Exun - Kathuri Ethnicity

Exun Kathuri remain lean and agile, their frames built more for sudden movement than brute endurance. Many are shorter than their Safahi cousins, their builds shaped more by urban diet and sedentary periods than the constant rigours of the desert. Their digitigrade stance remains, as do their expressive tails and sensitive ears, though these features are often hidden or downplayed when among suspicious humans.

Clothing has a notable impact on the perception of their form. While beneath their cloaks they retain the same predatory grace, their more flamboyant styles lend them a theatrical silhouette, often deliberate, inviting misunderstanding in order to better control it.

Fur colour among the Exun ranges widely, though paler coats are less common due to the reduced exposure to sun and heat. Mid-toned tans, deep russets, charcoal greys, and dusky golds predominate, often dyed, patterned, or stylised with combed markings and aromatic oils. Eye colours vary between golden-amber, copper, and sea-green, depending on region and diet.

Exun often adopt ornamental markings that mimic or satirise the sacred paint of their Safahi forebears. Khol-like markings around the eyes, false scarification drawn in charcoal, or intricate body paints applied before festivals or performances are all common. To outsiders, these may appear sacred; to the Exun, they are gestures, tributes, jests, or masks, depending on mood and moment.

Exun dress is flamboyant, layered, and symbolic. Silks, stitched linen, recycled brocade, and coloured leathers are common, often in riotous hues or embroidered with patterns mimicking desert flora, foreign runes, or invented sigils. Long-sleeved robes, high-collared vests, asymmetrical cloaks, and trailing sashes dominate their wardrobe. Belts and scarves double as pouches, sheaths, or masks depending on need.

Jewellery is integral. Bangles, bone charms, amber beads, and salvaged coin medallions serve both decorative and mnemonic purposes. Anklets and tail-rings jingle softly in rhythm with their gait, a music that speaks identity, rank, or clan even when tongues are muted.

The Exun live almost exclusively outside Safah, in temporary settlements or semi-permanent enclaves scattered across Erothi and Valenfar. Major concentrations exist near the great markets of Rashara, Numbe, and Ellia, as well as the travelling circuits of Virech and Ashview. In Carthia, a quiet but enduring community has taken root near the wind-blasted coast south of Ashview, a cluster of wagons, sand-hued tents, and ritual firepits known locally as the "Copper Row".

Rather than fight for land or legitimacy, the Exun adopt the neglected corners of the world, ruins, salt flats, caravan lanes, the alleys where taxmen don’t linger. They survive by being needed: as traders, entertainers, smugglers, diplomats, or spies. In hostile regions, they may pass as humans or Seishi, their features obscured by mask and artifice, yet their tail gives them away, eventually.

Certain Exun clans display traits rare or unknown among Safahi: unusually patterned coats resembling foreign fauna; dialectic quirks in their speech patterns; heightened sensitivity to sound, believed to stem from generations performing in crowded taverns or amphitheatres. Urban-born Exun may be more rounded in physique and have shortened claws, the result of adaptation and concealment alike.

Some show an odd familiarity with the magic or customs of their host lands, a by-product of assimilation, trade, or necessity. Among older Exun, these changes are met with wary humour; among younger ones, they are embraced as marks of cleverness rather than dilution.

Daily life for the Exun follows no fixed script. Their camps rise and fall with the season, their trade routes shift with war, plague, or fashion. Some live as itinerant musicians, carving out a living on festival circuits or private stages. Others peddle herbal tinctures, heirlooms, and apocryphal relics in open-air markets or shadowy auction-houses. Still more work as guides, dancers, couriers, interpreters, or, less honourably, as spies and burglars paid to enter where locals cannot pass.

Work is fluid and often communal. A single troupe might host scribes, cooks, fencers, and fire-eaters under the same painted tent. Children learn by imitation, emulation, and play, apprenticeship begins as performance, and performance is always work.

Exun cuisine is eclectic, a mixture of remembered austerity and acquired indulgence. They value highly spiced lentil dishes, dried fruits, pickled vegetables, and small portions of meat when it can be afforded. Many foods are fermented or smoked for portability, and communal meals are the social centre of most encampments.

Foreign influences are woven into their cooking: saffron rice learned from Rashara, honeyed flatbreads from Carthia, fermented cactus spirits from southern Erothi. Cooking is a shared and often performative act, guests are fed first, stories are told with each spice added, and every pot of tea is both ritual and welcome.

Exun ideals of beauty are performative, mutable, and context-driven. They admire grace in movement, expression in poise, and wit in posture as much as symmetry or ornamentation. Scars may be hidden or highlighted, depending on the tale they tell. Clothing and motion carry aesthetic weight, the cut of a robe, the flick of a tail, the stillness before a story begins.

Courtship is open and theatrical. Suitors may present gifts, tell riddles, or engage in duet dances, displays that balance sincerity and spectacle. Gender presentation is fluid and often stylised. Performers may adopt and shed masculine or feminine attributes with ease; identity is not negated by this, but revealed in its transitions.

While Safahi gender norms emphasise balance and duty, Exun gender presentation is expressive and strategic. A performer may present as feminine one week and masculine the next, without altering their core identity. Within family structures, gender is largely irrelevant, roles are based on skill, circumstance, and group need rather than social expectation.

The notion of 'gendered duty' is often regarded as a Safahi preoccupation. Exun clans measure worth in contribution, not conformity. That said, reverence is still paid to maternal lines, particularly among troupes who trace their origin to a single Pilgrim matriarch or storyteller.

Marriage, as understood in most civilisations, is rare among the Exun. Partnership is often fluid and based on mutual trust, usefulness, and passion, not contracts. Some troupes practise symbolic pairings, often sanctified through shared acts of endurance or co-performance. Others forgo ceremony entirely.

Parenthood is communal. Children are raised by the troupe, not the bloodline. Stories, skills, and responsibility are passed laterally, not hierarchically. Those who abandon their young are shunned; those who raise others' young are revered, especially among child-light caravans.

Rites of passage vary across troupes and regions, but most revolve around travel, performance, or trial. A youth may be deemed an adult when they perform solo before strangers, survive a solo errand across dangerous lands, or return with a story none else in the troupe has lived.

These rites are less about challenge than recognition, a moment when one's worth becomes publicly visible and irrevocably remembered. Some troupes brand or mark those who pass; others change the colours worn or grant a new name fragment tied to the act.

Death, for the Exun, is not a private wound but a shared absence. Funerary customs vary, a body may be cremated in a solitary blaze, left in the wild beneath a ritual cairn, or reduced to bone and honoured in carved charms. The key is memory: the dead are sung, storied, and echoed in names and dances.

Some troupes carry a ceremonial scroll, etched with sigils or verses naming each dead member. Others repaint the wagons or tents of the deceased with their final tale. To speak ill of the dead is taboo, but so too is idolising them falsely. "We honour them as they were, not as we wish they had been."

Exun taboos are flexible, but a few are near-universal. Betrayal of kin, by blood, by troupe, or by oath, is among the gravest sins. Theft from within the community is met with exile, while deception of outsiders is seen as a necessary art, not a vice. Lying to a child, however, is considered deeply dishonourable.

Water is still sacred, as it is among the Safahi, but less ceremonially so, waste is punished, and public washing rituals still exist in larger caravans. Another potent taboo is the speaking of one’s birth name to a stranger; among Exun, one earns the right to know names, and loses it just as easily.

The Exun primarily speak dialects descended from Low Kathuri, though many troupes now incorporate a medley of foreign phrases, port-slang, and gesture-lexicons developed through centuries of clandestine life in hostile cities. These hybrid dialects, sometimes called "Tassel-Speech" or "Dust-Cant" by outsiders, serve as both code and cultural identifier.

Most Exun retain fluency in ritual Old Safahian, taught in fragments and used during rites, births, and funerals. However, these recitations are often partial, distorted through memory, altered by improvisation. They are sacred in tone, if not always in accuracy.

The arts among the Exun are ubiquitous, intimate, and ephemeral. Tapestries are woven to mark a season and unravelled to begin the next. Music is taught orally, shaped by region and repertoire, with instruments including bone-flutes, stringed lyres, sand-drum cloaks, and whistling tail-chimes.

Dance is both entertainment and spiritual gesture, with each movement conveying lineage, loss, promise, or place. Stylised mask-theatre remains a favoured form in more stable enclaves, often telling ancestral tales in four-act improvisations known as Pattern Circles. Woodwork, embroidery, and perfume-making are also common crafts, their designs passed through family like sacred stories.

Exun myths are oral, fluid, and story-shaped rather than scripture-bound. The dominant ancestral cycle is that of the Sand-Walker Who Never Returned, a figure who defied the call to return to Safah, forging instead a lineage in exile. Other common tales include The Mask-Eater, a cautionary parable about losing one’s identity in performance, and The Thief Who Saved the Sun, a subversive hymn to clever survivalism over obedience.

These stories are rarely recited verbatim, but rather adapted to each performance, sometimes by altering a detail, sometimes by changing the protagonist’s gender, moral, or fate. The audience, especially children, are expected to challenge or question discrepancies, an act that affirms cultural continuity as much as creativity.

Though the Exun reject formal hierarchy, certain names echo across generations. Among them is Irel the Unburnt Cloth, a matriarch who led five troupes through the Siege of Al-Grinath with nothing but song and sand-mirrors. Another is Kel of the Last Lantern, famed for smuggling dozens of orphans through a Seishi border at war, leaving only a trail of marked feathers as proof.

Civic saints, those who acted not for glory but for kin, are celebrated annually in Night of Names ceremonies, where their deeds are retold, misremembered, and restitched into relevance. These figures may be real, mythologised, or amalgamated, but what matters is what they mean, not what they were.

The Exun trace their origins to those who never returned from their Pilgrimage, a decision seen as both heretical and heroic. Their earliest troupes formed in the shadow of collapse: post-war ruins, plague-ridden market towns, scorched trade roads. They survived by becoming what others needed, or feared. Minstrels to some, beggars to others, spies and saviours both.

While the Cult of the Cycle still lingers in echoes, their history diverges from it sharply after the Fourth Pilgrim Exodus. Since then, Exun clans have clashed with human merchants, formed uneasy alliances with Seishi tide-caravans, and avoided the Directorate wherever possible. Their modern story is one of perpetual border-walking, never exiled entirely, never truly embraced.

Unlike the Safahi, the Exun do not typically use clan names in the traditional sense. Instead, lineage is expressed through troupe bonds, a travelling collective which replaces the blood-bound clan as the central unit of social structure. Troupes are often named for a founding figure, a defining event, or an iconic motif (e.g. "The Gilded Step", "The Thirstless Flame", "Dawn-Cart of Echoes").

Adoption is common, and lineage may pass by reputation or mentorship rather than blood. While some troupes preserve matrilineal memory for ritual purposes, most treat social bonds and shared experience as the true fabric of kinship.

Given names are typically short and lyrical, often two syllables, with gliding consonants or hissing vowels: Nira, Veyu, Sahil, Eska, Ruvan, Talem. These are usually bestowed by the parent or a troupe elder after the child displays some early trait, curiosity, silence, a tendency to climb, an eerie sense of timing. However, these names may be replaced or altered as the child comes of age or earns new esteem within the troupe.

Many Exun also bear performance names, bestowed after their first public act of significance. These are often metaphorical or poetic: Whirl-Soul, Iron-Tongue, Sand-Bright, One-Breath, Ink-on-Claw. Such names are both a boast and a challenge, they proclaim identity, but also invite reinterpretation if the bearer fails to live up to their own legend.

Neutral names are common, and most names are not gender-coded. The fluidity of presentation and role in Exun society makes rigid naming conventions rare and even undesirable. A name is a persona, not a pronouncement.

Carthia, particularly its western frontier near Ashview, harbours one of the most enduring and visible Exun enclaves. The district known as Old Scrim Market, a sprawl of collapsed amphitheatres, winding tents, and bone-hung archways, serves as a haven for wandering troupes, outcast artisans, and broken instruments waiting to sing again.

Here, Exun Kathuri live in plain sight, performing at festival days, selling rare dyes and memory-masks, and, some say, trading in secrets. The local authorities tolerate them so long as no scandal spreads. They are beloved by children and feared by merchants with something to hide.

Erothi’s river ports, particularly in Mascra and the southern fringes of Firdan, often host Exun troupes along their festival circuits. These troupes dock in reed villages or perform along torch-lit causeways, exchanging lore for silver and shelter.

While popular among rural communities, urban centres remain wary of their presence, suspecting theft, espionage, or worse. Nonetheless, many Erothi nobles quietly keep Exun advisors, archivists, or performers on retainer, always unacknowledged, always paid in coin and silence.

Valenfar is inhospitable ground for the Exun. The Directorate’s obsession with order and lineage makes the wandering, name-changing Kathuri a natural threat. Yet even here, in the southern trade ports and along the shadow-markets of Pyra, Exun troupes persist, as smugglers, rare performers, or purveyors of forgotten knowledge.

They do not advertise their origins, and wear false names like cloaks. Still, Directorate informants occasionally whisper of Exun story-circles hidden beneath theatres, and encoded rituals played out in plain sight. These are tolerated only when they serve state interest, and disappear when they do not.

The diaspora of the Exun is not an accident but a tradition. Their presence ripples across borderlands, pilgrim roads, and festival caravans from Skiftesvik to Caerney, wherever the old songs have yet to fall silent. Their exact numbers are unknowable, many pass as local, hiding their tail, their accent, their memory-ribbons beneath foreign customs.

In nearly every culture, there is a half-remembered tale of a masked troupe, a vanished girl with cat-eyes, a song no one else remembers. That, too, is the Exun. They do not dominate, but they endure, threadbare, clever, and always moving.