Author: Marek Kapral, Peldak Chronicler
Date: 32 AP
From: The ‘Declaration of Founding’ news bulletin, posted on boards in city squares across Peldor, Sayar, Monsoo, Ciratha, Foregone, and Relgan.
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Citizens both new and old, I bid you greetings on this celebrated day!
In the wake of our army’s swift conquest against the perfidious slave traders of Relgan and our liberation of the tribals of Foregone, the Lord Protector, the Senate, and even King Arus himself have declared the founding of a new interstellar state, which shall henceforth be known as the Peldak Protectorate.
For my countrymen who may find themselves isolated and ignorant of events outside their homes, I’ve been asked to provide something of a simplified overview of this founding.
Who are our new countrymen? What kind of worlds do they inhabit?
Let us find out.
Peldor
The world of Peldor, birthplace of the peldaks.
Peldor is a rouge planet, which means it drifts through space alone and doesn’t have a star to orbit, or a day/night cycle. Our world is warmed by regular eruptions from thousands of volcanoes scattered across the surface, and is lit by plants and animals which sport large sacks of bioluminescent sludge. Our ancestors learned to harvest this goo for their light-shedding properties, and refine it. This cultivated sludge can maintain their glow for years, and was typically applied to clothing, jewelry, and the weapons we brought into battle. A brighter glow burns out quicker so, due to the expense of constantly reapplying new coats, strong light was seen as a status symbol for nobility at various points in our long history. When given as a gift, items will have different meanings depending on the color of their light, but most of those meanings are insults and declarations of war, so I don’t recommend aliens go about trying it.
We peldaks are a tall, strong people, with a long history of martial prowess. Roughly 3,000 years ago, the city of Pelda was founded, its inhabitants known as peldaks. When the city of Pelda and the Army of Light eventually conquered the world, peldak became synonymous with us as a collective people.
Because peldaks don’t age past our physical prime, hundreds of men and women who were present at the original founding are still alive. The first generation of peldaks -those born within the first 100 years after the city’s founding- are seen as a venerable class of people, and every single living peldak from that generation has since achieved great deeds, and attained the rank of nobility.
Our ears are long and pointed, and officially our eyes are grey, with our hair a dark brown. These were the colors of the original founders and are the preferred style, so while many peldaks have other color combinations, they tend to dye their hair and irises to be more socially acceptable. While hair and eyes can be easily dyed, ear length is more difficult to fake, and larger ears have always been considered an attractive feature. Ears under six inches are considered ugly, with ears over a foot long are universally loved.
The peldak language is split in two: High Peldish, often called peldosh, is a mutually intelligible offshoot of a much older language originating from the eastern coast of the continent. Low Peldish, is a simplified version of High Peldish, designed to be used by commoners and laypeople. High Peldish was originally as a scholarly, priestly language for the nobility to explain high concepts to each other, with Low Peldish only having a few hundred written words, and the spoken language was more for general, everyday use. Over the last 3,000 years, literacy rates rose, and now the two are so intertwined in common parlance that one needs to be fluent in both to get by on Peldor.
The only recognized religion on Peldor is Vendaiism. There exists many names and spellings for it, but the faith centers around the worship of Hananiah Vendall, the Son of God, who came down to save us from our own barbaric nature. Though it’s obviously just symbolic, the Head of State for the government of Peldor is Hananiah Himself. Most peldaks attend church service at least once a month, though the specific rituals and customs they go through depend on which of the four main denominations they attend.
Through our force of arms, we promise to expand the realm of the Peldak Protectorate to the furthest stars, conquering them, and vanquishing evil wherever we find it.
Sayar
Endless deserts marked only by sparse oasis’s and mountain ranges, the home of the sayran.
A world of extremes, the days suffer through blistering heat while the nights are cursed with a bone-chilling cold. For several thousand years, the sayran have traversed the sandy expanse, riding massive, domesticated beetles and hunting the surprisingly high number of fauna that live beneath the sands. They organize themselves into small nomadic tribes, riding from oasis kingdom to oasis kingdom on the backs of their beasts, and thriving through the use of their arcane magics.
Their magics confuse me, but church-studies have determined they’re not demonic. It’s ordinary, dull, a typical part of life, though new and unknown to non-sayran. Their magic, much like their planet’s day/night cycle, is a natural phenomenon that simply doesn’t exist on Peldor, but is no less part of God’s plan and shouldn’t be treated with suspicion.
The sayran, and the animals of Sayar, can sustain themselves through absorbing this magic, which is why there’s so many creatures on a dead world nearly devoid of plant life. The ability to absorb magic means that they can’t eat food from other worlds, their diet is strictly tied to their planet, and non-sayran can’t eat their food either.
It is by their magic that the sayran developed a method to travel the stars, eventually finding we peldaks and freeing us from our dark world 32 years ago. I personally hold a great affinity for their people, we must find some way to repay them. Each race had limited access to this space magic and would have been able to travel through the stars eventually, except us. This magic doesn’t naturally exist in or around our world, so it would have been impossible for us to leave.
But while everyone could utilize this magic, only the sayran can control it directly. The best analogy I can offer is that other races could make a sailboat to make use of the winds, but the sayran can control the winds directly, forcing it to blow the direction they want. It boggles the mind how it’s possible, or what it feels like, but I hear it’s second nature to all sayran. Perhaps it’s not our place to understand the specifics.
Their religion follows a single monotheistic God and centers largely on a specific angel that they believe created the space magic that is so central to their way of life. Due to various striking similarities between their faith and ours, the Pope of the Church of Pelda, after deep discussion with his papal council, declared the sayran faith as a natural extension of ours.
Surely our two peoples, isolated by such vast distances of frozen void, having such compatible religions means there’s an invisible hand guiding us along.
Because their natural talents in magic allow them to survive for years on no food or water, such things were considered a luxury for them. This meant that food was not considered essential to survival, just a small bonus. Unlike ancient wars on Peldor, where the defeat of your tribe meant genocide, the stakes of sayran conflicts were low, so they developed an interesting method of combat.
Representatives from each feuding group (historically it was 7 representatives each) would be chosen to fight in single combat under the watchful eyes of their God and Angels, with each side wagering something considered to be of relative value under their ‘angel of the scales’. These matches would usually be determined by first blood, as there was no point killing each other over such non-essential things like food and water. When one combatant was injured, he was considered out for the rest of the ‘war’, and matches would continue until one side had no more fighters. Then, the victorious clan/tribe/family/kingdom would gain whatever it is they wagered.
As sayran society developed and became more organized, the populations increased, and the collection of food grew more efficient. These ‘wars’ slowly turned festive and grandiose, before eventually becoming a corner stone of sayran life. The feasts at these festivals offered more food than the amount originally being disputed, and ‘wars’ started over a wider variety of reason. Love affairs, gambling, court disputes, personal animosity, all of these things could be resolved either by stepping into the ring yourself, or choosing a champion to fight on your behalf.
It’s interesting to note that in modern sayran society, these festivals are usually the only time the sayran eat. Their bodies never adapted to having such an abundance of food, so they put on weight easily if their diets aren’t strictly maintained. While standards change from clan to clan, generally speaking, being fat is considered a sign of indulgence, that you can’t control yourself, while being skinny is a sign of anti-social behavior, that you don’t partake in these festivals with your friends and clan. A healthy middle ground is considered best.
The sayran couldn’t develop paper thanks to their lack of trees and therefore never invented a writing system (though they did have a rough pictographic system that was carved on beetle shells, and was mostly used to calculate supplies). However, they were able to make an accurate calendar, which we peldaks adopted. A year is 360 days, every day has 24 hours, and an hour being 60 minutes made up of 60 seconds each. This is the official dating system of the Peldak Protectorate, with the sayran coming to Peldor and joining with us forming the epoch at year zero. Everything before that event is BP (Before Protectorate), and everything after is known as AP (After Protectorate), with the current year being 32 AP.
Without paper, history was passed down orally through song, and nowadays the sayran operate massive choirs and operas, using their magical gifts to attune their voices for a wider range of sound. These choirs almost always play during festivals, and I would be remiss not to mention how the sayran have beautiful singing voices, it’s truly a blessing on the ears.
Monsoo
A temperate, wet world full of island chains and archipelagos, where the monsoorai people reside.
A dark-skinned people, the Islanders are easily the finest sailors in the explored galaxy, though I’m sure many cirathans would take issue with that statement. The monsoorai were instrumental in bringing transport and supply ships to the contested worlds during the Founding War, never would I have expected people to actually enjoy traversing the seas and the stars.
The world of Monsoo is currently divided into hundreds of states, many of which only encompass single islands, and the larger empires vying to unify the monsoorai people once more. Monsoorai history is cyclical, with the people being united under one great empire, that empire breaking up, and the successor states going to war to reunify the people. The Protectorate’s only current ally on this world is the Aging Sun Empire, or Asean for short. Years ago, Asean launched an expedition through space and met merchant ships of the proto-protectorate in the year eight. Now that the Founding War is over, we plan to help them expand their reach across their world.
The civilized people of Monsoo share a common language, and during peace time enjoy a vast trade network where goods flow throughout most of the explored world. During times of war, the sailors of the various nations are the main fighting force, with victory being determined almost solely on the waves. Piracy and mercenary fleets are a common sight on the fringes of each nation’s borders, with hidden coves providing a safe harbor from retaliation by the larger states.
Shortly after meeting, we peldaks rushed to the defense of Asean after they were attacked by the largest of the successor states, the Heaven’s Tree Empire. Through Asean’s sailing and our foot soldiers boarding the enemy ships, we successfully defended them from being conquered outright during the War of Iron Rain.
Were it not for the somewhat recent invention of ‘cannons’, we could have gone on to capture enemy islands. Giant metal ships turned their cannons to our men on the land, and we suffered several miserable defeats. Thankfully our warriors are quick to adapt, so through unity and force of arms, we were able to recover and bring about a limited victory.
A cannon is a large metal tube with a reservoir of ‘liquid firemoss’ in the back. When ignited, the liquid explodes, and a solid metal ball is launched forward at speeds more than enough to tear holes through steel armor. Decades prior, following the collapse of the last empire, the monsoorai states employed all sorts of tricks to get a leg up on their rivals. The first was a simple cannon, then they started plating metal over their ships, then they produced more powerful cannons to punch through the metal armor. It was simply bad luck that we fought an enemy had developed such a devastating technology.
During the race of technology, the monsoorai eventually decided to forgo the use of wood entirely to create floating metal behemoths. Such dreadnoughts (the translated name of Asean’s first fully metal ship) could not use a mast and sail to propel itself, so they parked these dreadnought-class vessels in front of strategic ports, so no enemy fleet could assail them.
As technology progressed, the monsoorai managed to create something known as a ‘combustion engine’, which was quickly applied to the dreadnoughts. I don’t know how it works, but I was told that combustion engines utilize the explosive properties of firemoss to spin turbines under the water, finally allowing dreadnought class vessels to sail. These dreadnoughts were so overwhelmingly superior that dozens of smaller states were conquered in short order, and wooden ships became obsolete within a year.
The monsoorai diet consists largely of fish, but the sheer amount of spice and flavor available gives thousands of variations on how to prepare even a single species. In my personal experience, half of those variations are spicy to the point of being unfit for human consumption, and monsoorai will gleefully mock you for being unable to finish your plate. They, like the cirathans, also mock us peldaks in particular for being poor sailors.
Generally speaking, there isn’t much of a difference between the various successor states of the monsoorai.
Every state speaks the same language, uses the same legal system, has the same form of government, trades with the same currency, play the same sports, and the common man considers themselves monsoorai first and foremost. Everyone identifies more with the concept of a unified Monsoo Empire, and takes pride in their long history. The monsoorai are a race of literate, politically engaged men with a deep appreciation and love for their people. The biggest difference between each island is the unique history of that island. The island where _ was created, the island that was the birthplace of the _ empire, such achievements are flaunted for centuries, never to be forgotten.
The average monsoorai doesn’t particularly care about which faction will end up dominating the planet, and in times of peace, travelers and merchants are free to cross territorial waters as they see fit. The biggest drivers of the post-collapse civil wars are the nobility of each state, as they want to be the rulers of the next empire. The soldiers fighting for each successor state typically due so because of money and post-service benefits, not for a deep love for the particular successor state.
When we help Asean rule the waves, all will come to accept the Aging Sun Empire as the rightful successors of the planet.
Ciratha
A dry world dominated by arid deserts and a single great ocean, the cirathans live in city-states which dot the coasts and islands.
Their world sits far from their twin suns, and the seasons are dependent on their phases. If the suns are side by side, the days are long and the world is pleasantly warm. If one sun is behind the other, the days are short, and snow blankets the land, even along the equator. Surrounding the ocean are hundreds of miles of grasslands and forests, and to the south are marshy jungles intermixed between hundreds of small lakes. Most of the remaining world is dominated by uninhabited deserts that the cirathans have never crossed.
The cirathans are a short people, typically fair skinned, with large golden eyes and silky golden hair. These eyes afford them an incredible range of vision, easily able to take in large amounts of information, and their sight extends farther than other humans.
This attention to detail makes them naturals at negotiation and debate, though their hunting skills are capped by being unable to wield a bow heavy enough to shoot as far as they can see. Where peldaks view ourselves as straightforward and honorable, cirathans take pride in their ability to lie, bluff, and keep themselves unreadable to others. In the eyes of a cirathan, someone who gets fooled has only themselves to blame. In light of this culture, wars are frequent, yet shockingly bloodless. Their generals and admirals are all liars, and the goal is to position their forces in such a way that the enemy is demoralized and gives up, not wanting to waste their lives in a slightly disadvantaged battle.
In the same vein, cirathans make for fine merchants. To skilled negotiators, even pirates and bandits can be driven off simply by winning an argument. This may seem incomprehensible to most, but think from their perspective. If you pride yourself as a living lie detector, and the merchant you’re attempting to rob says he owns a pet dragon, and you can’t tell if he’s lying… what if he really does have a pet dragon? In other instances, cirathans seem to instinctively honor their tradition of speech. A bandit may know there exists no such dragon, but failing to prove it’s an obvious lie will prompt the bandit to accept his defeat and leave empty-handed.
To avoid slander, it should be noted that there are three types of lies, and only one is culturally acceptable (this only refers to business. When dealing with thieves, everything is okay so long as it keeps you from being robbed). The first type is categorized as exaggeration and bluffs, which everyone understands and partakes in. At a certain point, which might vary between city states, lying becomes so blatant that it turns to outright fraud, which the second type of lie. Most cities have laws against fraud.
Generally speaking, the difference between the two is that a bluff could reasonable be seen through if the victim were better at detecting lies, whereas fraud something that nobody could detect.
If you sell a medicine that lessens the pain of migraines, but you say it completely removes all pain from a migraine, that’s an acceptable lie. The victim should know that such a miracle cure doesn’t exist. If you claim the medicine removes all pain from a migraine, but it actually causes brain cancer, that’s fraud. You’re selling a poison while calling it medicine, and nobody could reasonably be expected to see that.
The third type of lie, and the most heinous, is an oath breaker. Ciratha is a world where major deals can be signed by a handshake and a promise, multi-city trading empires can form or fall apart based solely on the personal reputations of the parties involved. If a cirathan stakes his name on something, swearing an oath, then failure will spread his name as a liar who can’t be trusted. Trust is a powerful negotiation tool, and loss of trust is nearly impossible to get back.
Examples of oath breaking would be things like failure to repay a loan without extenuating circumstances, or not upholding your end of a bargain. If I ask you to invest in my shipping company, promising a return on your investment, and then my merchant ship is attacked by pirates and the company goes bankrupt, that’s not oath breaking. Pirates are a natural risk, you knew that when you invested. If I ask for an investment in a shipping company, but then only use half of your investment to buy a cheap boat while pocketing the rest for myself, that’s an oath break. You trusted me to work hard and make the company profitable, while I cut corners.
During one of the sayran’s many expeditions to find Peldor, they stumbled across the world of Ciratha and landed there for a time. The local cirathans treated them well and were eager to hear of their journey. Sadly, at the time, that early design of the sayran starship could not house cirathans. Their ship relied on the people inside sustaining themselves on magic, which the cirathans couldn’t do. It wasn’t until the year 8, after the monsoorai were introduced, that the cirathans could buy the ships necessary to travel the stars.
Shortly after joining this proto-protectorate, the cirathans developed Cirathan Standard, an easy-to-learn, straightforward language purposefully designed for ease of communication. It took me a decade to master it, but Cirathan Standard has become mandatory teaching in peldak schools.
The cirathans also have a merchant language that’s heavily dependent on body language and context. An alien with an understanding of Cirathan Traditional (for which the merchant language derives) could follow the words, but their poorer eyesight would make it impossible for the alien to interpret the real language. The merchant language was designed with the idea of discussing private business in front of others without anyone knowing.
City-states often form trade and defense leagues for economic growth or mutual defense (failure to defend allies would be an oath break). In years prior, we set up a ‘Pel League’, which encompasses hundreds of cities on the eastern side of the great ocean, and has been exploding in membership ever since the start of the Founding War. If a city-state wants to trade with the Peldak Protectorate, they must either join the Pel League, or face a high tariff.
The Pel League is just a customs union bound by peldak law, and a guarantee that if any outside city were to attack them, the full might of the peldak military will come to their aid. The internal politics of the league bore me, but it’s divided into several factions, alliances, and guilds, all vying for preeminence in the league.
Foregone
A beautiful red world marked by red trees, red grasses, red sands, and red waters, the red firryans make their home here.
Foregone is a single landmass intermixed with various rivers, seas, oasis’s, jungles and deserts. The plants are red, the rocks are red, the water has a red tint, even the animals are various shades of red. The only non-red thing on the planet are the firryans, as their skin has the ability to change pigmentation based on the color of their surroundings. Though, while living on their homeworld, this obviously means they’re red as well.
In addition to this chameleon-skin, the other well-known feature amongst the firryans is their striking beauty. It’s impossible to explain for those who haven’t seen one in person, but the firryans just have something about them that everyone can agree is attractive. This isn’t broad strokes or exaggeration. I mean every person I’ve met, as an individual, has found every firryan they’ve met attractive, without exception.
It is for this second reason that the firryans have largely been enslaved for at least the last 2,000 years.
Another race on the planet of Relgan, which will be spoken of more in a moment, lives in a solar-system close by and have made regular journeys to the world, at least once a decade. The relgi set up a client state on Foregone, the city of Foregone for which the planet gains its name. In exchange for the citizens of this client state being protected from slavery, they would round up non-citizen firryans and sell them to the relgi trade ships.
This led to two major factions in the firryan people over the centuries. The cosmopolitan firryans, who lived in the city of Foregone and got rich off the slave trade, and the nomadic firryans, who traveled the world in small communities to avoid capture. The cosmopolitan firryans are currently displaced due to the sacking of their city during the war, while the nomadic firryans are understandably distrustful of outsiders.
Work is being done to rebuild the city (and turn them away from their sinful slave-trading ways), and create inroads with the nomadic communities. Only time will tell if these efforts succeed.
Both factions of firryans divide themselves further, the nomads into tribes, and the cosmopolitans into districts of the city, each with varied customs, beliefs, and patterns of black tattoos across their bodies. It is theorized that firryan slaves on Relgan began the tradition of black tattoos to create a solid sense of community, even as their skin tones changed with the environment. There are scattered incidences of slaves stowing away on relgi ships to return to Foregone, so they might have brought the tradition back, allowing it to spread over the centuries.
The firryan faith is ancestor worship. Great heroes whose names are passed down through the generations, and supposedly watch over their descendants. As capture was a constant danger for the nomadic peoples, and record keeping was nearly impossible over such vast periods of time, it’s difficult to separate the truth of what these ancient men and women did from what the legends speak of. Tales vary from nomadic tribe to nomadic tribe, some legends get attributed to different heroes, a figure mentioned as a hero to one group might be a bitter villain to another, there’s very little consistency of faith. The nomads don’t concern themselves with this inconsistency however. Each tribe has a patron hero or two, and their version of that hero is the most correct, with everyone else’s interpretation being wrong. Wars between groups really only come about due to these ancient, mythological rivalries. The firryans take their ancestor worship seriously and wouldn’t hesitate to kill a man from a rival tribe just because their patron heroes hated each other. Otherwise, conflicts only arise against the Cosmopolitan firryans and their raiding parties.
Cosmopolitan ancestor worship is more structured and documented, with heroes being celebrated all over the city for their great works. Districts of the Forgone were (before we sacked the city) covered in ancient statues and beautiful tapestries of their most celebrated ancestral heroes. Libraries full of ancient tomes and records dot the city streets, and there are plenty of museums to go around. Rather than each district having one or two patron heroes like the nomads, the increased record-keeping abilities of the cosmopolitans allow them to record the names, deeds, and ancestry of every firryan who has ever lived in the city. For this reason, the cosmopolitans don’t bother with graveyards, as they believe their people live on in books and records.
Perhaps there’s some truth to the firryan’s idea of guardian spirits looking over them. When our forces invaded the city of Forgone, not a single book from any library was damaged in the fighting. Or maybe that speaks more to the discipline of our soldiers and the quality of their commander.
There does exist a third group of firryans, however.
The firryans who live on Relgan, the descendants of the slaves taken to that world.
This third groups varies to an insane degree. Some tribes of firryans hide away, others live in harmony in Relgan states, other own their own states. The one linking factor for these expatriate firryans is that they all have some level of relgi ancestry in their blood, even if it isn’t noticeable at a glance. Cosmopolitan and nomadic firryans on Foregone tend to see these expatriates as foreigners, tainted by the relgi, and not true firryans. Many expatriate groups even adopted regli religious traditions and language.
Relgan
A world with three main continents and thousands of islands, the home of the relgi defies easy classification.
There are forests, great grasslands, mountains, jungles, deserts, arctic regions, the lands of Relgan are so varied that it’s hard to summarize the people of this world. They divide themselves into kingdoms, empires, republics, the diversity on display is astounding, and it’s no wonder why there has never been a unified relgi government. There exists dozens of languages, and most relgi don’t even look alike. Variety of hair colors, skin tones, cultures, they’re similar to how Peldor was in the centuries before the peldak conquests.
The names relgi and Relgan come from the language of the main slave traders we fought in the Founding War. Their nation was called Tendor, and they known as the tendori. Because they called their world ‘Relgan’ in their language, that’s the name we adopted as well.
There were many nations who possessed spaceships and the ability to travel to Foregone, competing with each other to capture the highest number, and best quality, of firryan slaves. It is said that over a thousand years ago, a collection of relgi states fought a great war with each other over hunting rights on regions of the firryan homeworld. In wake of the devastation it caused, the states formed a coalition and set up the city of Foregone to act as a middleman. The city would capture slaves as a neutral entity, then sell to whoever was looking to buy. Either the firryans themselves were always intended to be the owners of Foregone, or they slowly gained more and more power in the city. Either way, history records that after a single generation of these firryans selling their own in exchange for relgi goods and technology, they grew to love the luxury and security this relationship brought them, and took over duties in the city.
It was a cirathan merchant ship, lost and far off course, that eventually found Foregone. With their eyes able to decipher body language, they instantly traded all the goods in their cargo hold for a batch of firryan slaves, and quickly opened lines of communication with the various relgi states. This slave trade continued for years behind the peldak’s back, and quickly spread to the rest of Ciratha, and Monsoo.
But once this sinful trade was noticed by we peldaks, we didn’t hesitate to put an end to it.
In the year 26, a cirathan trade ship, carrying a detachment of peldak guards, was approached by a relgi slave ship belonging to the nation of Tendor. The cirathan captain, unaware of our fierce hatred of slavery, thought he was simply fortunate to meet the ship on his travel and proceeded to dock with their economic friend. The second the peldak detachment realized what was happening, they slaughtered the tendori crew aboard, freed the firryans, and demanded the cirathan captain change course to Peldor.
When the Lord Protector and the Senate heard what was going on, they promptly declared war on the tendori and mobilize their forces. 6 years later: the capital of Tendor burned, Foregone was in rubble, the remaining cirathans, monsoorai, and relgi all freed their slaves to avoid our wrath
We then moved into the tendori lands, building bases and colonies to make sure our laws are obeyed. Of course, we’re helping them rebuild in the process. These are our new countrymen as well.
Across the world of Relgan exists a sizeable portion of half-relgi half-firryan hybrids. Up until the war, the statuses of these hybrids varied from state to state, with some treated as slaves no different from their firryan parents, and others treated as equals to their relgi counterparts. The state of Tendor considered them as equals (though Tendor possesses a caste system, so the hybrids were only equal to the caste of their tenori parent), which made it somewhat confusing as various hybrids fought alongside the tendori to keep us from freeing their own enslaved mothers and fathers.
The hybrids take after their parents in one of two ways: 1. Their skin pigmentation can change. 2. They’re considered unnaturally beautiful. There are no documented cases of a hybrid sharing both the traits of their firryan parents. If the hybrid mates with a pure blooded relgi, their offspring’s trait will remain but in a lesser form, such as their skin only changing to certain shades, or being considered only fairly attractive. Third generation hybrids will have an even less expression of their trait, and fourth generation hybrids are indistinguishable from pure blooded relgi. If the hybrid mates with a pure blooded firryan, they will slowly gain the second trait until they’re indistinguishable from a normal firryan.
Given the nature of firryan attractiveness, it should come as no surprise that the majority of relgi have some level of firryan ancestry, even if it’s not enough to be noticeable. In fact, firryan ancestry is so widespread that you could argue there’s no such thing as a pure-blooded relgi at all, and another few millennia of slavery would have resulted in firryans owning both worlds. Ironically, our war saved the relgi from extinction, not the firryans.
It is from this shared heritage that we find any level of uniformity on Relgan. All relgi states have some sort of relation to the firryans.
While they might be divided in different nations, while their faiths, government structures, and languages might differ, there are clear lines of heritage and continuity to be found.
A group of slaves might have fled one state and found refuge in an abolitionist nation, bringing their culture and language with them. Various relgi nations worship gods that bare striking similarities with heroes in firryan folklore. Centuries prior, a large empire broke apart largely due to disjointed slave uprisings, with each uprising creating their own small nation, all linked through a shared history, culture, and language of the state they broke free from.
A deeper dive into Relgan history would require a more dedicated explanation than this brief summary, but the main takeaway is that the relgi have been irreversibly altered by a long history of subjugating the firryans. There exists very little that hasn’t been affected by it, even down to their food. Some of the most celebrated dishes find their roots in what the firryan slaves learned to cook. For example, stew was originally created to cheaply and quickly feed large numbers of slaves, but has become a widespread, celebrated cuisine all over the world, even in nations that never practiced slavery.
Soon, the linking piece of uniformity for every relgi state is that they’re all part of the Protectorate.
****
Given that the Peldak Protectorate was founded through the defeat of the tendori, it’s natural to think that they’re our enemies, and we should extract a harsh toll from them as retribution. However, we peldaks know well the value of integrating our defeated foes and turning them into valuable friends.
Besides, the only truly unified world in the Protectorate is Peldor. There exists several clans of sayran which have not joined us, the monsoorai’s largest nation has a burning hatred for us and our friends of Asean, there’re constant whispers in the cirathan city-states of how to avoid ‘subjugation’, the firryan nomads are outright hostile to any aliens, and the rest of Relgan is warry of our conquests as well.
If the Peldak Protectorate is to expand and encompass the rest of the galaxy, as it inevitably will, war will be a tool applied liberally. If simply being a former enemy means we can’t treat each other humanely, then I imagine most of the galaxy will eventually meet a gruesome end, making us no better than the tyrants we seek to displace.
Instead, think of the tendori not as these uniquely evil creatures beyond redemption, but as the first of many misguided souls who required the firm hand of the peldaks to bring them on the path of goodness and morality.
