X Straighten your spine, balance your shoulders and stick out your chin.
X Speak in bold, declarative sentences.
X Never admit to uncertainty.
X Be offended.
X When in doubt as to what to be offended by, select any of the following: insults to the Sky gods, darkness magic, sexual license, disrespect for tradition, presumptuous women, irreverence toward rightful authority, the Orlanthi ‘Lightbringers Quest’ story.
X Fight bravely for what you believe in.
X Obey rightful authority.
X Think rigidly.
X Treat all women as accoutrements. Treat all peasants and foreigners as chattels.
My Magic
Only the highest, the Emperor and top-ranking patriarchs, may directly worship Yelm. All others commit effrontery by even considering it. The sorts of people you might actually meet draw magic from his relatives and intermediaries, such as his martial son, Yelmalio, the great defender Antirius, or the rebuilding Emperor, Khordavu.
Why I Adventure
Dara Happans do not adventure. This sounds disreputable if not outright criminal. We would not sully ourselves with it.
We do engage in acts of legendary heroism, however. These are all waged in protection of the Empire and its proven righteousness. He who does not follow a patriarch or commander is a fi lthy outlaw and not to be trusted.
Exiles may travel about the rest of the world seeking trouble.
They tell themselves that they are toughening themselves for the day when they come home, subjugate themselves to their patriarchs and reassume their seemly positions in life. I suppose what they tell themselves is even true, on occasion.
Teshnan
We yearn to see the celestial fl ame. We are the people of Teshnos, the steamy jungle land to the south of Kralorela.
Lifetimes are nothing to us; we achieve spiritual perfection through cycles of reincarnation. We live, learn, progress, die, are born again and continue to perfect ourselves. We will still be doing this long after your so-called Empires have vanished into half-forgotten history.
My Myths
Those of us who have seen the celestial fl ame are revered as teachers and leaders. They are called the zitrs. There are only a few hundred zitrs in our densely populated land.
The greatest of zitrs propound their own system of enlightenment. They are called Seers. Each tells different stories of the gods. Some recognise different gods than others.
The details do not matter too much, because the gods exist only as exemplars, to teach us. The magic exists not within the gods but in what the gods teach us about themselves.
A Seer’s teachings usually consist of a few simple sentences.
These are so packed with meaning that they take several lifetimes to fully understand. The god stories they tell provide the tools to understand the teachings. For instance, one great teacher is Chal. His teachings are:
X Teaching the First: At the heart of everything there is fl ame.
To learn this, one must live several incarnations as a farmer or herdsman.
X Teaching the Second: The individual life-fl ame is not a fi re that burns in a form but the fi ery form itself. To learn this, one lives more lifetimes as a red-robed priest, making sacrifi ces to a chosen god.
X Teaching the Third: Each of the fi ery forms is one celestial fi re. Here one has become a noble, living in opulent luxury, smothered in jewels and layered in silk.
When one has fully assimilated the Third Teaching of Chal, one becomes a zitr. Other Seers are:
X Elat, of the Four Tough Survival Teachings. His followers begin as naked woodsmen and fi nd the fl ame within the aldryami song.
X Zon, of the Ivory Mask Teachings. He tells us that behind the fi re is a mask, behind the mask there is a soul and behind the soul, there is us.
X Jrudai, of the Gold in Fire Teachings. His followers begin with enormous wealth and must slowly dispose of it over multiple incarnations. They are few now.
X Sankusa of the Five Weapon Teachings. His martial followers come ever closer to the fl ame by mastering fi ve weapons over the course of multiple incarnations: knife, spear, bow, sword and strangling cord. Teshnan warrior prowess is often mocked but not in the presence of Sankusites. They are our fi rst line of defence against invaders.
The most recognised gods, by the teachings of Chal, Zon, Jrudai and others, are:
X Zitro Argon, the primal fi re. His devotees meditate, fast and sometimes burn themselves but do not make sacrifi ces to him.
X Somash is the Sun, the mightiest of the gods. His adherents dedicate themselves to purity, fi delity and truth. Warriors, poets, healers and administrators follow him.
X Calyz is the friendly fi re. He burns in domed kilns, cooking our food and heating metal for shaping into useful forms.
X Solf is the decadent, burnt-out volcano. His worshippers seek to destroy themselves through dissipation. To follow him, one must apply for a license from the king. Otherwise too many people would take his path, die all at once and have no bodies to reincarnate back into.
X Furalor is the destroying fi re. She is the funeral pyre on which all worldly things, including souls, are burnt, so that they may then be recreated.
Some schools recognise other gods who work in balance with the fi re gods. Others proclaim such recognition as wasteful error, calling these entities half-gods. The best known half-gods are:
X Huand, the cooling water. She is the force of moderation, into which Somash dips each night, lest his fi re burn so bright as to burn his people.
X Dakkad, the infusing air. She fl ows into Calz’s kin, adding fl avour to foods and strength to swords.
X Umalon, the fruitful earth. When Furalor has destroyed something, she plants it in her daughter’s infi nite womb.
Umalon births it back into the world, adding a fresh element each time.
X Arshmolod, the bringer of death. Furalor’s pale daughter appears to the dying, to conduct their souls to the consuming fi re. Her belly is round and swollen;
her pregnancy represents the dying individual’s next incarnation.
Here is a parable of creation and devolution. After many lifetimes you will know which parts of it burn true. Do not tell it to the God Learners, or they will use it against us.
First there was nothing. Then there was the celestial flame.
It could not burn forever without something to consume. So it let parts of itself fly out and these made the gods, followed by their land, and then people, followed by their land.
Diminished but at the same time fuelled, the Celestial Flame became Zitro Argon.
This god was too far from the new land, so it invested the god Somash with a solar halo and sent him spinning into heaven.
The people were cold and hungry, so he made Calyz for them.
The world became too full of ignorant people who lacked interior ambition, so Furalor decreed herself the destroyer and laid waste to them.
Solf joined her campaign, because it looked like fun to him. In his selfi shness he perverted what was hallowed and necessary about destruction and in so doing invited in the demoness Makbonella.
She was both destruction without purpose and creation without restraint. Makbonella polluted exuberant young Solf and knocked Somash from the sky.
Only the people were left to fi nd the fl ame again and so then the fi rst zitrs generated themselves from their memories of the gods.
They were Chal, Elat, Zon, Jrudai and the others. They fought the monsters of Makbonella’s horde not with swords but with the magic of their thoughts – Sankusa’s thoughts were like knives and cut through her ropy hide as if afl ame.
Eventually the competing zitrs agreed to harmonise their philosophies into the One Thought. This was not sustainable, because it contained everything but while it existed it was enough to exalt Somash back into the sky and free Furalor from her prison inside Umalon. She came out of the prison and visited Makbonella’s own destruction upon her. Umalon rebirthed the monster queen as the self-devouring jungle which surrounds our land. Now she serves us, by consuming foreigners who come to conquer us. Chal taught us to tame her spirits.
My History
Our history is of little interest to outsiders and this is how we like it. Our change is inward-directed, manifesting hardly at all in the realm of mere politics. Encased by haunted jungles
full of cooperatively fi erce spirits, we have kept to ourselves and bothered no one. Please do not fi nd us fascinating.
On occasion we invade Kralorela. Mostly this happens symbolically, in a snowy mountain pass, when one of our great war elephants contends with one of their serpents. The winner gets good luck for a year.
Our history recounts many raids by Praxians, Pentans, hsunchen or amazons from the Trowjang. These scarcely qualify as invasions and are barely worth mentioning. We dealt with them with Sankusan fi re weapons, burning magic from the sky and the strategic payment of tribute.
We traded little with the outside world before the God Learners rose. Sometimes goods would come to us on Waertagi ships and we would ship out ivory and mahogany in exchange for them. The God Learners want us to buy more from them, to become accustomed to their trade as a drunkard is to ale. They hope to learn from us. We are not afraid of outsiders, as the Kralori are. We invite any to come and observe our holy ways.
Those who pay us the cold coin of disrespect will contend with our fearsome jungle spirits.
My Life
We are ruled by the Pentapartite Dynasty. Kingship rotates between adherents of the Five Seers who brought back the sun: Chal, Zon, Jrudai, Elat and Sankusa. When one king dies, the zitrs of that tradition go forth among the people looking for an orphan whose soul has been reincarnated into the desired tradition. Today we are ruled by King Kasinslian, a highly evolved follower of Sankusa. Flames leap in the pupils of his imperious eyes.
My Magic
Our fi ve main gods teach us to manifest mystical powers by looking inward to the celestial fi re that burns in all of us.
Other deities provide Common Magic and folk magic to the people who need these for their everyday lives.
Why I Adventure
Most teachings tell us that the desire for adventure is a spiritual trap. It speaks of a desire for an outer variety, as a distraction from the need for inner purity. Such temptations retard progress through your incarnation cycle.
The Sankusans differ on this point. To achieve mastery of the fi ve weapons, one must go out into the world and locate worthy enemies. Sankusans sometimes wander far and wide in search of appropriate confl icts. Although they fi ght for fi ghting’s sake, they take care to enlist only in ethical causes. Otherwise one risks pollution and a fall into accidental Solf worship.