Kin-kind can be found in all parts of the world, cleverly hidden but always present, a by-product of the temple’s more vengeful days. The curse that birthed their people first began centuries before even Pjiami’s time, when the towering temples that exemplify each of the capitol cities were little more than shrines with the first villages growing up around them. These were the days before histories were written, when stories were passed down by bonfires with drums and flutes, and it was magical talent that near instantly decided the leader of any given group.
These are also the days when the Pywan walked less often among mortalkind. When their powers began to wane, due to the unfortunate tradition of any village’s priestess manipulating the structures of faith for their own personal power. It used to be that anyone who wished to speak to the goddess, to hear her voice and know her will, could bring an offering of her element as it is drawn from nature to her graven image in the shrine to Advent the goddess. The statue, whatever material it was wrought from, would be given brief life from the offering and she would speak to the mortal as a mother would speak to any child. Priestess, looking to control the people beneath them, ceased to teach their people in this ritual so that they instead gained advice from her, not the goddess she venerated.
This deprived the Pywan, and their appearance upon the world came less. They walked among mortalkind not for pleasure, but for purpose-- a number of times trying to educate their people in the ritual and bring it back... but inevitably, each excited mortal they taught went running to their village priestess to exclaim about their discovery; their experience with a goddess and the knowledge they’d been charged to pass on.
At first, these poor people simply met with unfortunate ends. They were charged with blasphemy, and hurriedly executed, all while carefully gagged. But, near the mountain shrine that would eventually grow into the city of Dritar, a priestess who had been experimenting extensively with her magic in the attempt to blend creatures together as mortal-made monsters to guard her home, struck upon a different idea that sentenced an unwanted villager not to death, but life in shame and exile. She, in concert with a death-born mage, birthed the ritual that would pit an accused mortal’s soul in combat with that of a fallen beast, as it was known that spirits that have contact with one another tend to bleed into one another, like watercolors swirled together on canvas. Her experiments, numerous, ultimately had one of two results; the subject either died or emerged from it a half-mortal, half-beast abomination. She presented these first kin-kind to her people, proclaiming it was the goddess who had cursed them, and they were driven out into the untamed wilds.
The ritual spread among the priesthood, slowly but surely, in the centuries to come, and became the punishment for anyone who spoke against the temple in any manner. It was perceived that the reason the Pywan seemed to speak to the common people less was because they’d become more sinful-- why else were friends and neighbors struck down so often with such a horrific curse? It became pious sport to hunt these twisted beings, burning the body in grand celebration whenever one was brought dead to the village shrine. Children are told stories of the kin-kind to scare them, and ensure they never wander far into wild places, lest they be snatched up and eaten by the vile beasts that lurk in hiding.
In truth, many a wandering child has been led back on the path home by a wolf-kin hunched in the bushes, or a drowning child returned to shore by fish-kin of all varieties. Children are in every little danger from their kind... but many a hunting party has never returned.
The kin-kind are their own culture, and because they live in small groups in all manner of places, it is disingenuous to make broad statements about all of them. Each tribe has its own rules, its own traditions, its own stories. What is true for the wolf-pack of Kralt is hardly true of the aquatic school of kin-kind off the coast of Jiaal, nor the goat-kin who hide among the mountainous terrain of Chokasha. All that can truly be said of all kin-kind is that they live apart from the rest of the world, but that they are no less sentient than their parent races, no less empathetic... and no less vicious.
