Yarkasqa - The Starved Land[]
The Starved Land[]
Yarkasqa is a mountainous land that separates the coastal city states from the interior of the Amyran continent. A land of deep, narrow vales, densely forested dells and high alpine meadows. The Amyrans call this the "Starved Land" because of its drought-ridden, fire-prone forests and lack of major sedentary agriculture. Occasionally harassed by threats arising from Thangodrim and Utumno - such as a solitary dragon looking for new territory or rogue demons looking for easy pickings. Surrounded by dense, urbanized settlement on either side of the mountains, Yarkasqua poses a formidible barrier to transcontinental trade and commerce. The Amyran Empire has built an Imperial Highway through its mountain passes at great effort and maintains a system of waystations and outposts at great expense. Amyryan presence does not extend beyond the Imperial Highway - quickly giving way to the Yarkasqa wilds. Yarkasqa is at best a nominal client state of the empire, and in reality an independent frontier that has never been fully subdued.
Two isolated confederations (the Northern and Southern Confederacies) on either side of imperial highway exist in a state of cold war with the Amyran Empire, maintaining their independency by roguery and monkery (the two going hand-in-hand). A century ago these two nations met at their border, the Imperial Highway, and had a large religious festival, making a covenant of mutual aid to maintain their joint independence and fight abroad together. The Imperial Legate hosting the festival was rounded up along with his Imperial garrison and executed to seal the covenant. After a century of guerilla warfare the Imperial Highway is now securely in the hands of the Amyrans, but little else has changed. Yarkasqans now regularly travel the Imperial Highway - exporting their infamous mercenary bands of rogues, assassins, sages and holy people abroad to rival power players within the Amyran Empire. Yarkasqan rogues are now deployed as a regular tool of imperial political intrigue and Yarkasqan sages are regular fixtures within the great houses, training the scions of empire.
Traders, merchants and travelers are mostly outsiders who stick to the imperial highway that cuts through Yarkasqa. They stick to the system imperial waystations that dot the imperial highway that the Amyrans maintain (with imperial control fading beyond their outbuildings). However, these travelers are the economic lifeblood of Yarkasqa bringing wealth, commerce and goods to its settlements via religious pilgrims and traveling merchants and tinkers.
Social and Political Life[]
"A land of rogues and monks!" Goes a famous quote from an Imperial Legate who failed in his mission to subdue the Yarkasqans. This is now the motto of the Yarkasqans, minted on coinage by its many independent mints and yelled in battle by its many mercenary bands abroad. There are few permanent settlements. Its most famous are the mountain strongholds of semidivine teachers and sages that operate as monasteries or quasi-colleges. These strongholds have large cadres of warrior-rogue disciples, and surrounding communities of adepts, adherents and pilgrims. Their political power is localized to the stronghold and its surrounding communities, but their cultural and religious power reaches throughout the clans and confederations of Yarkasqa and far a field attracting pilgrims, disciples, envoys and embassies from across the vast Amyran Empire. They are a united cultural force in an otherwise highly fragmented and decentralized political landscape.
The Amyrans view the people of this land as one nation - the Yarkasqans. The natives see themselves as two distinct cultures (the Siol and Shido) that coexist within the same lands. These distinct cultural and ethnic groups organize themselves in loosely-knit, overlapping clans that lay claim to small, patches of territory, and specific sacred sites, strongholds and resources. The Siol and Shido that live to the north of the Imperial Highway have more in common with each other than their kin who live to the south. For that reason, they have organized themselves into a Northern and Southern Confederacy, each consisting of both peoples within their respective area. The Amyran Imperial functionaries have made little attempt to understand the nuances of Yarkasqan political structure, which has rendered their attempts to designate "treaty chieftains" as official parties to various parlays completely ineffective.
Yarkasqan society is a society of citizens, not subjects. Individualism, independence, and individual agency are stressed in social, political and religious structures and beliefs. The Siol and Shido peoples despise royalty, nobility, and aristocracy, centralized religious or political power. That is why they are a loose knit confederation that keeps no kings or nobles. Their warrior caste and leaders are elected from the most able within the clans. Their nobles are revered masters of popular temples, shrines and schools. Citizens participate in society as soldiers, farmers, and artisans to the mutual good of their clans. Yarkasqans are expected to maintain the threefold path.
Threefold Path[]
The Threefold Path was developed within Yarkasqa long ago and has since become widespread throughout the Amyran Empire. The Threefold Path is a philosophy, discipline and way of life which mandates that Yarkasqans must exemplify the three virtues of fitness, vigilence and readiness. Disciples of the Threefold Path strive to these virtues by seeking to attain and maintain peak mental, spiritual, and physical states. The Threefold Path believes that discipline in one hones and enhances the others. For example, mental focus enhances spiritual attainment and physical discipline hones mental focus. A proverb states "wind sharpens water sharpens rock." In the Threefold Path, air is often associated with spirit, water with mind, and earth with body. The various sages, teachers, temples and shrines throughout Yarkasqa emphasize different approaches or focus on different aspects of acheiving the Threefold Path. For instance, the Shrine of Great Mountain Elder emphasizes hydromancy and psychic training as means of achieving the Threefold Path leading with mental discipline. The Forge of the Obsidian Master focuses on developing excellence in craftsmanship as a spiritual and mental discipline.
Religious Life[]
In religious life, Yarkasqans are expected to be literate and participate as religious and philosophical students and disciples to maintain their fitness and readiness as soldiers, farmers and artisans - with each of these pursuits having deeply spiritual disciplines embedded within them. Religion stresses individual physical, mental and spiritual perfection seeing them as all interconnected forces grounded in nature. For this reason, many religion sites are at places where air, water or earth come together. Outsiders are often struck by how practiced and artful Yarkasqan craft and ways of working and living are - not realizing the deeply spiritual underpinnings of what they are observing.
Yarkasqan folk religion is far more ancient than the Threefold Path, existing syncretically with it. In fact, the Threefold Path may have developed overtime to make it more coherent and cohesive. Regardless, Yarkasqan folk religion exists syncretically with the Threefold Path throughout Siol and Shido society. Yarkasqan folk religion sees the gods as natural forces that are personified in sacred ancestors and in places of power. These forces can be harnessed by individuals with the aid of aid of these sacred people and places. Yarkasqan folk religion also believes that there are the seeds of divinity in each individual - that each person comes from nature and returns to nature and is connected to nature past and present while alive. For this reason, it is necessary to seek divinity and possible to climb to godhood in this life. Because of this, many Yarkasqans exist in a permanent liminal state between the fey and the material. They channel natural, elemental forces as spiritual force - known as Ley by the Amyrans of the empire. This is likely an idiosyncrasy, applied from Amyran monastic philosophy improperly to Yarkasqan folk practices. Yarkasqans are channeling elemental aether using their spirit force. This close association with elemental and fey forces creates a landscape uniquely influenced by Feywild energy and abundant with fey creatures.
"Godhood is gained, not gifted or granted..." is a famous teaching of the sage, Yarkasqi Manui. And it encapsulates a foundational idea that separates Yarkasqans from many of the cultures around them. They are not subjects of their gods and the gods do not have mercy, give gifts, etc. Rather the Yarkasqans exist with their gods as they do with their kin. This is a relationship that is very different, in that there are no true clerics or paladins among them - but many who fufill similar functions.
To outsiders, Yarkasqa is a unique land that produces an outsized portion of heroes, where a significant portion of the population has attained semidivinity. Among the Yarkasqans, it is expected for a god to emerge from among them every few centuries. They expect to commune regularly with their deities and have demigods walking among them.
These folk beliefs and practices take on different expressions among the Siol and Shido peoples, but are nonetheless a shared inheritance.
People of the Seed[]
The Shido and Siol people (meaning People of the Seed in both their languages ) reflects the fact these people believe they contain the seeds of divinity in themselves. Also - as heros and masters among these people escalate their divinitiy - they must eat fruit from a feytouched tree unique to Yarkasqa to maintain their levels - they carry the seeds with them when abroad to sustain their ability to operate at levels beyond the physical, mental and spiritual capacity. These seeds contain a high dose of aethereum.
The Siol People[]
The Siol are a culture of semi-sedentary farmers, who live in a tight clan structure. Property, territory and wealth is collectively owned by each clan. Children are raised in common by their sept. All members of a sept are known as "brother" or "sister" " father" or "mother" depending on age. Those within the clan, but outside the sept are addressed as uncles, aunts and cousins. Despite their deeply collective social and political structure - they are highly individualistic, with each member of a sept encouraged to choose their life path when coming of age - free from the obligations of filial piety or familial duty. For this reason, the Siol produce many monks, and traveling rogues. The Siol believe that they are decended from the fey creatures and entities that stalk the forests of Yarkasqa, and therefore have bound fey worship up in their ancestral veneration practices. This grants them natural feytouched abilities, such as the ability to meditate instead of dream like elves and resistence to being charmed. Their ancestors have left great mounds, standing stones and dolmens carefully arranged across the landscape as sacred shrines to these fey ancestors, and they play a special part in the religion practices and observences of all the septs and clans. They are treated a shared inheretence and are the property of all clans, and considered neutral meeting points. Therefore, they are often the location of common markets, religious festivals, marriages, and political parleys. Being migratory, semi-sedentary farmers - the Shiol clans build oppidia in high, fortifed places to protect their farmland, store their harvests and shelter during times of threat. They are only permanently occupied by a small garrison of clan warriors, otherwise.The Siol are known for their vibrant, runic tatoos, which often bear tribal and feywild runes and charms. Monks, Disciples, Poets, Sholars and Rogues are especially venerated among the Shiol - for those who are able to stand above the collective of the Clan. The clans proudly support them and give aid them out of piety, duty and pride. The Shiol organize for their collective defense using all means of rougery. Entire clans devote themselves to this as a means of self-discipline and collective defense. For this reason, the Siol are famous throughout the Amyran Empire for their thieves, rogues and assassins - which are in high demand and bring great wealth to their people.
The Shido People[]
The Shido people are warrior pastoralists, raising herds of cattle, goat, sheep, horses and swine. Over time, they have established an uneasy equilibrium with the Siol in how to share land usages and resource rights between their clans. The Shido clans have a small, elite warrior caste among them which live in permanent strongholds strategically located to protect access to key resources within clan territory. However, most Shido live scattered about the clan's territory in decentralized, semi-sedentary family villages. So they are a highly scattered people, much smaller in number than the Siol. As interlopers into the land several centuries past, they have occcupied the areas with access to prime and prized resources, such as mines - so they are more materially wealthy than the average Siol sept that has not made its fortune abroad. The Shido possess an intense culture of self-improvement - their folk religion being bound up more directly in using their spiritual force to channel and suffuse with either. They are much less associated with the feywild. In fact, they have an antagonistic relationship with it - taking great pride in hunting, and feasting upon the fey creatures that stalk the forests. These fey creatures are considered vengeful, unappeased ancestors, who did not acheive divinity in death. So an important part of Shido hunting and warrior culture is to give these creatures an honorable death and sending in order to help them achieve proper divinity. While the Siol have many foundations, monasteries and schools where disciples and adepts may study and practice, the most revered in Yarkasqa are the foundations of the Shido, as they are the originators of the formal Threefold Path that has been exported to and popularized throughout the empire. They are considered by Amyrans to be the originators of leycraft (an incorrect interpretation of spirt force channeling).