty, considering the relationship between a grown (and ideally strong, formidable and overall 'manly') man and a younger boy (ideally an adolescent with an androgynous or outright effeminate appearance) more virtuous than that of a man and woman - as far as they were concerned, women were for making new Irari to fill the world while boys were for fun, and there was no relationship manlier than one that literally didn't involve women in any way.

    From recovered Irari statuettes and pottery paintings by both the Irari & peoples who managed to contact them, it appears that their ideal man was a macho equestrian whose first answer to any insult or obstacle was a javelin to the face, routinely crushed his opponents in wrestling matches with his massive muscles, had a practical forest for a beard, defended his family & people with his life, and maintained harems of both women and effeminate boys. Indeed, surviving Irari love stories are mostly centered on the manliest of their men fighting over especially beautiful boys, not women. It is believed that the Irari embraced masculinity to such extremes as a reaction to their constant warfare with the matriarchal Thiskaira who neighbored them.

    Pretty much the Irari masculine ideal

    Irari religion
    The Irari religion, simply referred to by modern historians as 'Am-Ardis' ('to worship' in the old Irari tongue), can be best defined as a Mainstream faith of Traditional soul with a Bastion-of-the-Faith mentality. The Irari worshiped a pantheon of male gods led by Hutuini, who was the god of the sun, the weather & war and progenitor of all the other deities (whom he fathered with the lunar goddess Selasa, whom he in turn had originally carved from a meteor that had fallen from the moon). They also acknowledged the existence of myriad nameless nature spirits who served these gods, called hep'ari (the closest modern translation would be 'fairies'). Whenever someone, from a peasant to the Mebrak himself, wanted something from the gods - be it victory in war, the death of their rival, a successful childbirth, a woman's love, a particularly handsome boy slave, or just plain wealth - they would offer up a sacrifice of animal's blood or crops at stone altars. Those who had the means would also engage in great hunts called 'neri' on the autumnal equinox, dedicating the best portions of their kills to the gods as sacrificial burnt offerings and eating the rest.

    Irari statuette of a bear, the sacred animal of Hutuini

    A loosely organized, all-male priesthood led villagers and princelings alike in sacramental rites calling upon the Irari gods. It appeared that the Irari held rites to initiate youths into their faith when they came of age, thought to be around twelve for both boys and girls; these youths were led on a procession through their hometown by their local priest, singing and dancing and banging brass cymbals, until they had made their way to a sacrificial altar where boys would slit the throats of chickens and girls burned an offering of fruits and vegetables, all while the priest called on Hutuini and Selasa and other Irari deities to accept them into the ranks of their worshipers.

    Besides leading prayer services, passing legends on to the next generations and offering up sacrifices of animals and crops (either on behalf of their entire community or just certain individuals), priests also appear to have doubled as herbalists and pyromantic oracles, doing their best to heal the sick with herbal solutions & blood-letting and casting handfuls of salt or (after the unification of the Irari under Arbin) oracle bones with questions engraved onto them into a special flame lit atop their altar in a bid to get the gods to show them the future. Despite their purported powers and social purpose however, Irari priests were firmly anchored to the communities they served and do not appear to have been particularly influential in political affairs, which remained thoroughly dominated by the Mebrak and his nobles. Exactly how these priests were selected remains a mystery, but a combination of manifesting latent magical abilities (or what looked like magic) and tutelage under a senior priest remains the best guess of present-day historians.

    An Irari stone altar, no doubt used for sacrifices and pyromancy by priests thousands of years ago

    Given the generally xenophobic attitude (growing out of their wars with the Hyperboreans) that permeated their culture and civilization, it should come as no surprise that the Irari fiercely adhered to their religious traditions to the exclusion of outside faiths. Martial Irari legends, such as that of Hudubi the Breaker of Horses and Topawi the Bronze-Armed, detail the exploits of mythical champions who struck down hordes of ravenous, mindlessly evil foreign men and women with the guidance of the gods. Irari villages, being as remote as they were, rarely ever got foreign visitors who weren't slaves being dragged back by their warriors, and certainly any foreigner who swung by to preach was likely going to find him/herself either run out of town or left literally swinging by an angry mob stirred up at the local priest's exhortation.

    Irari military
    The Irari were, like other Tawarë before the Hyperborean invasion, were originally a fairly peaceful people. The coming of the savage northerners shattered their Bronze Age idyll and forced them to mobilize on a much larger scale than they were used to in order to survive. Bronze was no longer used chiefly to make plows, scythes and forging hammers, but blades, spears and battle-axes. Iron, too, was used; while actually weaker than bronze (at least when forged with the admittedly quite lackluster metallurgy of the post-Hyperborean dark age), it was cheaper and more plentiful, and so iron weapons soon became the choice of lower-ranked Irari warriors while bronze arms and armor remained the purview of the elite.

    The best and most heavily equipped fighters among the Irari were their aristocrats, as was the case in many other parts of the world. The zaneuri fought wearing conical bronze helmets and heavy cuirasses of bronze scales or flakes sewn onto a fabric backing, and wielded bronze or iron-headed spears taller than they were in conjunction with a pointed bronze shield and a long hacking sword or socketed ax for a sidearm. The wealthiest Irari nobles and Mebraks were also known to wear entire coats of bronze scales, which stretched down to or past their knees. Zaneuri invariably formed the center of an Irari battle line, locking their shields to present a formidable wall of spear-points and pointed bronze discs to the foe that was further anchored on its flanks by the lesser zolebi warriors and backed up by the mass of levied commoners. When on the offensive, they would do their best to maintain formation as they advanced, shrugging off missile fire behind their shields and armor until they were finally within range to sprint forward, scream their warcries and attempt to stab their foes to death in close combat - or better yet, cause the enemy to panic and flee before their apparent near-invincibility.

    An Irari zaneur in battle panoply, c. 10,500 AA

    Mirroring societal and military developments in many other Hyperborean societies, the zolebi made up the majority of the Irari fighters who knew what they were doing, being professional retainers who had sworn oaths to serve a master until released and spending their days training and eating at their lord's expense. They could be further divided into two classes: spearmen, and archers. Both wore bronze helmets, but the spearmen also wore lamellar vests of leather or rawhide for added protection as they fought, and wielded shorter bronze-headed spears than what their masters had in addition to wooden shields, an iron sword or ax, and two or three javelins that they flung at the foe while advancing or being approached; in the latter case, they proved especially effective at disrupting the typical Hyperborean wild charge. Archers did not wear any armor beyond their helmets, and (obviously) fought primarily with a bow & arrows while also carrying smaller wooden bucklers and swords or hatchets for close combat. To counter the horse-archers of the steppes and tundra, Hyperborean or otherwise, the composition of a warband's zolebi was usually 2:1 in favor of the archers; while the spearmen fanned out to the left & right of the zaneuri to extend their shieldwall, the archers stood in front of them and took advantage of the fact that they could wield longer bows than what one could use on horseback to outshoot opposing horse-archers, and could also retreat behind the shieldwall when charged.

    A zolebi spearman with his javelins and brass-coated shield, c. 10,500 AA

    Model of a zolebi archer, c. 10,500 AA

    The common plaba'ik made up the majority of Irari armies. A mix of volunteers and draftees, they fought with whatever weapons they had on hand: farming implements, forging hammers, shepherds' staves, kitchen knives, hunting bows and more. They were usually deployed as skirmishers, screening the true fighters of an Irari warband and always retreating behind their betters when battle was truly joined; there, they could fire at the foe from over the shield-wall's heads and shoulders, add their weight to the shield-wall of the zaneuri & zolebi, and plug any gaps that form in the line to the best of their ability. Besides their knowledge of their local terrain, which would come in handy when they fought in mountain passes or on hills, there really wasn't much else separating them from the poor fools that made up peasant levies around the world.

    Three plaba'ik militiamen, c. 10,500 AA

    The Irari, like their distant Allawauric cousins, virtually never used cavalry. At first, the lack of saddles and stirrups were an obvious limitation on the usage of horses, but even after the former had been introduced to the Irari they did not fight on horseback. Horses were not useful beyond being a means of civilian transport and as beasts of burden in the rugged terrain of their homeland, and surely the Irari were not impressed by the results of Thiskaira (or Yahg, or Suufulk) charges into their shield-walls either. At most, Irari nobles would ride to the battlefield and then dismount to fight. They did use another creature in warfare, however; frightened by the Hyperboreans' use of ferocious wolf-hounds from the Arctic, the Irari countered by deploying large cats usually kitted out in armor of padded cloth, which would hopefully distract the hounds long enough (either by getting torn to shreds by the Arctic beasts, or simply luring them away on a senseless chase) for the rest of their army to finish the battle.

    The bronze armor of a prized pet cat said to have belonged to Garda, first king of Arbin

    Irari tactics were fundamentally defensive: they typically counted on their missile troops being able to bait the enemy into charging into their shield-wall, which would then weather the assault until the foe had become so bloodied & worn out that they could be swept away by a counterattack. More rarely did their infantry advance under the covering fire of their archers and skirmishers, which ran the risk of them being outrun or flanked by a mounted and/or lightly armored opponent, especially on open ground. Almost needless to say, the Irari were best at fighting within their own mountainous homeland, where their Hyperborean, Yahg and Suufulk foes would have little choice but to run into their prepared shield-walls in the narrow mountain passes and forested hills of the highlands while their missile troops were free to rain arrows, stones and javelins on their heads from above with little fear of retaliation. When fighting out in the open, the Irari were far less successful, limited by their foot-bound mobility and lack of cavalry to cover their flanks.

    Tactics for pitched battles aside though, the Irari did absolutely engage in aggressive raiding actions against their neighbors. Individual zaneuri often led their retinues of zolebi (sometimes accompanied by a handful of loot-hungry plaba'ik volunteers) down from their mountain fortresses to attack Hyperborean villages, moving atop horses as mounted infantry until they reached their target, whereupon they'd dismount to pillage on foot. Once they had thrown sacks full of loot over one shoulder and a comely lad or lass over the other, they'd saddle up again and attempt to flee before Hyperborean warriors could retaliate. Of course, the Hyperborean invaders were more than happy to return the favor on a regular basis, climbing Irari mountains and traversing their forests to do the exact same thing to Irari towns. This sort of tit-for-tat marauding defined the bulk of the Hyperborean-Irari conflict, with the large pitched battles & attempts at actual conquest/reconquest that everyone remembers in song and legend being exceptional in part because they were exceptions to the pattern of year-round raiding.

    Hyperboreans: The Thiskaira
    The Hyperboreans are known to history as a generally patriarchal culture, but there was at least one major exception to this rule: the Thiskaira of the far north, who were matriarchal instead - though no less warlike or tribal than their male-dominated cousins. There has been much speculation as to how they came to be so radically different from other Hyperborealic societies, but according to the myths of the Thiskaira themselves, their founders were the widows and daughters of men butchered by the dread cave-elves of their homeland during a particularly long and bitter winter, freed from their chains and granted weapons with which to kill their Zaroi captors by the goddess Thamisia. Modern historians believe there is at least some kernel of truth to this legend, that the original Thiskaira were Hyperborean women who found themselves without male guardian figures for some reason or another and consequently banded together for mutual protection from the elements, Zaroi raiders and other Hyperboreans.

    Whatever their genesis truly was, what is certain is that the Thiskaira eventually migrated out of Hyperborea along with the rest of that particular language family. It is not known when exactly they came to Muataria's shores, but it could not have been any later than 10,200 AA, for that is what the oldest Thiskaira artifacts on the continent date back to. The range of their ruins and artifacts in far north-eastern Muataria, beneath the slopes of the World's End, indicate that they were either among the earliest arrivals (in which case they managed to secure their territories from latecomers) or the latest (having driven out earlier Hyperborean arrivals and stopping only at the points of Irari spears in the mountains).

    Artist's imagining of the first Thiskaira party to land on Muataria, sometime between 10,000-200 AA

    Over time, they spread out southwards on both sides of the World's End, and their tribes evolved in two increasingly distinct directions: those living east of the river they called the Slaza Mat'aria ('Mother's Tears') and which their Irari enemies called the Gaq'inul, the so-called 'Left-Bank Thiskaira', were largely nomadic pastoralists who built no great settlements but wandered from one grazing ground to another on the steppes, while the 'Right-Bank Thiskaira' living west of the river settled down in villages to live as farmers, fishers and trappers. Neither half of the Thiskaira were any less warlike than other Hyperboreans around the world, and their tribes frequently engaged in both year-round raiding and wars of conquest with their neighbors (Hyperborean or otherwise) and one another. That said, by reputation the nomadic Left-Bank Thiskaira were considered fiercer fighters and wilder lovers than their settled cousins. And certainly, both were bitter enemies of the Irari, the one bunch of Tawarë who managed to survive their initial onslaught and sallied forth to fight them from their mountain strongholds year after year.

    Range of known Thiskaira settlements and artifacts dated to 10,500 AA or earlier


    Pink: Left-Bank Thiskaira
    Olive: Right-Bank Thiskaira

    Thiskaira language
    The Thiskaira language appears to be one of the 'purer' Hyperborean languages in the sense that it stuck quite close to the original Hyperborean language, with only limited sound changes and little Tawaric influence.

    Modern speech Hyperborean Thiskaira
    Man, men Ghuz, ghuze Ghush, ghushi
    Woman, women Aghuz, aghuzay Agush, agusha
    Mother Madar Mat'ar
    Bow Bugh Bug
    Horse Hurat Hora


    Thiskaira society
    At a fundamental level, the Thiskaira reversed traditional Hyperborean gender dynamics. Wherever they pitched their tents or built their houses and their word was law, it was women who did the leading and fighting, while men were firmly relegated to the role of supporting their wives and daughters as the latter fought - if not just to being breeding stock. The Thiskaira were, like other Hyperborean societies, fragmented into many tribes, each comprised of clans; in their case, descent was traced matrilineally, and clans were led by elders elected by the free women of each respective clan for their wisdom and ability to fairly arbitrate in disputes between clanswomen. The elders, in turn, elected a tribal queen called the Mat'arvh, or 'matriarch'. The Mat'arvh led the tribe in war, presided over disputes between her subjects should they come from different clans as judge and executioner with the elders forming the jury, handled the distribution of loot after battles, and among the Left-Bankers also dictated when & where the tribe would migrate every year or season. A Matriarch of the Left Bank would have simply lived in a bigger and nicer tent than her subjects, and slept on a rug made of a bear's pelt; her settled counterpart among the Right-Bank Thiskaira could be expected to have a much nicer stone palace with a hearth to keep warm and a hay or wool-stuffed bed to sleep on. Both would have been bedecked in gold, gems and the hide of more formidable quarries, such as wolves and bears, to show off their superiority to their lessers.

    Artist's imagining of a Thiskair Mat'arvh, c. 10,500 AA

    Ruins of a Thiskaira stone palace, dated to 10,398 AA

    Beneath the Mat'arvh and her elders were the tribal warriors, women simply called the sakarasha or 'warrioresses'. While similar to the professional retainers of other Hyperborean nations, these were volunteers who'd dedicated their lives to fighting for the tribe as a whole, not any single mistress within the tribe - at least, not officially. In reality, they were as prone to factionalism as any other class of budding warrior-nobles. Among the Right-Bank Thiskaira, sakarasha who performed heroic deeds in battle were frequently rewarded by being given hereditary grants to slices of the tribe's originally communal territory, elevating them into the ranks of the tribal aristocracy called the ekesha or 'freeholders'; those non-warriors who lived and worked on the rewarded land were now the subjects and responsibility of the newly minted ekesh, who was now responsible for organizing both defense (meaning both maintaining their own standing retinue of sakarasha and scrapping together a levy when needed) and tax collection on a local scale. In this regard, from around 10,300 AA power among the Right-Bank tribes began to devolve from the Mat'arvh and elders to the ekesha, as the former increasingly found their authority nominal outside of the territories still under their direct control and their decisions under threat of challenge by the ekesha, while the commoners increasingly had to go to their ekesha to deal with matters of justice or hear out their grievances rather than the distant Mat'arvh. Among the Left-Bank Thiskaira, there were no ekesha, and the sakarasha remained a purely warrior class whose greatest privilege was getting first pick of the plunder after a battle or raid.

    Thiskair ekesh in hunting dress, c. 10,480 AA

    Beneath the ekesha and sakarasha, one would have found the common women (simply referred to as the agusha, or 'women') who made up the majority of free Thiskaira society. Among the Left-Bank Thiskaira, they would have subsisted chiefly as farmers, gatherers, woodcutters, fishers and trappers amidst the forested tundra that they called their new home, living in timber huts and growing barley and rye to be made into beer and hard bread where they could; their diet would've been supplemented by berries, mushrooms, herbs, reindeer, stoats, seals, hares and various fish, as well. The people of the Right Bank were chiefly nomadic pastoralists, driving great herds of goats, sheep and horses across the wide-open steppes from one grazing ground to another, sleeping in felt tents and engaging in communal hunts to get yet more food for their bellies. On both banks, these free tribeswomen could elect their elders and had the right to demand arbitration by said elders or another social superior in matters of justice, but that was about the extent of their political rights; they didn't have much more say in how their communities were run, especially not on the Right Bank where power increasingly devolved into the hands of the ekesha, who went on to wield it as local autocratic strong-women rather than even pretend to care about communal consensus like the elders once had to. Like the Irari, the Thiskaira had no strong mercantile tradition, and those villagers or nomads who were assigned to trading missions rarely ventured further than the next village or tribe over.

    Reenactress portrating a Thiskair commoner weaving baskets, c. 10,250 AA

    Men were the lowest status residents of Thiskaira lands. Those who were born to free Thiskaira women were recognized as barely free men, expected to work under their mothers and wives in the field & at home but little else; certainly, they couldn't be warriors or leaders, no matter their abilities. Many more men were slaves, either taken in raids or born into that condition, and their lot varied between 'surprisingly comfortable' and 'utterly deplorable' depending on what their master and home was like, as was the case with many other slaves around the world. The daughters of a male slave and a free woman were treated as free women from birth, so the only hope an enslaved man might have for his children to not live in servitude was to catch the eye of a mistress in need of daughters. The Thiskaira also kept female slaves, some for pleasure (see below), others for hard labor alongside their male counterparts.

    A mining slave (probably Geq'ireebi) in Thiskaira employ, c. 10,420 AA

    Mirroring the celebrated male homosexuality of their bitter Irari enemies, the Thiskaira celebrated female homosexuality instead. As far as they were concerned, men were for breeding, while girls were for fun - and love, even if they were slaves. The Thiskaira sincerely believed that only women were capable of genuine emotional love, while men were baser creatures driven by love's poor shadow lust and whose instinct was just to sire children with the comeliest females they could find. Consequently, being able to amass harems of pretty girls in their teens or early adulthood was considered a sign of wealth and power among the Thiskaira, while amassing harems of strong and virile men with whom to churn out more Thiskaira babies was considered less a sign of personal wealth and more a duty on the part of warriors and aristocrats.

    Depiction of an Irari harem slave in the stone palace of Delibala c. 10,496 AA

    Thiskaira religion
    The Thiskaira religion, centered on the worship of a Mother Goddess or Mat'ari-Darga in their ancient tongue, can be best defined as a Mainstream faith with many Local variations, a Martial soul and an Ancestral mentality. Their chief deity was the eponymous Mat'ari-Darga, the Earth Mother: Earth itself was considered the physical manifestation of the eternal and supreme female divinity that gave birth to, and still sustains, all life. Humans, beasts, and even the very trees and stones were considered to be Her children, and each of these - even seemingly inanimate objects such as boulders - were thought to have a soul imparted upon them by their mother. Females, as those who gave birth to new vessels for the souls shaped by the Mother Goddess, were more like her than males, and naturally better attuned to her needs and dreams than the opposite sex: consequently, the Mother Goddess and lesser goddesses (chief among them Thamisia, a lunar goddess further associated with war, hunting and lovemaking), her daughters and avatars, only ever appeared to female prophetesses and shamans. These were Her clergy, the loosely connected 'Oracles' (Thiskaira: Hayaha) who were raised up from and duly served their local communities, trying to see the future by cutting trees with a ceremonial knife and watching how the sap flows and offering up sacrifices of calves and lambs over firepits, so that their souls may be taken back by the Mother Goddess and please Her to the extent that She will repay her devoted with better harvests and twice as many animals as they had just sacrificed.

    As one might guess from their willingness to butcher animals that they freely admit have souls, the adherents of the Mother Goddess were not a peaceable lot in the slightest, and were just as vicious and warlike as many other Hyperboreans. They were essentially darwinists, convinced that 'only the strong survive' was one of the laws of nature laid down by the Mother Goddess herself; and as warrior-women who knew the truth of her existence, it was only right and just that the Thiskaira executed this law to the best of their ability. War was thought of as nature's way of weeding out the weak and ensuring that only the best continued living to serve the Mother Goddess, as surely as wolves and lions tearing apart weaker and slower prey was. Thus, every time the Thiskaira went forth to raid or make war on their enemies, they could say they were only doing the bidding of their creator and thinning out those who only wasted everyone else's oxygen from the greater human race. Once they'd triumphed, they could do as they pleased with whoever survived the initial battle or bout of pillaging, whether they opted to enslave or simply butcher these survivors; after all, 'the strong may do as they please to the weak' was another law of nature.

    The Thiskaira did not worship the Mother Goddess, or any other lesser deities, at temples or with overly elaborate rites. As mentioned above, their Oracles instead conducted simplistic rituals around communal firepits or cut into trees to discern the future and determine what the Mother Goddess was thinking, whether or not anyone was watching. At most, archaeologists have found evidence of wooden poles with symbols for each of the Thiskaira goddesses carved into them and set up at places believed to hold great magical power. 'Audience participation' extended as far as other Thiskaira offering up their own animals for sacrifice at the Oracle's hands and repeating any religious chanting uttered by the Oracle; there were certainly no sermons or debate sessions to be had, once the Oracle announced her readings it was over. Other goddesses, such as Thamasia or her twin sister Hathasia (the goddess of the sun, fertility in both agriculture & the body, and motherhood) were also revered with simple, energetic dances and sacrifices of specific animals (ex. dogs for Thamasia).

    An Oracle, or 'Haya', of the Left-Bank Thiskaira with a sweet-scented herb for the fires in hand, c. 10,500 AA

    Both Left- and Right-Bank Thiskaira buried their dead beneath barrows in the traditional Hyperborean style, much like the Lakani far to the southwest. The fallen were interred with their possessions in an earthen tomb as large and richly decorated as their personal wealth would allow, in the hopes that should the Mother Goddess reincarnate their soul into a new body, those belongings would at least slightly anchor them to their old body and impart upon them memories of their former life. Should Mat'ari-Darga see fit to instead elevate their soul above the Earth, to serve and fight at Her side - well, there was no harm in having a nicer tomb to let everyone else around you know how important you were and now still are to the Mother Goddess, anyway.

    Barrows belonging to a Right-Bank sakarash and her favored servant, dated to 10,377 AA

    Thiskaira military
    Following common Hyperborean social patterns, Thiskaira warbands could be separated into three tiers: an aristocratic warrior elite, the professional armed retainers who served said elite, and a tribal levy of just about everyone else. The most obvious distinction, of course, is that Thiskaira warbands were all women, though they weren't above accepting the help of male allies and mercenaries. They favored the bow and spear over the sword and ax, for the former two allowed them to offset the physiological differences in male and female bodies, but otherwise kept pace with developments in Hyperborean metallurgy and technology - Thiskaira iron weapons dating to the 10,400-500 AA period were of obviously higher quality than those of the earlier days when they first landed in Hyperborea (for one thing, most recovered relics of the latter have decayed so badly that it's been difficult for archaeologists to tell what they were) and a broken coat of Thiskaira ringmail dating back to 10,502 AA has been discovered, indicating that they either developed it independently around that time or learned how to make chainmail from other Hyperboreans, such as the Saor and Speraca.

    At the pinnacle of both Left-Bankers and Right-Bankers, there stood the Mat'arvha, or 'Matriarchs': the supreme war-leaders of the various Thiskaira tribes, who doubtlessly would have entered battle in the best iron and bronze armor their underlings could forge and who were surrounded by cadres of handpicked bodyguards. Right-Bank Matriarchs appear to have generally fought on foot, standing side by side with their women and forgoing horses except to quickly traverse the frigid tundra and dense boreal forests that they now called home, while the Matriarchs of the steppe-dwelling Left-Bank Thiskaira rapidly embraced horseback combat, adopting the saddle from the Yahg and Suufulk to ease their travels, and would have boldly led their warriors into battle with bow, lance and slashing sword in hand. Among the Right-Bankers, the ekesha (nobles), who would have been armed and attired much like the Mat'arvha and gone into battle with their own retinues to support them. Both Thiskaira subfamilies would have also used plenty of woad, extracted from the glastum plant native to the steppes and forests on both sides of the World's End, for war paint to give themselves more inhuman and intimidating countenances.

    Reenactress portrating a Mat'arvh of the Left-Bank Thiskaira, c. 10,500 AA

    A Mat'arvh of the Left-Bank Thiskaira in mail armor, c. 10,500 AA

    Beneath the Mat'arvha, one would have found the sakarasha, or armed retainers and professional warriors in service to the Matriarchs and (among the Right-Bank Thiskaira) aristocrats. Unconcerned about their daily meals, beer and shelter (all of which was supposed to be provided by the mistress they'd sworn to serve), they could dedicate at least a few hours of every day to train in the martial arts, and consequently became a stratum of fighters equal in ability and ferocity to any other Hyperborean warrior class. Right-Banker sakarasha would largely have fought as medium infantry-women, attired in rawhide vests (increasingly replaced with vests of properly treated leather as time, and technology, advanced), skirts with iron scales sewn onto them and open-faced iron or bronze helms that traded some degree of protection for increased mobility and visibility, and chiefly wielding axes with long shafts but small heads or slashing longswords in conjunction with iron-rimmed shields made of soft wood and long, light javelins with a hollow shaft and a soft, barbed iron head; no doubt thrown with the hope that it would break off in the target's body upon striking and be impossible to remove without causing further injury. They rarely formed shield-walls, which were difficult to maintain in the rough terrain of their homeland, but instead fought aggressively in loose order, skirmishing with the enemy and mounting quick charges & feints until the latter was sufficiently weakened and disordered to be finished off.

    Left-Banker sakarasha would have been uniformly horse-archers or mounted lancers, little different from the way the Yahg and many Suufulk fought with the obvious distinction that they were all female. The archers would have favored padded clothing and leather or rawhide for protection rather than mail armor, and fought by staying at a distance from the foe and peppering them with arrows. Lancers were known to have worn vests made of horn, rawhide, leather or iron scales sewn onto a fabric backing coupled with helmets of iron or boar's tusks and goat horn, and to have completely forgone shields in favor of 3-4 m long two-handed lances able to impale up to two men at once; without shields however, these shock medium cavalry-women were highly vulnerable to missiles (necessitating the cover of their horse-archers to tie down opposing missile troops) and in close combat where their long lances were too unwieldy to be effective weapons. These women counted on breaking the enemy in one or a few devastating charges, and would have known that they'd be sitting ducks if pinned down in a prolonged melee after the charge. Both archers and lancers were known to also carry lassos for use at short range, to drag enemies to their deaths or into slavery.

    A Right-Bank sakarash carries the head of a rival Hyperborean warrior as a trophy, c. 10,450 AA

    Left-Bank sakarash lassoing an Irari common soldier with the aid of a Yahg mercenary, c. 10,499 AA

    The majority of Thiskaira armies were, as was the case with virtually every other Hyperborean military force in this period, a mashup of volunteers and conscripts from the lowest rungs of society - the agusha. Farmers with straightened scythes or pitchforks, smiths with their forging hammers, cooks with knives, hunters with their bows and more executed much of the unglamorous support duties for their social betters: serving as sentries or scouts, foraging (whether by literally just picking berries or by raiding enemy settlements), forming up the bulk of the battle line and thus serving as meatshields to pin enemy soldiers down while their superiors strike the decisive blows on the battlefield, building siege weapons, carrying battering rams and assault ladders to the foe's fortifications...nonetheless, they were always entitled to a share of the plunder after victories, and could even attract the eye of the tribal Mat'arvh and thus enter the ranks of the sakarasha by performing great deeds in battle. Among the Left-Bank Thiskaira, the agusha virtually entirely fought on foot, chiefly as archers and light infantry who skirmished with the enemy with slings, javelins, hunting bows and even thrown rocks; and even among the Right-Bankers, many agusha still fought on foot, with only the wealthiest of commoners (namely those who had more than one horse in their household to spare) supporting the sakarasha as unarmored mounted archers and scouts.

    A Right-Bank Thiskair common archer brought to life by modern reenactment, c. 10,500 AA

    A Left-Bank Thiskair horse archer of common stock, c. 10,500 AA

    Finally, the Thiskaira used Arctic wolfhounds in combat, as surely as any other bunch of Hyperboreans. Theirs appear to have overwhelmingly fought unarmored (the poverty of the tundra & steppe that the Thiskaira settled, in comparison to the richer lands where the other Hyperboreans went, probably had something to do with that), at most being outfitted with iron-spiked collars with which to gouge their mistresses' opponents. Thiskaira wolfhounds fought at their mistresses' side except in one specific scenario: when dealing with Irari shield-walls, these hounds were released ahead of the rest of the Thiskaira army in the hope that they'd disrupt the Irari formation before their owners closed in for the kill.

    All in all, Thiskaira strategy and tactics seem to have been extremely aggressive and offense-oriented, making for an hard foil to the defensive-minded Irari they regularly combated. Like the Irari, small bands of Thiskaira sakarasha (among the Right-Bankers, led by ekesha) routinely rode out to raid the villages of their neighbors, Irari and Hyperborean alike. When they amassed a large enough warband for...well, war, the Thiskaira preferred to engage their foe at a distance first, screening their infantry and heavy cavalry with archers (on foot and mounted) who would exchange missiles with the opposition while the melee fighters advanced in loosely organized lines that tried to stretch to outflank the distracted enemy. When they'd gotten close enough and it was deemed the foe had been bloodied sufficiently, the archers would cease fire as to avoid hitting their own allies, and the warriors charged in; champions of the Thiskaira tribes would race ahead of their underlings, all screaming shrill warcries at the top of their lungs and hoping to be the first to bury their spears in an enemy soldier's guts, followed up by the common warriors who'd add their bulk of numbers to the fight.

    While superb on flat areas and against equally disorganized opponents (namely, other Hyperborean warbands, the early Tawarë and to a lesser extent the Yahg and Suufulk) however, the headstrong and aggressive Thiskaira fighting style proved less than effective in narrow mountain passes where they had little room to maneuver and against determined, disciplined shield-walls capable of weathering their attacks until the women-fighters had burnt themselves out & could be hurled off the field by a counterattack; in other words, the exact way the Irari fought, hence why the latter was able to fend off all major Thiskaira offensives aimed at their mountain homes throughout the early Iron Age.

    A popular myth contends that the Thiskaira burnt off one of the breasts of their newborn infants, so that it wouldn't get in the way of their archery and javelin-tossing. This is untrue; however, Thiskaira who went to war did actually bind their breasts with a long strip of cloth, usually made of soft wool, to flatten them during battles, making it easier for them to fight in close combat (or, indeed, to shoot a bow or throw a javelin) without their prominences getting in the way. The oldest such strip found to date dates back to 10,388 AA, was made of spider silk and belonged to a Mat'arvh, whose well-preserved corpse was found frozen in the World's End mountain range along with the similarly mummified bodies & skeletons of hundreds of her followers - what exactly they were doing when they froze/starved to death there remains a mystery, but the assumption of most scientists is that they were attempting a sneak attack on Arbin but got lost in a blizzard and perished before they could find their way to their target, or back down from the mountain.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; May 31, 2018 at 08:47 PM.

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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Hyperaustralians: Those Who Stayed Behind
    While many Hyperaustralians migrated off their suddenly-frozen homeland in the decades and centuries following the dawn of the Great Cooling, more remained home. And if outsiders thought the migrants were savage...well! Those who remained behind were, if anything, even more psychotic than their cousins who had the sense to leave Hyperaustralis, having been driven well into insanity and out the other end by mass starvation and the depletion of nearly all natural resources (from trees to food to fresh water) save iron - which, of course, they mostly found good only for making weapons and armor, and what point is there to having military equipment if you don't use it? What little strands of civilization existed on Hyperaustralis by the end of the Bronze Age appear to have rapidly disintegrated into an anarchic sea of perpetual small-to-medium-scale warfare, cannibalism, human sacrifice and other atrocities as the Hyperaustralians battled one another over increasingly scarce resources and attempted to beseech their dark gods to preserve what little they had left.

    Little is directly known about this five-hundred-year dark age in Hyperaustralic history due to an almost complete lack of information, and the slight issue that not one bunch of contemporary Hyperaustralians (it would be a stretch to call any of the ramshackle societies they managed to scrap together in these times 'civilizations') had developed a writing system until the very end around 10,500 AA. The myriad mass graves, troves of battered and bloodied iron weapons and armor, burnt-out stone settlements and legends passed down from one generation of Hyperaustralic elders and other lore-keepers to the next tell enough on their own, anyway. The following are the early post-Cooling Hyperaustralians about whom anything at all is known:

    Man-eaters: The Gyarl
    The oldest post-Cooling Hyperaustralic tribe about whom anything is known, the Gyarl were said to have embraced cannibalism in order to survive. They were nomadic savages, wandering from one ice plain to another in the shadow of Hyperaustralis' lone volcano, and their men wielded iron-studded clubs with which to beat their victims senseless as opposed to killing them outright...so that they could be dragged back to a hide tent to be carved up by the Gyarl women with iron and obsidian knives, of course. Quite unlike other Hyperaustralians, they had no Dzlieri slaves, having devoured theirs shortly after the onset of the Great Cooling, and were also said to eat their own children when especially hungry and unable to locate any 'new meat' quickly enough. The Vanarassi tribe, one of several which survived months of harassment by the Gyarl, described the Gyarl tribe as:
    Quote Originally Posted by Vanarassi legend
    ...a pack of howling men covered from head to toe in thick black and white furs, so that no part of them could be seen but their faces, which they paint with the blood of beasts and their human victims. They try to strike at night, descending on our camps with no torches and only iron clubs and spears in their hands, approaching as silently as they could on their bellies until they reach sprinting distance. It is then that they rise from the snow and burst forward with their shrill war-cries, to club and drag away anyone who looks like they're worth eating and to put the ill, the old, the sickly and those who fight back too fiercely to the spear.
    Reconstruction of Gyarl warriors looking over their latest catch, c. 10,085 AA

    Eventually, the Gyarl fell victim to a disease that was then known as the 'Curse of Khaza' after the cannibalized elder who supposedly struck them with it, which sapped them of their strength and vitality, made them prone to fits of uncontrollable laughter and wild mood swings, and eventually rendering them incapable of swallowing anything (much less human meat). Many Gyarl died thanks to this mysterious plague around 10,100 AA, and the survivors were finished off soon after by a coalition of the many rival tribes they'd antagonized in the past. However, the Gyarl survived in legend as the Ya-Garl, demonic horrors that were once Gyarl who'd met a violent end (including, but not limited to, being eaten by their own tribesmen) that appeared during snowstorms to maul and devour unwary travelers. While there is no visual proof of any Ya-Garl, there have always been mysterious disappearances of people who wander around at night during blizzards on the Gyarl's former hunting grounds, disappearances which could probably be explained in various other ways but which Hyperaustralian superstition maintains are the work of the Ya-Garl.

    Estimated range of the Gyarl by 10,100 AA

    Artist's rendition of a Himadassi legend: their champion Karathu about to beat a Ya-Garl to death with his fists

    The blood-drunk: The Himadassi
    While virtually all of the Hyperaustralic tribes that survived the Great Cooling (and many of those that didn't) had numerous atrocities to their name, they at least committed their grievous crimes out of desperation; even the Gyarl would not have turned to cannibalism if they had other food supplies readily available, after all. Not so with the Himadassi, who were quite possibly the most bloodthirsty of the early Hyperaustralians, which is really saying something. They were a tribe that would attack any other tribe or individual who passed by their way, not out of xenophobic hostility or a need to feed (either on the victim's supplies or the victim him/herself), but simply for fun. When the tribe's witch-king decreed that it was time to make war upon a tribe, no Himadassi would think to question him, not because they viewed him as a god but because an opportunity to shed blood was never something to be passed up on. The Himadassi were also known to spare the children of their enemies after slaughtering the parents before them, not out of pity or kindness, but to ensure that they'd grow up to hate them in turn and to want to fight them - in essence, ensuring that they'd grow up to perpetuate a cycle of the violence the Himadassi liked so much. In the words of the Himadassi champion Karathu, who also went by pleasant nicknames such as 'Breaker of Skulls', 'Red Plague', 'Bringer of Grief' and 'Bane of the Ya-Garl', when questioned as to why he fought by the wise men of a rival tribe...
    Quote Originally Posted by Karathu
    Do you also ask a fire why it burns? Battle is not only what we do, it is what we are.
    Upon achieving victory, it is the Himadassi way to humiliate whatever foes they didn't kill by forcing them to pass beneath a 'yoke' of their iron spears, formally marking their newfound servitude to the Himadassi. The Himadassi consequently built a small empire of sorts around 10,250 AA, assigning their slaves to do all the menial work like gathering and preparing food, building shelters and making or cleaning their masters' clothes while they themselves focused entirely on two things: waging war, and forging the equipment to do so. The Himadassi were also known to murder their slaves at random (save for especially strong and rebellious ones, who they targeted) on every solstice, not just to sate their bloodlust but also in a bid to intimidate the rest into falling in line.

    A Himadassi warrior bids farewell to his family as he marches off to war, c. 10,200 AA

    Spread of the Himadassi by 10,290 AA

    Despite their extremely warlike nature and success at expansion, the Himadassi did stall and stagnate shortly after they began to really take off. Legend blames this on the greed and power-lust of Karathu's grandson, the witch-king Pasathu who tracked down and slew a feathered dragon (with the help of half the tribe, quite a few of whom died trying to bring the beast down with javelins and slings) so that he could eat its heart and gain its strength. It worked - at the cost of driving him insane and sending him on a berserk rampage against his own people, starting with the exhausted and bloodied survivors of the hunt around him. Although he was eventually put down, Pasathu (still a young man at the time of his death) left no biological heir, and his massacre of many of the Himadassi's best and brightest before his own death left no obvious candidate among the people to assume the mantle of leadership. The Himadassi continued to survive for some decades, disorganized and rudderless, but in their weakened state they were little match for a bigger, badder and better-organized & led force. One such force, the rising power that was the Inissi, finally did them in around 10,300 AA, and the only Himadassi who survived their onslaught would ironically live on as the slaves of this greater power.

    Kings crowned in darkness: The Inissi
    We only begin to get a clear picture of life on Hyperaustralis starting around 10,400 AA, by which point at least one major power had emerged on the fractious continent in the form of the Inissi. They were a tribe of the northern coast, who first gained notoriety when they destroyed the weakened Himadassi before them around 10,300 AA, but it had taken them a century since that great feat to found anything resembling a real empire. In hindsight, historians argue, there was little reason to not predict that the Inissi would found the first true Hyperaustralic empire: they were by far the most 'civilized' of the known Hyperaustralian tribes after the Great Cooling, having independently developed an abugida writing system and written on simple clay tablets with styluses of sharpened flint; the curious replacement of wood as their main fire-lighting material with coal, which they mined from the mountains overlooking their homeland, and peat gathered from bogs on the rare occasion that they weren't frozen over; the establishment of an actual permanent capital, a first in Hyperaustralian history, Akaris, which also doubled as a core of their palace economy - in the style of the High Allawauric civilization, the Inissi of outlying villages would bring their crops and other goods to Akaris and amass it all into great piles, from which their witch-king redistributed to the individual families and villages as much or as little as they needed; and the stratification of their society beyond tribal lines.

    Of course, there was much to criticize the Inissi for as well, at least from a modern perspective. It's true that they were not crazed cannibals, as the Gyarl were, nor were they psychotically bloodthirsty to the exclusion of all reason like the Himadassi; theirs was a more insidious evil, for they were determined empire-builders, with all the negative connotations that that characterization brings. Inissi warbands and later, armies fought with greater organization than any of their contemporary Hyperaustralic rivals, but they also didn't stop at destroying their enemies; no, the Inissi also had to burn down their foes' camps, and take the women and children of said enemies as slaves. This was standard fare in much, if not all, of the ancient world, but what set the Inissi apart was the sheer scale of their slaving operations - by 10,500 AA when there could be no doubt to a modern historian that their empire had been established, they had a vast underclass of chattel slaves tasked with everything from mining coal for their hearths and furnaces, to building their houses from fire-baked clay bricks and animal hides, to gathering kadvish and the tulka & ibak roots for sustenance, to warming their masters' beds: the only things they weren't trusted with were 1) fighting and 2) forging the Inissi's weapons, both of which were lessons their masters had learned from the Hamidassi.

    The Inissi kingdom, c. 10,500 AA

    Inissi language

    Modern speech Proto-Hyperaustralic Inissi
    Man, men Gach, gach'e Gak, gaksi
    Woman, women S'gach, s'gachei Sagak, sagakai
    Conquest Andum Hindaum
    Sword Habad Sa-hapat
    Dog Hubur Obor

    Inissi society
    At the pinnacle of Inissi society sat their Witch-King, who in the Hyperaustralic tradition was both a sort of great shaman and a warlord. Inissi Witch-Kings did not form dynasties and pass their throne to blood relations, nor were they elected by the nobility; rather they were chosen for their magical ability by and from the ranks of the kingdom's shamans (yanali, singl. yanal), men whose prophecies came true and who could reputably commune with the dead. Their duties did not only include communing with the spirits of nature and their ancestors for guidance and leading Inissi armies into battle, but also serving as the kingdom's supreme landowner. Among the sedentary Hyperaustralic tribes, all land was considered the communal property of the tribe; and among the more 'advanced' and 'civilized' Inissi, all of the kingdom's land was considered to still belong to the tribe in the sense that the Witch-King of Akaris is the Inissi. He essentially leased most of his lands (ie. the entire kingdom) to the yuthisi aristocracy as fiefdoms, but the commoners living on those fiefdoms still owed allegiance to both him and their local overlords. To use a modern analogy: if the Inissi kingdom were an apartment, the Witch-King was the landlord, the yuthisi were his security guards, and the peasants were tenants. Twice a year, every subject of the Witch-King had to make a journey to the stone palace of Akaris with all the goods they could carry, which the Witch-King would then redistribute according to their needs.

    Recreated quill headdress and laughing lion skull-mas, as an Inissi Witch-King would've worn c. 10,500 AA

    One thing that really set the Inissi apart from their less organized fellow Hyperaustralians was the emergence of a hereditary aristocratic class from their witch-kings' trusted inner circle of battle-companions were derived, and the consolidation of their barbaric camps into towns with simple earthen walls was conducted with governors chosen from this new aristocracy. Called the yuthisi or 'braves' (singl. yuth), these Inissi nobles were assigned fiefs to govern by the witch-king in Akaris, and were consequently responsible for both the administration and military defense - in other words, raising and maintaining private armies of local volunteers and mercenaries who could both extort taxes (as in, driving the villagers under their thumb to Akaris at the start of every season to pile up their belongings for redistribution) out of the population and fight outside threats on their own dime - of their new territories. The yuthisi also appointed all village chiefs in the towns under their jurisdiction, and dealt with legal disputes that said village chiefs were unable to resolve (though if a case had to come all the way up to the local yuth, it was likely it'd end with someone getting tortured to death). Initially most yuthisi lived in & ruled from caves in the mountains, but as the Inissi borders expanded more and more had to leave their subterranean holdfasts behind and build new forts of stone and earth on strategic hills or near rivers, closer to their subjects.

    A yuth as he would've appeared in what passed for Inissi court attire: face paint, a token to ward off evil spirits and a wolf pelt headdress

    Below the yuthisi there existed an informal 'middle class', chiefly artisans such as blacksmiths and wood-craftsmen. These were the people who actually lived inside towns, sheltered from outside dangers by their walls of earth and stone, and sold the goods they made for a living instead of barely subsisting off the land. There were few traders among the free Inissi: while there were naturally some peddlers who wandered from village to village to hawk their goods, and fixed merchants who bought and sold goods at a town's marketplace, the lack of any large-scale infrastructure beyond simple dirt roads, the frequent danger of bandits/greedy soldiers and yuthisi/the incursions of a rival tribe on said roads, and a cultural bias against merchants and traders in general as people who simply moved around the goods made by others & contributed nothing to the kingdom's martial security ensured that no great commercial enterprises came into being in Inissi lands, at least not in the early Iron Age.

    Farmers were reckoned below the artisan class, and were entirely what a modern observer might recognize as proto-serfs: they had some legal rights (they couldn't be flogged or executed for no reason like slaves, for example) but were legally just tenants who didn't even own the land they lived & worked on, and since very few legal cases made it above the level of their local village chief (and fewer still get as far as the yuth), they had little chance of ever achieving justice against anyone ranked higher on the Hyperaustralic social totem pole than a fellow peasant. All were subsistence farmers, cultivating crops of various roots and kadvish during the brief spring & autumn, and praying to whatever gods will listen that their lord's men don't take more than what they themselves need to survive when the time comes; during winter, in case they didn't have enough crops stockpiled to last until spring, entire peasant families would brave the bitter cold, knee or waist-deep snow and icy pitfalls to hunt and forage for survival. Unlike say, the Saor or Venskár, among the Inissi and the Hyperaustralians in general there was virtually no tradition of a free peasantry, where common families personally owned the parcel of land on which they built their homes and grew their crops; all of the Inissi's own farmers were proto-serfs, as mentioned earlier.

    Inissi peasants hurriedly plant their crops while the continent's still enjoying its extremely short spring season, c. 10,450 AA

    Finally, there were the slaves, who were considered chattel and heavily outnumbered all sectors of Inissi society, even the peasants who were treated only marginally better than they were. These slaves were treated extremely harshly to instill fear and discipline in them, with failure in even the smallest tasks being quickly punished with a beating for the first offense and a flogging or outright execution for the second (a third always merited instant death). The strongest and most rebellious slaves were also routinely publicly tortured (not killed, that would be a waste of good manpower) in an attempt to both break their will and intimidate other slaves into staying in line; this torture was rarely too crippling, indeed it was often just a flogging session that would leave scars but otherwise rendered the slaves still able to work, but in more extreme cases - normally attempted escapees - the targeted slaves could also be hamstrung in one foot to ensure they would never be able to run away. And yet they were still better-treated than the Dzlieri slaves under the Inissi yoke, who on top of being used as harshly as the human slaves, were also considered a fitting dinner for their masters in a pinch. This was technically not really cannibalism, since the Dzlieri were a separate species from humanity and the Inissi don't seem to have ever eaten fellow humans (at least not as a matter of official policy like the Gyarl), but it sure wasn't seen that way by everyone surrounding the Inissi domains back in their day.

    Owing to Hyperaustralis' extremely cold weather and ensuing lack of trees, the Inissi relied on coal, peat and lignite for heating. Slaves and servants tended to furnaces and hearths where these materials were burned to provide the building they were a part of with warmth and light, and it was said that the crude roads of Akaris were illuminated by braziers filled with red-hot coals. Carbon monoxide poisoning from the burning coal must have been quite the issue for the Inissi, but as far as they were concerned, anyone who dropped dead from standing in an improperly-ventilated room with a brazier or furnace full of coal for too long must've just incurred the displeasure of the gods for some reason - people died all the time in those days after all, and it wasn't like they had access to modern science for answers.

    Inissi religion
    The Inissi practiced a polytheistic religion known to modern historians as the 'Red Pantheon', a Mainstream faith of Statist soul and an Ancestral mentality. The eponymous Red Pantheon was comprised of numerous gods and goddesses, almost all of which were of a violent nature and demanded either human or animal sacrifices, and was led by a god of warriors & kings called the Dread King. None of them, the Dread King included, created the universe; rather they were the children of those who did just that, nameless and apparently indescribable 'Elder Gods' of whom nothing is known beyond that the Inissi believed they 1) actually created the world and all which dwells in it & 2) were overthrown and sealed away in the deepest recesses of the heavens by the Red Pantheon. No altruistic, or even vengeful, motives were attributed to the Red Pantheon for this celestial coup: in the Inissi's own telling, they overthrew their parents out of lust for power and the feeling that the Elder Gods weren't giving them their due by making them co-rulers of the universe, and since they actually succeeded, there was nothing wrong with what they did per the Darwinistic attitudes of the Hyperaustralians in general.

    Universally depicted in Inissi art as a gargantuan, extremely muscular man with no eyes or skin that wore a crown of bones and carried an iron spear or sword, the Dread King was apparently prayed to to ensure that the Witch-Kings of Akaris and their armies would always have the strength to do what must be done to preserve the Inissi kingdom, no matter what it might be, and to fill the hearts of their enemies with (appropriately) dread. Though he was routinely honored with the ritual sacrifices of specially-marked bulls (whose throats were slit over an altar, upon which they'd be roasted and afterwards communally eaten by the faithful) and prisoners (tied to stakes, flayed alive and then finished off by being burnt to death while shamans praised the Dread King and implored him to accept their sacrifice), the Witch-Kings were thought to be the only men on the earth who had a direct line of communication with this horrifying deity; this was the main reason they were not supposed to be challenged by their subordinates, ever - doing so would undoubtedly anger the Dread King, and the Witch-King just so happened to be the only person around who can call on him to smite the fool who dared question their judgment. The unearthed skulls of several Inissi Witch-Kings have also been found to bear the Dread King's mark, a black triskelion painted on red; archaeologists have yet to determine why this was done, as most Witch-Kings' skulls do not bear the mark.

    Mark of the Dread King

    The Dread King was wedded to - ironically - the Red Pantheon's goddess of fertility, harmony, the sun and nature, Ina-Tana. Depicted as a dusky-skinned woman with black hair whose features were mostly hidden away under the many layers of robes and shawls (all varying shades of green) wrapped around her body, it was said that her touch created life even where her husband had gone on his murderous rampages, and she was prayed to for good harvests, shelter from the elements, and successful childbirth. Most of her festivals didn't involve bloodshed, a rarity for the Red Pantheon's deities, save one: on solar eclipses, a lamb is sacrificed, roasted and eaten on her altars while the shaman calls on her to lift away the 'Sun's veil'. Her symbol, the six-leaf clover, was said to be painted onto the palms of those shamans who dedicated themselves to her worship (and honored her by engaging in ritualistic orgies with their acolytes), though for obvious reasons these markings didn't survive the same way her husband's did.

    A six-leaf clover, the mark of Ina-Tana

    Besides the litany of lesser gods and goddesses - brothers, sisters, and children of the Dread King and Ina-Tana - who comprised the Red Pantheon and whose names have mostly been lost to history, the Inissi also revered demigods fathered by the Red Pantheon's male elements and human women. Even the Dread King, whose wife was the most beautiful of the Pantheon and despite his utterly monstrous appearance, was apparently not above engaging in extramarital relations with women who caught his eye (or so one might say, if only he had eyes). With their half-divine strength, these demigods performed great feats to enter the pages of Inissi myth: among others, Iratul son of Armatha broke an ice shelf with his hammer to secure the treasure within for his village, the Dread King's son Hinbali wrestled a feathered dragon and finally killed it by tearing its head apart at the jaws just to demonstrate his strength, and another son of the Dread King named Nashalul told jokes so funny, so awful or both that they made the heads of any who listened explode. Every Inissi Witch-King claimed descent from one of the Dread King's half-human sons, usually retroactively after ascending to the throne (the shamans were prone to executing those who falsely claimed divine heritage and couldn't prove it in a trial by ordeal for blasphemy), as further justification as to why they should never be questioned by their underlings. Said shamans existed as lesser conduits to the gods, often claiming descent from lesser demigod heroes like the yuthisi did in the process, and appear to have heavily stressed the need to remain loyal to the Witch-Kings in exchange for their privileged position in society - they got as much food and luxury items redistributed into their hands as the nobles did, and it is known that anyone who struck a shaman was to be killed on the spot.

    The seat of the Red Pantheon's gods was thought to be the 'Great White', a massive glacier - quite probably the largest in the world, measuring at approximately 70 miles wide, 285 miles long and 9,000 ft deep - sitting at the core of Hyperaustralis. None who feared the gods dared approach it, for the Dread King did not appreciate visitors and would smite anyone foolish enough to trespass on his snowy 'lawn', or so it was said. The discovery of more than a few skeletons, mostly undamaged by human hands and dating back to entirely different years during the early Iron Age, on the way from Inissi lands to the Great White indicate that some individuals and small parties - adventurers, shamans, even just teenagers on dares - did attempt the long trek to their gods' homes, and died for it: not because the Dread King smote them (at least, not directly...), but simply due to exposure, starvation and the occasional attack by brigands, warriors of rival tribes and wild animals, up to and including Laughing Lions.

    A mere fraction of the 'Great White'

    Inissi military
    A cursory examination of the Inissi war machine demonstrates why it was the most successful of all the early Hyperaustralic armies: it was more numerous and better organized than those of all their neighbors. The yuthisi aristocracy naturally formed the best fighting contingent of the Inissi armies, and besides being heavily armored in a 'battledress' of iron sheets bound together and wearing helmets beneath their hoods, also had their own twist on the chariotry of the Muataric nations - war sleds, pulled by teams of up to a dozen huskies, on which the yuth fought with a barbed iron lance and the assistance of one or two crewmen; a driver, and (if he's rich enough to afford an especially large sled) an additional archer. These war-sleds functioned like Antarctic chariots, tearing across the snow-covered and icy landscape with frightening speed to plow into an opposing warband's ranks where the dogs would bite at men's legs and stomachs, the yuth struck out with his spear and (if present) his retainer felled other foes from a distance with a bow. As it was not unheard of for the sled to be immobilized in battle, usually by way of the sled-dogs getting killed or too distracted with combat to keep moving, the crew were to get off the sled and engage in close quarters with an iron hacking sword and a hide-covered pinewood shield.

    Model of an Inissi yuth with his armor, dated to 10,420 AA

    The yuthisi however fought largely independently of the Witch-King's command, operating almost as lone wolves on the battlefield who'd often charge ahead of his army and maneuver & withdraw as they pleased. No, the true distinctive strength of the Inissi was in the Witch-Kings' standing army, the irmelezi (literally 'armed men'). An all-volunteer sustained by the treasury of goods & food that their master kept after redistributing the rest to his people, the irmelezi were well-armored and armed by the standards of their day: all irmelezi wore iron chainmail shirts (the oldest of these dated to 10,452 AA, nearly half a century older than the oldest known Hyperborean mail hauberk; presumably, the better-organized nature of the Inissi empire and the even more dire state of affairs on the Hyperaustralic continent forced them to develop it more quickly than the Hyperboreans) and simple, round iron helmets between their outer hide coats and underclothes, and fought with iron spears, axes or swords in conjunction with hide-covered shields onto which the Dread King's mark had been painted, all of which were supplied at royal expense. They appear to have been the elite heavy infantry of the Inissi, crossing wintry fields atop ashwood snowshoes with rawhide laces to firmly secure their feet, and to have never exceeded around two thousand men in number - organized into regiments called 'hundreds', each directed by a captain directly appointed by the Witch-King and dismissed at his pleasure - at the best of times, though in the tradition of grandiose ancient storytelling, Inissi chroniclers would routinely boast their Witch-King had hundreds of thousands of these elite warriors at his beck & call to impress their people and intimidate enemies.

    An Inissi irmelez, c. 10,500 AA

    The majority of an Inissi war-host would, as is to be expected of an Iron Age civilization, be comprised of men from the lower orders of society: free farmers, craftsmen and slaves alike pressed into service, more frequently by their local yuthisi than the Witch-King of Akaris himself (he had his irmelezi to count on). Dismissively referred to as heluthili, or 'centipedes', these common soldiers would have fought unarmored and from a distance as archers and skirmishers with bows, slings and javelins (often simply light harpoons) while their betters got up close and personal with the foe. Like many other ancient levies, it is difficult to imagine that they'd be of any use in close combat beyond adding the sheer weight of their numbers to the fight; as warlike as the Hyperaustralians could be, they were still human, and presumably untrained humans thrust into a warzone with nothing but hunting bows and knives still have families to tend to, fields to work and a million other things they'd like to be doing besides dying on the battlefield for a Witch-King they both fear and have likely never seen.

    A Heluthil archer and his dog, c. 10,390 AA

    The Inissi, like less civilized Hyperaustralians, don't seem to have used horses for combat or transportation very often: though once often used to pull chariots manned by their Witch-Kings and nobles before the Great Cooling, after the continent froze over horses became extremely rare and were only trotted out to pull the Witch-King's ceremonial chariot during the brief summers. Instead, the most mobile elements of their army and society were those who moved atop dogsleds, while others had to march on foot using snowshoes. Witch-Kings had the luxury of entering battle in ornate palanquins carried by slaves, but once it was time to actually fight, they appear to have fought like the yuthisi on large iron-framed dogsleds pulled by as many as twenty dogs, as did their bodyguards.

    Iron Age rivals to the Inissi
    The Inissi may have been the most powerful and organized force on Hyperaustralis as of 10,500 AA, but they were far from being unchallenged. In fact, Inissi myth, chronicles (though it often gets difficult to tell the two apart...) and historical artifacts show that they were quite literally surrounded by rivals who could have torn them apart if only they'd been better organized and capable of coordinating attacks on the Inissi empire with one another.

    Map of other major tribes/confederations around the Inissi, c. 10,500 AA

    The Daivai - By far the largest and most formidable threat to Inissi hegemony, the Daivai were a theocratic confederation of warlike tribes living beyond the former's eastern borders. They were led by a council of tribal shamans who were apparently sufficiently powerful & respected to boss around even the chieftains of their own tribes. The Daivai followed a Heretical variation of the Red Pantheon that had an almost monotheistic reverence for the Dread King above all the other gods & didn't seem to believe the gods would lower themselves to mating with humans to sire demigods, and gloried in bloodshed as the only true way to entertain and impress said Dread King: like the Hamidassi, they had a strange tendency to let the children of rival tribes they destroyed live, with the expectation that they'd grow up and want to avenge their parents - for no reason beyond guaranteeing an endless cycle of battles with these opposing peoples in the future. On account of these unusually (even by ancient Hyperaustralic standards) bloodthirsty tendencies and their shared worship of the Dread King, some historians speculate that the Daivai were an offshoot of either the Hamidassi or Inissi who diverged from their parent tribe at some unknown point in the murky 'dark age' of 10,000-500 AA, but so far none of these speculators have managed to find hard evidence to support their hypothesis.

    The Tigassi - Another confederacy of rival tribes, this time living along the Inissi's western flank. They were reputedly expert spearmen and poison-makers, and naturally combined these talents by smearing the tips of their spears and arrows with a poison made from jellyfish venom before entering battle. As animists, they had shamans who communed with the spirits of nature on behalf of their tribesmen, and also erected totem poles which served to both chronicle each tribe's experiences in times of peace & war and to attract more spirits like moths to a flame.

    The Oborai - An especially large tribe living southwest of the Inissi kingdom. They were said to have been expert dog-tamers and handlers, and the first Hyperaustralians to effectively use dogsleds as a tool of war. When an Obor's most prized dog perished, tradition demanded he wear its pelt so as to keep the beast with him in spirit. Though the Inissi were known to dismiss the Oborai as unsophisticated 'dog-lords' (indeed Oborai literally means 'dog-men' in Inissi), evidence suggests that the Oborai taught them how to train dogs to pull their sleds in the first place, and upon being repaid with constant warfare they were able to keep the larger and better-organized Inissi armies off-balance with mobile warbands of sled-riding marauders.

    The Ras-gaksi - Literally 'the antler-men', the Ras-gaksi were a violently insular tribe that lived southeast of the Inissi and gained their name from their use of antler headdresses. They were said to have foregone even simple wooden huts in favor of living in felt tents, and to consider nature so sacred that they ate no plants, instead subsisting on an entirely carnivorous diet; they'd also apparently learned from the mistakes of the Gyarl however, and didn't consume human meat so as to not contract the same plague that ultimately did them in - they did kill any outsider who stepped foot on their territory, but contrary to Inissi propaganda, simply left the corpses impaled on stakes or bound to trees to scare off other potential trespassers rather than cannibalizing them. Some anthropologists speculate that they were descended from a splinter tribe of Gyarl survivors, but as is the case with the Daivai and their tenuous links to the Hamidassi and Inissi, there is no hard evidence supporting a firm 'yes' or 'no' answer to end the speculation.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; February 10, 2018 at 09:53 PM.

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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Peace beneath the mountains: The early Akesai
    More than one historian has described the Akesai people as 'a riddle, wrapped inside a mystery, wrapped inside an enigma'. As a language, the Akesai tongue does not appear to be related to (much less a branch of) the Sebi'Awi living on the southern side of their mountainous homeland, nor the nomadic Suufulk and marauding Yahg who prowled the steppe to the north; indeed, it is the only known representative of its family. And as a culture, all signs point to the Akesai having lived in splendid isolation for thousands of years between the Stone and early Iron Ages, the bitter cold and seemingly insurmountable mountain slopes sheltering them from outside influences and allowing them to live in blissful ignorance while the Sebi'Awi warred amongst themselves and the Yahg tore the Suufulk & each other to shreds around them. Apparently an extremely insular and traditional folk by nature, most evidence of what the Akesai were before the coming of Hyperborean nomads from half a world away comes in the form of physical architecture and artifacts left behind by the Akesai themselves, not what other nations wrote about them.

    Akesai language
    Modern speech Akesai
    Man, men Ngan, nganug
    Woman, women Ama, amanag
    Mountain Ri'i
    Yak Yug
    Tradition Srol

    Spread of Akesai artifacts and known dwellings between the Stone & Bronze Ages


    Dark green - Range of Akesai artifacts & dwellings by 1 AA
    Olive - Range of Akesai artifacts & dwellings by 7,000 AA

    Who exactly were the Akesai?
    Archaeologists have discovered traces of human habitation in the mountain range the Akesai call the Tipak Tidi, or 'Great Shelter' as the Akesai call it, going back to 7,000 years before the advent of agriculture. These first humans lived as hunter-gatherers in caves, as many Stone Age humans did (though they practiced a tradition of sky-burials even then), but as time progressed and technology advanced, they too changed. The discovery of sufficient tin and copper deposits to get a proper bronze-making industry going around 4,000 BA led to the creation of (relatively speaking) hardy tools, and together with the fairly moderate global climate, revolutionized the lifestyle of the ancient Akesai. No longer would they subsist on berries and the hunt; now many Akesai began to leave their caves for hide tents (and later simple earthen huts with thatch roofs) in the outdoors and start tilling fields to grow barley, rye & buckwheat in the valleys below, while their cousins who stayed up in the mountains tended to herds of mountain goats and yaks.

    Akesai chalk painting on the mountainside, dated to 2,200 AA

    Bronze Age Akesai society appears to have been fragmented into matrilineally-linked clans led by spiritual elders which lived independently of one another, not even organizing into tribes, and was remarkably peaceful: the valley-dwellers and mountaineers traded what they had (crops and meat/milk respectively) between one another without a fuss, each clan usually had enough to subsist on and was satisfied with it, and inter-clan skirmishes in harder times where at most five or six people died were what passed for warfare. When conflict arose, the aforementioned elders would try to work out a diplomatic solution (usually settling on restitution for stolen goods or animals, or arranging a duel to first blood between men who found cause to despise one another, or marrying a man and a woman of prestigious birth from the rival clans so as to bind them together), and the escalation to an inter-clan skirmish was a last resort should all other alternatives be exhausted. Discoveries of gravesites show that far more Akesai who died violently were killed by wild animals rather than in battle.

    An Akesai valley village at work in the harvesting season, c. 7,500 AA

    But nothing lasts forever - certainly not peaceful idyll. And what the Akesai had enjoyed came to a sudden and bitter end with the Great Cooling, and the massive migrations that came with it. The omens weren't good from around 9,000 AA, what with winters growing longer & harsher while summers grew shorter & cooler year after year. Alas, the winds of change brought a lot worse to Tipak Tidi than just the cold...

    Akesai religion
    Brjid Yangdrung, or 'Road to Liberation', is the native name of the faith of the Akesai. It can be best defined as a Mainstream religion of Traditional soul and an Ancestral​ mentality, and at its core taught that humans needed to find peace and balance with nature to attain enlightened perfection. According to practitioners of Brijid Yangdrung, the physical world is actually just the shadow of the world of spirits, where new souls are born from stars and descend to the earth to settle in the bodies of newborn infants. Death was not something to fear, but rather a means of liberating one's soul from material shackles so that it may ascend to join other free spirits in the Beyond after having lived and experienced life - at least if one has accumulated sufficient good karma, or dhan as the Akesai called it, by embracing pacifism; engaging in reflective meditation every dawn night; performing good deeds; and remaining in harmony with the Earth (which involves near-vegetarianism, only rarely consuming meat and other animal products, not killing fellow humans even in self-defense and never logging or mining more than they must). Those who have not acquired sufficient dhan to prove that they have learned the lessons of harmony and balance from their time on the physical plane will find themselves still shackled to it, doomed to reincarnate over & over until they have acquired enough dhan.

    The broken wheel, a common symbol of Brjid Yangdrung

    Brjid Yangdrung doesn't have deities in the traditional sense. Both the physical world and the spirit world were said to have been created by the 'Great Maker', Ami-Metupo. Ami-Metupo, a genderless spirit of immense (possible infinite) power, is however not an interventionist god; It created and maintains existence, including the spiritual mechanism that measures a person's dhan and decides whether their soul deserves to return to the spirit world or not upon their death, but otherwise does not interfere in mortal affairs. In turn, while Yangdrung practitioners maintain a healthy respect for the Ami-Metupo, they don't quite worship It, either. Their reverence is instead reserved for gurus, enlightened men and women who have not only discovered and come to understood the rules governing the accumulation of dhan and the nature of the universe through extensive traveling & meditation, but go on to spread that knowledge and inspire others into following their example. Early Yangdrung gurus lived spartan lives in caves as hermits, subsisting on a vegetarian or nearly-vegetarian diet and foregoing all physical pleasures, but never turning away those who came to them for medical aid (usually administered with herbs) or spiritual guidance, and once a year they would hit the road to find a new cave, teaching all who would hear their words along the way.

    Old and/or especially determined gurus may also perform the ultimate sacrifice of becoming a Sangha (unisex Akesai for 'sage'). In following this tradition, the guru would willingly submit to entombment within a mountain with the assistance of the nearest local village, the last people to whom he or she imparted his or her teachings. They would then starve themselves by subsisting entirely on pine needles, resins and seeds that they gathered themselves for an entire year to eliminate all fat. Finally, at the dawn of the new year, the townsfolk were charged with eliminating every possible air-hole in the prospective Sangha's cave, ensuring their death. The tomb would be left alone for 1,000 more days, after which the guru would be exhumed. If the body was still preserved, it was taken as a sign that the guru had indeed succeeded in becoming a Sangha, the only religious figure that enjoyed actual worship in the Yangdrung; a Sangha's spirit was voluntarily anchored to the Earth so that s/he could help others attain enlightenment at the grave personal cost of never ascending to the spirit world until all other souls have, and pilgrims routinely visit these tombs to pray for the Sangha's guidance & to leave offerings of incense and aromatic herbs to beseech their spirit for assistance.

    Recovered Sangha mummy, dated to 10,388 AA

    Wilders, braves and iron spirits: The Eastern Hyperboreans
    The majority of the Hyperboreans who left their Arctic home continent for (often literally) greener pastures under the pressures of heightened Zaroi surfacings and the Great Cooling migrated west of the World's End mountains, but by no means did this mean all of them did. Quite a few Hyperboreans, particularly those from the eastern tribes, landed east of said mountain range and soon adapted to the harsh life of nomads on the steppe and tundra of northeastern Muataria, fanning out from the eastern slopes of the World's End and clashing with assorted Yahg and Suufulk tribes until the furthest-flung of their kind had made it all the way to the valleys and small rivers in the shadow of the Tipak Tidi mountains along Midija's northern boundary. Being an already extremely warlike bunch accustomed to riding horses (albeit with no saddles, unlike the Yahg) and working with iron, the 'Oriental' Hyperboreans fared better than the early Suufulk did against the fury of the Yahg, and through a combination of wholesale abandonment of their old settled lifestyle & adoption of the Yahg saddle, their myriad tribes were able to sustain a precarious existence across a great swath of the western and southern 'Great Grass Sea': from the Borealic Ocean to the Tipak Tidi, and from the shores of the Un'Hun lake sacred to the Suufulk in the northeast to the western reaches of the Midijan Ocean to the southwest. Only a few linguistic roots, the forging and usage of iron weapons and tools on a mass scale, their use of trousers and the tradition of entombing their dead beneath great kurgans still united the increasingly fractious Oriental Hyperboreans with one another and their ancestral roots in a land an ocean away.

    Spread of the Oriental Hyperboreans, 10,500 AA


    Solid indigo - Concentrated Oriental Hyperborean presence, little aboriginal presence remaining
    Spots - Dispersed Oriental Hyperborean presence, often coexisting (for a very loose definition of the word...) with & weaker than their new Suufulk, Yahg & Akesai neighbors

    The Pyromantics: Oriental Hyperboreans' common religion
    No matter how close or how far they were from one another, the various tribes and peoples that constituted the Oriental Hyperboreans did share a common thread - that of religion. Usually simply referred to as 'Oriental Hyperborean pyromancy' by scholars, this was best defined as a Mainstream religion of Traditional soul and an Ancestral mentality, divided into many Local variations. The Sun, which obviously rose in the east and thus was revered by these Eastern Hyperboreans even before they left their homeland, was worshiped as the supreme deity: a male giver of life through its rays, and more than capable of scorching any who opposed its will and laws with its heat. The moon was considered to be a goddess, treated as the Sun's consort in some traditions and its rival in others, and (regardless of its exact relationship with the Sun) generally regarded as the mother of His children: the stars, which illuminate the skies when the Sun has gone to rest at night, and which were thought to sometimes descend to the earth in humanoid shape to provide guidance to the worthy who call upon them, succor to the weak, and punishment to the guilty who managed to escape mortal law. Great champions who died heroic deaths in battle or while saving the vulnerable among their people could expect to be reborn as yet more stars upon the next solar eclipse, which Pyromantics believed to be couplings of the Sun & Moon. Naturally for such a solar- and fire-centered religion, the start of summer was a time for their greatest celebrations, and the start of winter heralded a time of mourning, self-reflection and heightened alertness. Small, often hereditary priestly classes tried to divine the future through sacred fire and performed sun-related blessings or curses for the various Hyperborean tribes, but wielded little political influence.

    A stylized sun, the most common religious symbol among Oriental Hyperborean Pyromantics

    Another common thread linking the assorted Hyperborean pyromantic traditions, and indeed the source of the religion's name, was their belief in pyromancy. Whether they burned oracle bones in firepits like the Yamra did, examined the movements of smoke rising from a consecrated flame like the Melyans or directly stared into sacred fires in an attempt to divine the future like the Kikogani, Oriental Hyperborean priests, shamans and soothsayers were believed to be capable of diving the future through the usage of holy fires. As death by fire was considered a purifying experience that pleased their gods in the sky, Oriental Hyperboreans also traditionally burned the worst of their criminals at the stake, and the Yamra in particular indulged in the fiery sacrifice of prisoners-of-war.

    Left to right, a simple Yamra firepit; a Melyan cast-iron brazier; and a reconstructed Kikogani fire temple, all communal centers of pyromancy

    Finally, all Pyromantics appear to have practiced two burial rites: cremation and interment beneath a kurgan. Cremation, the rite for most non-notable Oriental Hyperboreans, appears to have been employed because of the aforementioned belief in fire as a purifying element, and so it was hoped that by being burned to ashes (which would then be scattered to the wind, no Oriental Hyperborean people appear to have stored the ashes of the deceased in urns) the departed would be purified of all sin and vice in preparation for their soul's ascent to the skies, where they may be reborn as a star during the next eclipse. Warlords and kings of great note, however, appear to be buried beneath tumuli to bind their spirit to the Earth under the belief that they can then continue to guide & watch over their people from beyond the grave.

    Two styles of Oriental Hyperborean kurgans: left, used by the Yamra & Melyans on the flat open steppes; right, used by the Kikogani in their mountain valleys

    Within 500 years of the first Hyperborean landings east of the World's End, the Oriental Hyperboreans had fractured into over a hundred known tribes and thousands of clans, many of which are not estimated to number more than a few hundred nomads at best. Most of these tribes eked out a pastoral existence, wandering from one grazing patch and watering hole to the next every now & then with herds of horses, goats and cattle in tow and fighting anyone who stood in the way of their continued survival until they either reached their destination or were defeated - which, unless they were able to both retreat from their foe and find a different pasture/watering hole, often meant the slow death of the tribe. These tribes were not stable political entities, as nothing but brute strength could keep clans from arbitrarily splitting away to found their own tribes when a tribal warlord died or just whenever the clan elders felt like it. When they needed additional resources, slaves, or just for the sake of it, the Hyperboreans would eagerly throw themselves into violent raids against the Suufulk and Yahg, the Mun'umati of the Great Sand Sea, the Thiskaira (who themselves were technically Oriental Hyperboreans, just more settled than most of their patriarchal cousins) & Irari, and of course one another. That said, there were a few tribes that managed to leave a deeper mark on history than the others, who were so minor that their names are scarcely worth mentioning outside of a specialized history class. These include...

    The Yamra
    The Yamra ('wilders' in their own tongue, singular Yamr) were the most significant of the early Oriental Hyperborean peoples who lived close to Hyperborea itself, being one of the first tribes to make landfall east of the World's End and originally settling along the shoreline. They were not keen on sharing pastureland with their Hyperborealic cousins, and by force of arms they drove many of those fellow Hyperboreans further south and east in those chaotic first decades of Hyperborean settlement. By 10,480 AA, the term 'Yamra' can no longer accurately describe one tribe, but instead applies to a wide swath of disunited tribes & confederations (some of which included non-Hyperborean tribes, either as willing members or subdued peoples) speaking regional dialects of the Yamra language and spanning across the northwestern corner of the region called the Great Grass Sea. These people adopted many traits and words from the Yahg they frequently clashed with - starting with the word for horde, 'uyğü', which they translated into huydu.

    Estimated extent of the Yamra Huydus based on the range of their artifacts & kurgans, c. 10,480 AA

    Yamra language
    Modern speech Hyperborean Yahg Yamra
    Man, men Ghuz, ghuze Yag, yaguth Ghus, ghusut
    Woman, women Aghuz, aghuzay Yug, yugukh Aghus, aghusak
    Fire Pehzun Ulav Pelun
    Horde N/A Uyğü Huydu
    Wrath Gara Y'agab Ga'rab

    Yamra society
    The Yamra were never united into a single cohesive political entity, but rather remained a collection of tribes and tribal confederations (called hordes, or 'huydus', in the Yahg style). Each tribe is comprised of clans, which in turn are obviously comprised of a number of blood-related families, and so depending on the number of clans it contains and the size of each of those clans a Yamra tribe could number between anywhere from a few dozen to several thousand individuals at a time. In keeping with the patriarchal traditions of the Hyperboreans, clans are led exclusively by male elders (suqal, pl. suqalan): whenever an elder died, every adult clansman was free to offer his name up as a potential successor, after which all who stepped forward would fight in a free-for-all pit melee with the rest of the clan as their audience until all but one of the warriors had either surrendered or died - naturally, the last man standing would assume the mantle of leadership. This barbaric ritual usually ensured that whoever led the clan would always be its strongest, most ruthless and/or most cunning warrior, but it could also land them with a maimed or insensible leader when they needed a capable one most.

    A newly minted Yamr suqal holds up the head of his defeated foe while his retainer looks on, c. 10,100 AA

    When enough Yamra clans pulled together into a tribe, the suqalan would elect one of their own to serve as the tribe's chieftain. In case no consensus can be reached or literally every one of the constituent clans' suqalan wanted the top job for themselves and was unwilling to compromise, they would once more fight it out, with the last man left standing/breathing at the end of their melee acquiring the position by default. On the huydu/horde level, the same process unfolded with tribal chieftains to determine who would reign as the horde's supreme warlord or Hraǵ ('king' in Yamra), although there was one major change: in case of the position had to be decided by combat because one or more sides were unwilling to back down from their claim, the rival chiefs would not fight one another alone, but with warbands comprised of as many volunteers from their own tribe as they could muster. It is not known exactly why this is the case, though knowing the Yahg-like streak of ruthless Darwinism that underlined their culture, most modern historians believe this tradition started when some Yamra chief somewhere got the bright idea to bring his army to his pit match with his rivals. In any case, once chosen (and regardless of how he won his crown), the Hraǵ would serve first and foremost as his horde's supreme war chief, picking out raiding targets and leading them major pitched battles, dividing the spoils of war and always having to be seen leading from the front to maintain the respect of his underlings. Off the battlefield, his main job was to hold his horde together, keeping the tribes under his banner united as one through a mix of bribery, intimidation and carefully arranged marriages between prominent clans, settling inter-tribal disputes, directing the horde's migrations and making thorough examples of anyone who questioned his authority or tried to break off from the horde.

    Upon the death of a Hraǵ, the suqalan might (against all odds) elect a successor in an orderly fashion, more often fight for his throne - or, equally as frequently, simply choose to disband the horde and go their separate ways. Nothing would keep them bound in the horde short of a show of martial might on the part of those who wished to keep the horde united, which almost always meant civil war between the 'unitarians' and secessionists. As a consequence, almost needless to say, Yamra hordes weren't much stabler than Yahg ones.

    A Yamr Hraǵ of the Tashara Horde with his queen or 'Ina-Fura' ('first wife'), their son and heavily armored guards, c. 10,495 AA

    Occupying the space between the chiefs & kings on one end of the social ladder, and the common clansmen on the other, lay the Yamra variation of the quintessential Hyperborean professional warrior/retainer class - the hashika, or literally just 'fighters'. Like other Hyperborean warrior classes, the hashika were comprised of male volunteers who willingly left their families behind to serve as the sworn swords of their tribe's chieftain, or the Hraǵ himself. In exchange for his unwavering lifetime loyalty and constant training when not already on the battlefield, each hashik was entitled to warm himself by his master's hearth, eat the master's food, and acquire a fair share of the spoils - jewels, food, women, you name it - after each battle, with the valor of one's deeds in battle being the only key to acquiring more of the plunder rather than any personal friendship or blood ties to their master. Hashika did not manage any land or slaves for their overlords, for the Yamra (being nomads) obviously weren't bound to any plot of land, and would have owned nothing but their horse, weapons, armor (if they were especially rich) and personal slaves, although if they were lucky enough to survive to old age and sire enough children of their own, they could found a new clan easier than most.

    Yamra women were to be seen, not heard. For most Yamra women, this meant that they were expected to be obedient mothers & homemakers who spoke only when spoken to, outside of two exceptions. Firstly, for Yamra priestesses, that saying was very literal: the shamans of the Yamra were invariably mute women, who had voluntarily removed their own tongues as part of their initiation rites, called the Jadagan or Silent Witches. The Jadagan were the seeresses and spiritual leaders of the Yamra, trying to glean the future in sacred firepits using oracle bones, and in so doing leaving the only evidence of a Yamra writing system. These witches would carve any question posed by their petitioner, whether he be a lowly hunter or a clan elder, into a bone from an animal killed by said petitioner, then cast the bone into the fire and try to figure out an answer from the cracks left in it from the heat. The Jadagan were also responsible for consecrating the kurgans beneath which the Yamra, like most other Oriental Hyperboreans, buried their dead, and for conducting human sacrifice: unlike their slightly more civilized cousins to the south, and perhaps under Yahg influence, the Yamra were prone to gutting and burning prisoners of war at the stake, with the local Jadag being responsible for mutely carrying out the grisly ritual in sight of the rest of the tribe. The more prestigious the sacrificial prisoner, the better.

    Model of a Yamr Jadag with the tools of her trade, c. 10,500 AA

    The second exception to the rule were the woman-warriors of the Yamra, the 'half-men' or hegh-ghusut. These were women of a more martial bent who could successfully defeat a male Yamr warrior from their tribe or clan in at least two out of three trials, presided over by their chief or suqal: a horseback race, an archery contest, and a duel to be fought until one of the combatants had either died, surrendered or was otherwise incapacitated. Hegh-ghusut fought in separate units commanded by a fellow hegh-ghus (invariably one who prevailed in all three of her qualification trials; beating the male competitor in two out of three marked one as good enough to fight with the boys, but not to lead) and were supposed to be treated equally to the male warriors when it came to both battlefield assignments and shares of the plunder. The otherwise extremely patriarchal Yamra seem to have accorded these women at least a measure of grudging respect in their tales and oracle bones, and historians suspect that the hegh-ghusut tradition began as a response to the successful deployment of female warriors by the neighboring Thiskaira as well as a way to shore up manpower for wars with the Yahg & Suufulk.

    Artist's imagining of a Yamr hegh-ghus warrioress, c. 10,350 AA

    Beneath these admittedly quite small and bloody-handed elites, the majority of Yamra lived as nomadic pastoralists. Fathers were the heads of their families and would hunt & forage for food together with their eldest and most active sons and/or brothers, while younger sons stayed behind to guard the family's herds of cattle, horses, goats and sheep with the help of some of the slaves. When a family patriarch died, his possessions were traditionally to be divided up as equally as possible between his sons. The mothers and daughters of the family (the Yamra had no problem with polygamous marriages and concubinage, and a Yamra man's possessions could be inherited by his concubines' sons if his lawful wives had borne him no male issue) cooked, crafted pottery, made clothes, beds and rugs of hide and leather and wool, tended the hearth and set up/maintained/dismantled the family tent as needed together with the household slaves that weren't already aiding the family's designated herders or working in the nearest iron mine. Each clan also typically designated one or two of their constituent families as the clan's hereditary blacksmiths and jewellers, so as to keep them supplied with weapons and to provide the more well-off tribesmen with sufficient status symbols. As seasons changed, water sources froze over or shrank, and grass was depleted, the Yamra would simply saddle up and migrate elsewhere, returning only months or years later when the nature had replenished the pasture and thawed the lakes & rivers.

    An average Yamra family, c. 10,350 AA

    Yamra warfare
    The Yamra warbands represented a blending of Hyperborean and Yahg martial traditions. Like the Yahg, by 10,500 AA the Yamra fought exclusively on horseback and fielded horse archers, lancers and berserkers. However, their military organization better resembles the warbands of the other Hyperborean nations to their west rather than the Yahg armies, and they never allowed slaves to take up arms even as drugged berserkers.

    The majority of a Yamra army would have been comprised of the huat, a tribal levy into which at least one able-bodied man from each of the tribe's families was drafted and which also included non-hashik volunteers seeking glory and loot. When the tribe wasn't at open war but the chieftain felt it was raiding season, members of the huat were chosen by lottery to accompany him on his expedition. As every Yamr man (regardless of social standing) had to become familiar with archery, wielding a spear or staff, and horseback riding from an early age to survive, the huat came to be a force of primarily horse archers, sufficiently skilled and drilled in firing a bow from horseback that they didn't need any 'official' training unless under the command of an especially innovative chieftain who wanted to instill some real discipline in his ranks. Yamra mounted archers, being completely lacking in melee equipment (each soldier of the huat had to bring his own equipment to the fight, and the common men would've at best had long skinning knives and woodcutting axes on hand) and abilities, thus would've tried to keep at a distance from the foe and hope to just shoot them to death while moving in undisciplined, constantly shifting skirmish lines or blobs.

    A simple Yamr horse-archer of the huat, c. 10,400 AA

    The next step up from the huat were the Yamra's spin on Hyperborean warrior-retainers, the hashika and hesh-ghusut. As professionals who trained for war when they weren't fighting one, they possessed far greater skill and discipline than the huat, being capable of maintaining formations and engaging in one of the favorite Yamra tactics - the feigned retreat - without it degenerating into a real rout. They too mostly fought as mounted archers, and wore little armor beyond iron or bronze helmets and the odd lamellar coat. However, there were some hashika who took full advantage of the invention of the saddle to fight as light or medium lancers, garbed in iron helms and coats of scales or mixed leather and rawhide lamellar; based on archaeological finds, it is estimated that between one in eight to one in five of hashika (depending on their tribe) served as lancers rather than archers. These men (there is no evidence of hesh-ghusut lancers, they appear to have universally fought as horse archers) copied the weapons of their Yahg rivals, chiefly the two-handed lance: measuring up to 4 m in length and topped with a narrow iron head, it was a potent weapon whether they charged in packed wedges or ordinary lines.

    A hashik light lancer, c. 10,420 AA

    A hesh-ghus of relatively high (probably chief or suqali) birth, c. 10,500 AA

    Hraǵs and chiefs of the Yamra were known to lead their men from the front, bedecked in oft-gilded armor and jewelry so that none could mistake them for a common soldier. They and their bodyguards rarely (preferably never) used bows, for to fight at a distance was considered unmanly and unbecoming of a tribe or horde's leader; no, the Yamra sense of honor demanded that they risk their skins in close quarters, and seek out the opposing Hraǵ or chieftain for single combat if possible. Many a song has been sung about the exploits of particularly daring, valorous and/or savage warlords among the Yamra, but to position one's commander in the front line was obviously an extremely risky move, and just as many battles were lost when a Yamr Hraǵ or chieftain got himself killed fighting out in the front & left their army headless.

    A Hraǵ in un-gilded heavy armor charges into battle with his lance & retainers, c. 10,450 AA

    Finally, in the vein of the Venskár, Saor and especially the Yahg, the Yamra fielded their own berserkers. Unlike the Yahg, the Yamra did not conscript slaves to serve as their berserkers, indeed slaves were forbidden from carrying arms under pain of death in their society; instead their berserkers were all volunteers, often from families of decent standing, who offered up their services out of religious zeal and/or a desire to further amass prestige for their clan. They drank copious amounts of itükhade juices before battle to enter the berserker trance, as Yahg shaghui do, but as they obviously follow very different gods and their priestesses are mute they can't quite replicate the Yahg 'psyching-up' rituals following the consumption of itükhade. The Yahg evidently did not have a high opinion of Yamra berserkers and considered them inferior knock-offs of the real deal.

    Depiction of a grinning Yamr berserker with a gilded ax, c. 10,400 AA

    The Kikogani
    The name 'Kikogani' ('iron spirits', singl. Kikogan) is the name borne by the Oriental Hyperboreans who settled furthest south from their initial landing sites, having crossed the entirety of the Great Grass Sea over 300 years to live in the cool river valleys and forests beneath the shadow of the Tipak Tidi mountains. Having brought iron and bloody-minded warfare into a previously fairly peaceful region, they were responsible for driving the Akesai back into the mountains and forcing a cultural shift away from pacifism among said aboriginals. Besides their wars with the Akesai, the Kikogani also frequently fought large groups of Suufulk, who competed with them & the Akesai for control of the Tipak Tidi mountain passes until the latter had completed their migration into Midija. The Akesai had their own name for this particular crop of invaders: rdzai-'drai, 'round-eyed devils'.

    While their Yamra and Melyan cousins remained horse-bound on the plains, and their Suufulk rivals gradually took on native Midijan traditions down south, the Kikogani went on to establish sedentary tribal kingdoms at the feet of the western & central Tipak Tidi while remaining largely Hyperborean in language (despite incorporating a few Akesai loanwords and sounds, the Kikogani language clearly still belonged to the Hyperborean family), faith and values, having forcefully subjugated and absorbed any of the native Akesai they got their hands on rather than bothering to learn their customs. This made them unique among the Oriental Hyperboreans as the only bunch who truly settled down and adopted a non-nomadic lifestyle. By 10,500 AA, the Kikogani had a presence along two-thirds of the Tipak Tidi's northern face, though they were most populous and only truly dominant in the western third of the mountain range, and at times even dared cross the mountain passes to raid the similarly young K'Uta kingdoms of northern Midija to the south.

    Kikogani settlement by 10,500 AA

    Kikogani language
    Modern speech Hyperborean Akesai Kikogani
    Man, men Ghuz, ghuze Ngan, nganug Nagh, naghun
    Woman, women Aghuz, aghuzay Ama, amanag Amagh, amaghan
    Iron Iwat Khos Kikawh
    Yak N/A Yug Yanag
    Fortress Harziat Kharyo Harshat

    Kikogani society
    As mentioned above, ancient Kikogani society was sedentary, in sharp contrast to their nomadic cousins the Melyans & Yamra. They were fragmented into tribes, which were further broken down into clans comprised of dozens of interrelated families, and which had permanently settled into the river valleys and evergreen forests lining the northern feet of the Tipak Tidi mountains. These families, in turn comprised of up to three generations living under the same roof, dwelt in simple adobe houses (preferably built as close as possible to rivers) with clearly delineated boundaries for their gardens and grazing grounds; those who could afford it built wooden fences, while those who couldn't dug shallow ditches to enclose their property. Within these boundaries they grew wheat, barley, rice, fruits & cotton and herded sheep, goats, horses, steppe camels, cattle and pigs. Fights, just as often culminating in deaths as not, and long-running vendettas over household-level border disputes were not uncommon; a common Kikogani saying went,
    Quote Originally Posted by The Kikogani
    I stand against my brother, my brother and I stand together against our father, our father and us against the clan, our clan against the rest of our tribe, and our tribe against the world.
    All that said, despite the vicious tribalism that pervaded Kikogani culture, hospitality remained of paramount importance to them. Even a bitter enemy must be welcomed into one's house if invited, treated to only the best the host has to offer when it comes to food, drink and entertainment, and guaranteed safe passage past the boundaries of the host's property when the time comes for them to depart. Murdering a guest under one's own roof, murdering another guest under a host's roof, or murdering one's host was considered sacrilegious and doomed one's entire family to ill fortune. Presumably, this ethic of hospitality arose as a way to guarantee safety in negotiating peace deals and resolving vendettas among Kikogani families great and small.

    Model of an ancient Kikogani peasant family's adobe house, complete with adjoining barn & roof access in case the men need to shoot at raiders, c. 10,500 AA

    As the Kikogani were an extremely patriarchal society, similar to other early Hyperborean peoples, these families were led by patriarchs who passed their position down through agnatic primogeniture, skipping over older relatives in favor of directly transferring leadership from father to eldest surviving son, and jealously guarded their hereditary lands from encroachment by their neighbors, raiders and even their overlords at times. Kikogani society had very firm gender roles in mind: the men were the hunters, foragers and builders while the women were expected to serve as cooks, cleaners and caregivers, and only farming and herding were considered suitable for both sexes to perform. The family patriarch wielded absolute authority over his household, which also extended to deciding who his children & grandchildren could marry and the bride price any prospective groom would have to cough up. Only males could own property, and by custom a father's land & possessions were unevenly divided between his eldest and second-eldest sons, with the former inheriting three-quarters and the latter getting only a quarter of the aforementioned possessions; younger sons had to strike out on their own, while the daughters were expected to be married off to men who could support & protect them in their teens or early 20s.

    Traditional male and female Kikogani commoner's garb; woolen or cotton caftan over loose trousers, and dress & headdress

    On account of their lack of an inheritance, younger Kikogani sons would band together into roving gangs called armangani (singl. arman) - 'adventurers' - at least until they impressed a clan enough to marry into their ranks & be allotted some land by their newly adopted kinsmen, at which point they'd have to leave their old company behind to settle down. These men were bandits and sellswords who hoarded iron equipment and horses, surviving from season to season through a combination of mercenary work for clans looking for extra muscle in their disputes with or raids on troublesome neighbors, foraging & hunting in the countryside, and harassing travelers & raiding isolated farmsteads. As most armangani companies were little more than wandering gangs, their leaders (raheari, roughly approximating to 'captains') tended to just be the biggest, most vicious and/or most cunning of their members who were able to get the rest to listen to them & fend off any competitors, and discipline was maintained by that rahear's chosen thugs bullying, clobbering and hanging any dissenters in full view of the rest of the band. More sophisticated companies had raheari choosing a second-in-command who'd succeed them upon their death/retirement or being elected by the other adventurers, as well as dedicated smiths, cooks and foragers to keep their armories stocked and bellies full. In any case, active armangani companies were the closest thing the Kikogani had to standing armies and certainly tended to be more experienced, if not also better-armed, than any given clan's village guards.

    Recreation of a veteran arman's caftan, c. 10,500 AA

    Above the basic family units, as mentioned before, the Kikogani were structured into clans comprised of multiple interrelated families, typically ranging (depending on the size of the families in question, how many slaves and non-blood-related retainers/servants the clan employed, and how loosely the clan elder was willing to define 'blood relation') from a few dozen to a few hundred individuals. The clan elder, called 'pir' (pl. pirogani) was elected by and from the ranks of the patriarchs of the clan's constituent families to serve for a lifetime. The pir typically lived in a special stone house built at the center of his clan's territory and was his clan's supreme war leader and lawgiver, deciding where and when they should raid, determining their relationships with neighboring clans and presiding over boundary or legal disputes between his people, though his authority over the clan was not absolute: should he lead them into defeat in battle, or be perceived as ruling unjustly in disputes between his subjects and/or in the division of plunder, it was perfectly possible for the other patriarchs to vote to depose him. In case he was faced with a majority of votes in favor of his deposition, the pir had two choices: he could accept the choice of his clan, in which case he would not only be replaced as pir but actually be exiled for life from his clan so that they don't have to worry about him trying to reclaim his position, or he could try to fight to hang on to power and plunge his people into civil war (or simply force a coup, depending on how much or how little support he still commanded from his own kin).

    Ceramic statuette of a Kikogani pir, dated to 10,520 AA

    Still further above the pirogani stood the sordani, the tribal kings of the Kikogani. These men led tribes comprised of two to a dozen or even more clans, and unlike the pirogani who deferred to them, they weren't elected from any chiefly family, although they did function as essentially higher-level pirogani in that a sordan's primary role was to lead his tribe into war & to organize raids, or a defense against other tribe's marauders. A tribe's founding clan - which is to say, the one responsible for beating or wheedling the other clans into a tribe - was supposed to be its sole provider of sordani, and upon one sordan's death, the throne passed to his closest male relative through what a modern scholar might call agnatic primogeniture: first the eldest surviving son, then if he has no living sons then his eldest living grandson, then his brothers and nephews, and so on. Of course, that wasn't to say that a sordan's hold on his crown couldn't be contested by a blood-related usurper (ideally one who can claim to be the rightful ruler, such as a grandson whose place in the succession was skipped in favor of his uncle) or an outside invader with enough swords at his back to mount a real challenge...

    Akesai cave fresco depicting advancing & armed Kikogani sordani or tribal kings, c. 10,490 AA

    A group of priests, the mardu-naghun or 'wise men', supported each sordan and his tribe. These mystics were drawn from two or three specially designated families said to have a connection to the gods, who were branded on the chest with the symbol of the sun upon assuming the special clerical cap & could divine the future from fires (or the ashes they left behind) in temples of stone, consecrate the kurgans of notable deceased Kikogani, and were also sufficiently skilled in herbalism & the healing arts (from setting broken bones, to irrigating wounds with boiling rice wine and binding them, to amputating gangrenous limbs) to function as the tribe's healers. The sordani relied on their judgment to determine whether the time was right to wage war or make peace, and lesser clansmen would go to these men & women to have their fortunes read in the flames - whether their marriage would be fruitful, would they meet good fortune in the next week, how bountiful or lean would the harvest be that autumn, and so on. Despite the masculine name given to their social class, the mardu-naghun included women, and were pretty much the only way women could garner any direct influence in the extremely patriarchial Kikogani society; if one or more of a tribe's sacral bloodlines had no qualified sons, their daughters could become mardu-naghun (or more accurately mardu-amaghan, 'wise women') in their stead.

    Clay statue of the head of a Kikogan mardu-nagh or 'wise man' wearing a traditional cap, c. 10,475 AA

    Kikogani warfare
    The Kikogani style of warfare, mirroring how their society was quite literally more settled than that of their cousins on the steppe, was a good deal more sedentary and infantry-focused than that of the Yamra. This suited them just fine, because they mostly fought in woods or mountains (terrain for which cavalry was ill-suited), and in any case they were no less bloodthirsty and aggressive than the other Hyperboreans tended to be. Kikogani kings and clan elders alike would often direct their men to fight at the drop of a hat, whether for resources, territory, familial grudges or simply for the hell of it. They were never short on enemies to keep their lives interesting, either: the native Akesai were of course their favorite punching bag, but the Kikogani tribes were also known to regularly raid and war with one another, the Suufulk to the north, and the ascendant K'Uta kingdoms on the other side of the Tipak Tidi mountains.

    In keeping with the general Hyperborean model, Kikogani armies were structured into three loose tiers: the levy, the professional warriors, and the elite royal or chiefly guard. The first of these tiers, called the hasibari or 'hastily assembled', was the typical tribal levy: a throng of conscripted tribesmen armed with whatever they could afford, pressed through a week of training at best, and then shoved out the gate to do battle. Traditionally, during a total war each family in a tribe was required to send at least one man into service when called upon by the tribal sordan, and the hasibari troops would then be organized along clan lines and led into combat by their respective pirogani; in times of peace, when called on 'just' to raid, the families that had to provide soldiers for the raiding party were chosen by lottery, although in both cases the sordani would never turn down additional volunteers. Unless their family happened to be filthy rich, these men would also have fought unarmored, the best they could hope for in terms of protection being as many layers of extra clothing as they could get their hands on and a wicker shield put together by their relatives. This uneven combination of ill-trained troops armed with skinning knives, cleavers, woodcutting axes, shepherds' staves, slings, javelins and hunting bows would, like other early Hyperborean levies, have possessed more enthusiasm than sense, driven by a desire to accumulate personal glory & loot and often lacking the discipline to do much more than rush the opposing mob with weapons held high.

    A drafted shepherd of the hasibari, c. 10,470 AA

    The armangani, or 'adventuring companies', filled in for the Hyperborean professional warrior class. Part brigand and part sellsword, these men were the closest most sordani had to lifetime warriors, and in times of war and peace alike they would be approached by sordani or pirogani to fight for their tribe or clan in exchange for a down payment (since the Kikogani didn't have coinage, this meant a pile of material goods, food and rice-wine) and a cut of any plunder they win. Being actual soldiers as opposed to a throng of rabble like the hasibari, the armangani often entered battle with an actual plan beyond 'charge blindly' in mind and armed with iron weapons: lances, bows, axes and more rarely, swords. Each armangani company would have been organized into designated divisions of infantry, foot archers, mounted lancers and horse-archers, with the mounted archers classically serving as outriders, foragers and marauders and the other divisions handling the brunt of the fighting. Armangani cavalry typically advanced as a loose screen of horse archers backed by packed formations of lancers and were also known to dismount when fighting in difficult terrain, though they preferred to stick to their horses when they could. As armor was a good deal more expensive and difficult to forge than weapons, typically it would only be the rahear (captain) and other officers of an armangani company that fought wearing iron helmets and scale or lamellar armor.

    Armangani mustering to counter a night raid - from left to right: dismounted horse archer, lancer, footman and foot archer, c. 10,500 AA

    The best a sordan had to call upon were not the armangani, however; that honor went to their royal guards, the Sherikani. Literally meaning 'companions', this was an elite circle of heroic champions trusted above all by the tribal sordan - his own sons, childhood friends, saviors from past battles, and the like - who were equipped, provisioned, trained and sheltered at his expense. Sherikani were universally attired as heavy horsemen, attired in iron helmets and a corselet, rerebraces & faulds of iron or leather lamellar worn over a padded caftan; riding atop the largest and strongest horses they or their master could buy; and armed to the teeth with a composite bow inherited from their ancestors' days on the steppe, a two-handed lance, and a longsword or mace, making them equally deadly in ranged combat, while charging and when engaging in melee. They carried no shields, trusting in their heavy armor to protect them instead, and can always be found at the side of their liege. Since the Kikogani code of honor demanded a king risk his life at the forefront of his subjects, similar to what their Yamra cousins thought, these men needed all the arms & armor they could get to stay alive and protect their charge.

    A Kikogani sherik charging with his lance, c. 10,500 AA

    Although honor demanded Kikogani kings sally forth to personally lead their army in meeting any threat to their domain, and those who preferred to hide behind the walls of their harshat ('fortress') could expect a coup for their apparent cowardice, that didn't stop them from building surprisingly formidable fortresses all the same. Sordani would have resided in harshati built from stone and as high up as possible, ideally on hilltops or even mountains, so that the defenders can see threats coming from miles around. And besides the central stone hall where the Sordan, his family and his most trusted sherikani slept & ate, the fort's outer walls and towers also sheltered gardens, kitchens, granaries, an armory & smithy, adobe huts for the other servants and a number of crude dugouts for unimportant guests and refugees to sleep in. When war was imminent and the men of the tribe were being mobilized into the hasibari, their women, children, elderly and invalids were to hide out at the harshat until the fighting died down. Depending on how much thought went into the construction of these ancient fortresses and where they were built, Kikogani harshati could prove to be virtually impregnable, especially to armies that had not yet developed siege weapons.

    Ruins of a Kikogani mountain harshat dating back to 10,477 AA

    The Melyans
    The Melyans, or 'braves' in their own tongue, are the southernmost of the Oriental Hyperborean peoples, who settled at the savanna and desert crossroads between Midija, the Great Sand Sea and the Ometic lands. This was a more temperate area than either the chilly, windswept steppe to the far north where the Yamra dwelt or the mountain valleys where the Kikogani had settled down, and the Melyans too were more temperate and less warlike (to an extent) than their cousins. They remained organized into nomadic tribes that wandered from one pastureland and watering hole to the next, to be sure, but their elders were more inclined to pursue diplomatic negotiations to resolve inter-clan and inter-tribal disputes rather than jumping straight to violence like the Yamra and Kikogani would, and while most tribes still engaged in seasonal raiding, the Melyans were also known to guarantee the safe passage of foreign merchants who paid the tolls they demanded and to even rent their warriors out as mercenary escorts to Midijan, Shamshi and Ometic traders.

    The Melyan tribes coexisted with or in the vicinity of the Kikogani, Suufulk, Suufulk-ized K'Uchi and K'Medi, Mun'umati and Ometic peoples. Almost needless to say, their relationships with these neighbors was often at least slightly tumultuous, punctuated by raids from both sides and wars over grazing grounds, water supplies or the control of trade routes. On other occasions, they formed alliances - even long-standing ones - and worked out agreements to share pasture & water to avert conflict. The Melyans also rarely bothered, or got organized enough, to attack fortified cities; they were all for going at easy pickings in the countryside, not walls of stone or wood and earth lined with prepared defenders.

    To their Kikogani neighbors, the Melyans were known as the sāxha-naghun, 'burned men', on account of having a complexion darker than the Hyperborean standard - the inevitable outcome of living on the sun-burned savanna between the Ometic lands and Midija, as well as mixing more extensively with the obviously dark-skinned Ometic peoples neighboring them than the Kikogani did with their own subjugated natives. On the other hand, the people of Omet referred to them as the furani yalebi, 'sun-burned', not for their complexion (which was still paler than that of the Ometic natives) but for their red and blond hair.

    Range of Melyan artifacts and estimated migratory routes by 10,500 AA

    Melyan language
    The language of the Melyans represented a merger of their ancestral Hyperborean tongue with that of their new Mun'umati neighbors.

    Modern speech Hyperborean Mun'umati Melyan
    Man, men Ghuz, ghuze Mat, umati Ghut, ghuti
    Woman, women Aghuz, aghuzay Nisa, ranisa Agita, agitari
    Sun Sûl Šamaš Šulat
    Iron Iwat Hibad Hiwa
    Camel N/A Yemel Yamal

    Melyan society
    The Melyans remained wholly nomadic, unlike the Kikogani (but quite like the Yamra). They organized themselves into pastoral tribes, which could be further broken down into clans and individual families as was the case with the other Oriental Hyperboreans, which lived off of their herds of cattle & camels and flocks of goats & sheep, riding from one grazing ground and watering hole to the next as the seasons changed, and never built any great cities or even oasis towns like the Mun'umati did.

    A felt tent of the sort that a Melyan family would've used c. 10,490 AA

    The typical Melyan clan was comprised of three to five families, each of which were comprised of up to three generations living in felt tents that would always be pitched next to one another whenever the clan/tribe they belonged to stopped moving. Each of these families were led by the oldest man among them, a tradition of seniority quite unlike the brutal inter-clan free-for-all that the Yamra practiced and the primogeniture of the Kikogani, and were as patriarchal as the family units of the Yamra or Kikogani: women and children were to be seen, not heard, and engaged in peaceful or 'unmanly' pursuits such as cooking, weaving & the healing arts while the men remained hunters, leaders and smiths. As the Melyans, like other Hyperboreans in this time period, had no coinage, they bartered goods around their campfires and bedecked themselves in as much jewelry and colorful clothing as they could afford to distinguish their status. It was said that one could instantly tell who the richest man in a clan or tribe was, because he'd be the one wearing the most colorful shirts.

    A male-only Melyan celebratory dance, c. 10,500 AA

    Traditional Melyan woman and girl's dress

    The family heads, in turn, would elect one of their own to lead the clan for life as a şuroc, or clan elder. The shedding of blood within one's own family or clan was considered to be highly undesirable and to be avoided where possible, again unlike the Yamra attitude to kinslaying for power, and the clan elder & family heads were expected to sit any feuding parties under their banner down and work out a compromise that - even if it fails to please any of the involved parties - at least keeps them from killing one another. Şuroci handled all matters relating to justice, rationing, trade and the arrangement of marriages within their own clans, and would have to sit down and have a chat with another clan's şuroc if one of theirs kills, maims, cheats or falls for a member of that other clan.

    Five to twenty clans made up a tribe, with some especially large tribes numbering in the high hundreds or low thousands, which was in turn led by an elected king called a şuf. The şuf was elected by and from the ranks of the şuroci, and like them, he was supposed to bring his subordinates together and build a consensus prior to acting - whether it was to direct the tribe in a certain direction as the seasons changed, to divide duties and grazing/watering rights, which town or caravan to raid and which to offer their services to as mercenaries, or to go to war with a rival tribe - rather than unilaterally make decisions like an autocrat. If a majority of the şuroci did not approve of the course in which he was taking their tribe, and especially if he only had his own clan to count on, the şuf was expected to resign; failure to do so all but guaranteed an outbreak of bloodshed. The şuf also carried a duty to preside over the tribe's treasury, built up from a flat 5% tax on the tribesmen's hides, meat and cheese due every 120 days, which would be used to sustain the tribe in lean times. A şuf who got caught selling or consuming his tribe's supplies without their consent could expect a coup or civil war in short order.

    Iron statuette of a Melyan şuf, dated to 10,433 AA

    The Melyan reliance on consensus-based governance meant that decisions were made more slowly than among the Yamra, but to their credit, it also meant that Melyan tribes were less likely to splinter. Şufi traditionally preferred to try and keep rebellious clans within their tribe's fold with the carrot of compromise and concession rather than the stick of brute force, which could spark off a tribal civil war if not applied carefully. For their part, the şuroci were supposed to bring not just their own concerns but those of the clansmen they represented to the şuf.

    Melyan religion
    The Heretical Melyan sect of Hyperborean pyromancy diverged so far from its traditional roots under the influence of Mun'umati monotheism that it can almost be considered a separate religion entirely, one of Martial soul but still bound by an Ancestral mentality like more traditional Oriental Hyperborean pyromantics. The Melyans didn't recognize the Sun as a deity, but as only one of the six emanations of their true god - a figure referred to as Da'waberê, the Dawn-Breaker. According to the Melyans, the sky, earth and waters were made from the aether by a featureless creator deity (usually depicted as a blank-faced humanoid being in grey robes seated upon a plain throne) called the Balantirîn, or One Above All, but It is a deistic god who did not care to further develop Its creation. It was the Dawn-Breaker, chief of the servitors of the One Above All, who set the sun and stars (including himself, as the Morning Star) in the sky to light the way of primordial humanity, and together with his like-minded cohorts taught these first men the secret of fire, metalworking, engineering and the arts. While Balantirîn is content to sit in Its own pocket dimension, observing but never interacting with mortal affairs, Da'waberê and his host of Lightbearers continue to actively involve themselves with humanity, allocating responsibilities, blessings and curses to men as they deserve from day to day.

    The symbol of Da'waberism: two rays shining from the morning star

    Da'waberê's followers revere his six visible incarnations - the Sun and five of the brightest stars in the sky - and his attributes: fire, naturally, but also war, self-improvement and constant purification through trial. A life of ease and idleness, like that which the One Above All lives, is an unworthy life in the eyes of the Dawn-Breaker. People should instead constantly strive to improve themselves, and just as one must expose iron to fire to temper it, there is no better way to do that than by confronting adversity head-on. Struggle is to be appreciated as both an inevitable facet of life and a means to improve oneself. Da'waberites consequently embrace war as a means of honing their skills on the field of battle and weeding out the weak among their ranks, though they will also respect other trials & feats of strength, such as hunting dangerous game or willfully exposing oneself to one's greatest fears (ex. an aquaphobe deciding to go for a swim in a mighty river).

    All this said, Da'waberites do hold themselves to a code of honor that does not deem the killing of unarmed civilians or surrendering opponents to be acceptable (the weak may be enslaved by the mighty, but there is no honor in smiting an already-defeated foe or one that can't fight back) and also demanded following through on oaths and promises no matter the cost, which was part of the reason they made fairly trustworthy guides, hosts and escorts for civilized merchants or explorers crossing their territory. Those who died in a glorious and honorable manner may have their soul placed in the skies as a new star, to burn bright for all eternity alongside Da'waberê himself; those who didn't, had their souls burned to nothing in his divine furnace as a punishment for their weakness and/or dishonorable conduct.

    The Da'waberites were led in their worship by a clergy of warrior-priests. Though they were called pyromancers like the priests of other Oriental Hyperborean sects, Da'waberite pyromancers didn't restrict themselves to trying to see the future in sacred flames or leading their flock in mystic rituals. They doubled as the smiths of their tribe and fought alongside the ordinary believers in battle, in so doing serving as the Melyans' equivalent to the professional warrior class found in other Hyperborean cultures. For their priestly garb, Melyan pyromancers wore simple scarlet hoods and cloaks over padded armor and carried weapons which they made with their own hands & carried at all times, and their sermons were frequently exhortations for their followers to push themselves to their limits in order to honor the Dawn-Breaker. When a sacrifice had to be made to appease Da'waberê, the pyromancer would lead as many volunteers as he could scrounge up on a hunt, then ritually cook whatever game they brought down by sunset over a cast-iron brazier and consecrate the offerings in Da'waberê's name before he and the gathered faithful dug in, hoping that their deeds had sufficiently impressed the Dawn-Breaker into infusing the sacralized feast with his blessings.

    An ornate Da'waberite brazier in use

    Melyan warfare
    Melyan warfare resembled that of the Yamra more than the nearby Kikogani, being centered on aggressive skirmishing and cavalry maneuvers to quickly dominate the battlefield rather than fighting defensively or trying to wear the foe down in an infantry-heavy slog. Most Melyans would have had to learn to ride a horse just to survive, perhaps even before learning to walk. Where they differed from the Melyans was in their usage of camelry: both the Melyans who lived in the Great Sand Sea and those on the southern savanna rode different types of camels, both for transportation and for combat, where they frequently proved useful against opposing cavalry - horses were frightened by the scent of their camels.

    Every able-bodied man with a steed was expected to serve in their chief's warband when called upon. This tribal levy was called the 'pāşarê' or literally 'expendables', and was essentially the Melyan answer to the Yamra huat: sometimes every man in the tribe was called up to fight a major war, and at other times a smaller number of men were picked (either by lottery, or the arbitrary choice of the şuroc or şuf) to form a raiding party. Either way, the men of the pāşarê usually fought as skirmishers on horse- or camel-back. They were required to arm and attire themselves, and so at best would have worn padded clothing for protection and carried whatever weapons they could afford or make at home: javelins, slings, arrows, woodcutting axes, pickaxes and the like. Pāşarê tactics usually amounted to trying to sting the foe with their missile weapons while maintaining a safe distance and remaining mobile so as to have a greater chance of avoiding retaliation, and thus (on account of their lack of training, discipline and armor), probable death.

    Pāşarê of the Great Sand Sea Melyans, c. 10,460 AA

    Among the Melyans, the place of the traditional Hyperborean class of professional warriors was uniquely taken by the clergy of Da'waberê. The pyromancers of the Dawn-Breaker made their own weapons and were known to carry them them or keep them close by at all times, even while sleeping, bathing or giving sermons. They rigorously trained against one another and any tribesman brave enough to spar with them to remain in excellent physical condition, and fought as surprisingly disciplined - and unsurprisingly zealous - medium cavalry wearing their priestly robes over layers of padded clothing, their preferred tactic being to ride up to the enemy in organized lines, throw a few weighted javelins, and pull back until they find (or have cut open) a sufficient opening to suddenly turn around and charge home with maces and backswords in hand.

    Melyan pyromancers with javelins and axes, c. 10,500 AA

    The mightiest of Melyan warriors were the chakê (singl. chak) or 'companions', their answer to the elite retainers and bodyguards of other Hyperborean peoples. Chosen as much for their tall stature and fighting prowess as their demonstrated loyalty to the şuf, the chakê frequently (but not always) came from high-status clans or a şuf's own kin and ate, trained and even slept alongside their master. They were armed and armored at his expense and expected to not only fight by his side, but also take lethal blows for him. As the şuf's finest, a chak would wear heavier armor than the rest of the tribal army - typically leathers mixed with iron scales and iron helmets decorated with gilded motifs & colorful crests - and rode the tallest, strongest horses his master could provide into combat as lancers, carrying a long but brittle two-handed lance in the Yamra style that was intended to break off in the bellies of its victims and an ax or curved sword coupled with a wicker shield for the close combat that followed the charge.

    Chakê charging into battle, c. 10,475 AA

    Discordant peace: Early Iron Age Akesai and the rise of the Shenpoist order
    The coming of the Suufulk and Oriental Hyperboreans completely upended the traditional lifestyle and pacifist beliefs of the Bronze Age Akesai. Violent disputes and raids were known to them, of course, but rare and often averted by the soothing words of their elders; as a people, they could not have been less prepared for the arrival of these foreign invaders, who neither spoke nor cared to understand their language and were hellbent on conquest & enslavement. The Akesai living in the western Tipak Tidi were mostly subjugated or exterminated in astonishingly short order without putting up much of a fight, the only free survivors being the ones who had the foresight and luck to flee to the eastern half of the mountain range. While the Suufulk migrated into Midija through the mountain passes, the Kikogani were determined to push further east, continuously devastating Akesai villages, uprooting refugees who thought they were safe and routing whatever club-and-bow-armed rabble dared oppose them head-on with their iron weapons and horses as they went. Against such ferocity, the elders and monks of the Akesai were forced to find ways to deal with this rude awakening to the outside world and organize proper resistance to the invaders, even if it meant killing in large numbers.

    A Kikogani warlord and his sherikani trample the snows of the Tipak Tidi, c. 10,205 AA

    The result was the ascendancy of a Brjid Yangdrung sect called the Shenpo Khag S'oi, or 'School of Overwhelming Harmony', around 10,212 AA. A Heretical sect of Clerical soul and a Bastion-of-the-Faith mentality, Shenpo Khag S'oi was founded by a man called the 'Ever-Harmonious One' or Tsang-Shen-Dab, said to have been a once-peaceful monk who killed for the first time when he caught a straggler from the raiding party that had destroyed the village which supported him. Tsang-Shen-Dab taught that while violence remained deplorable and should be avoided where possible, peace should not be sought at all costs, and it is acceptable to fight back or even kill in self-defense and the defense of others. In the first demonstration of the power of his teachings, he led an Akesai militia to victory over invading Suufulk and Kikogani armies in the semi-legendary Battle of Ba Pass, ambushing the invaders while they were busy fighting one another and letting the enemy warlords retreat only after burying most of their warriors beneath a landslide and breaking all of their limbs with his fists, feet & iron-tipped quarterstaff.

    The 'whole wheel', standard of the Shenpoist Order

    Outside of the Tipak Tidi, Tsang-Shen-Dab is best remembered for founding the Akesai martial art of S'ai-jo, a highly acrobatic style that stressed the use of fluid, lightning-fast strikes to subdue opponents (non-lethally or otherwise) while also remaining balanced & on one's feet at all times, and which incorporated the usage of quarterstaves for two reasons: firstly, it was thought to spill less blood than bladed weapons, and secondly, its reach and bluntness made it more effective against the iron armor of the Kikogani than daggers and swords. When he died by becoming a sangha at the age of 88, having defended his growing monastic complex atop Mt. Ba from all adversaries for 40 years, it was said he had amassed 100,000 disciples (believed by most historians to be a gross exaggeration, but one that hints at the sheer scale of the Akesai abandonment of pure pacifism), and his oldest students - who had become S'ai-jo masters and teachers in their own right - came to believe that if the Akesai were to survive these harsh times, they had to unite all of their people beneath their departed master's banner and teachings.

    Modern depiction of a S'ai-jo master, or even Tsang-Shen-Dab himself, wielding a quarterstaff, c. 10,230 AA

    The practitioners of S'ai-jo accordingly went out of their monastery complex on Mt. Ba, determined to weld the Akesai into one nation. By 10,385 AA, they seem to have mostly succeeded, for a good chunk of the eastern Tipak Tidi mountains all answered to the commands of the Sagra Sanghi Pon or 'Living Sagely Master' - the title of the order's leader, said to be the reincarnation of Tsang-Shen-Dab (on account of being born in the exact moment of his previous vessel's death), who was raised from infancy/whenever he or she was found by the Shenpoists to command them and who was consequently venerated as almost a living god. The Sagra Sanghi Pons would go on to lead this first united Akesai nation in defense of their remaining lands, with an eye on eventually counterattacking into the western Tipak Tidi, while other Akesai tribes lived to their east in blissful harmony, sheltered from the ravages of the Iron Age by the Shenpoist order's vigilance.

    Map of the Shenpoist Order's territories relative to the Kikogani (orange lines: frequently contested peaks & valleys, red dot: Mt. Ba)

    Organization of the Shenpoist Order
    The territories where the Shenpo Khag S'oi exerted both temporal and spiritual dominance were commonly represented as the 'Shenpoist Order' on maps, but as far as the Shenpoists were concerned (at least early on), they were not rulers in the traditional sense - merely stewards of the Tipak Tidi and the protectors of those native Akesai who lived in its shadow, who may at times have to 'gently' 'persuade' their traditional leaders (the clan leaders) to see things their way for the greater good of the Akesai. The Sagra Sanghi Pon or 'Living Sagely Master', head of the Shenpo Khag S'oi, never claimed kingly dignity and was theoretically overlord of nothing & nobody but the students, practitioners and monastic complexes of the school, and Akesai who were not formally part of the order lived pretty much the same way they had before the arrival of the northern invaders and the ensuing rise of Shenpoism; in return for the protection provided by the order, all that was expected of the clans enjoying said protection was to pay a small seasonal tribute to keep the Shenpoist forces fed. In the first century or so of their existence, the Shenpoists even tolerated other schools of Brjid Yangdrung on their territories, so long as they did not try to proselytize to initiated members of the Shenpo Khag S'oi or attack sites under Shenpoist protection.

    Artist's impression of the Shenpoist fortress-monastery on Mt. Ba, capital of their order, c. 10,500 AA

    Things began to change with the ascendancy of Nanam Nang, the 10th Sagra Sanghi Pon, around 10,410 AA. A more ambitious and ruthless man than his predecessors, Nanam Nang felt that the sacrifices his order was making to guarantee the safety of those beneath them were not being properly appreciated - a sentiment shared by many in the Order - and he also felt that the caste system he had witnessed in his travels to Midija as a youth would instill order and obedience within the 'backwards' but more egalitarian Akesai society. After turning back the simultaneous attacks of a Kikogani sordan from the west and a K'Uta king from the south only to be repaid with a smaller tribute than he had expected, he easily turned his fanatical army on the very people he was supposed to be protecting, forcing scores of clan elders to resign from their positions and dispatching trusted disciples of his to rule over the Akesai villages as his 'stewards' or phyags. Each phyag had a troop of Shenpoist warrior-monks (often that village's own volunteers, now long since trained to follow the order's leaders and commands unquestioningly) on hand to enforce his will, which meant collecting taxes in the form of a share of the clan's crops and animal products; conscripting laborers for the order's larger-scale projects; punishing lawbreakers, usually with imprisonment or a public caning; and hunting down rebels. Since not even the Shenpo Khag S'oi endorsed the death penalty, those who were caught trying to undermine the order's new, much more draconian rule were either enslaved or blinded and had one hand and one foot amputated rather than being executed outright. Practitioners of non-Shenpoist schools of Brjid Yangdrung were also increasingly persecuted.

    To keep at least some of the people on their side, and as part of a greater project to introduce a Midijan-like caste system, Nanam Nang ordered his phyags to differentiate between the clansmen who immediately supported their entry and those who were ambivalent or showed signs of dissent. Fawning sycophants in the village they were tasked with ruling were to be elevated to the status of 'householder' (de facto landlord), or mupang: they were issued a wax seal denoting their hereditary ownership of their own home and some of the land in & around the village, and all the other villagers living on that newly granted land were to become their tenants. Mupangs were expected to meet tax quotas of rice, barley, buckwheat, milk, cheese and meat, to identify troublemakers so the phyag could keep an eye on/preemptively arrest them, and to assist the phyag in picking out the strongest and healthiest of their laborers for conscription whenever the order wanted to build a new fort or monastery. Everyone else in the village was reduced to, essentially, serf status. Former clan elders could very well find themselves working the fields with the people who once deferred to them while another of their former subjects exhorted them to work faster with a rattan cane in hand.

    A mupang's traditional dress, c. 10,500 AA

    This was the new social order enforced by the corrupted Shenpoists by 10,500 AA: a harsh theocracy in which they reigned supreme from stone fortress-monasteries in the mountains, overlooking masses of serfs with the assistance of landlords they'd raised up in centuries past for demonstrating sycophantic loyalty. Local phyags, so called 'Red Hoods' by the serfs they lorded over for the color of their robes, had effectively supplanted the role of clan leader and more often than not ruled their little fiefdoms with an iron fist, answerable only to the Sagra Sanghi Pon and their nearest overseer or Laspon: the 'Blue Hoods' who were in charge of supervising up to half a dozen villages & phyags at a time, and ensuring they all met their production/corvée quotas and taxes on schedule. The Shenpoists effectively combined the role of the priestly, bureaucratic and martial castes of Midijan society in themselves, left the mupangs in the role of the peasant and artisan castes, and reduced the rest of their population to an equivalent of the caste of lessers - the only difference between a common Akesai serf and a slave was that the latter could be straight up killed with no consequences. To further entrench their position and make it harder for the new underclass to unseat them, the Sagra Sanghi Pon also mandated that only Shenpoist monks could bear weapons; anyone else caught with an iron-tipped staff, sword, war bow or any other weapon of war was fined and flogged on their first and second offense, and had a hand & foot removed on the third.

    Ü-Lüng, a smaller Shenpoist fortress-monastery where a phyag lived overlooking his subjects

    Akesai warfare under the Shenpoist Order
    Where the Shenpoist Order ruled, they were not only the government and law enforcement, but also the military. Nobody outside of the order was permitted to bear weapons, much less practice with them. For their own part, the Shenpoists once only took volunteers, but from the times of Nanam Nang onward they began to conscript children into their ranks (ostensibly to shore up their numbers in the face of continued Kikogani and Suufulk/K'Uta aggression), to be trained into skillful and unquestioningly obedient warriors. Under the terms of their infamous 'child tax', all orphans and runaways were declared to belong to the order by default, and in times of need the local phyags also reserved the right to draft one child between the ages of 4 and 14 from every family under their dominion into their order.

    Shenpoist monks were shaped into killing machines through a lifetime of constant meditation and training. Their S'ai-jo training comprised of being instructed to meditate to remain calm and unemotional, to clear their minds of any thoughts except for the purpose of serving others by defending them and in unarmed martial arts, the usage of weapons (typically iron-headed quarterstaves, bows and post-Nanam Nang, glaives, with the front-rank warriors often also bearing tall wicker shields) and an assortment of general techniques to maintain fighting condition: breathing exercises, balancing (to the extreme of carrying filled water jugs while walking across a narrow stone fence or balance beam) and endurance-building through squats, jogging, cliffside marathon runs in padded clothing and swimming in lakes and rivers. The ideal result was an acrobatic and unflappable warrior with lightning-fast reflexes who could never be swept off his feet; keep infantry and cavalry alike at bay with a quarterstaff or glaive; strike hard enough to bruise and break bones through armor; outshoot the average Kikogani archer; defeat adversaries even when armed with only their fists and feet; and obeyed orders without a moment of hesitation, no matter how cruel or nonsensical they may seem. As most Shenpoist monks fought unarmored save for their padded clothing, they were essentially an army of extremely versatile and deadly light infantry, at least in theory.

    Shenpoist warrior monk wielding an iron-tipped quarterstaff, c. 10,500 AA

    The wisest and mightiest of Shenpoist warrior-monks were those who had attained the rank of Master, or Pon. They were the field commanders of the order, commanding armies in the thousands, and noticeably the only armored fighters in a Shenpoist army alongside their personal guards, the 'Byas or 'Select' whom they handpicked from the lower ranks for demonstrating great courage, loyalty and strength at arms. Unlike the Hyperboreans, the Pons of the Shenpo Khag S'oi did not usually fight in the front-line of their armies, instead holding themselves and their retainers back in reserve and directing the flow of battle from the safety of the rear lines; only when they were needed would these elite fighters finally cut loose and engage the foe. Garbed in bronze or iron helmets and nearly ankle-length lamellar coats, and armed with more exotic iron weaponry such as long-hafted maces, three-part staves, meteor hammers and longbows, they were a bizarre and imposing sight to their adversaries.

    Heavily armored Shenpoist Pon with long-hafted mace, c. 10,500 AA

    The Shenpoists virtually never fought mounted, as most of their battles were waged in forbidding mountains or forested valleys where cavalry was not particularly useful (and could easily be menaced by the wolf-dogs of the Kikogani). Yaks and donkeys were used for the transportation of supplies and higher-ranked warriors from fortress to fortress or battlefield to battlefield, but little else, and the few horses their order was known to possess were first and foremost status symbols of the most prestigious monks.

    The hierarchy of the Shenpo Khag S'oi went as follows:
    • Sagra Sanghi Pon: 'Living Sagely Master', supreme leader of the order and reincarnation of Tsang-Shen-Dab. Distinguished by their golden conical hood and cloak over black and white robes.
    • Sagra Pon: 'Living Master', one of the order's sixteen high elders who advised the Sagra Sanghi Pon in military, administrative and diplomatic matters and rarely fought on the front-lines themselves. They uniformly wore black and gold robes with a dark blue sash.
    • Pon: 'Master', the field generals of the order. They wore black robes with a crimson sash outside of battle. Their civil counterpart, the Laspon, wore white robes with a dark blue sash.
    • I-Pon: 'Lesser Master', commanders of formations of up to 500 Shenpoists and a single fortress-monastery. They wore black and white robes with a bright red sash outside of battle. Equivalent in rank to the Phyag, lower-ranking civil administrators.
    • Yong: 'Warden', the average fully-trained members of the order. The uniform color of their robes were dictated by the local I-Pon. Older and more experienced yongs who have not yet attained a higher rank are awarded white or red sashes and brevetted the rank of 'Gya-Yong' and 'Saru-Pon', respectively 'Great Warden' and 'Almost Master', respectively elevating them to command of units of ten and 100 Shenpoists.
    • Sarba: 'Novice', those who have been initiated into the order and are of age to start fighting but have not yet completed their training. They wore white robes with a yellow (saffron-dyed) cloth belt and sash.
    • Dhug: 'Initiate', those who have been initiated into the order but are still too young (below the age of 8) to begin learning how to fight. They wore simple white robes.

    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; May 05, 2018 at 03:40 PM.

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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    As part of a reorganization drive and to reduce clutter here, we've begun moving our creations into separate threads in the Diplo subforum. Should make our assorted creations much easier to read through & post new entries for.

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    Dan the Man's Avatar S A M U R A I F O O L
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    So I got bored and maybe a little stir-crazy tonight after spending most of this weekend working on various final papers and presentations and decided to write a short myth or fable. The setting is implied to be "Tawaric", but it could really (and should really) take place anywhere. There's a couple familiar archetypes purposefully written in here. See if you can collect them all! Not sure this was the right place to post it, but here goes!

    Axe-King, the Serpent, and the Sea
    Published in the Journal of Historical Folklore, Vol. 23, Issue 7.

    Foreword by John Smith, Ph.D.

    Dr. John Smith is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Somestate in Collegetown, Someland. During his almost forty-year tenure at the University, he taught classes especially dealing with folklore and the oral transmission of knowledge across time, with his own research particularly involving illiterate cultures of the past and present.

    It is the tendency of literature from an oral tradition to distill its favored stories down to only their most important aspects. As the story was passed down - often from elders to children - extraneous details were lost, and we are today left with only the most significant aspects of the plot. Ancient stories, in that regard, can often be familiar - not simply because they are often what we grew up with - but also because they rely on a handful of familiar stock-characters, story arcs, moral lessons, and so on. For that reason they are especially pregnant with meaning that generally resonates across the human experience and through time.

    The tale you are about to read is older than anything you have ever read before. Spread for centuries in an oral tradition originating somewhere in the high mountains of Western Muataria, that ancient haven of primitive man. However, we were blessed within my lifetime to discover evidence of this story in a form other than the written and spoken word: In the most ancient days, those mountains were not the chilled and inhospitable environment we know them to be today, but rather, a temperate forest absolutely teeming with life; human life, as it were. And when I was still a young Ph.D. student, a cave was discovered on the northern slopes of the mountains, where the primeval forest once grew. In that cave a team of archaeologists investigating something else entirely accidentally stumbled upon what I would say is the most significant discovery in the history of this field of study: The most complete, beautiful, and complex collection of Paleolithic cave art ever found. The archaeologists discovered immediately that they were in over their heads.

    My doctoral advisor, the brilliant Professor Jane Doe, was called to the scene, and generously took me along. I was writing my thesis on Tawarë storytelling practices at the time. We spend three weeks documenting everything - in photographs, in written descriptions - I foolishly attempted a charcoal rub of the stones the paintings had been made on before Professor Doe stopped me, for fear of wearing away the original art. Satisfied with our findings, we returned home to begin the interpretation stage.

    What we discovered astonishes me to this day. It became apparent the longer we stared at our photographs that there was a thread of some kind binding everything together: Animals of all kinds - some familiar, some extinct - men and women, and a single strange creature which seemed to appear over and over again. We concluded, after untold hours of mystified bemusement, that we were "reading" a story. A story "written" by somebody who did not share our sense of traditional, linear plotlines, or our sense of the way time worked at all (primitive peoples have always had their own ways of expressing these things). The story instead exploded outward from its rocky canvas, with the reader left to make sense of it all themselves. The artist had clearly created something for an audience that he assumed would already know what he was talking about.

    That story, we concluded, was the earliest existing account of the story of Axe-King, the Serpent, and the Sea. The central characters seemed to be the same - an axe-wielding man; a woman, who appeared to be his queen; a wise old sage; the wicked serpent plaguing Axe-King's people; and the azure blue sea. Only a few unfamiliar characters could be seen. Some of the settings are different. The written version of the story we have dates back to the early bronze age and so takes place in an agricultural village, while the original surely would have been created by a nomadic society. But the rest of the hallmarks are all there. Professor Doe published a paper describing our findings the next year, which shook the very foundations of modern anthropology forever. I take a bit of self-indulgent pride in saying that the paper remains required reading for every college freshman attempting a degree in anthropology.

    As you read this story, you will find aspects of it to be familiar: Maybe the characters remind you of heroes from another historical epic; maybe the moral lessons remind you of a fable told to you by your grandfather as a child; maybe the serpent reminds you of an evil creature or monster from a horror film. All of the above is true, because you are reading the oldest known example of human literature on the planet. It is our story, it is your grandfather's story, and it will be your children's story. Happy reading!

    -Professor John Smith, Ph.D., University of Somestate

    Long ago at the feet of the great mountains there was a village. The people there lived simply, growing their corn and raising their animals to feed themselves and their families. The men were brave there and strong, but they were not warriors. The people did not concern themselves at all for war, for they lived in peace with their neighbors, thanks to the abundance which the gods had granted them.

    In those days the people were ruled by a man they called Axe-King. He ruled in peace but he was a shrewd man and cunning, the way a king ought to be. Axe-King knew that the same nature which gave such abundance could also take it in an instant, and that the welcoming faces of men could conceal secret greed. So it was that he came to be called Axe-King, for he bore with him at all times a royal axe and kept it always sharp and at the ready. The villagers, having lived in peace for generations, did not understand why he kept the old weapon, and questioned him. Seeing that his people had not known war for so long and feeling reassured, Axe-King saw that it was time to abandon his famous weapon. He buried it beneath the flagstones of his home.

    But lo the day came when the king and all of his people would regret his choice, and it was in a terrible way. For in the dead of the night a great beast, with the head of a serpent, the body of a lion, the feet of a sea eagle, the wings of a raven, and the horns of a ram came down from the mountain and stole Axe-King's queen from him. There it retreated to the sacred grove where the people worshiped the gods, and defiled it greatly, curling itself about the trunk of the largest tree and gnawing upon its roots. And there was great woe and uproar among the people, who tore their clothes in mourning for their queen, and wailed and begged the gods for deliverance with screaming prayers.

    Axe-King consulted with the wise man of the village, who told him to take with him his retinue and go north to the everlasting sea, for in those days men did not yet know that there were ways to traverse even these great waters. There he would find the strength he would need to slay the serpent and save his queen.

    So Axe-King and his followers went out to the sea, and standing on its shore they waited for the wisdom which the old man had promised. There they camped for three days and two nights. On the third night, Axe-King stayed awake for many hours, calling on the gods to show him the wisdom and strength to defeat the serpent. Not long before the dawn, Axe-King watched an old man walk to the shore. At first he thought it was the wise man from the village, but it became clear as he came closer that this was a different man entirely.

    The man did not stop walking when the foam of the wine-dark sea began to lap at his toes. He kept walking until the water reached his ankles, then his knees, then his waist, and finally his chest, but even then he did not stop. He kept walking until it seemed that he would surely drown. Axe-King, seeing the danger, plunged into the icy depths of the sea himself to save the man.

    Emerging after a long moment beneath the waves, Axe-King dragged the old man to the shore, who looked up into his face with glee and shouted "praise be to the gods, who have delivered me from my certain peril!"

    "Old man," spoke Axe-King with anger. "It was I who delivered you from this certain peril. And you walked your way into the sea yourself! Vex not the gods with your foolish words!"

    The old man laughed. "It is the way of man to set such traps for himself, when he is so involved in the present that he forgets what has been and what will come, and when he forgets who he is! For you see master, I had thought in that moment that I were a fish, and that the calm sea would welcome me with its open arms. But lo just before I felt your hands upon me I remembered that a fish I was not, and that it is the place of man to remain vigilant upon the shore! And so fare thee well master, for I return now to my family and my hearth."

    And with that the old man was gone, but with the creeping rays of the red dawn rising in the east, Axe-King was suddenly blinded by a great light. For in the sky he was shown a great vision of the gods; his people, all of his forefathers and great kings of the past arrayed before him. They spoke:

    "You have seen what happens to the man who forgets who he is. Go now, take up your old axe, and save our people!"

    Axe-king and his followers immediately left that place and returned to the village. In their absence the serpent had made an even worse desolation of the place: The crops withered, the sky was black, and the people were in great fear. But the king flashed across the village like a bolt of lightning, and he and his men together tore up the very flagstones of his house to retrieve his royal weapon.

    And so Axe-King took up his namesake and went with courage and the favor of the gods to conquer his enemy the serpent. He tore the beast from about the great tree with all of his might, and smote its head with his divine axe. When he had killed the beast its black blood spilled onto the holy ground, but rain began to fall from the sky and washed it all away. The rain gave life to the plants and to the animals and to the people once again. The queen, slipping loose from her bonds, went with Axe-King back to the village. There she bore him many strong sons and beautiful daughters, and Axe-King reigned there for a thousand years more.
    Last edited by Dan the Man; July 08, 2018 at 05:46 AM.
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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Looks great Dan. Lots of archetypes to be sure, but to paraphrase TVTropes, archetypes are not bad Feels very much like a primordial heroic tale on whose basic elements other, later civilizations' own stories can be based on. Have some well-deserved rep.

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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Yep, that was exactly the intention actually! I'm glad you liked it.
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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    So on the Discord, there's been a lot of positivity for the idea of cranking this setting up from low fantasy to high fantasy for a couple months now. To that end, I have proposed (first on the Discord, now here to make it official) the following basic metaphysical framework for our universe, its supernatural entities & magic, the latter two of which I'll get around to elaborating at some point in the future if folks are cool with this proposal.

    Where it all begins
    In the beginning, there were only two beings of equal power and opposite natures drifting aimlessly in the hollow void of the ‘great before’: the Great Creator and the Great Destroyer.

    Both resolved, in this emptiness where not even time existed, to amend the hollowness of existence. But to achieve this, they would have to work together, in spite of their diametrically opposed beliefs and hopes for the future.

    From his own body the Great Creator tore free the Sphere of Prime: thus was the atom, the particle, plasma and gases, joules and watts, the laws of physics, the zeroth and first laws of thermodynamics and more – the very basic building blocks of everything that exists – introduced into the universe. By the Creator’s will did atom impact atom, setting off the first nuclear explosions, and bound within their own heat and drifting plasma clouds they became the first stars.

    Creator and Destroyer alike worked to bring the Sphere of Spirits about next. The former breathed life into myriad visible and invisible beings whose forms had sprung from his thoughts, beings that took a googol forms and had a googol functions and were bound by only one common thread: they ignored many of the laws governing the physical universe that the Creator had made as part of the Sphere of Prime.

    Meanwhile, the Destroyer dictated that though the spirits were not physical beings and thus immune to physical harm, they could still be harmed by extraphysical means – ie. By other spirits, and of course himself and the Creator – so that they would not be beyond destruction themselves.

    Next the Creator brought from his flesh the Sphere of Matter. It is to this Sphere that all material things belong: flesh, blood and bone, both in the image of the Creator’s own and in countless other forms, as well as earth, stone, every type of mineral, water, and ultimately anything and everything that can be perceived by the untrained mortal eye and touched by mortal hands and feet.

    The Destroyer, for his part, continued to work within the framework of physical laws created by the Creator to dictate how every speck of matter might meet its end: certain amounts of force would surely tear even the toughest tendon asunder, break the strongest rock, burn down the mightiest tree and part the fiercest wave.

    Next came the Sphere of Forces – the elements, Prime energies made manifest in the mortal realm in milder patterns that would not shatter reality. Gases became the air that mortal creatures breathed and this air in turn could flow in the form of winds, excess heat manifested as flame, the waters took shape, and so on. The laws of the material universe were further refined to govern the ways in which each Force interacted with all the rest – water could put out fire but a hot enough flame could boil water into steam, strong winds combined with water could generate rain and hail alike, etcetera.

    As the Forces were all necessary to sustain life, and yet could end life easily in their own ways, this Sphere was the first true joint creation of both Creator and Destroyer, as opposed to something made by the Creator that the Destroyer then added onto.

    To bind the Spheres together, the Creator formed the Sphere of Affinity from his heart. This Sphere governed the physical and metaphysical links that connected every zeptogram of Prime, Spirits, Matter and Forces: the human body is a prime example – atoms (Prime) comprised flesh, blood, organs and bone (Matter), imbued with a soul (Spirit) and ultimately subject to the laws of nature so that, for example, a human who sticks his hand into an open flame will inevitably be burnt, while one who wades into open water can float and swim (Forces).

    As creation started to really come together with this Sphere, many of the countless formless spirits that had been spawned with the eponymous second Sphere were directed into material bodies. Being emotional and moral blank slates whose first bodies were those of single-celled bacteria, these souls had to develop their own instincts, survival methods, mindsets and eventually entire personalities over billions of years to match their physical evolution, largely independent of the guidance of their Creator – after all, sentient life has only existed for hundreds of millions of years, a fraction of the universe’s own lifespan.

    As the living beings of the world, even at their most base in the form of prokaryotes, could reproduce, the Creator made it a law of the Sphere of Spirits that a new spirit would automatically be generated and sent to inhabit every newly conceived lifeform, giving it the capacity to survive, learn and grow: whether it be an amoeba that split from its ‘parent’, to an acorn that has fallen from an oak’s branch into the soil, to the fertilized roe of fish, and finally to the zygotes of birds and egg-laying beasts in their shells as well as those of viviparous beasts and humans/humanoids in their wombs.

    This marked the first occasion of disagreement between Creator and Destroyer. The former could not bear the thought of his creations entering their universe without a spirit to give them aspirations and personalities beyond simply consuming and reproducing, while the latter believed that if left unchecked this would mean that life could perpetually expand without stopping, constantly devouring resources to sustain itself until it destroyed all of everything else they had created, at which point it’d promptly die. The Destroyer frankly told the Creator that he felt this was an overstep of the other god’s authority, and requested permission to form his own Spheres so as to prevent mortal life from consuming all, to which the Creator reluctantly assented.

    The first Sphere made entirely by the Destroyer was that of Time, which sprang from his thoughts as Prime did from the Creator’s. All things were given a beginning, a middle and an end: no longer could something, anything, go on perpetually, save the Creator and Destroyer themselves. Thus, Time was made into a universal construct on the same level as the laws of physics and thermodynamics from the Sphere of Prime.

    Finally, rounding out the Spheres came that of Entropy. This Sphere was destruction manifest, and the Destroyer who forged it from his heart bound it to the thermodynamic laws of Prime to seal its inevitability for everything that isn’t already a spirit – as surely as rock erodes, trees wither, and stars burn out or explode, all who live would eventually die, from the lowest amoeba to the mightiest of men. Even bacteria that could live in the same sea-floor steam vent for millennia would eventually perish.

    To the irritation of the Creator though, Entropy was made to be final; those who died, stayed dead. What was the problem, the Destroyer argued, if life could create life? A dead ant leaves behind thousands of eggs to succeed it, after all. There – now the cycle of life and death, creation and destruction, the old being cleared out to make way for new growth without holding it back, was complete from beginning to end.

    But the Creator could not bear the thought that even the noblest soul, having lived a long and fulfilling life where it experienced myriad loves and friendships and improved the lives of those it came into contact with, would nevertheless be reduced to nothing upon death. By his will, and over the explicit objections of the Destroyer, it was decreed that the souls inhabiting dead bodies would not die with their hosts, but instead be called to dwell in the paradisiacal dimension he created around himself.

    To say the Destroyer was upset would be as great an understatement as describing a supernova as ‘somewhat bright’ – giving the living a way to escape destruction defeated the purpose of having a Sphere of Entropy in the first place, as far as he was concerned. The two supreme deities had disagreed over the previous Spheres, but they had always managed to talk each other into a compromise before. To the Creator, the idea that all things should come to an end with no hope of renewal, of reward for virtue and redemption for ill deeds was abhorrent beyond words. To the Destroyer, a universe where one could elude destruction for all eternity and instead continue to grow like an all-consuming cancer was utterly repulsive.

    This moment saw no compromise that either side was willing to accept, and so it was where their partnership broke down entirely. The Destroyer insisted that he would sooner destroy all of creation than to allow the Creator to derive any joy from it; the Creator proclaimed that he would fight to his own death to protect his creations from the Destroyer’s wrath. The gods traded blow upon blow, and their contest was most dreadful indeed: stars were extinguished, planets broken asunder like rotten wood, entire galaxies consumed as the two Lords of the universe sought to draw on their power to strike at one another.

    Worse still, the spirits that had yet to be bound to physical lifeforms began to take sides. Some were drawn to the brilliant white light of the Creator, and through the Sphere of Affinity linked themselves to him, swearing to defend his creations with all their strength. They were opposed by those who found themselves drawn instead into the void of the Destroyer, a darkness so deep and impenetrable that it actively sucked in the Creator’s light, and his equally dark promise of salvation through a return to oblivion. These spirits fought one another amidst the stars, asteroids and space dust across myriad galaxies, while those of their kind who had not aligned themselves with either deity cowered wherever they could.

    In the end though, neither the Great Creator nor the Great Destroyer were able to decisively defeat one another. No matter what the Creator threw at his foe, the Destroyer would always find a way to destroy and overcome it; and likewise, no matter how much the Destroyer devastated, the Creator always rebuilt anew and struck back just as hard or even harder. Still, they wouldn’t stop, and their murderous dance continued for what must have felt like days to them – hundreds of millions of years to everything else.

    Towards the end of their open struggle, the Creator just barely began to marginally gain the upper hand over the Destroyer, wounding him severely enough that – though far from destroyed – the latter did have to withdraw into his home, an utterly lifeless and hollow void in some remote corner of the universe they had built together, to recover. Realizing it was impossible to break through the Destroyer’s defenses and put down his former partner without drawing on the life-force of all of his own creations, snuffing them out in the process, the Creator resolved to simply seal him up there and work on creating some other weapon that could permanently destroy the Destroyer without also taking the rest of the universe with him.

    Alas, those seals worked for about an hour, or a million years in mortal reckoning. While still hurting, the Destroyer had recovered sufficiently to restart his war with the Creator. He dared not face his adversary in open combat, at least not until he had fully healed from their last bout (which would surely take many more ‘months’), but having deduced that the Creator didn’t finish him off when he had the chance out of love for his creations, he directed those spirits which had followed him to make war on creation and corrupt or destroy as much of it as they could, betting that the Creator wouldn’t react in person for fear of reigniting open war and finding himself in the same position he had at the end of their last clash.

    As it turned out, the Destroyer bet wisely, if not entirely correctly. As anticipated, the Great Creator did not retaliate in person, instead counting on his own faithful spirits to battle those of the Destroyer and keep them from harming creation where possible – not just because he was reluctant to risk the destruction of the universe, but because he was busy devising his ultimate weapon for the next true confrontation with his adversary. This war of spirits and eventually, mortal followers was further complicated by those neutral spirits which had crawled out of their hiding holes, some of the strongest of which began propping themselves up as gods and establishing their own followings wherever they could find intelligent life.

    And that remains the present state of affairs in the universe, approximately 13.8 billion years in. From here, the story of the gods – well, it doesn’t end, but it is going to be taking the backseat while the spotlight moves on to the story of mortals.

    By all means, please do leave your thoughts. Yay, nay, 'let's go back to low fantasy', 'I have my own idea and here's how it would work', etc.

  11. #71
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Following up on the above, a proposal for a magic framework, also previously posted on Discord and tidied up a bit.
    Barry's #2 proposal: Magic
    Magic in this universe is defined as the ability to transcend, or at least bend, physical reality through attunement to one or more of the seven Spheres of Creation: Prime, Spirits, Matter, Forces, Affinity, Time and Entropy. This is done through the absorption of 'Quintessence' - residual cosmic particles released from the clash of the Great Creator and Great Destroyer, scattered across the universe and trapped in the atmosphere of this planet (and many others) - followed by internally reshaping it within one's body and with one's will, forcing it to take forms and work the supernatural miracles the user desires.

    There are three ways one can become a mage. The first is to take advantage of the ‘Quintessence’ directly: to do this, one need only consume a sufficient quantity of aetherium* to transform one’s physical body into a network of otherworldly ‘circuits’ capable of absorbing Quintessence from the air around themselves, reshaping it according to the Sphere they’ve attuned themselves to, and then expel it outward – but not so much that one overloads said ‘circuits’ and dies instantly.

    The second way is to cut a deal with a spiritual entity, whether this means becoming ordained as a cleric of a god or directly bonding with a spirit and becoming its possessed host. In the former case, the god will allow its servitor to draw upon its power and connection to the one (or more rarely, multiple) sphere it represents, with higher-ranked and thus more intimate and trusted clerics traditionally being given access to more of the god’s power than their juniors for obvious reasons. In the latter case, the mortal host will have access to all of their possessing spirit’s abilities at all times, at the cost of having to constantly listen to the thoughts of their spiritual ‘buddy’ and being vulnerable to said spirit hijacking their rational processes at any time.

    The last way is to be the child of someone belonging to the above categories. Statistically however, it’s exceedingly rare for one to be born with an innate connection to the arcane. Among humans, at least, the default rate is 1 in every 5,000 couples where both parents are mages, and 1 in every 15,000 where only one parent is a mage. The likelihood of passing on magical ability does not improve as the number of generations rises, so as an example, the grandson of mages is no likelier to be born a mage than his magically attuned father. Other races may differ on this point, of course.

    So, once a person becomes/is born a mage, what can they do? Well, as said above, they can transcend or (much more commonly) bend the laws of physical reality through the Sphere that they’re attuned to.

    Prime Magi are both the rarest sort of magi and classically considered to be the most powerful, for good reason. Even novices of Prime can rapidly deconstruct existing materials and reconstruct the atoms as something else entirely; the ‘input’ just needs to exactly match the ‘output’ they have in mind, or in other words, they’re bound by equivalent exchange. More powerful Prime Magi can channel raw Quintessence into illusions of themselves or others, convert Quintessence into electricity or laser-beams to be loosed from their fingertips, and render the magical attacks of their rivals nonexistent by absorbing their Quintessence.

    Finally, it is said that the most powerful of their kind can even create something out of nothing and produce energy output out of nothing, having fully transcended the laws of conservation of energy and thermodynamics; theoretically, if provided with enough Quintessence, a strong enough patron or having achieved the ability to generate their own Quintessence, these mages could create a star in their palm or will a pocket universe into existence.

    Spirit Magi are most frequently the sort of mage who gained their powers from bonding with a spiritual entity – it’s in the name, after all. As a consequence, what their abilities exactly are tends to be highly dependent on the nature of their patron deity or possessing spirit. Someone bonded to a benign healer spirit or serving a goddess of healing may manifest the power to not only heal physical wounds but mental ones as well, delving into the psyche of the troubled to battle their inner demons; someone bonded to a violent spirit or serving a god of war might have their physical abilities augmented beyond what even the strongest of ordinary men can pull off, draw on their patron’s Quintessence to create an arcane ‘cloak’ around themselves that sends projectiles fired their way into distant corners of the universe, and more; and so on, so forth. It’s said that the most powerful spirit magi can even telepathically assault their foes, contact the dead or call down other spirits from beyond and bond them onto physical objects, constructs or bodies.

    Curiously, spirits that have been bonded to a mortal subject (and don’t simply immediately, permanently hijack them) tend to actually grow emotionally and psychologically, developing an outlook on life that’s influenced by the thoughts and character of their host – though, since they aren’t replacing their host’s original soul, they can’t really be defined as a second soul either. This makes them quite distinct from spirits that have never bothered to bind themselves to a mortal host, who tend to maintain a completely otherworldly outlook on morality, the spectrum of human emotions, etc. to the point where they can come across as utterly incomprehensible to mortals.

    Matter Magi are those best versed in manipulating flesh, blood and bone, as well as all other forms of matter. These are what the common man thinks of when he hears ‘healing magic’: magi capable of mending severe or even fatal (though not immediately so, there’s no known earthly magic that can truly bring back the dead) wounds, restoring and re-setting bones, purging disease and carrying out impromptu blood transfusions on the spot in an age long before the IV drip was invented. But matter magi are far from restricted to purely the healing arts – these individuals can also craft weapons out of bone (though preferably not theirs) or anything else around them, infuse existing weapons and armor with Quintessence to grant them otherworldly strength and durability, draw their victim’s blood out through their orifices, or compel nearby inanimate objects to fly at the target of their ire. The strongest and most experienced matter magi are even said to be capable of flaying and flensing their opponents with a wave of their hand, entombing them in iron or opening up pits beneath their feet, among other things.

    Force Magi are those who wield the most conventional, and perhaps the flashiest, sort of offensive magic. They fit the bill of the fireball-slinging, tidal-wave-raising, gale-blowing battlemage the best out of all the magi, their Sphere being that of the elements of the earth. Their powers tend to develop in the most straightforward ways out of all the magi, as well – a novice who starts out being barely able to light an ember in his palm will (assuming he doesn’t die early on in his studies) grow to become capable of igniting firestorms with a thought, another who starts out being able to manipulate only puddles may have her powers grow to the extent of being able to whip up furious waterspouts, and so on.

    Affinity Magi tend to be the most underestimated of their kind. After all, what’s a mage who can sense emotions and relationships compared to one who can create gold and silver from thin air, commune with the dead, turn dirt into a spear in hand, or breathe fire at anyone who looks at them funny? But Affinity magi, while not as flashy as their cousins, tend to make far better spies (and occasionally therapists) than them, being able to instantly determine what makes the people around them tick – what they want, what they hate, who their friends and enemies are, what memories they cherish and which hurt them the most, all sometimes at just a thought. Stronger Affinity-wielders can implant their own thoughts into others’ minds and make even the cruelest or most nonsensical commands seem like genius or necessary ideas that their victim thought of themselves, compelling these others into doing their bidding without necessarily having to open their mouth. And the most powerful Affinity magi are the sort powerful enough to not only ‘see’ where a person’s soul is bonded to their body, but also sever those bonds, instantly killing them without leaving a scratch on their flesh.

    Time Magi seem much more powerful than, say, the Affinity magi at a glance, but in truth their powers are more limited than most. True, they can see into the past (making them great detectives if the need ever arises) and the future, but they can’t actually interact with objects and people in either. When it comes to fighting, the most any time mage can do is slow down time in an area – perhaps only as far as they can see, or many miles around them, depending on their strength – which, of course, allows the magus to zip around their foes (who will perceive them to be moving extremely quickly, to the point where they’re just a blur) and do whatever he or she want to them. The idea of a Time Mage so powerful that they can actually alter the past or communicate with figures from the future is not a new one, but if such mages exist, they’ve yet to reveal themselves.

    Finally, there are the Entropy Magi. Their Sphere and their powers have to do with not only destruction in its various forms, but with chaos and probability as well. Consequently, Entropy-wielding magi are the sort who can not only accelerate an opponent’s physical deterioration (usually just aging, but if they happen to be afflicted with something like cancer or another deadly disease…) but also to detect where and how something or someone is most likely to fail – maybe it’s a weak foundation for a building, or imperceptible gaps in a ship where water could leak through, or a chink in a warrior’s armor. The most powerful Entropy Magi are mirror opposites of Prime Magi, and so wield the ability to not only instantly deconstruct any amount of matter (like let’s say, a person who’s in their way) at the molecular level, but also to reduce something or someone to utter nothingness without their constituent matter going anywhere but nonexistence in violation of the law of conservation of energy. It’s even rumored that they can overcome entropy themselves, thereby achieving immortality.

    There are, of course, limitations. Most mortals never become mages, either because they were born that way, because their chosen patron deities won’t give them the time of day, or because they would die from ingesting aetherium. Of those who attain magical abilities, most never reach the heights of power they dreamed of. It takes years of training and regularly using one’s powers just to gain complete control over one’s magical power (so that one doesn’t accidentally spontaneously combust or level their own house when extremely stressed or angry) and advance from performing what can be charitably called ‘cheap parlor tricks’ to becoming a middling magus, and decades after that to achieve the abilities of what might be called an ‘expert’ – child mages being able to set even their own house on fire are practically unheard of, except by pure accident.

    The highest tiers of magical abilities are quite literally otherworldly – they’re beyond the reach of any mortal mage, no matter how old, wizened and innately powerful. No, to achieve such lofty heights, becoming the host of an extremely powerful spiritual entity willing to lend the mage its power becomes necessary. Whether the being is considered divine or demonic, benevolent or malevolent, and whether their actual nature matches the characterization mortal societies have attributed to them, are all wholly irrelevant factors.

    There are other kinds of natural magic in the world beyond those reliant on mortal action to begin, of course. Some creatures are specially attuned to one of the Spheres of Creation and can work their own magic. Others, such as the famous feathered dragon, aren’t and can’t, but can impart their physical strength and agility to a mortal who eats their heart or brain, albeit at the risk that the consumed beast’s primal instincts can overwhelm their rational mind. Still others are those animals, plants and inanimate objects that have become possessed by a spirit; however, since their host isn’t sapient or possibly even alive, these spirits (assuming they aren’t the souls of mortals who have died) can never grow emotionally the way spirits that have bonded with sapient mortals can, and thus they tend to be focused on little more than self-preservation with their enhanced abilities.

    And beyond the earth...well, powerful spirits, god or not, have always been able to work unexplainable miracles far beyond the capacity of even the most powerful mortal sorcerers. Why they don't intervene directly on the earth more often is a mystery for the ages - perhaps a healthy respect for mortal autonomy is ingrained in their conscience, despite their incomprehensibility to mortal emotions and moral standards, or perhaps they have established pacts of mutually assured destruction with their rivals that ensure one or more gods interfering directly in the affairs of their followers would ensure the intervention of their rivals on behalf of their worshipers, or perhaps they simply don't feel like it most of the time - but in any case, the assorted spirits' resolution to indirectly work through mortal agents and subtly influence the course of history most of the time, as opposed to directly imposing their will on everyone, makes the occasions where they do the latter all the more shocking. To say nothing of what could happen if the Great Creator and Great Destroyer were to stir from their thrones...

    *Aetherium is just a stopgap name I've come up with for the magic mineral we've got on the map. If you have anything better, please do propose it. Also I'm more than happy to have every culture & civ call it something else, I just came up with that name so I don't have to type 'magic mineral' all the damn time.

    As usual, once you've finished reading through the above 2,000+ words, please do leave your thoughts - yay, nay, 'let's go back to low fantasy', whatever.

  12. #72
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    I've completed a rewrite of the 'Illamite religion, society and history (in descending order of size) to account for the switch to high magic a couple months ago. See here and here.

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