Riek'norian

Vaul’riek, the Hollowed City, built into the petrified husk of a colossal Arch-tree beneath the weeping Caverns of Sinatoria. It's grim, disciplined denizens are creatures of severity, Dral'azie shaped by generations of militarism, spiritual indoctrination, and austere expectation. To outsiders they appear hollow, cold and inhuman. But to a Riek'norian, this is not emptiness. It is reverence. It is structure. It is the slow, beautiful silence of belonging. Widley feared for their pitiless discipline, what outsiders fail to grasp is that beneath their grim composure lies not arrogance, but a grief so deeply buried it has become discipline. Where other Dral’azie might revel in cruelty and punishment or turn violence into pageantry, a Riek’norian finds no pride in cruelty, violence to them is not indulgence, but necessity.   A Riek’norian is not a person in the sense others might understand, they are simply what the Hollowed City made them. They are taught that to feel is weakness and emotion is to be endured. Buried deep beneath the skin and not to be expressed. Every smile withheld, every softness denied, every inch of a Riek’norian life is disciplined, observed, and weighted. They have no need for sorrow or joy.   From their clipped, calculating speech, to the way they never waste a gesture, that discipline begins in the cradled. The moment of naming, a Riek’norian child is bound to their Birthright Blade, a shard blood and essence sealed in steel, echoing the ancient grief of Myistra Arcaine, who carved her pain away and gave it to Aulreth. What began as a desperate plea for numbness was misinterpreted into a sacred rite, and now the blade is carried not as a symbol of love, but of its absence, tempering duty where feeling once lived.