Atlas Elyden #136 - the Yaraomic People

Here's a bit of ancient knowledge I came up with over a few days to explain a bit of a blank slate in my worldbuilding - the history of the Korachani empire goes back just over 4000 years to the conquest of the Archpotentate Malichar over the various peoples of the Inner Sea.

Though in my years of worldbuilding I have documented certain aspects of this time in detail - years of conquest and the names of the forebear nations/territories, for instance, I never really thought of the peoples that were affected by this great expansion, and the death and displacement that they would have suffered.

I always assumed that Korachan crossed south over the Inner Sea, declaring war on established nations, but I just decided that it would be more interesting to have northern Sammaea (the territories detailed in this map) be home to a singular far-ranging culture, rather than independent states.

If you read the full history detailed in the map you may draw some parallels to real-world cultures. This was not the direct intention, but I was aware of it while I was writing and liked it as it was something a bit different, and added a bit more flavour to the world.

Please let me know what you think!

(this map was originally posted in higher resolution last week for Acolyte Patrons and higher.

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South of the Inner Sea, in the north of Sammaea, one finds the westernmost expanse of the Low-empire of Sarastro. Emerging just over 300-years ago from the Sundering of the long-standing Korachani empire, Sarastro is presently in control of various vassal states - Vaalk, Karakhas, Harappa, Lidea, Ba’akh, and Io - that most people assume existed as independent states before their subjugation.

This is unsurprising, given that it is what has been taught in the lyceums of Korachan, and later Sarastro, for millennia, continuing to this day. However, if one were to find independently-written annals and histories penned during that time, one would be confronted by a very different political and cultural landscape.

4,000-years ago, at the dawn of the Korachani empire, the Inner Sea was home to dozens of different cultures and ethnicities, some with histories going back millennia to the Fading, or even further, to the fabled Fourth Age. Different states and realms made treaties, traded, and waged war with each other. 

While north of the Sea these people had coalesced into what we might refer to today as states, the situation south of the Inner Sea was quite different.

the Yaraomic People

The northern coast Sammaea from as far west as extant Vaalk to the Daarken Gulf in the east was populated by a thriving culture and ethnicity that was known as Yaraom, or more accurately, Iaraom Bassha - the Yaraomic People, as they referred to themselves.

The Yaraomic People had a shared cultural identity that dated back to the early centuries of the Fifth Age, following the dark days of the Fading and which shaped their actions going forward into the new age. By the time the Archpotentate Malichar had united the city-states of the Korachani peninsula under his banner and was about to being his conquest of the Inner Sea, the Yaraomic People had amassed a thriving culture that spanned over 1,000,000 square miles. But where most people north of the Inner Sea had coalesced into independent states with borders, the Yaraomic People instead continued living largely pastoral lives, based around small communities of extended families led by elders and protected by their able-bodied adults. They had no written language (which is a factor in their disappearance from history), though they shared deep-rooted mythologies and genealogies with each other via ancient oral traditions, and they valued storytellers and loremasters, who rose to positions of prominence in their societies. A few Cities had appeared across their territories - where nomads and merchants traded and sold their wares, where people established agricultural centres with fortified granaries, where towers were erected to protect their people from marauders - but they were few and far between and their inhabitants were never driven by the urge for expansion - or subjugation - that drove their neighbours to the north of the Inner Sea.

By then the people of the northern Inner Sea had been trading with the Yaraomic People for years, but they had never penetrated deep into their territories. The Yaraomic People were accepting to trade with these foreigners, but were naturally insular, to the point that most northerners thought of them as surly or aloof. They were (and remain) deeply protective of their culture and heritage, and were not only reluctant of sharing these secrets with foreigners, but violently so in many cases, with documented instances of merchants coming to blows with foreign traders over ill-conceived comments and inquiries. Their reputation for being difficult worsened over time as interactions with the more gregarious Lascar, Korachani, and Gerician traders increased.

Just to the west of Yaraomic lands, Korachan had finally conquered the Valkan states on the eve of 20 RM following years of conflict (1.). Exerting its influence over the dozens of rival states in quick succession, its forces soon moved east of the Aris Mountains, into what they believed to be further Valkan territories. In truth the imperial armies were marching into the westernmost Yaraomic lands, razing villages, appropriating caravans, and taking people as slaves, all the while with them offering the barest of resistance. During this time, the nascent state of Mharaka was steadily growing hundreds of miles east around the city of Kekelib. Founded years before by a young Yaraomic shepherd who chanced upon an ancient Thymi crown of magickal provenance, it had steadily gained influence to become the most metropolitan area of Yaraomic culture - the first, and by most accounts, only, true Yaraomic nation.

But all around him he was seeing his people suffering. Over the years the Korachani noose had slowly but steadily tightened, with Karakhas (2.) taken in 121 RM in the south west, and Io (3.), Ba’akh (3.), and Lidea (4.) all taken to the east in 212, 634, and 911 RM respectively. With each conquest, Korachan established arbitrary borders that cut off thousands of Yaraomic people from each other, breaking up families and destroying trade routes, grazing lands and ancestral territories in the name of wanton expansion. People were displaced, with those not forced into vassalage moving out of lands they had occupied for centuries. Most flocked to a burgeoning Mharaka, though others returned to the nomadic ways of their ancestors, skulking through the hinterlands of Korachani territories. Soon the only Yaraomic lands that remained unspoiled were the territories of Mharaka, which were forced to abandon aspects of its forebears’ culture in the race to defend itself.

Korachani exocrines, missionaries and iconoclasts were sent into the remaining heathen lands with the aim of introducing their people to imperial culture and religion whilst weaning them off of their own customs. Though they did not count on the Yaraomic people being as proud or vehement as they were, their persistence over the centuries paid off, and the seeds of Korachani culture were sown in the form of the Iron Deity, whose worship slowly took hold in Kekelib. This spurred Korachani propagandists into action, and eventually Kekelib itself was besieged, falling to imperial cannons in 933 RM, spelling the end of Yaraomic culture (5.).

New borders were casually drawn on maps, sundering centuries of culture and history, and condemning hundreds of thousands of people to servitude, slavery, or death with a single careless stroke of a pen. Iconoclasts scoured these new territories, toppling buildings and statues without even bothering to learn their purpose or histories. Native languages were forbidden, with those speaking them executed. Many Yaraomic elders refused to comply, and they were cut down across Mharaka, effectively ending the collective crucible that had bore witness to Yaraomic myths, histories and knowledge. Even Yaraomic toponyms were abandoned as Korachan began using its own names, either corrupting native names to its own tongue or ignoring them completely. Mharaka became known as Mharokk, for instance.

Within the span of a single generation, the Yaraomic people had been stripped of their heritage and identity. And the people of the empire had been oblivious to the consequences of their actions.

the Great Struggle

Today, so long after their fate was established, the Yaraomic People have been largely obliterated from existence. This is through no concerted genocidal campaign, which would be giving far too much foresight to the occupying empire, but rather through millennia of abuse and neglect. Its people were downtrodden from the onset, becoming a servant caste to a growing population of immigrants and colonists from the north.

Those who remained in the hinterlands between the rapidly urbanised settled regions near the coast, rivers and major resources, managed to cling to their old ways of life, but over the years they either died out to slavery and attrition or begrudgingly relented, becoming absorbed by the spreading Korachani

Culture. Those few who clung to the old ways slowly migrated to less hospitable areas where the bulk of Korachani eyes could not see them, becoming nomads and scavengers living in close-knit kindreds forced to abandon their old ways.

This is the Great Struggle of the Yaraomic People, who were not only stripped of their home, but their religion, and culture at the hands of an uncaring subjugator. Today they are an afterthought in a land of colonisers, turned into refugees in their own land.

the Yaraomic Telling

However, there remain those who look to the past, not with bitterness or anger, but with longing and love. Most kindreds contain amongst their numbers an Iaraom Grabba - a lorekeeper. Typically an elder of the family, the Iaraom Grabba are keepers of oral lore, passing on old myths and histories to younger generations.Together these are known as the Yaraomic Tellings.

However the Tellings form a grotesque corruption of their true history, as seminal events in Yaraomic history have been lost to time, and even what is remembered today has undoubtedly been corrupted through millennia of reinterpretation, fragmented lore and additions from Korachani culture. Nevertheless, these tales form the basis of Yaraomic identity, and are what bind these scattered people together.

Masters of the Yaraomic Telling are itinerant lorekeepers, who travel alone or clandestinely amongst other groups across their ancestral lands, ignoring modern borders, collecting any fragment of pre-imperial history, poetry, and art they can to help rebuild their heritage. They gather under the cover of darkness on nameless days that were once celebrated by their people as feasts, passing on their findings to each other, where they will in turn be slowly disseminated - sometimes across generations - amongst the scattered kindreds.

They also diligently relocate any physical relic of their past - a piece of fabric, a tattered page bearing ancestral iconography, a shard of an idol - to the secret mountain monastery of Iarshuggah, where their culture is slowly being rebuilt. 

the King-Who-Wasn’t

Forever fearful of discovery, the Iaraom Grabba have reclaimed an ancient fortress deep in the western Harappan Mountains, using its tunnels and catacombs as repositories for their relics. Most prized amongst them are the journals of the Mharokkan exile Sudera who spent over 50-years living with the Yaraom in around 1100 RM - one of the oldest second-hand accounts of their customs that survives to this day. The journals were rediscovered in around 1340 RM in Takuh, and tell of a descendant of the ancient Shepherd King of Mharaka who will one day reunite the Yaraomic People, resettling Kekelib, giving them back their home. 

Known as the King-Who-Wasn’t this legend remains one of the most persistent aspects of Yaraomic culture and unifies its people across vast distances. Ironic, given that it only survives through the writings of a descendant of their oppressors, a fact which is not lost on them.