𓃖

[serpentface]

Francis / 28

this is my art + worldbuilding writing blog (@taraxippos for reblogs)

Mostly my worldbuilding project "Blightseed" and its primary story The White Calf, occasional other stuff

Semi-frequent untagged nudity warning

[serpentface]

Is it ever an issue that the calf is just "a straight up normal cow"? Like does that have to be kept from people in order to present it as a deity?

Not really because pretty much no one’s under the impression that its behavior being that of an animal is contradictory to it being divine. The Wardi mode of deity places basically no distance between physical objects and their deified spirits (just ascribes these spirits abilities and properties that extend beyond that of their physical bodies). The calf is most specifically the spirit Briya, which is the river by that name and pretty much The water spirit of the state Wardin by virtue of being the politically dominant Wardinae tribe's river and the site of the capital. Briya chose to incarnate into a discrete body (or can speak through dreams, or sometimes appear as a shade) but he is also the river, not something hiding in the river or ruling it from a distance, you can see him and hear him and touch him. He chooses to incarnate as a wild animal rather than a human who can speak, or rather than conveying unambiguous messages in the dreams of divining priests, because taking animal form with animal traits has a purpose, and its in that purpose that the sapient intentionality of the spirit lies, much more than the behavior of the animal.

Briya has incarnated as an albino aurochs twice in the past. In one story, he appeared to the old king Jaenes in the form of a wild bull to test him in a rite of kingship. Jaenes failed that test because he did not recognize the spirit and sought to conquer him like any wild game, and hunted him with dogs and spears. As bull Briya lay dying, he spoke and prophecized Jaenes’ doom, that he would not live to see the fruits of his ultimate victory, would not reign in the kingdom he forged, and that his death would come to him through his hounds (classic ambiguous wording maneuver). Jaenes indeed ended up a client-king to his partner Erub after losing a duel with him, as they could not co-rule their new conquest, but he was still his brother’s near equal in every other capacity, still would retain dominion over his own people, and his people would still benefit from the fruits of his labors. Thinking he had defied his fate, he returned to the mound where he’d killed and buried all his hunting dogs, in order to gloat about defying his fate, and a viper slithered out of the mound and bit him and he died badly.

In the more recent story, the king/architect of modern day Wardin Haigmanitawe Erub is said to have been visited by bull Briya in the same manner when he was a prince. He pursued the bull in a grueling hunt until it could be defeated by sheer exhaustion and captured alive and unharmed, thus passing the challenge. Bull Briya then gave himself willingly to be sacrificed and went to the knife as dignified and purposefully as a man, his death and return to the river blessing the land and Erub’s reign in the process. Haigmanitawe Erub had an extremely successful reign and brought prosperity to much of his people, and his reign also had a notable dearth of drought years and no disastrous floods, which could be credited to Briya’s blessing.

These stories are not understood not to be literal fact. Erub’s bull probably was not even remotely cooperative to being sacrificed after its capture, it probably did not go to the blade with any sort of quiet humanlike dignity. That’s not the point. The point is that Briya choosing the most dangerous wild animal for his body, who would behave exactly like the dangerous wild animal it is, IS the test. Erub successfully subduing it and performing an orthopraxic sacrifice with something so unruly and unpredictable IS passing the test, and by virtue of his proving, Briya consented even if bull Briya did not. The story is a way of conveying the (perceived, it’s possible this was orchestrated with an albino domestic bull as a political maneuver) historical reality and its underlying meaning in one. The exact, literal truth is not what is True.

The calf is similar. Nothing about its animal behavior contradicts the notion that this is Briya. The question is more “why this?”. There is not an up and coming new ruler to prove himself against a wild bull. Briya showed itself in the form of an utterly helpless 7 day old calf, which is no testing beast. It appeared first to temple servants going out to fetch water. There’s historical precedent and context clues to assume this IS Briya (it was first sighted running through the spring a few hundred meters from the Briya river temple, for god’s sake), and divination by council unanimously confirmed this, but what is the test? IS there a test? Did Briya come as a little calf who would instinctively lie still and hope that approaching hunters wouldn't see him so that he could simply be in a form easy to capture unharmed and then sacrifice? Is he just trying to help his people and himself via what is basically assisted suicide made as easy as possible for the killers, so that he can be reborn anew after a profound weakening, the same way that grass needs fire to be replenished.? Or is there a new sort of test here? Is this form, something helpless and vulnerable, the river demanding his people prove themselves in some different manner to earn his ultimate consent and help? Orthopraxy is exceptionally important to ensure a ritual goes off as it should, and there is very limited orthopraxic precedent for anything happening here. There are two past occasions recorded in poem and undetailed historical record in which Briya has incarnated, other times similar spirits have done so, but none that follow these exact guidelines. But bottom line, it’s here for a reason and contextually it’s probably something to do with the fucking drought.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t Some variation in how people perceive this animal, and how much humanlike intentionality and sapience they ascribe to the animal rather than the river who chose to be this animal. When presented to the public rather than just being moved, the calf is shown with much pomp and ceremony, it is absolutely being instilled with a sense of gravity beyond itself. A lot of people do take religious stories more literally than intended (not Dead Literally on a widespread basis, these stories are quite simply not presented as some dogmatic religious canon that must be believed as stated, but not all levels of allegory or fancy are always received as such). It’s just that there aren’t many people who are going to outright doubt that this is Briya inhabiting an animal solely on the basis that it acts like an animal (rather than like, on the basis that they think this animal is something else has been misinterpreted by false divination, or someone who questions whether albinism in wildlife is basically always the product of some incarnated greater spirit, or someone who hasn’t seen it in person speculating that it’s just a white domestic bull being passed off as something else, or someone who just doesn't believe this is possible to begin with), just like there aren’t many people who doubt that a river has a spirit solely on the basis that it continues being a river rather than saying “hey man what’s up” if you talk to it.

[this bit, from a bigger bit that will probably be cut, describes the general philosophy towards religious stories as expression of truth in other terms]

[serpentface]

Do people associate being right handed or left handed with anything in particular or is it not a big deal

It's not as big a deal in the Wardi sphere as it is in some places but it isn't nothing either. Lefthanded kids are considered unlucky (it fits into a spectrum of harmless inborn traits (pale eyes, freckles, and certain birthmarks) that are generally unfavorable but aren't that significant and don't warrant medicine, longterm intervention, or much curiosity in general) but to a great extent cultural concerns about the left hand are less about lefthandedness and more about what you do with the hand. The left hand tends to be the unlucky one in general. A left handed person may be forced or compelled to use their right hand for some actions they would otherwise use their dominant hand for, but not for Everything, or even most things.

The biggest thing by far is that eating/drinking and Especially distributing food with the left hand is considered bad etiquette, given typical social meal setups where a group of people will be sharing from a central dish divided by hand. Most people wash themselves using their non-dominant hand after using the bathroom, and right handed people are the majority so this tends to be assumed as the default. So the left hand is kinda the Poop Hand, which is at least part of what's involved in right-handed food etiquette (though it's the whole body that's unclean after using the bathroom until the hands have been rinsed. The Yucky Hand is not understood to be intrinsically more unclean than the right, and if anything it might actually be the Physically cleaner hand on average since many people may pay more attention to the hygiene of the hand they clean themselves with, but a lot of people think its outright gross to eat with it regardless). Because it's just bad manners and nothing worse, most people wouldn't raise a stink about someone who has no right hand distributing food with their left, though some may reflexively think it's kinda nasty.

Priests (who have much more strictly regimented behavior than laymen) are mostly not supposed to complete any ritual task lefthanded, and children being educated by a priesthood will likely be forced to learn All tasks righthanded (if they don't do so naturally), which is the only context in which attempted conversion is the default. This is largely something that's not thought about much beyond "it's what you do", but if you asked a priest why they can't do their tasks left handed their answer is probably going to be "it's unlucky", and if asked why they insist their acolytes who favor their left hand use the right instead while doing non-ritual tasks like learning to write, etc, the answer will probably be "to get them in the habit". A lot of people will avoid accomplishing chance-related tasks with the left hand due to the unluckiness (this is mostly in the context of playing games and gambling). Pointing at things with the left hand is also considered unlucky (transferring bad luck to the target of the point) and therefore very rude and potentially harmful, though one-finger pointing at things + Especially at people in general is aggressive and mostly avoided (the default polite 'look at that' gesture is extending the hand with the four fingers pointed together) and there's some hardline taboos for things you shouldn't point to at all.

On the other end of things, there's a notion that left handed people are better sword and spear fighters, which is only true to the extent that someone used to drilling with combatants carrying their weapon in the right hand and shield in the left can be thrown off by encountering the opposite, though the advantage this would confer against an experienced combatant will be minimal, if any. There are also two key apotropaic gestures against evil, one which averts external harm and one which dispels internal harm, and the dispelling gesture is sometimes thought of as more potent when done with the left hand.

[serpentface]

I’ll be doing artfight again this year you can find me here @ aurochs

Art Fight

An art gifting game

[serpentface]

I’ll be doing artfight again this year you can find me here @ aurochs

Art Fight

An art gifting game

[serpentface]

Chisut Susit ant farmer making his rounds collecting eggs and larvae. On the rainy face of the Cynozepali mountain range, domestic caviar ants are farmed on elaborate terrace networks that must be engineered to prevent flooding of the colonies, and to sustain other agricultural ventures in between the ant nests.

Terrace ant farms (and most domestic ant farms in general) are partly hollow readymade structures built for a colony to establish itself in, with these ones specifically being made with brick and clay and built into the side of a terrace wall, with sealable/removable chambers made with hollowed out tubes of bamboo. For smaller scale day to day harvests, these chambers are minimally disturbed by using a narrow crook to selectively scoop eggs and larvae into a basket. The terrace space between the nests is sometimes managed to grow the plants favored by the ants (who harvest them to grow the fungus they feed on) in some setups, though in others the space is utilized for wheat or other qilik-focused crops while ant-fungus food is brought to the domestic colonies from external sources.

Caviar ants and qilik have an ancient, partly co-evolutionary partnership, with active ant farming being likely the oldest settled agricultural practice in this world, and the ants have accompanied qilik almost everywhere they dispersed throughout the tropics and subtropics (though not to the temperate and polar southern extent of the qilik range of settlement, where the ants can't survive the winter). The eggs and larvae provide the staple protein for a significant majority of agrarian qilik societies. Chisut Susit mythology holds that early people stole their staple grain of wheat from Heaven but only learned how to grow it by watching the ant livestock of an agricultural deity collect, plant, tend, and harvest the grain, much like mundane ants collect certain leaves and grasses for their fungus and tend to their crop to feed themselves. The ants have these associations with wheat specifically by way of them having very little interest in collecting it for fungus food, if properly managed. This allows for ant and wheat agriculture to occur in immediate proximity, with the ants even assisting in weeding via marked preference for leafed, weedy plant species over grasses, though such dual management is an extremely complex practice and requires substantial labor and alertness to the conditions of each colony.

These ants produce colonies with potentially dozens of queens apiece and show reduced hostility towards ants of other colonies, allowing for massive egg production in concentrated settings provided that the colonies have sufficient resources for comfort. Their queens and drones are flightless and propagation requires the intervention of handlers, and feral colonies usually cannot harvest enough plant material for their own fungus agriculture needed to sustain the sheer amount of ants that hatch without anyone to harvest their eggs, but a successfully established feral colony can cause small scale ecological devastation before it collapses.

---

Qilik are adapted to using both their mouths and hands as manipulating limbs. Most tasks requiring forward-facing flexibility above the shoulder level are much better accomplished with the mouth, which has no teeth in the front and reduced/probably vestigial dentition in the back, as well as a lobed, muscular tongue that can provide an effective and fairly dexterous grip when used in tandem with the jaws.

Naked.

[serpentface]

Any advice for someone who wants to do their own setting in the bronze age? (Hope this isn't a silly question)

-Remember that technological ages are ways to describe regional tool use forms rather than a strict linear evolution of improvements. When we refer to "the bronze age" broadly, what's being talked about is a technological period in parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa in which bronze was the dominant material for tool production. Not everywhere with access to bronze metallurgy had a discrete 'bronze age' where this metal dominated toolmaking, and not just because they had something 'better' introduced before that could occur. A region's technology adapts to what resources are available (natively or by trade) and its geography, among other things.

I say this because Eurocentric looks upon history tend to focus first on the technological and political achievements of West Asian civilizations that laid the groundwork for European history as we know it, and then on European history as we know it, and so a lot of people are taught this very linear model of technological advancement, often with an underlying tone of an almost predestined arc of greatness. Stone age -> Copper Age -> Bronze Age -> Iron Age -> Dark Ages -> Renaissance -> Modernity. This is not some inevitable trajectory, this is the trajectory of one part of the world. There are Reasons metal use developments go in the copper->bronze->iron order in places where all three metals had dominant historical use. Copper has a lower melting point than iron, is abundant, and is much more durable than metals like gold or silver, and neolithic era kilns were entirely adequate for making copper tools, but not iron. So we have a "copper age" where metal tools are in demand. Bronze working comes as a development from copperworking, as bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, both of which have fairly low melting points. It requires specialized knowledge and techniques (with the tin and copper being handled separately before forging), so bronze metallurgy is not simply an immediate expansion of copperworking. This is seized upon where metal tools are in demand because bronze is much sturdier than copper, and so it becomes dominant and we have a 'bronze age'. Terrestrial iron is extremely abundant but must be smelted before use, and smelting it requires substantially higher temperatures than copper, tin, or bronze. So this required changes in forge technology that could generate hotter fires (in addition to techniques like introducing carbon to the process and ability to remove impurities) in order for ferrous metallurgy to take hold.

Basically what I'm saying is it's diminishingly unlikely that a society is able to create iron tools before it's able to create bronze tools (unless this technology and all requisite knowledge to use it was introduced from elsewhere, or unless you have magic in your setting that can generate really really hot fires. OR unless we're talking about the cold forging of meteoric iron, which is already in a workable state (unlike terrestrial iron which must be smelted from ore) and was used for a few thousand years before anyone started smelting iron). These processes all developed out of building on each other and knowledge being disseminated. But that doesn't Mean these technologies will naturally and inevitably come one after another. Andean and later Mesoamerican civilizations utilized both copper-tin and copper-arsenic bronze alloys and used this bronze for both utilitarian and artistic goods, but these bronze tools (as well as copper ones) were used alongside stone tools, and bronze tools did not have the overwhelming impact there that they did in parts of Eurasia (unfortunately this is an area of relatively limited easily accessible scholarship so I can't just off the cuff list any Specific hypotheses on why, beyond "the Americas and Eurasia had very different geographical and political and material circumstances, Eurasian styles of war and transportation created unique demands to specialize in metal tools for use in weapons/armor/vehicles/etc and fostered a dependency in them via competition with similar societies, while navigating the Andean and Mesoamerican political environments/systems of transport/warfare simply did not necessitate specialization in metal tools, and instead demanded a greater variety of material technologies be at play for utilitarian toolmaking"). Development of iron smelting did not occur in the precolonial Americas whatsoever, but iron from the Innaanganeq meteorite was used in cold forging and traded across great distances by the Thule people and their descendants for centuries. There is no linear "advancement", there is just what resources are available, what a society's needs are to survive/thrive in a specific geographical/social/political environment, where and how trade networks can be structured, and how local, regional, continental, and global history plays out.

This wikipedia map is good to look at. This is the overall division of subsistence/society types in 2000 BCE, in the midst of what was broadly the Eurasian Bronze Age.

Note that state societies are relatively few and far between, and are a tiny minority of societies in the world, and not all of them were utilizing bronze tools at this time (and on the other end, the area of bronze working comprises all sorts of societies who are in interaction by geographic proximity and trade, or in a couple of places in east and southeast Asia where the practice may have developed independently by this time). Keep in mind that your whole world is not going to be in its "bronze age" and there's going to be lots of other stuff going on, and many of your bronze age societies are going to have direct contact and trade with non-bronze working societies.

BUT ANYWAY:

Unless you're making a direct earth analogue with direct analogues to real life civilizations, your focus should first be on the material circumstances that facilitate mass creation and utilization bronze tools. You should have at least a basic map (and I think you should always have at least a basic map for large scale worldbuilding, or at the very least know where the things you're talking about exist in relation to the equator), and you should have an idea of where tin and copper ores are present on that map.

-If a major part of your setting is specialized into bronze toolmaking and is in a 'bronze age', that means people in this area have access to both copper and tin. And tin is a rare mineral so this means that there's long distance trade networks supplying tin to a large area of bronzeworking societies. Large, robust trade networks of that kind are generally going to have large, robust societies with an outsized hand in facilitating them, though a full spectrum of settled and some nomadic societies will contribute to this trade system. Think about where in the world bronzeworking techniques were first developed independently, and have a map in mind to figure out how this technology would have spread.

Here's a map I pulled from wikipedia of diffusion of bronze metallurgy, a a map that details tin deposits in more detail, and a map of possible tin trade routes

[source for the second map, I would read the whole article]

You can see what a long distance tin would have to be moved, and how the locations convenient for long distance sea trade become hubs for their zone of interaction. You need to have this sort of thing in mind when crafting your setting- where can tin be mined? What routes would the tin trade take? This goes for any other metal as well (and also should be kept in mind for any resource spread or obtained through trade in general), but copper is much more abundant and so its sources will not have as dramatic a sway on how bronze metallurgy disseminates and how bronze age societies structure their trade.

This sets up other questions to take into consideration. A place that's a convenient trading hub for getting tin to societies that demand it may develop an outsized sway on its zone of interaction, and be highly contested, or important for major civilizations to bring under their control or political influence/allegiance.

Trade is always easiest by water. No matter how well developed road infrastructure is in a given place, goods are going to be more difficult to transport (and therefore expensive) if they have to be moved mostly or entirely overland (except for like, short distances) rather than mostly or entirely over rivers and seas. In places on the far fringes of your Bronze Age region where tin imports would have to be moved a long distance purely on land, bronze goods may be limited to special purposes or to upper classes, with the average person using stone tools (class stratification may impose this to varying degrees on places with better access to tin as well). Large areas where trade has to occur completely over land will also slow the spread of new technologies (and cultural transmission in general), and in our history, this speed of transmission further depended on available domestic animals. Horses monumentally shaped human society wherever they were in use as domesticates, in some part because they facilitated relatively rapid movements of People and Ideas and Things over very long distances on land (camels play a similar or overlapping role in some places) (horses were also huuuuge for warfare but I digress). Places without pack/cart/mount animals also had robust land trade systems that moved goods over vast distances, but moving goods overland purely by human labor imposes different constraints on trade than movement supported by beasts of burden (and does open up some different opportunities- a human can't carry nearly as much as a horse, but they're smarter than the horse and can navigate more types of terrain and don't eat as much).

For your big states with outsized regional power, they need to be placed appropriately. Every state society within these periods fell within the subtropics or tropics with their long growing seasons, and in places suited for large scale settled agriculture, meaning with dependable access to fresh water one way or another (mostly by major rivers that facilitated large scale irrigation). The civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt fell within largely arid climates, but their agrarian cores were built up along rivers with huge fertile floodplains, and beyond that developed and utilized irrigation technology to better capitalize on their water sources. This allows for huge sedentary populations to be supported, which in turn can support the existence of complex states, which in turn help facilitate control over trade via centralized power/bureaucracy to manage it, large bodies of laborers to extract, produce, and move trade goods, military to protect assets and expand sphere of influence via conquest or threat of conquest, etc. Minoan civilization existed on an island and there's nothing particularly outstanding about its agricultural viability, but its prime location as a trade hub seems to be what facilitated its power, appearing to dominate trade in much of the Mediterranean at its peak. They appear to have exported luxury/specialty goods and moved tin and other key trade goods along and benefit in turn from resources that were limited on the island of Crete, which otherwise may not have been able to sustain a state society of this scope. Capitalizing on this system made them very powerful for a time (though unfortunately we haven't decoded their language, and so have very little definitive understanding of their government and how it interacted with trade). You should be thinking about stuff like that where you're placing some of your major players.

I'm ultimately assuming you want a setting that more or less resembles the Eurasian bronze age, in terms of the scope of societies, the number of people in interaction, etc, and the Mediterranean sea was crucial to the development of that technological period. Seafarers in this overall period didn't have the ability to make journeys across entire oceans, which requires a whole litany of achievements and cultural knowledge in navigation practices and sailing technology (large boats carrying goods around the open Mediterranean in the bronze age required teams of rowers). So having this sort of large but (relatively) narrow sea that connects to the open ocean, spans a substantial range, and has plenty of islands as stopping points is fundamental to how this period was able to play out. Of course you can also take entirely different routes and have a large period in its 'bronze age' that spread its technology primarily along oceanic coasts, secondarily along large rivers, and more slowly over land, but that's going to look very different (and odds are, is going to make this bronzeworking region smaller due to having less avenues to move tin around quickly and cheaply).

As usual the best way to do it is to research the bronze age(s) of real life, specific bronze age societies, etc to see how these ideas work in action. And I think the best way to use real life research for a constructed setting is to pay the most attention to how things interconnect, because that's ultimately what's going to give you the tools to make something feasible without it being a direct copy of real life. When you learn about a material, you ask questions like "where does it come from? who's extracting it? who's moving it over long distances? who's facilitating that movement?". ETC. Every answered question gives you more questions and you could go down this road for an eternity without running out of things to ask, but getting used to thinking and making connections like that is vital.

It is Impossible as a singular author to have a region the size of the one in that trade map and every single one of its moving parts worked out (much less An Entire World). You could spend your entire life just fleshing out every possible aspect of a bronze age trade power civilization on an island the size of Crete. But just knowing the kinds of questions you have to be asking and developing an intuition for how things interconnect is half the battle.

[thefibrarchaeologist]

Bear in mind that trade also means cultural contact, exchanges of ideas, that sort of thing. It also requires ressources, so a lot of the goods traded - beides metal - will be luxury goods aimed at that sector. (This is how you end up with both Baltic amber and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan in Myceneaen Greece. Also glass! And ivory, and ostrich eggs).

It can also mean the introduction of new species and diseases. I recall something about rats being introduced in the Late Bronze Age from India (?) Don't quote me in that, but I think it came up in the context of the potential role of epidemics in the Bronze Age collapse and the possibility that the plague was one of them (not verfied, afaik). Chickens arrive from that region right around or shortly after the end of the Bronze Age.

[serpentface]

tags from @doloneia

[serpentface]

Any advice for someone who wants to do their own setting in the bronze age? (Hope this isn't a silly question)

-Remember that technological ages are ways to describe regional tool use forms rather than a strict linear evolution of improvements. When we refer to "the bronze age" broadly, what's being talked about is a technological period in parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa in which bronze was the dominant material for tool production. Not everywhere with access to bronze metallurgy had a discrete 'bronze age' where this metal dominated toolmaking, and not just because they had something 'better' introduced before that could occur. A region's technology adapts to what resources are available (natively or by trade) and its geography, among other things.

I say this because Eurocentric looks upon history tend to focus first on the technological and political achievements of West Asian civilizations that laid the groundwork for European history as we know it, and then on European history as we know it, and so a lot of people are taught this very linear model of technological advancement, often with an underlying tone of an almost predestined arc of greatness. Stone age -> Copper Age -> Bronze Age -> Iron Age -> Dark Ages -> Renaissance -> Modernity. This is not some inevitable trajectory, this is the trajectory of one part of the world. There are Reasons metal use developments go in the copper->bronze->iron order in places where all three metals had dominant historical use. Copper has a lower melting point than iron, is abundant, and is less malleable and better for tool use than metals like gold or silver, and neolithic era kilns were entirely adequate for making copper tools, but not iron. So we have a "copper age" where metal tools are in demand. Bronze working comes as a development from copperworking, as bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, both of which have fairly low melting points. It requires specialized knowledge and techniques (with the tin and copper being handled separately before forging), so bronze metallurgy is not simply an immediate expansion of copperworking. This is seized upon where metal tools are in demand because bronze is much sturdier than copper, and so it becomes dominant and we have a 'bronze age'. Terrestrial iron is extremely abundant but must be smelted before use, and smelting it requires substantially higher temperatures than copper, tin, or bronze do to smelt/work. So this required changes in forge technology that could generate hotter fires (in addition to techniques like introducing carbon to the process and ability to remove impurities) in order for ferrous metallurgy to take hold.

Basically what I'm saying is it's diminishingly unlikely that a society is able to create iron tools before it's able to create bronze tools (unless this technology and all requisite knowledge to use it was introduced from elsewhere, or unless you have magic in your setting that can generate really really hot fires. OR unless we're talking about the cold forging of meteoric iron, which is already in a workable state (unlike terrestrial iron which must be smelted from ore) and was used for a few thousand years before anyone started smelting iron). These processes all developed out of building on each other and knowledge being disseminated. But that doesn't Mean these technologies will naturally and inevitably come one after another. Andean and later Mesoamerican civilizations utilized both copper-tin and copper-arsenic bronze alloys and used this bronze for both utilitarian and artistic goods, but these bronze tools (as well as copper ones) were used alongside stone tools, and bronze tools did not have the overwhelming impact there that they did in parts of Eurasia (unfortunately this is an area of relatively limited easily accessible scholarship so I can't just off the cuff list any Specific hypotheses on why, beyond "the Americas and Eurasia had very different geographical and political and material circumstances, Eurasian styles of war and transportation created unique demands to specialize in metal tools for use in weapons/armor/vehicles/etc and fostered a dependency in them via competition with similar societies, while navigating the Andean and Mesoamerican political environments/systems of transport/warfare simply did not necessitate specialization in metal tools, and instead demanded a greater variety of material technologies be at play for utilitarian toolmaking"). Development of iron smelting did not occur in the precolonial Americas whatsoever, but iron from the Innaanganeq meteorite was used in cold forging and traded across great distances by the Thule people and their descendants for centuries. There is no linear "advancement", there is just what resources are available, what a society's needs are to survive/thrive in a specific geographical/social/political environment, where and how trade networks can be structured, and how local, regional, continental, and global history plays out.

This wikipedia map is good to look at. This is the overall division of subsistence/society types in 2000 BCE, in the midst of what was broadly the Eurasian Bronze Age.

Note that state societies are relatively few and far between, and are a tiny minority of societies in the world, and not all of them were utilizing bronze tools at this time (and on the other end, the area of bronze working comprises all sorts of societies who are in interaction by geographic proximity and trade, or in a couple of places in east and southeast Asia where the practice may have developed independently by this time). Keep in mind that your whole world is not going to be in its "bronze age" and there's going to be lots of other stuff going on, and many of your bronze age societies are going to have direct contact and trade with non-bronze working societies.

BUT ANYWAY:

Unless you're making a direct earth analogue with direct analogues to real life civilizations, your focus should first be on the material circumstances that facilitate mass creation and utilization bronze tools. You should have at least a basic map (and I think you should always have at least a basic map for large scale worldbuilding, or at the very least know where the things you're talking about exist in relation to the equator), and you should have an idea of where tin and copper ores are present on that map.

-If a major part of your setting is specialized into bronze toolmaking and is in a 'bronze age', that means people in this area have access to both copper and tin. And tin deposits are rare so this means that there's long distance trade networks supplying tin to a large area of bronzeworking societies. Large, robust trade networks of that kind are generally going to have large, robust societies with an outsized hand in facilitating them, though a full spectrum of settled and some nomadic societies will contribute to this trade system. Think about where in the world bronzeworking techniques were first developed independently, and have a map in mind to figure out how this technology would have spread.

Here's a map I pulled from wikipedia of diffusion of bronze metallurgy, a a map that details tin deposits in more detail, and a map of possible tin trade routes

[source for the second map, I would read the whole article]

You can see what a long distance tin would have to be moved, and how the locations convenient for long distance sea trade become hubs for their zone of interaction. You need to have this sort of thing in mind when crafting your setting- where can tin be mined? What routes would the tin trade take? This goes for any other metal as well (and also should be kept in mind for any resource spread or obtained through trade in general), but copper is much more abundant and so its sources will not have as dramatic a sway on how bronze metallurgy disseminates and how bronze age societies structure their trade.

This sets up other questions to take into consideration. A place that's a convenient trading hub for getting tin to societies that demand it may develop an outsized sway on its zone of interaction, and be highly contested, or important for major civilizations to bring under their control or political influence/allegiance.

Trade is always easiest by water. No matter how well developed road infrastructure is in a given place, goods are going to be more difficult to transport (and therefore expensive) if they have to be moved mostly or entirely overland (except for like, short distances) rather than mostly or entirely over rivers and seas. In places on the far fringes of your Bronze Age region where tin imports would have to be moved a long distance purely on land, bronze goods may be limited to special purposes or to upper classes, with the average person using stone tools (class stratification may impose this to varying degrees on places with better access to tin as well). Large areas where trade has to occur completely over land will also slow the spread of new technologies (and cultural transmission in general), and in our history, this speed of transmission further depended on available domestic animals. Horses monumentally shaped human society wherever they were in use as domesticates, in some part because they facilitated relatively rapid movements of People and Ideas and Things over very long distances on land (camels play a similar or overlapping role in some places) (horses were also huuuuge for warfare but I digress). Places without pack/cart/mount animals also had robust land trade systems that moved goods over vast distances, but moving goods overland purely by human labor imposes different constraints on trade than movement supported by beasts of burden (and does open up some different opportunities- a human can't carry nearly as much as a horse, but they're smarter than the horse and can navigate more types of terrain and don't eat as much).

For your big states with outsized regional power, they need to be placed appropriately. Every state society within these periods fell within the subtropics or tropics with their long growing seasons, and in places suited for large scale settled agriculture, meaning with dependable access to fresh water one way or another (mostly by major rivers that facilitated large scale irrigation). The civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt fell within largely arid climates, but their agrarian cores were built up along rivers with huge fertile floodplains, and beyond that developed and utilized irrigation technology to better capitalize on their water sources. This allows for huge sedentary populations to be supported, which in turn can support the existence of complex states, which in turn help facilitate control over trade via centralized power/bureaucracy to manage it, large bodies of laborers to extract, produce, and move trade goods, military to protect assets and expand sphere of influence via conquest or threat of conquest, etc. Minoan civilization existed on an island and there's nothing particularly outstanding about its agricultural viability, but its prime location as a trade hub seems to be what facilitated its power, appearing to dominate trade in much of the Mediterranean at its peak. They appear to have exported luxury/specialty goods and moved tin and other key trade goods along and benefit in turn from resources that were limited on the island of Crete, which otherwise may not have been able to sustain a state society of this scope. Capitalizing on this system made them very powerful for a time (though unfortunately we haven't decoded their language, and so have very little definitive understanding of their government and how it interacted with trade). You should be thinking about stuff like that where you're placing some of your major players.

I'm ultimately assuming you want a setting that more or less resembles the Eurasian bronze age, in terms of the scope of societies, the number of people in interaction, etc, and the Mediterranean sea was crucial to the development of that technological period. Seafarers in this overall period didn't have the ability to make journeys across entire oceans, which requires a whole litany of achievements and cultural knowledge in navigation practices and sailing technology (large boats carrying goods around the open Mediterranean in the bronze age required teams of rowers). So having this sort of large but (relatively) narrow sea that connects to the open ocean, spans a substantial range, and has plenty of islands as stopping points is fundamental to how this period was able to play out. Of course you can also take entirely different routes and have a large period in its 'bronze age' that spread its technology primarily along oceanic coasts, secondarily along large rivers, and more slowly over land, but that's going to look very different (and odds are, is going to make this bronzeworking region smaller due to having less avenues to move tin around quickly and cheaply).

As usual the best way to do it is to research the bronze age(s) of real life, specific bronze age societies, etc to see how these ideas work in action. And I think the best way to use real life research for a constructed setting is to pay the most attention to how things interconnect, because that's ultimately what's going to give you the tools to make something feasible without it being a direct copy of real life. When you learn about a material, you ask questions like "where does it come from? who's extracting it? who's moving it over long distances? who's facilitating that movement?". ETC. Every answered question gives you more questions and you could go down this road for an eternity without running out of things to ask, but getting used to thinking and making connections like that is vital.

It is Impossible as a singular author to have a region the size of the one in that trade map and every single one of its moving parts worked out (much less An Entire World). You could spend your entire life just fleshing out every possible aspect of a bronze age trade power civilization on an island the size of Crete. But just knowing the kinds of questions you have to be asking and developing an intuition for how things interconnect is half the battle.

[serpentface]

I have to know: what was wrong with the skull of the body taken from three deer cave??

[being a jackass] What do YOU think.............

[serpentface]

Does Janeys have "good" interactions with his mother?

Yeah this is someone he lived with for the majority of his life and was still in routine contact with for the 9 year gap where they weren't living in the same building, so he had plenty of neutral and positive interactions over the years. Like he'd be able to remember her telling stories to him and Faisa as little kids, and have vague memories of her almost constantly being there for him when he spent the age of 2-6 routinely ill with everyone thinking he was going to die. She was a good embroiderer and she routinely made clothing for him; gazelles have been his favorite animal since he was a child and she made him a cape with that in mind as a gift when he became an adult (the trim is lined with a pattern of running gazelles). Her last strictly Good interaction with him was congratulating him for becoming an officer and expressing that she was proud of him. Which was within a few months of her death but Not the note they left things on, so it probably wouldn't even come to mind if he was asked but it did happen.

And then there'd be kind of Mixed Bag situations where he'd have a really horrible interaction with her, but she'd be really distressed and feel awful by the end of it and try to soften the blow by expressing how much she loved him. Which for one stretch of his life (about the age of 14-20) was pretty much the Only context she would express that. And in the moment that was often "good" and desperately needed reassurance. But in retrospect, depending on how he feels about her in a given moment, he thinks she was either lying because she knew that would break him down and prevent him from standing up to her, or thinks that it was true and she was doing her best and everything was really just his fault, with little in between.

Or another Mixed Bag is that she spent her last 3.5 years alive living in Jaenys' household after Saijen died, and she was Weird about her heavily suspected bastard grandchildren and had at one point had a full breakdown about him naming one of them after her, but after a while kinda stopped giving a shit (kind of like "its so over my line is dead this is all I've got for real now", she stopped caring as much about a lot of things) and started wanting to be involved with them, and she was like. A perfectly good grandmother to them. Erubi and Lifya jr will grow up having nothing but positive memories of her, besides some strictness and disciplinarianism that's culturally typical of any grandparent, and not even in a very pronounced way. (Lifya jr probably won't remember her at all because she is a little over 3 years old at the time of Lifya's death but ykwim). The way she treated them reminded Jaenys of how his own paternal grandmother Erubi was to him, and his grandmother was his favorite person in his household by far. By that point in his life he had developed much more of a spine towards her and was more willing to stand up to her, and this was completely disarming. So like he'd see her letting his kids off for something that would have gotten him or Couya beat and be like "OH SO IT'S FINE NOW?" and/or "YOU'RE JUST BEING EASY ON THEM TO GET UNDER MY SKIN" etc etc and she'd be like "WHY DO YOU TREAT ME LIKE A MONSTER" and it was like this off and on until she died. But he does Care about his kids and there's at least some part of him glad they did have that grandmother figure in their lives for a time, and there would be times where they're hanging out with Grandma while he's talking to her about current news and everything's so normal. He's a father and his own mother is taking care of his kids like most grandmothers do and it's normal.

[serpentface]

Three Deer Cave ghost story

[Story from Brakul about a story his grandfather once told him]

This happened when my grandfather was a little boy. His village was haunted by a ghost a young man brought out from the Three Deer Cave.

It’s a cave hidden in a pine grove at the base of the White Cliffs, and it's known to be a wildfolk camp. It's best to give the whole place a wide berth in the winter when they're sheltering in the cave, but they move up to the forests in the summer and so it's safe to approach then. You really shouldn't trespass into it, because they'll know, but you can look. And if you look into the entrance when the sunrise is lighting it up, the tunnel veers hard right and you can see a beautiful old drawing of three deer running along the wall, hence the name. Wildfolk sorcerers draw their deer to mark their winter camps and pray for the health of their herds, just like our sorcerers draw cattle and horses on our boundary stones to do pretty much the same thing. I don’t know why the wildfolk only draw underground though. You’d have to ask someone else.

When I was a young man, boys my age would sometimes dare each other to go inside Three Deer Cave in the summer to prove their bravery or whatever. It’s a stupid thing young men do because they’re stupid. I never went in because I don’t mess around with that kind of stuff. But a lot of youths have gone far into the cave, and they all say that there’s more drawings of deer deeper inside, and art of some other animals, and that no one is sure how deep the cave actually goes.

And apparently that sort of nonsense was also happening in my grandfather’s day. There was a youth named Ibar, just barely a man, whose friends had dared him to go inside. The challenge was that Ibar would reach the big gallery and see what was carved on the large rock by the gallery entrance, and then bring that information back as proof that he had completed his task. All the boys who had finished the dare apparently kept the carving on that rock a secret back then, because it made them an elite group with special knowledge of the cave, I guess. But it's well known now that it's just a drawing of three men who are running with spears and have erections. I think one of the boys probably drew it and just lied about it being there before he came.

Anyway, Ibar went into Three Deer Cave wearing nothing but his summer kilt and mantle, and carrying nothing but an oil lamp to light the way. He walked for a long time, guided only by his little lamplight. It was slow going, but he eventually found his way to the fork and turned right, which led him down a passage into the open gallery where the wildfolk make their winter camp. He didn't see any sign of them, besides their drawings and some old deer bones here and there. Ibar had seen the erection drawing as required, and was probably nervous about being in there too long, and so he turned around to leave in a hurry. It was then that he stumbled on a rock and dropped his lamp, which shattered to pieces on the ground.

Everything became completely dark. He held up his hand in front of his face and saw nothing. He closed his eyes and it looked no different from when they were open. This was a true darkness that would make a cloudy, moonless night seem like a clear summer noon by comparison. And with the light gone, the silence also seemed so much heavier. He could hear every beat of his heart and the rush of his blood, each breath, every shift of his clothing, and the sound of his walking feet, and all these things seemed so loud against the silence pressing in around him. He felt as if he could have been standing on a wide open plain or in a space only slightly larger than his body, and he wouldn't have known the difference. He had never yet known anything so horrifying as this.

Though Ibar was in this predicament for a stupid reason, he wasn't completely stupid, and he recovered from his fear enough to think of how to get back out. He walked to his left until he felt a wall, and then started heading back the way he came. He had only taken one fork in the path, and there were no other passages large enough to just walk right through without knowing, so he should've been able to find his way out as long as he kept in contact with the wall.

He walked for what felt like ages, all the while second guessing whether he actually was heading the right way, or if he was just walking himself deeper and deeper beneath the earth, never to see the sun again. It was hard to navigate without light, and he tripped on rocks or little ledges and fell into the mud a few times. He was getting very tired, cold, and sore.

Suddenly, up ahead, he saw something just a little lighter than the blackness around him, and he started walking faster. He thought maybe this was distant daylight? But soon he realized it was not light from the outside. It was a young man about Ibar's age, dressed in a cape and loincloth and holding a little oil lamp, and he was walking right towards him. Ibar was so glad to see another person! He called out “hey!” and took a few steps to meet him, thinking it was a boy from the village coming to get him. But then Ibar stopped, and he became very silent, because he realized the youth’s lamp had no fire, and the illumination of his body came from nothing and shone nowhere else. The youth looked as if he were lit up by bright moonlight, such that it was hard to be sure of any color on his body or clothing, but everything around him was still completely dark. It was as if he was moving towards Ibar through a black void, like the whole world was empty and they were the only two things in it. The sight of him made Ibar dizzy, as if he could not tell which way was up or down. He thought maybe this is a young wildman using magic to frighten him? But that couldn't be, because the youth was taller than a wildman was supposed to be, and he was wearing normal clothes.

Ibar soon realized that the unearthly youth was not only lit by nothing, but he also made no sound. He should have been able to hear the young man's footsteps quite clearly, but all Ibar could hear was his own racing heartbeat and heavy breathing, even as the youth got closer and closer. He was not doing anything threatening, and in fact he didn't even seem to be looking at Ibar at all, but suddenly Ibar was more scared than he ever had been in his life. When the youth was close enough that his face was visible, Ibar wanted nothing more than to run away as fast as he could, into the deepest bowels of the cave, anything to get away from the ghostly youth. He only just managed to resist his terror enough to flatten himself against the wall instead.

Ibar stayed frozen in place. He knew the ghost was beside him now. He knew that if he turned his head he would see the ghost’s face inches away, looking right back at him, and that nothing in the world could be worse than that sight. So he stayed very still and sobbed and prayed for his safety.

He was not sure how long he stayed there, but eventually he realized he was shivering very hard in the cold cave air. He needed to keep moving if he was going to live. So Ibar pulled himself away from the wall but kept his eyes shut tight, and continued feeling his way forward. After a while, he dared to open his eyes, and the ghost was nowhere to be seen amid the blackness.

It took him a long time walking along the wall, but eventually Ibar saw light ahead of him, real light. It was the sunrise! He had been gone for most of a day and an entire night, but he didn't even think about that. He had never been so glad to see the sun.

He walked down towards the village, and everyone was so relieved to see him. They all thought he had gone missing and a bunch of people were out looking for him, and his dickhead friends hadn't told anyone he was in the cave because they were afraid of getting in trouble for daring him to go in there. And they did get in trouble. That was a whole other thing. But anyway, everyone was happy to see Ibar, and his family brought him home and got him cleaned up. He was in bad shape. His whole body was covered in mud and he had bleeding scrapes on his hands and knees. One of his sandals was missing, and his kilt had been ripped by sharp rocks. He was also very disoriented, clearly in the early stages of cold sickness, but he got better after huddling with his brothers by the fire and drinking hot wine.

He told his family everything I just told you. It made everyone nervous, but they just did a simple cleansing to be safe and then tried to laugh it off. No one had ever heard of anyone dying in Three Deer Cave, and dozens of boys had been in and out of there without ever encountering a ghost. Total darkness, fear, and cold sickness can fool the eyes. And even if the apparition was real, it still could've been a wildman's trick, and nothing more serious than a nasty prank since Ibar had been allowed to leave mostly unscathed. People started joking that they'd tell their children that it was a ghost of a boy who had died doing the dare in years past, since the threat of offending the wildfolk wasn't enough to dissuade young men from going in there already. This whole episode was forgotten, for the moment.

But all was not well. Ibar soon became ill with nausea and fits, and he started talking about seeing the ghost around the village at night. He only got worse and worse. He always knew the ghost was somewhere very, very close by, and he became so afraid that he would not leave his home. But he wasn’t even safe there. Sometimes, he would wake up and cry out in terror, because he had seen the ghost peeking in at him through his window, or even inside the home, standing over where he slept. My grandfather’s home was close to Ibar’s, and he could hear the screaming and crying late at night.

It was obvious he was possessed, and now everyone was taking this very, very seriously. Ibar's parents got one of our sorcerers to exorcise him, and that seemed to have worked, because Ibar's fits stopped and he could sleep soundly through the night. But the possession had done too much damage already. Ibar claimed the ghost was still nearby, though he did not see it anymore, and he never quite regained his strength. He eventually fell sick with a fever and died that winter.

And then, after Ibar's funeral, other people started seeing the Three Deer Cave ghost. My grandfather never did, but his older cousin saw the ghost one time while pissing outside at night, and so did a bunch of other people. Several of our tribe’s sorcerers convened and attempted to banish the ghost, but he was attached very, very strongly now, and nothing they did could drive him away. He was much too old and too powerful. They figured out that the ghost wasn’t one of our people, but probably one of the old people who built the mounds. He died after getting lost in the cave many, many centuries ago, and maybe he thought Ibar was his lost body, or one of his own tribe, and followed him home? And now he wouldn’t leave.

Ibar had gotten the worst of it, but the ghost hurt other people too. One woman who saw him miscarried that very same night, and a little boy who saw him started having fits. Everyone put down strong protections at every entrance of their homes, and started staying indoors all night, but there was usually at least one person who saw him over the course of any given night. He would be seen moving past a window, or he would stand outside of people's doorways, with his feet visible through the gap under the screen. Eventually, the haunting was so bad that some people were talking about abandoning the village.

This was when they brought out the oldest sorcerer in our tribe, who was effectively retired and but still spry enough to do work when she had to. She decided there was nothing to be done but to try and find the ghost’s body, and that she would be the one to do it, since she’d taught her apprentices all she could and was ready to die now. So she went into Three Deer Cave with warm clothing, a shroud, a few torches, a pack of spare flint, and a very long rope to mark her way.

The old sorcerer was gone for almost the whole day, and everyone was afraid that she’d never come out again. But she did, early in the night. She was carrying the shroud, and there were some human bones in it. She looked unsettled and was shaking badly, but she would not tell anyone what she had seen. She only directed her apprentices to start collecting wood for a funeral pyre and to prepare a horse for divination. The sorcerers were able to find out which old mound the ghost’s kin were buried in, which was not too far from the cave, and so they had everyone bring the wood up near the mound to hold a funeral for him.

Everyone came out to help give the ghost his rites, if only to improve the chances that he would leave them all alone. A lot of people pitched in to give him some nice clothing and jewelry and other things that he needed, and the chieftain at the time even gave him some horses and a prize young cow. It was a very nice funeral fit for a chieftain's son, so hopefully the ghost would be satisfied and understand that we did the best we could even though we didn't share customs with his people. My grandfather had contributed by picking some snowdrops for the ghost, which he left on the pyre. He had seen the ghost's skull up close then, and he once told me that it had been very strange looking, but that he could no longer remember why he'd thought so. He just remembered looking at it and being unsettled by how wrong it looked, and that he was trying very hard to be brave and grownup about it.

They cremation went smoothly, and they fanned the fire hot enough to burn much of the bone away. The sorcerers put the ashes in an urn, and actually buried it right in the mound by adding more rocks to it, which freaked everyone out. My grandfather told me there had been a huge argument about whether or not they should've done that. But the mound people must have been happy to have their kin returned to them because they caused our people no trouble. And no one ever saw the Three Deer Cave ghost again after that.

[serpentface]

Heywhat the fuck is happening

(Kataliba Yanne in the midst of a formal apology for past slights after over a decade of mutual bad blood, due to the fact that they're now both officers of the same rank in the same unit and about to embark on the same major endeavor of the pilgrimage and he doesn't want to deal with any bullshit; Jaenys thrown the fuck off by all this and trying to decide whether he likes this guy now or wants him dead)

[serpentface]

What do you think Wardi society might look like in 2,000-ish years? Like, presuming things like widespread iron use (am I right in thinking it's mostly bronze used, in setting?) and something more in line with modern agricultural techniques, and et cetera. I guess, like, how would you imagine the setting to function in the "modern day", if the Wardin you're writing about is taken to be the "bronze age"

I don't have a real answer for this, for one thing this entire region IS broadly in an 'iron age' and the sub-Viper lands never had a discrete 'bronze age' (copperworking, along with bone/stoneworking for more disposable items like darts and arrowheads, was dominant for tool making at the time when ironworking and dependable access to tin imports were introduced by sustained contact with overseas ironworking societies, so if its history was being discussed through the limits of the technological age framework it could be said to have gone from a 'chalcolithic' straight to an 'iron age'). The metal tools, weapons, and armor you see in Wardin are mostly made with iron (exceptions mostly being ceremonial tools made with weaker metals), which is wayyyyy easier and cheaper to produce here than bronze because tin is incredibly scarce in this region (beyond its global scarcity in general) and it has to be imported from a very long distance overseas in the central portion of the inner seaway (or an even more expensive hybrid land-sea route/Extremely long sea route from Dain speaking peoples across the Viper and then way the fuck to the north), whereas there are major iron deposits within the bounds of Wardin and its tributaries.

And for another thing I haven't really paid much mind to the far future, so there's too many variables at play to give any statement that isn't just making stuff up on the spot. If this society's descendant culture(s) were colonized in the next 2000 years, or had some type of proselytizing world religion take hold there one way or other, the people who live in this same place might have a very different culture 2000 years on than if neither thing occurred (and it would be immeasurably different no matter what). I'm also not treating an eventual industrial revolution type technological leap in this setting as a given, and if it happens it won't be on an irl history timescale since this isn't an earth analogue (beyond being set in a cenozoic-type period in terms of climate and Most of the land life). For all I know a massive supervolcano could go off in 1200 years and the resulting volcanic winter will bottleneck the global population, long distance trade will collapse, and smaller mobile societies in warmer latitudes will survive and adapt better than formerly powerful settled agrarian ones Everywhere, and they'll determine the trajectory of the next couple thousand years.

I get what you're asking me which is ultimately more of a fun thought experiment of 'what would this society be like in a modern technological climate', but I've got an ultra-literal no fun allowed brain and like, all the traits of 'modern society' are built on a highly specific arc of history with highly specific actors. Everything really could have gone in a million other different directions in our own world, and this isn't even the same world.

As a concession I will say that I had a dream once where I was showing Jaenys an iphone and telling him what 'the future' was like by scrolling through photos of Breaking Bad characters and fetish maid outfits, and he was able to clock that the maid outfit wasn't actually typical everyday clothing, and got a little scared of Mike Ehrmantraut. This is the closest thing I have to an answer to this question.

[serpentface]

Young man in dedicated mengarijana vulture costume for a formalized two-bird dance performance.

This is a lay ceremonial dance performed on the summer solstice, which is the beginning of a martial holiday period wherein the state hosts the summer games and localized festivals are held. This dance is embroiled in solar veneration but not a part of any specific ritual- its performance is a matter of festivity, can be organized and participated in by anyone, and is largely about getting a large group of people amped up and singing together while watching a couple of guys dance as birds, with less formal group singing and dancing to follow.

The dance is performed by two men who take on the roles of a golden eagle and a white-caped vulture, both considered to be solar birds with the eagle embodying the growing sun (winter-summer solstice) and the vulture embodying the dying sun (summer-winter solstice). It tells a loose story where the men become their birds, an enemy is defeated, and they become men again. There's room for improvisation and humor on the dancers' parts, though some elements of the choreography are fairly static, and wholly serious performances by skilled dancers who can evoke birds of prey and look impressive while doing so are appreciated. They dance in a clockwise circle around each other while acting as men (first and last verses) and each have a solo dance during their highlight verse while acting as birds (in some variations, each dancer sings the other one's focus verse, while the lead singer performs the opening and closing verses). There's very often a drive for the men to outdo each other in their performance, and this dance is most exciting when it's a competition between two very skilled dancers. There's usually a consensus on whether the eagle or vulture "won". The only prop the dance strictly requires is for both men to be wearing their capes fastened at the neck, which are clasped at the corners and held down and out to the side to evoke wings during the bird parts. More formal performances (usually at festivals run by a wealthy patron) will include ornate purpose-made clothing for each dancer to better resemble their bird.

The song is very simple in a way that's typical of Wardi call and response ceremonial songs/dances, unlike sung poetry or ritual coulagri (summoning songs) which follow a meter and can be extremely elaborate. All the "verses" are repeated four times and the "bridges" are only sung once. Any organized performance will be accompanied by at least one drummer, and more elaborate setups will also utilize bells and rattles. The audience will often clap in time (though is generally expected to stop, along with every form of percussion besides the drum, while the lead singer asks their three questions). The audience is expected to know the three answers, which are bound to be familiar for most people as the average person has grown up hearing this song.

LYRICS:

Wardi:

[Verse x4]

Wematseäm oüyra met

(Wematseäm oüyra met)

Wematseäm oüyra met

(Wematseäm oüyra met)

[Bridge x1]

Wematsata dwi?

(A jiëyan ti kagnachuy)

Wematsata dwi?

(A jiëyan ti kagnachuy)

[Verse x4]

Inyahara uya brat

(Inyahara uya brat)

Mengaricoura yuwayat

(Mengaricoura yuwayat)

[Bridge x1]

Haitemaä dwi?

(San bataya e asyan)

Haitemaä dwi?

(San bataya e asyan)

[Verse x4]

Inyahara siramayat

(Inyahara siramayat)

Mengarijana yuwayat

(Mengarijana yuwayat)

[Bridge x1]

Cotumeä dwi?

(A asyan ti gai gedo)

Cotumeiä dwi?

(A asyan ti gai gedo)

[Verse x4]

Wematseya oürya met

(Wetmatseya oürya met)

Wematseya oürya met

(Wetmatseya oürya met)

[Closing x1]

Wematsata dwi?

(A jiëyan ti kagnachuy)

Wematsata dwi?

(A jiëyan ti kagnachuy)

English:

See us, we are here

(See us, we are here)

See us, we are here

(See us, we are here)

What do we see?

(The men that are dancing)

What do we see?

(The men that are dancing)

The summer sun is fat

(The summer sun is fat)

Gold cape is flying

(Gold cape is flying)

What does he do?

(He strikes men down)

What does he do?

(He strikes men down)

The summer sun is dying

(The summer sun is dying)

White cape is flying

(White cape is flying)

What does he seek?

(The men that have fallen)

What does he seek?

(The men that have fallen)

See us, we are here

(See us, we are here)

See us, we are here

(See us, we are here)

What do we see?

(The men that are dancing)

What do we see?

(The men that are dancing)

---

Notes:

Mengaricoura and mengarijana ("goldcape" and "whitecape") are used here as epithets for the golden eagle and white-caped vulture respectively, the latter is part of the vulture's actual common name (which is literally "white-cape bird(of prey)").

Jiëyan is the dual plural for "man" (containing plural prefix jië) and is used in this song when referring to the two dancers directly, asyan is the >2 plural for "man" (containing plural prefix as) when invoking triumph and defeat in conflict with an eagle striking men down and a vulture eating them.

Inyahara is dead literally "adult sun" and refers to the sun around midsummer when daylight hours are longest, and to the deity-form that presides over this time of year. He is fat and healthy at his peak and then begins to die; the solstice evening is the moment of this transition. Inyahara is a proper noun in this song and does not include the definite article 'the' (a) that I added to make the English translation read more smoothly.

The form of "to be" used in "We are here" uses a permanent form (ouy), while the "to be" in "the summer sun is fat/dying" is impermanent (uy). The former is invoking a collective presence across a homeland rather than the temporary presence of the singers in the specific place where the dance is held, while the latter describes transitory annual conditions. Oüyra is the masculine "we" form of permanent "to be"; masculine plural conjugations are always used for mixed-gender groups, the feminine form is only used when referring to groups without any men.

[serpentface]

I have a question about veiling and specifically about how women feel about strangers seeing them without a veil. If my headband snaps while I'm walking to the market and my veil falls off am i covering my face in shame or am I just kind of annoyed? If a guy gets mad and snatches off my veil, is he undressing me? Is this considered a violation? It's not about modesty but if the only people who see my hair are my husband and my family, is it embarrassing to be seen without one? Thank you!

Wardrobe malfunctions are an annoyance. The purpose of the garment lies in its presence rather than it existing to conceal anything specifically, so you aren't Naked without it. There's enough psychological weight to it that it might be embarrassing depending on the person, but the a lot of women will take their veils off in public from time to time to fix their hair or adjust the veil or etc- unless she's in a formal setting, or engaging with someone for whom formality should be expected, or specifically having a 1 on 1 interaction with an unfamiliar man (she will probably wait til later in these cases). So for the average person whose headband breaks or etc, she goes "oh goddamn it", picks up the fallen veil and shakes off any dirt, puts it back on loose (which is functional, some women wear them like that, but it's impractical if she has to be active), and maybe feels a little sheepish about it but mostly just annoyed, and her main concern is that one of her textiles just broke and now needs repair or replacement, which sucks.

How much of an embarrassment being unveiled is will be highly contextual. The same person who'd take their veil off to fix their hair in the middle of a crowded marketplace might feel horribly embarrassed if they didn't realize there was a guest in their house and walked in on them while unveiled. A lot of the time it's going to be more embarrassing if the woman is in interacting closely with an unfamiliar party, being seen unveiled is only routine with familiar parties and it adds an entirely unwanted level of intimacy otherwise. The average person WOULD be mortified, whether out of personal shame or fear of judgment, if they were somehow stuck in public without any head covering. They "look like a whore", it's a complete non-question to take off a wraparound top and go bare chested with the top as a veil, and she might even opt to find a secluded place to take off her skirt and use it as a veil, so long as it drapes low enough to cover her legs at least past the knee.

It does tend to be a thing that younger women who are new to the practice (but not So new as to be able to forget she's not a girl who goes around everywhere without a veil anymore) are more sensitive to be seen by strangers without head covering in any context. The veil is the key social signal that you're an adult woman of respectable status, and it usually feels like a huge step that you're wearing it and is something a lot of girls feel very proud of. It's a vulnerable transitional period, whether you're someone who's actually marrying that young or not, and this garment signifies a degree of security in your new place in the world. Having a veil on is also in large part a signal of "I AM SEXUALLY UNAVAILABLE". A 15 year old girl might feel devastatingly embarrassed if she had that wardrobe malfunction in public, and when she's 65 the same person might be unceremoniously whipping it off to get at any given itch under the headband.

BUT yanking off someone's veil is SIGNIFICANTLY more weighty as a manner of harassment than say ripping off a person's hat, it could absolutely be compared to undressing someone in public in terms of its pointed intentionality to degrade and in it being a sexually charged form of assault. As a premeditated act, it's demeaning the woman as a "whore" (and this would Usually be the intent of ripping off someone's veil, sex workers aren't permitted to veil and same goes for women legally punished for adultery or certain other crimes, it's sexually tinged identification, humiliation, and othering of a victim). It would be considered assault by law (if physical injury did not occur, it could still fall under some somewhat nebulous moral laws about public attacks on a person's character), the aggressor could potentially be sued, and a lot of people would socially condone that woman or her husband/sons/father/etc beating them up on the spot, or would at least "get it".

[serpentface]

The five ungulate species found in the plains Wardin overlaps with, with average regional human height (5'4'') for comparison. Not including feral cattle and khait, which are also significant actors in these ecosystems.

Wild horse- It resembles shorthair domestic horses (to the point that their common name is just 'wild horse', that or 'dwarf horse' for being shorter and about half the weight) but they are not closely related enough to interbreed; even sterile hybrids are unknown. They are also much less gregarious than domestic horses and have an unusual social structure for an ungulate in general, generally living in monogamous pairs with a shared home range. They are non-sexually dimorphic, and unlike domestic horses both males and females usually possess cuspid teeth, which may be utilized in territorial disputes. It is a preferential browser and is found most abundantly in savanna, shrubland, and riparian habitats with good browsing opportunities, though will expand out into plains if they can find home ranges with plenty of cover. They are notable for tolerance of very dry conditions and populate areas of true desert within their range. It is a common pest in agrarian contexts.

Hibimeti antelope- The buck has tall, nearly vertical horns. It is shorter than the gazelle but stockier and heavier, and can maintain its top running speed for longer. They form large herds in the winter, potentially consisting of a few hundred animals (though most are much smaller), and break off into smaller bands and bachelor herds during the rest of the year. All highland and some lowland populations migrate seasonally between winter and summer pastures, but many 'resident' populations occupy year-round home ranges in places where food sources are dependable. They preferentially browse on forbs and shrubs, and on the tops of grasses. These antelope are relatively easy to tame and hold in captivity, and are captive reared for their meat in some contexts, though these are not domesticated animals.

Jaimeti gazelle - These are true open plains specialists, and the most tolerant of short term dehydration of any even toed ungulate pictured here (though the wild horse beats them on that front). They have the most dramatic seasonal migrations as they seek out fresh pasture, with some populations traveling hundreds of miles and accumulating into herds that are a few thousand strong, though they will break off in smaller bands of 10-20 individuals when settled at a grazing site. Smaller herds of antelope often associate with the gazelle's migratory movements for better cover from predators. They prefer open habitats at lower elevations and are rarely found in the mountains. They cannot maintain their top speed as long as the antelope, but are extremely fast and agile and make for challenging prey, making them favored pursuits in forms of sport hunting throughout their range.

Barking deer - This is a pretty big deer. They are heavily adaptable generalists and can occupy a wide range of habitats. They are primarily grazers rather than browsers, though change dietary preferences depending on the season, browsing more during the dry late summer-early winter and grazing more in the late winter-early summer when the grasses are still fresh. They do not typically migrate long distances, aside from some populations changing elevations in response to winter conditions, and will readily occupy a year round home range with sufficient graze availability. They are more gregarious than most deer and may assemble into herds of 150-200 animals during the early spring-mid summer months, though break off into smaller harem bands during the breeding season. Their common name refers to the loud warning bark that hinds produce when spotting a potential predator.

Wild cattle - the aurochs is gigantic. An average bull is as tall as an average man (about 5'6'') at the withers, outstanding individuals can approach 6'. Cows are shorter and a good deal smaller, though still outweigh and stand over domestic cattle with a height of around 5'. Both sexes have lunate horns, with those of cows typically being smaller and thinner. They face pressure in parts of this range from both feral and managed domestic cattle, and some populations are heavily 'hybridized' with their domestic cousins, usually the result of breeding between domestic bulls and wild cows (wild 'hybrids' can only be reliably identified by the presence of lyrate horns, long dewlaps, and fatty humps). This subspecies fares well on open plains and scrub but requires close proximity to water sources, and does not typically migrate great distances and rather switches up its diet depending on the season. Its preferred habitat is savanna, and in other parts of its range it can thrive in woodland. They live in small herds of ~5-20 individuals, and full grown bulls are mostly solitary. They typically flee from contact with humans, but can be exceptionally dangerous if provoked or sufficiently irritated.

[serpentface]

eunuch lore question apropos of nothing: i'm curious what the social outcome would be for a normative Wardi man who loses his penis/testicles unintentionally, due to disease or tragic scything accident or whatever.

say a man is like 35, gainfully employed, sexually normal, married, has healthy kids, enjoys hunting and sporting with The Guys, generally the perfect specimen of Wardi masculinity; then a spider bites his dick while he's asleep and it gets the worst infection ever and the doctor has to chop the whole thing off to save his life. what happens to this man? does he get kicked out of the male gender space and reassigned as a eunuch, or has he successfully established himself as enough of a father/husband/brother to stick around even with his Biological Male Essence destroyed?

alternative scenario: this same man, with all his perfectly masculine interests and personality, gets his fateful spider bite like 15 years earlier, after he's had most of the expected male puberty but before he's fully taken on any of the social roles of a grown man. what does his family do? is he still considered a son for the purposes of inheritance? can he ever get married? what is life like in this society for a man who genuinely wants to have kids and be a dad and all that but is definitely, obviously, 100% infertile?

If you asked the average person, they would definitely say that men and eunuchs are at least a little different, and they would probably invoke an Essential Maleness That Is Stored In The Balls. Ones more enlightened in the ways of medicine could explain to you that having enough semen Stored In The Balls is specifically what masculinizes a body and has subtler effects on a man's health, character, and temperament; cutting off the source entirely makes one more akin to a woman in body and temperament. But the image of "a eunuch" in their mind is really less about what parts of their anatomy are present, and more about how and when and why these parts were taken away, and what role that action places them in.

The Eunuch in the cultural imagination and practice is a servant administrator in the court, or guards of female priests and royalty, the vast majority of whom were probably sold and castrated at approximately 9-14 years old at their father's behest and you can really tell they aren't Men. Or a specific body of priests who are gelded as the first of many autosacrificial acts. Or a criminal who was gelded in punishment and humiliation. Or maybe the natural kind who never saw a blade but still sounds like a girl at 30 and can't grow a beard or sire children. It's not the beloved friend of 20 years who just lost his balls in a desperate act of medical intervention after a horrific spider accident. He's technically a eunuch now, but he's not, like, a eunuch eunuch. If anything he's more akin to former warriors who made it into old age alive, minus a limb. If he was born without the limb he never really could've been a complete man to begin with, it's a pity. If he lost the limb on the cusp of adulthood it's outright tragic. But he had a full life and nothing about him has Really changed. Mocking him for lacking some of the traits of manhood would be like mocking the elder who's lived to the uncommon old age of 85 for not being able to hold a spear. It borders on absurd. Similar logic can more or less go for the spider victim in his late 30s, though there are differences in that losing your balls has much more specific baggage than losing a limb and people are likelier to giggle about it a little, or may evoke his loss of Essential Maleness if it's socially or politically advantageous to cast him as weakened and feminized.

But the average man clasps his spider victim friend's hands and warmly assures him he's lost none of his spirit, and from there on strictly avoids invoking his lack of testes unless the latter has found some humor in his circumstances. The average woman finds any desperation-tinged displays of machismo from the spider victim extra amusing and/or irritating given the literal lack of balls to back it with (some might even take a little vindictive glee), though her opinion on this behavior probably did not change with the loss of his testes. The respected, established spider victim goes on hunting with the guys and being the head of his household because Biological Male Essence Of The Balls is really only present or absent by social and societal consent.

The spider incident happening to a much younger man is different along a similar line of logic, he's not going to just suddenly Stop being a man to others around him, but unlike the older victim his his role Has materially changed. The chief economic value of a sons is as an inheritor of property and a guarantor of your family's future prospects by making more sons. That's not the ONLY economic value of a son (much less their only value in general), but that's their primary purpose when it comes to securing the collective family's future. The youth who has been mauled by a ferocious spider doesn't stop being a 'son', there's no law or taboo that Prevents you from treating him identically to your other boys, there's no (non-reproductive) stations in life he's forbidden from strictly on the basis of not having balls (there are many he will be passed over for in favor of an intact man if his status is known, though). But he's not going to be managed the same way as other young men, in the same way that you don't offer a post-menopausal woman in a political marriage. He unambiguously physically cannot do his Job, and this job is a major part of entering the world of adult manhood. This is complicated a little by adoption being a legitimate means of acquiring an heir (almost always of a family member along your same patriline) but that's Never going to be your first choice, especially not when the stakes are high, and you're unlikely to bank your family's future on your sterilized son's choice of adoptee. You're just going to rearrange your inheritance to position an intact son as heir (or adopt one if you don't have any), who will receive most of your property and eventually have sons of his own, and meanwhile your spider victim son gets whatever share is contextually appropriate, probably what the youngest would have gotten.

There's nothing preventing him from getting married, he can be head of his own household and adopt an heir and pass whatever he inherits to him, but the primary incentives for marriage are gone and the spectrum of marriage opportunities that will suit your family's socioeconomic needs (and marriage IS about benefiting the collective first, and everything else second) is much narrower. It might just not be worth the bride price. He's not going to just Not Be Seen As A Man Anymore, but he may be unable to fully inhabit an adult man's role in his family and community, which will bring his Lack Of Essential Maleness Stored In The Balls closer to the forefront of the minds of people who know his condition.

I should note that 'receiving an accidental sterilizing injury where your balls are removed' is also an extreme outlier scenario so there's no conventions for how that Changes things. The analogues that have specific cultural baggage are being a 'natural eunuch' (usually describes undescended/absent testes, sometimes describes otherwise 'abnormal' male characteristics co-occurring with infertility, even if the testes are developed), or actually being Made A Eunuch By Intent To Make A Eunuch (the exact baggage of which depends, in part, on what you've been made a eunuch for). Both of these cases are likely to make you perceived as something that is effectively Other than a man by default, are commonly assumed to annihilate your sex drive, and are considered to make you physically weaker than other men.