Ralian - Urman Ethnicity
"You ask why we fight. Why the trees whisper war. Why the claws come down in silence and rise red. But you never ask what was here before your roads, before your cities, before your gods wrote their names in fire. I will tell you, even if your ears are full of thunder.
There was green. Endless green, full of songs not sung but known. Every stream had a name, and every name had a guardian. The sky walked the earth in the shape of the Siriat, vast and silent, and we followed in reverence, not to rule, but to remember. Our mothers named us under the smoke of burning roots, and our fathers carved our names into bark so that the forest would know us. We hunted with thanks. We bled with purpose. We sang the marrow of our dead into the trees, and in spring, the trees sang back.
Then came your fences. Your axes. Your white stone gods and silent kings. You called it land, and drew lines across it like a drunk carving meat. You built your roads across the bones of our fathers and called us beasts when we refused to kneel. And now you wonder why we bare our teeth. Why we vanish and strike and vanish again. You wonder why the forest hates you.
It does not. But it remembers. And so do we."
Introduction
The Ralian Urmans are the oldest native people of Erala, and yet among the most misunderstood. They are often called “jungle beasts” or “tribal savages” by those whose cities now rise on their ancestral lands. But these are not the words the Ralians use for themselves. Among their kin, they speak of “the bonded,” those who walk with the world, who tread carefully upon root and river, who still remember the face of the land before it was scarred.
They are a forest-dwelling people, physically powerful and spiritually devout, shaped by a world of towering trees, sweltering rains, and the ever-present watch of the Siriat, the strider-beasts revered as gods and omens. Their societies are bound by oath and blood, governed by matron-councils and spirit-speakers, and held together by a deep reverence for the land and the past.
Unlike their Fraki cousins who roam the grasslands, or the Altic who endure the frozen wastes, the Ralians remain rooted, both literally and culturally. Their territories, once spanning across all of Erala, have been slowly reduced by centuries of human encroachment. Many tribes now live hidden in the deepest jungles, others trapped in shrinking reservations boxed in by frontier cities and sugar plantations. Their young are sometimes taken to “civilised” schools. Their elders are scorned as relics. Yet still, they endure. And in the deepest groves of Gierfell and the storm-fed deltas of Ergol, the old chants are still sung.
To understand the Ralians is to understand a people at once fiercely proud and deeply wounded. Their culture is defined not by conquest, but by survival, not by progress, but by memory. They do not seek dominion. They seek honour, belonging, and the preservation of a sacred covenant between the self, the soil, and the soul. Their greatest virtue is not power, but remembrance. Their greatest grief is the forgetting forced upon them by fire, blade, and treaty.
This chronicle does not seek to ennoble or excuse, but to clarify. The Ralian Urmans are not beasts. They are not broken. They are a people under siege, spiritual, cultural, and generational, and their songs, however faint beneath the jungle canopy, still carry the weight of a world older than any stone road laid by foreign hands.
"We are not born to hide. Our backs are broad because we carry forests. Our claws are long because the trees do not give fruit to the toothless. Let them call us beasts. Let them call us brutes. Their stones crumble. Our roots grow. And when the wind returns, it will not remember marble, only the scent of earth and blood and bark."
Appearance and Lifestyle
The Ralian Urmans are a people unmistakable in form, adapted to jungle, warfare, and hardship. Their bodies speak not of ornament, but of inheritance. Their strength is not for show, but for survival. Covered in fur thick with oil and ash, their skin beneath ranges from cool slate-grey to deepest charcoal. Eyes burn gold or green beneath low brows. Every claw and callus is shaped by forest and fight alike.
Unlike the plains-roving Fraki or the ice-hardened Altic, the Ralian live in a climate where the trees smother the sun, where air drips and leaves whisper. They move low, silent, and poised, their forms shaped by centuries of canopy life, ambush hunts, and arboreal skirmishes. Though animal in first impression, there is nothing clumsy or dull in their manner. They move with control. Their stillness speaks as clearly as their tread.
The average Ralian Urman stands between 1.5 and 1.7 metres tall, though their hunched posture often makes them seem shorter to unfamiliar observers. Their musculature is dense, concentrated around shoulders, back, and thighs, and their torsos are slightly forward-leaning, optimised for quadrupedal bursts and climbing. Their hands and feet are broad, with thick digits and strong claws, equally useful for war and work.
The genders differ more than in many sapient species. Males are typically taller and visibly more muscular, with heavier jaws and pronounced brow-ridges. Females are shorter and more wiry, their limbs longer proportionally, their features finer, their postures more upright. In motion, males favour power; females, endurance. Both are warriors in spirit, but nature and culture have long divided their roles.
Ralian Urmans are clad in thick, coarse fur that clings close to the skin. It ranges in hue from dusty brown to ink-black, with rare individuals bearing dark rosettes or pale throat-stripes traced down family lines. Their underfur is dense and water-repellent, their outer fur shaggy along the limbs, particularly on males. Their skin beneath is leathery and grey, often hidden save in battle scars or shorn mourning.
Facial markings are rare but meaningful. Burned stripes denote lineage lost in war. Painted pigments on ears, cheekbones, or across the snout signal mourning, oath-taking, or readiness for combat. Piercing is uncommon, but carved bone and fang necklaces are popular among older warriors and clan-hunters, passed from parent to child or earned in battle. Among females, symbolic braiding of fur and the wearing of polished claw-shells mark motherhood or matron status.
Ralian attire is practical, tribal, and often deceptively elaborate. In the jungle heat, most wear only belts, short cloaks, or strappings over fur, often decorated with carved charms, talismans, and clan-bindings of bark or polished horn. Ceremonial dress, however, is rich in dye and texture: crimson-dyed mantles for matriarchs, soot-black wrappings for hunters, and green-frond circlets for those who speak to the land’s spirits. Even the humble loincloth may be woven with thread pulled from sacred bark or inscribed with etched feathers carrying ancestral breath.
Armour, when worn, is traditionally made from boiled leather, bark-laminate, or woven sinew, though some tribes now incorporate iron or ceramic shards bartered or stolen from humans. These are worn with mixed pride and shame: pride for survival, shame for dependence. Females rarely wear armour, but ceremonial ward-sashes or shoulder-guards mark their status within hearth and rite.
The Ralian do not build in defiance of the jungle, but with it. Their villages are woven into the trunks and roots of the forest: half in the trees, half below the soil. Homes are constructed from braided vine and mud-bark, suspended on living stilts of trained growth or nestled within widened trunks. Clans rarely number above a few dozen, and settlements are often semi-permanent, moving with river shifts or seasonal tides. Sacred glades, burial terraces, and silence-groves (used for memory rites) anchor the wandering pattern of Ralian life.
In human-colonised areas such as Rosena or Ellia, some Ralian tribes have been forced into enclosed "green bounds" or reservation forests, often boxed by fences, garrisons, or trade posts. Within these, culture bends under watchful eyes, and rituals warp into performance. In contrast, wilder tribes deeper in Ergol or western Faela maintain traditional structures, often on the move to evade expansion.
Fur patterning and stature vary subtly between bloodlines. Jungle-dwelling lineages near Gierfell tend toward lighter fur and longer limbs for climbing, while river tribes along Ergol's floodplain often have broader hands and water-slick coats with shorter, sturdier frames. Elders, especially males, tend toward deep black coats streaked grey with age, while females grey along the snout and eyes first. High-ranking females often wear ash-dye to accentuate these lines, marking wisdom through visible time.
Some fur markings are seen as omens. Albino kits are considered touched by spirits and are often either secluded as future seers or, in older rites, left exposed to the jungle's will. A child born with mirrored eye-colour (one gold, one green) is said to carry a divided spirit, destined for conflict or greatness. It is the duty of the clan-matron to determine which.
Ralian life is physically demanding from birth. Cubs are raised communally but trained early to climb, hunt, and remain silent in watch. Males begin martial instruction at five seasons of age, with their first formal hunt at nine. Females are taught herbalism, weaving, spirit lore, and the high rites of bone-breath and food-speak. Daily life revolves around clan tasks, hunting cycles, and rituals of offering. Water must be fetched, ground-fire stoked, fangs counted, wounds soothed. Everything is done with purpose, and always in the presence of others.
Gender roles are strict. Males hunt, defend, patrol, and duel. Females tend the hearth, guide rituals, manage food, educate young, and determine tribal memory. Among the matriarchs, lineage is tracked, oaths are remembered, and ancestors consulted. To humans, these divisions appear archaic. To the Ralian, they are sacred balance. Violation is not rebellion, but dishonour to the spirit-tide that binds each to their path.
The Ralian diet is forest-born, heavy in protein, fibre, and fermented root. Jungle birds, snake-meat, fish, and grubs form the core protein sources, often cooked in leaves or smoked over clay-pit fires. Wild greens, bitter roots, bark-flakes, and medicinal fungi are foraged daily by females and older youths. Preservation methods include drying, salting with mineral ash, and suspension in honey-vine mash. Ceremonial meals often include bloodbroth or marrow-roast, consumed as part of ancestor rites or honour feasts.
Food is never eaten alone. To do so is an act of grief, and even mourners share mouthfuls through silence. In reservations, enforced rations and sugar-heavy imports have begun to distort these traditions. Some clans in Carthia now hide food rites in private circles, whispering ancestral prayers over canned meat while guards turn away. It is not the taste that matters, they say, but the breath shared before the first bite.
"The land is not ours. We do not rule it. We do not shape it. We listen. We kneel. We feed the fire when it hungers and bury our dead where the river remembers. To break the pact is to die unmarked. To honour it is to be remembered in claw, tooth, and leaf."
Beliefs and Values
Among the Ralian Urmans, belief is not a matter of faith, but of continuity. Theirs is a living spirituality, a covenant not written in scrolls, but sung into rivers, etched into bark, and carried in the breath of elders. They follow Arorism in its oldest form: an animistic, ancestral path that binds each act to the land it touches and each breath to the one that came before. Siriat, the great beasts of the land, are revered not as gods, but as evidence, proof that balance still breathes, even in a broken world.
Values centre on duty, memory, and restraint. Honour is not earned in speech but in silence kept, oaths fulfilled, hunger denied, and kin preserved. The clan is the measure of all things: its story, its survival, its future. To betray one's role within it is not only a social failing but a spiritual fracture, a tear in the spirit-tide that no dance can mend. Harmony between the genders, the living and the dead, the tribe and the land, this is the Ralian ideal, though it is ever threatened by the encroachment of human greed and time's erosion.
Ralian beauty is measured not in symmetry or softness but in strength, endurance, and the visible echoes of service. Scarred males are admired, each healed wound a tale. Broad shoulders, thick necks, and sharp claws are prized among warriors, while controlled stillness and precision of movement mark the most respected hunters. Among females, beauty lies in bearing: the set of the shoulders when issuing orders, the calm in the eyes during a ritual, the skill of foraging hands or weaving fingers. Fur density and sheen are valued, but more as signs of health than ornament.
Grooming is communal. Lice-picking, fur-combing, and wound-cleaning form part of courtship and bonding. Couples perform joint dances before elders during mating season, not to seduce but to demonstrate compatibility in rhythm, breath, and endurance. Courtship may take moons or moments, but once declared and approved, it is marked with a blood oath carved into bark and sealed with breath over a flame. Mates wear neck-braids or ear-wraps dyed in each other's clan colours, and breaking the bond, even in grief, requires ritual consent from the hearth-mother and the spirits of both bloodlines.
Urman gender roles are not flexible, and the Ralian are no exception. Males are expected to fight, patrol, hunt, and defend. They learn the spear before they learn the reed flute. From cubhood, they are taught to suppress indulgence, to master pain, to obey the matriarchs without question. Strength is their purpose; silence, their virtue.
Females govern memory, hearth, ritual, and the delicate but crucial arts of food, healing, and the spirit. It is the female who recites the clan-tree, names the ancestors, prepares the dead. Though warriors are rare among them, their authority within the tribe is absolute. To defy a matron is to court exile.
These roles are spiritual, not arbitrary. They reflect beliefs passed down since the breath of the first Clawmother, who bore her mate's cubs by firelight and taught him to guard them until he bled. To step outside this order is to risk rupture. Some rare individuals, often shunned, sometimes revered, walk between, but they are marked, watched, and bound to complex paths of solitude or vision-walking.
Marriage among the Ralian is sacred, permanent, and clan-anchored. It is not merely a union of hearts, but a binding of bloodlines. Mates are chosen through trial, observation, and elder approval, not arranged, but regulated. A male must prove strength, reliability, and clan honour. A female must demonstrate wisdom, steadiness, and spiritual clarity. The ceremony, known as the Firepairing, takes place before clan ancestors, with both mates bleeding into bark and casting it into the hearth. From that moment, they are breath-bound. To touch another without widowhood is taboo beyond words.
Fertility is sacred. Females bear cubs only every few years, and pregnancy is long and vulnerable. During this time, males are bound by oath to guard and provide, never straying beyond sight or scent for more than a day. If a mate dies during pregnancy, their name is inscribed onto the child's scent-totem. To raise a cub alone is rare, but not shameful, the hearth-clan steps in to ensure no bond is lost to wind or weeping.
Ralian life is marked by rites from cradle to claw. Birth is silent, the first cry of a cub is not celebrated but soothed, and their name withheld until the fifth moon, when a matron and a bone-whisperer read the dreams of the mother and the wind-signs of the season. Cubs receive their first fang at four years and are then blood-marked and assigned early training paths. Adulthood comes after the "Second Fire", a trial where young Ralians must survive three days alone in the jungle and return with a tale, a wound, or a gift. Those who fail return not as adults, but as dreamers, watched closely for signs of spiritual fracture or unbalance.
A rare rite exists, the Soot Naming, for those who survive the loss of all kin or a major betrayal. They shed their clan-name, take a new scent-crest, and are considered dead to all but the spirits. Only a matron may lift such a curse, and few do.
Death among the Ralian is not an end, but a return. The body is not buried or burned, but given to the jungle, suspended in a bark cradle above the sacred glade, exposed to rain, scavengers, and time. Over days or weeks, the body returns to the land, watched in shifts by kin. Bones are later collected, cleaned with herbal smoke, and placed in the Bonehall, a root-bound vault beneath the village or, in mobile tribes, carried in sacred packs from season to season.
Spirits of the dead are invoked in song and scent. Meals are eaten in their honour for the next full moon. On the seventh night, a wailing dance is held, where mates, siblings, and cubs throw ash into the wind to guide the departed back to the spirit-tide. Vengeance rites may follow, if the death was unjust, a ritual oath to balance the scale through blood, blade, or shadow.
Ralian law is not codified in stone, but in story and taboo. To speak during mourning, to hunt without offering thanks, to strike a cub in anger, these are not crimes, but spiritual fractures. To violate them is to endanger not only the self, but the entire clan's place in the Cycle. More severe are breaches of honour: breaking oaths, seducing another's mate, betraying one's patrol. Such acts demand Blood Rebalancing: a ritual duel, exile, or, in rare cases, name-burning, a rite where the transgressor’s name is removed from all memory, their totems shattered, their tale never spoken again.
Among reservation tribes, the taboos bend, not always by choice. Rations must be hoarded, bribes paid, fences watched. This tension corrodes the old codes, and some elders now speak of the “Grey Path”, a growing divide between memory and need, and the spiritual sickness it seeds. Still, even here, the core remains: do not forget. Do not dishonour. Do not let your name fall silent for shame.
"The land is not ours. We do not rule it. We do not shape it. We listen. We kneel. We feed the fire when it hungers and bury our dead where the river remembers. To break the pact is to die unmarked. To honour it is to be remembered in claw, tooth, and leaf."
Beliefs and Values
Among the Ralian Urmans, belief is not a matter of faith, but of continuity. Theirs is a living spirituality, a covenant not written in scrolls, but sung into rivers, etched into bark, and carried in the breath of elders. They follow Arorism in its oldest form: an animistic, ancestral path that binds each act to the land it touches and each breath to the one that came before. Siriat, the great striders, are not worshipped as deities but venerated as living echoes of a world in balance, walkers of the deep path that even the forest bows to.
Values centre on duty, memory, and restraint. Honour is earned not in speech but in silence kept, oaths fulfilled, hunger denied, and kin preserved. Every Ralian bears the weight of their forebears; to shame oneself is to stain a dozen names, and to redeem oneself is to rise not alone, but with one's clan. Vengeance, especially for the death of a mate or elder, is not a matter of choice but obligation. Mercy is admired, but not if it disrupts balance or leaves debts unpaid.
Ralian beauty ideals reflect the jungle’s own aesthetics: precision, endurance, and resilience. A fine coat is respected not for its softness but for the clarity of its pattern, the strength of its sheen, and its harmony with the clan’s ancestral colours. Grey-toned skin with thick, well-conditioned fur in rich brown or black is seen as a sign of good health. Scars are neither hidden nor glorified, they are read, like bark, for their shape and place. A scar earned in war is a history. A scar taken without purpose is a lesson written in flesh.
Courtship is ritualistic and formal. Dance, vocal display, and scent-bonding precede any approach. Gender roles are sharply defined: males court, provide, and display strength; females choose, nurture, and sustain. Rejection is delivered gently, but clearly, through a symbolic marking of the earth between the two parties.
Gender divides all of Ralian society. Males serve as hunters, warriors, trail-carvers, and ritual blood-bearers. Females are gatherers, homekeepers, hearthspirit tenders, and lore-binders. While both genders hold immense social value, their duties seldom cross. It is not seen as limiting, but necessary, a spiritual architecture set down by the Siriat themselves. Each gender holds power in its own sphere, and both must work in harmony to preserve the clan’s rhythm.
This division surprises even conservative humans, whose own hierarchies are less formal. Among the Urmans, a female warrior is not forbidden, but deeply unusual, and must carry a divine mark or a sacred reason. Likewise, a male fire-minder must prove his calling before he is permitted to serve the hearth.
Marriage is sacred, formal, and lifelong. Ralian bonds are formed through a ritual exchange of teeth, one incisor from each mate, buried together beneath a sapling. This tree is tended by both partners for as long as they live. To harm it is to end the union. Mating is exclusive, and love is fierce. To lose a partner is to wear mourning fur for a full year. Some never take it off. Widows and widowers may not remarry without a rite of severance and ancestral consent from the clan’s shaman.
Infidelity is almost unheard of and, when it does occur, is grounds for exile or, in rare cases, sanctioned combat. Love between mates is private, intense, and lifelong. It is not spoken of often, but seen in action, in shared burdens, exchanged meat, guarded silences. Among the Ralians, to avenge a mate is not only permitted. It is expected.
Children are raised communally but bonded to a hearth pair, typically their biological parents, though adoption is sacred and equal in weight. Males rarely tend to cubs directly beyond early play and protection; females oversee teaching, language, spiritual hygiene, and early rites. At age twelve, the cub undergoes the Rite of Skin, a solo hunt, fast, and vigil, after which they are renamed with a prefix indicating survival: ‘Kra-’ for hunters, ‘Oro-’ for scouts, and ‘Ana-’ for fire-bearers, among others.
These rites are not optional. Failure results in postponement, and shame. Success is met with feast and the burning of the cub’s old fur, a farewell to childhood, and a greeting to the spirit within.
Death is a return. The body is laid beneath a shallow layer of soil, covered with moss and carved stone. A death-song is sung by those closest, describing the deeds, faults, and final moments of the fallen. Honesty is key: to lie during this song is to doom the spirit to echo without rest. On the seventh day, the deceased’s fur is burned and the smoke offered to the canopy as breath for the Siriat. Mates do not sing; they watch, and weep in silence. Their mourning is worn in hair, in claw sheaths, and in wordlessness. For a full moon-cycle, they do not speak except to spirits.
Ralian Urman culture is structured by taboo, not law. The spilling of blood on sacred ground is forbidden. So is laughing during the funeral rites, refusing to share meat, or killing a young beast without need. Scented tattoos mark those who have violated such codes, warnings to others, symbols of shame to the bearer. Redemption is possible, but rare, and must involve sacrifice: a quest, a severing, or a gift to the Siriat of personal significance.
Honesty, loyalty, and service are not virtues. They are assumptions. A Ralian who lies to their elder or betrays their clan is not argued with. They are erased, from song, from record, from spirit. Such an act is only performed by consensus, never lightly, and always in silence. The greatest sin in Ralian culture is to act as if the world belongs to you, rather than the other way around.
“We did not write our names into stone. We sang them into bone, into bark, into blood. The land remembers. It does not need ink.”
Culture and Expression
To understand Ralian culture is to listen beyond language, to read a rhythm of gesture, scent, and song too easily mistaken for silence. Theirs is a civilisation built not on permanence, but resonance. Knowledge is passed in tales, in scars, in the patterns of clanpaint and the turns of a hunting trail. Memory is not stored. It is performed. Their arts are not made to endure, but to echo, and what echoes enough times, becomes eternal.
The Ralian Urmans are not without complexity, but theirs is a complexity rooted in utility, reverence, and survival. Each chant, each ritual carving, each dye-paint on fur serves a purpose: to teach, to honour, to protect. Their expressive traditions reflect a deep spiritual conviction that beauty is not ornamental, it is functional. Even a dance is a prayer. Even a lullaby is a map. This fusion of art and necessity binds their people more deeply than any written word ever could.
The Ralian language family forms the western core of the broader Maric language group. Spoken Ralian is highly tonal, emphasising breath, pause, and glottal emphasis. Complex meanings are often conveyed with minimal vocabulary, layered through vocal cadence, scent-marking, posture, and ear or tail movement, communication is truly multisensory.
There are five major Ralian dialects corresponding roughly to the ancient tribal homelands of Ergol, Pecha, Kraynor, Gierfell, and Tromos. While mutually intelligible, each carries unique idioms and ritual phrases. The Ergolese tongue is the most archaic, preserving near-sacred formulae used only in funerary rites and intertribal declarations. The Kraynoran dialect is considered ‘high’ Ralian and used in diplomacy or ritual storytelling. Gierfell and Pecha dialects are more melodic and faster-paced, reflecting the denser forest terrain and its associated urgency of sound.
Some Urmans born near Carthian territory speak a creole form of Ralian and Eralic, but this is rarely accepted in tribal spaces. Using the human tongue in sacred speech is a breach of propriety, an echo sung to the wrong spirit.
Ralian artistic tradition centres on impermanence. Wood-carving, bone-inscription, and body painting dominate the visual arts. Clan elders etch seasonal tales into bark strips, designed to fade after one generation. Warriors daub temporary markings in ash and ochre before raids or rites. Paint dances, in which gestures are choreographed to the application of pigment, are performed at dusk in clearing-circles, each movement a syllable of shared memory.
Music is percussive and breath-driven: bone flutes, hide-drums, and water bowls struck in rhythm. Every clan maintains a unique song-form called a ga’runash, passed from eldest to youngest. These songs encode territory, taboo, and ancestry, and are considered living documents of the clan’s spirit. To lose your song is to become unrooted, to be unblooded.
Architecture is non-monumental but deeply expressive. Homes are formed from bent saplings and river-stone, with decorative knots in cordage signalling the dwelling’s lineage and the season it was first raised. Altars are made of woven reed, remade each moon cycle. Urman art remembers, but it does not cling. It is reborn with every breath.
The Ralian myth-cycle begins not with creation, but with loss. According to oral tradition, the First Urmans were born from a dying grove, called forth by the Siriat to bear witness to the forest’s last breath. These proto-Urmans gave voice to the grove’s memory, and through their songs, made it live again in new form. Thus was born the First Echo, the spiritual core of Ralian cosmology.
Key tales include The One Who Brought Fire to the River, a trickster-ancestor who stole fire from a lightning-struck tree and negotiated with a flood-spirit to share it without burning the forest. Another revered myth is Ash-Fur’s Long Walk, the story of a widowed matriarch who traversed all five Ralian realms in mourning, learning a new rite at each sacred stone she passed, returning home with a woven bundle of laws and songs that formed the first intertribal covenant.
These myths are not merely told, they are enacted. At solstice gatherings, tribal youths reperform them through gesture, scent, and breath-song, merging present identity with ancient echo.
Among the Ralians, the line between myth and history is deliberately blurred. Nevertheless, several ancestral figures emerge across clans as models of wisdom, leadership, or sacrifice. Chief among these is Torak Stone-Binder, a lawgiver said to have carved the first blood-oath treaty between river and mountain clans. His pact is still honoured at three known boundary cairns, where no blood may be spilled.
Kesa of the Three Moons is venerated by many eastern tribes, a matriarch and warrior who bore triplets under a lunar eclipse, all of whom survived into elderhood and became singers of separate but linked lineages. Duska the Silent Claw is remembered not for founding, but for ending a war. Her vow of silence lasted twelve seasons, broken only in a single poem sung at a peace-meet that ended the blood feud between the Rootdrinker and Hollowmark clans.
These figures are not worshipped, but remembered. Their stories are not static, they shift with the clan’s need, reshaped each retelling. Memory is the shrine; blood the ink.
Ralian historical consciousness is communal, cyclical, and rooted in place rather than time. What the Alemni call 'epochs', the Ralians mark as breathings: periods shaped by natural upheaval, spiritual revelation, or intertribal convergence. The Breathing of Ash (approx. 700 years ago) corresponds to a volcanic eruption near Kraynor that reshaped settlement patterns across three realms. The Broken Silence (approx. 250 years ago) marks first large-scale encounters with Carthian colonial forces, and the resulting shift toward defensive alliances among lowland tribes.
Many clans trace their lineage through ‘featherlines’, oral genealogies named after birds whose calls accompanied key moments in their history. A clan whose ancestor was born during a heron migration might bear the title ‘Heron-Blooded’, with all that implies: calm, territorial, perceptive. To alter a featherline without cause is considered treachery; to preserve one despite great loss is a mark of clan endurance.
To outsiders, these patterns may seem amorphous, but they are as strict and structured as any written code, only sung, not scribed.
“You carry three names: the one your father gave you, the one your clan remembers, and the one the land has yet to whisper. Be slow to discard any. The forest forgets nothing.”
Naming and Lineage
To a Ralian Urman, a name is more than a marker, it is a thread in the tapestry of blood, place, and memory. While many Aroran cultures value names for their aspiration or earned prestige, the Ralians consider their names to be duties: inherited weights and whispered promises. Unlike the deed-names of Kathuri or the fluid self-renamings of the Varlimni, Ralian names are bestowed by family and upheld through life, subject only to ritual transformation in moments of profound change, marriage, spiritual awakening, or exile.
Names are given shortly after birth by the father’s kin, drawing upon the family’s lineage, the season or signs of the birth, and ancestral patterns. The mother contributes symbols, short descriptive terms or attributes, that are not formally part of the name but may influence how it is spoken within the hearth-circle.
Ralian names are patrilineal and fixed; clan name and father-name follow the given name, and children inherit the father’s clan, unless the child is born out of ritual union, in which case a compound name is used with ceremonial approval. The use of a matrilineal clan-name is rare and requires special dispensation from the elders, typically when the father is dead, exiled, or his bloodline considered spiritually ‘burnt’.
Name changes are rare and must be sanctioned by the shamanic council. The most common cause is bonding, formal, lifelong partnership, often accompanied by the combining of family lines under a new clan mark. Less often, a name may be shed during rites of mourning, rebirth, or self-exile, such an act is heavy, akin to tearing out root and feather alike.
Each Ralian clan is a complex network of bloodlines traced through patrilineal descent. A child belongs to their father’s hearthgroup and inherits his featherline, with secondary ties to the mother’s. While marriage between members of the same featherline is strictly forbidden, inter-clan marriages are encouraged, often arranged to secure peace, share spiritual burdens, or balance seasonal labour needs.
The father is the public root of a child’s lineage, determining clan affiliation, social duties, and spiritual taboos, while the mother provides immediate nurturing and kinship within the hearthgroup. In many ways, the clan functions as an extended patriarchal body: elders enforce codes, arbitrate disputes, and preserve the spoken genealogies that bind generations across centuries.
Marriage is sacred. Unlike the more fluid bonding of other species, Ralian Urman unions are solemn oaths before kin and spirit alike, marked by the binding of names and the sharing of blood-ink. To betray a marriage-bond is not merely social taboo, it is considered a spiritual fracture, one that stains the children’s featherline and may require years of ritual atonement to mend.
The following name examples reflect the structure of Ralian naming practice, including a personal name, a father-clan indicator, and sometimes a descriptive or clan-assigned epithet:
- Merrak of Thornhide, A forest-born male of the Thornhide clan, likely of martial stock.
- Kaela daughter-of Brel Thornhide, A formally named female acknowledging her father, Brel.
- Jasa of Blackpine, Tusk-Gifted, A male given an honorific for a successful rite of passage involving forest beast taming.
- Yorra Brelkin, A contraction of 'Yorra, kin of Brel', a common form used in the outskirts.
- Tarrak of the Broken Grove, A male born into a ruined or exiled hearthgroup, his name a mark of spiritual loss.
Elder titles or religious names are only used in sacred context, and never spoken outside rites without cause. Among the uninitiated, to speak an elder's name unbidden is to risk offending the spirits that dwell in their breath.
“They say we have no borders. But our borders are drawn in rain. In the shape of branches burned by lightning. In the bones of those who stood too close, too long, and thought the jungle theirs.”
Geography and Demographics
The Ralian Urmans are indigenous to the deep green heart of Erala and its surrounding lands, the rain-slick jungles of Pecha, the mist-drenched slopes of Ergol, the vine-choked riverlands of Kraynor, and the storm-fed uplands of Gierfell. Once, their hearthfires danced along the mountain roots of Tromos and the southern coasts of Carthia, their songs carried by wind and beast to the shores of Faela and Ellia. Now, those same coasts bear the crests of human lords, and the jungles that remain are thinned, carved into, and surrounded.
Despite this, the Ralians endure. Some remain deep in the forests, maintaining ancient rites. Others live on tribal reservations hemmed in by human farmland or built into the margins of colonial towns, caught between memory and necessity. Their geography is no longer only one of terrain, it is also one of encroachment, defiance, and adaptation.
Ergol, cradled along the equator, is the spiritual homeland of many Ralian clans. Its sweltering jungles and shifting river networks are veined with trails known only to the elders, where trees bear the scars of a thousand seasons of bark-speech. The central wetlands of Ergol host the Great Featherline Confluence, a sacred meeting ground where clans once gathered to trade names, blood, and visions beneath the eclipse-thorns.
Since the rise of human forts along the southern border, these gatherings have grown fewer. Still, Ergol remains a stronghold of unbroken tradition, where the wild still listens, and strangers know better than to burn what does not belong to them.
Pecha, straddling the shoulders of the western mountains, is a realm of narrow jungle valleys, cloud-fed springs, and cold morning mists. Ralian clans here are more reclusive, more wary of strangers, and often more heavily scarified in the old ways. The Pechan tribes favour stone altars and cliff-ledge shrines carved into the mountain roots, marked with ochre runes and bleached totems hung in solemn rings.
Kraynor, just north of the great mountain divide, acts as a crossroads realm, both geographically and culturally. Ralian settlements here are more exposed, often interspersed with human townships and hunting grounds. Many reservation communities exist along the eastern riverfronts, small, tightly-knit clusters of wooden dwellings and ritual gardens, boxed in by cultivated fields and the weight of foreign eyes.
It is in Kraynor that many Ralians first learn Eralic. It is in Kraynor that many Ralians vanish into the cities, returning only in dreams. And yet, the old ways persist. Bone-chime altars still hang in schoolyards, and no child forgets the ash-lines drawn at mourning feasts.
Gierfell is a forested highland in the far northwest, cooler than the equatorial jungles but no less sacred to its Ralian inhabitants. Here, clans build into the wooded hills, crafting longhouses of woven bark and riverstone. The Gierfell Urmans are famed for their breath-flutes, instruments said to carry prayers across whole valleys, and for the moss-blessing ceremonies held beneath the moonshadow trees.
Though human settlers from Rakhana have claimed the northern uplands, the south remains contested. Tribes here have grown increasingly martial, their shamans marked with ash-claws and their youths trained to track, strike, and vanish before the enemy ever sees their eyes.
Carthia, Ellia, and Faela were once rich with Ralian spirit paths and root-bound villages. Now, they are realms of human dominance, with Ralians reduced to small reservations, borderland foragers, or scattered kin hiding deep within state-owned forests. The jungles of these eastern realms are scarred by stone roads, iron rails, and taxmen who do not know what they have destroyed.
And yet, the Urmans remain. In Ellia, they carve prayers into the bones of fish and drop them into the rivers. In Faela, old men guard groves of lightning-warped trees where no birds sing. In Carthia, even in Carthia, they raise children to speak the featherline, though they do so only in whispers. These lands may bear foreign names, but beneath the surface, the old breath still lingers.
Beyond the ancestral heartlands, the Ralian diaspora stretches along the Medu coastline and into the inland markets of central Erala. Many have fled war, famine, or expropriation, taking root in lowland cities where their strength is used but their voices are not heard. Some form urban enclaves, tightknit quarters of mud-brick housing, shared ritual spaces, and hawkers selling bark-tea and fermented root paste by moonlight.
Others drift between towns as labourers, caravan guards, or scavengers. Some hide their names. Others tattoo them deeper. In every settlement, however far from home, one can find an elder who remembers the rain-paths, and a child who still draws claw-marks on stone when no one is watching.
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