Worldbuilding: Ananti War Dancers
Making notes to self about worldbuilding. Need to start getting stuff out of my head and onto paper somehow.
Ananti is one of the many homeworlds of the Eileci clans in the Burning Sigil.
The Eileci are divided into three major groups, based on how and where they live. The Burning Sigil live on planets and are often without Talent (i.e. superhuman abilities), though they take bonds and Talent and the cultural artifacts of ensuring a safe upbringing just as seriously. The Singing Sigil live on spaceships that travel and rely mostly on trade for their economy. The clans of the Singing Sigil almost all have Talent. The Turning Sigil live on space stations in various orbits and anchor Eileci space and territories. They also almost all have Talent.
Ananti is the world that Laiha is from, the main character of this canon that I'm actually interested in writing about. One of the many things Laiha ends up called is the last war dancer.
Many clans have a particular Talent they've bred as pure as they can and strengthened on purpose. The Ananti colony has the order of war dancers, in their tongue, Rakhan.
As with all Eileci, it's only on bonding and marrying that they are able to actually use their Talent, but this is a futuristic, spacefaring universe, and they test for Talent early, well before anyone would find out on accident.
Laiha is pledged to the war dancers when she's still four years old and is supposedly completely incapable of accessing her Talent. She began training immediately, learning the traditional dances passed down for generations on Ananti, the Dance of War, the Dance of Blades, the Dance of Sowing. The dances are such that if the trainee practices them vigilantly, he or she will know how to control their Talent when it manifests. It will simply have power behind it at last.
The Rakhan are, in a way, telekinetic, but they generally manipulate earth and stone, glass and metal. As they can till the soil and weave fabric with their Talent, I know it's not limited to that particular material, but those are the ones the war dancers generally train with.
War dancing in the Ananti clans is very similar in nature to wind stepping in Clan Koshon, where they step between the layers of reality but train themselves in using it for combat and defense, and also the I-forget-their-name clan that has trained their specific ability as a warrior class.
