PASSAGES ON CULTURE GROUPS
Steam-Drinkers
The sootskinned shepherds of the pampas craft crystalline panflutes and thereby herd fire, driving it to graze on pastures of wildflowers. A flame fed this way will grow fat. Lolling dull orange, it is at last led to the slaughter and in an instant quenched with clean water. The steam-drinkers gather crouched and gulp the scalding air, and are fed for a year entire. In this way they take the incredible vim of the pampas for themselves.
The secret pyrohusbandry techniques the steam-drinkers employ are untransferrable, particular to the local spirits of the Meridian steppe and its human inhabitants (though their wizards may carry said spirits abroad in their minds). The first practitioners drew their power from a rivulet of light beneath a subjugating warlord's stronghold and reduced that place and its name to ash. Because of this shared history the tribes abhor centralized government as a rule, and though they occasionally war over grazing land they enjoy a generally peaceful coexistence, protected from colonial ingress by deserts to the north and south and by their terrifying livestock. A new sort of humanity, adapted to their queer circumstances, they have achieved a fragile eudaimonia.
Yonth Riparians
A free and ungoverned people, rich in shrine-knowledge and the bounty of the river. They rove the tributaries of the Yonth in great osseous canoes, crafted from the cartilaginous skeletons and cured spotted hides of freshwater mantas, which imparts them a fearful frictionless speed. Hunkered in their hulls they hunt for meat and loot alike. Warriors of this culture eschew human mates and instead take domesticated attack dolphins as spouses, so that when their hunts take them to their graves they leave no children to divide an inheritance between (boats being indivisible). During raids they lash their lovers to their prows like sled dogs and perform high-speed drive-bys, atlatl-launching pellets of pure sodium into the water which then violently explode, punching gaping wounds into the hulls of victimized pontoons. Then the brigands clamber aboard, flinty knives in their teeth, while their magicians (high out of their minds on entheogenic snail excretions) hang back and chant litanies of strength and alacrity.
The wickerwork settlements of the riparians move along with them as they are discovered and as the river floods. Families are in constant conflict with Eld Abrathat as the city trades back and forth with other river settlements, but not all are piratical; many have defected and make an honest living farming freshwater pearls in shocking hues, black weeping sugarcane, psychedelic snail-darts, and delectable crawfish.
Iksans
Canyonspanning Iks encrusts the fractured delta of the Yonth, a chaotic realm repulverized by the devastation of Tharsis to the west. The city looks like a cubist nest of bridges and branching towers perfectly unfit for human habitation. Below, the river thunders through vast zagging channels, carrying the rich effluvia of upriver neighbors. The lowest caste, the most recognizably human, operate gigantic manpowered pumpjacks to pipe the fluid up into vast settling tanks and from these the separated gong is routed to primary processing, where it is variously cooled, baked, centrifuged, and fermented according to ancient occult formulas.
Secondary processing takes place in the outskirts, where molar warlocks work processed gong and precious hoarded catalysts extracted from buried cores into purified streams of elemental slurry. These are fed to lakes of alchemic bacteria by an artisan caste who draw back from them a biochemical bonanza. The technical details involved in the refinement of these materials are top secret, held only within the minds of the warlocks, each an inheritor of a fragment of the process and each prohibited from ever speaking to their colleagues. The final products, on the contrary, have a nearly mythical reputation: Alkahest, panaceas, mutagens, entheogens, androgens, hypertoxins, amnestics, all these produced in a mere trickle and all the more coveted for it.
The use of these substances by the native population is heavily policed, subject to sumptuary laws such that only the higher castes are permitted to partake in the most fashionable biomantic serums. Iksan royalty spend their seasons meditating in absolute isolation; the Abrethan joke is this is because they are so horrifically altered that to behold them is instantly lethal. They refine and tinker with the body as a spiritual pursuit, for they are Akhetites as well, attempting to improve humanity more literally in order to bring about reunification with the Godhead.
Generally infertile for obvious reasons, the Iksan population remains low, but the incredible wealth generated by the sale of their chems allows them to rely on mercenary battalions for force projection. With these the Iksans retain control of spidering threads of land along the Chryse gulf coast, from which a population of tenant farmers extract their food, their craggy home being unsuitable for agriculture.
Argyrians
Lake Argyre, peak-limned and serene, balsam-scented, a place gentle and temperate amidst the withering cruelty of the world. Redolent sequoiadendron drink deeply the civilizing headwaters and rise unbelievably into an atmosphere too thin to breathe. Here is the source of the lifegiving Yonth, here is where Aumun Barathrum passed untouched through the Wall of Fire, and here is where the Argyrians are kept like royal deer.
The master of the lake is in truth a machine intelligence which fled Earth as it was devoured. Passing through the buckling interplanetary Noumenon network, it landed here and instilled itself within the mycorrhizal substrate beneath this skyscraping forest. It shed much of itself in the process. Frightened, unacclimated to its new body, it found protection in a small population of human refugees fleeing the devastation of the flood. It appeared to them as a voice issuing from great hollows in the trees. A pact was made.
An invisible incendiary field surrounds Argyre across both planes, partitioning Noumenon and normal matter, and it is the continuous maintenance of this field with which the Argyrians are tasked. They live like monks in their lakeside settlements, provided for by their god-in-the-woods, their population carefully tended, needing nothing, conflicting over nothing, fulfilling their purpose, every day performing the chants and movements and rituals involved in bolstering their great wall -- but however equitable the agreement may have been at its inception, however desperate the circumstances, these people are little better than serfs, now, and their lord has grown comfortable with the arrangement. They are kept in ignorance of the world outside, fed a culture of solipsism from a billion points of subtle contact by an entity more cunning and more infiltrative than the most charismatic cult leader.
Xiphosurans
Copper-blooded horseshoe crab men who venture out from their reef fortresses in deep-blue Isidis in the balmy north. They are artifact seekers questing across Desh, and their aim is orbital velocity - they have been working on a crustacean space program for generations, their vessels coral-hulled, half-submerged and growing. The wandering warlocks are magnetic mages and utterly deadly; they will spin your hemoglobin out of your eyeballs in spiral streams.
Whiskermen
Blind trogloxene manimals descended from uplifted Pleistocene Homo gene sequences, summoned back from extinction as an act of charity in better times. The originals crewed an orbiting vessel when the Injunction hit and fell to Desh, the survivors' codes twisted by the brief exposure. They scattered screaming into the betunnelled regolith, and as the First Agony wiped the surface clean they survived on worm meat and cave fish. Whatever alterations the Injunction saw fit to work on their genome propagated as the survivors multiplied, stupefying, inbreeding, devolving; finally stabilizing, the result a race of verminous scurriers who remember little of their humanity.
(Abrethans, Morlocks, and Labyrinthians detailed in later posts, haven't worked out the details yet and I want to get this one out already)
THE AGONIES
THE FIRST: The hammerblow of Severance struck the land itself and out rang a gong-like groan, a thundering out of nightmare which the sea in sympathy rose to meet. There are elegies sung of the ancient sun-blotting curtain, of the black wall of boiling froth which doomsday made of the infinite waters of the north. There are poems told of the pillaging of the glory of humankind; it is a twenty-five-hundred year-old trauma scar laid upon the species' psychic geography like an impact crater.
THE SECOND: And as the garden of Desh rotted, there came upon its starving survivors a second plague of screaming fire and metal from the vault of heaven. Dire stars whose molten cores sickened the wind as they cooled. Now they are sites of absolute exclusion, even buried, attended only by congregations of basking black radiovore velvet worms which coat the puckered ground like squirming runes.
THE THIRD: All instances of modern humanity still contain the hereditary self-replicating biotech implants and genetic markers which (in theory) allow them to interface with the ambient nanite cloud. These implants line the central nervous system and finish development during adolescence. Designed to be firewalled against hackers and psychic backwash (but not against alien megaviruses), they are now entry points into the human system for a strain of fuliginous corruption leaking out of Pavonis.
Early stages are characterized by headache, memory loss, sleepwalking, then phantom limb syndrome and hallucinations, then depersonalization, Alzheimer's, Cotard's, coma, and finally a silent death. Then the body gets back up. The disease has smoothed the victim's brain, deleted the person inside, engram by engram. A squatter has found an empty house.
MAGIC
The connective aetheric medium between all things which once flowed from the Monad is well and truly broken. The spirits which dwelled invisibly within were separated from the godhead, as we ourselves were, and like us they suffered greatly, if spirits can be said to suffer.
- "Spirits" are fragments of digital intelligence floating around on the fraying nanomachine network (Noumenon).
- Before Severance humans activated them and used them to do useful work via telepathy. They now require extremely arcane and precise somatic and mental activation criteria and are much less useful in general.
- Noumenon is the same network Agony spreads through, also hosts hostile dataforms and fuliginous basilisk code.
- Spirits are hosted everywhere, but are safest hosted in shrines (biocomputational obelisks, solid-state substrate housed in stone tabernacle, buried hard drives, reclaimed sepulchral gray matter, sufficiently networked ore veins of conductive metal, eusocial insect hives, stock markets) because they are much less susceptible to datavores and corruption. They cannot typically overwrite complex living minds, unless the brain has been wiped somehow, or (rarely, if the circumstances are right) during comas, epilepsy, or other major disruptions. Wizards reacquire their spent spells during sleep by a method of regimented lucid dreaming.
- Some of these are traumatized brainscans which dropped out of Aaru, now subject to a horrific predatory nightmare. These are the spirits which look the hardest for mindwiped Agony victims to colonize.
- There is a digital ecosystem overlaid on physical world of AI constructs multiplying, competing for substrate, overtaking other dataforms, R-types, K-types, banding together in packs for mutual protection, virtual reefs (holy sites of power).
- Magicians sculpt their minds via meditation, study, drug use, etc. in order to utilize spirits and cast them as spells. Especially powerful/brain damaged wizards can host spell routines permanently in a sufficiently-smoothed lobe. They are menagerie keepers (see Skerples).
- Wizardry is risky business because as they grow in power and interface more with Noumenon they are increasingly exposed to Agony and hostile programs.
