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The Blood of Dragons

The ancient history of the khemakh tribes that lived in the lands now dominated by the Black Fault is a history that is known to none, carried only in oral stories that were lost when the Kostuan empire conquered their lands some time around 400 BTF during their territorial and economic peak. Members of the khemakh tribes that weren’t outright massacred were taken as slaves, either as gem miners or labourers for the construction of the city of Haspela and the imperial highway that runs along the southern coast of Sokos.

The khemakh continued a miserable existence as slaves for 400 years during which their culture began to adopt some values of Kostuan culture, most notably polygamous marriages and the forming of the organized Kathana faith that drew from the longstanding practises of khemakh tribes. The local Kathana was able to coexist alongside the mainstream Kostuan faith, its own smaller pantheon of spirits having their place among countless other foreign deities in the Star Court. Kathana quickly grew popular among the khemakh slaves, it built the framework for a common Thayyae identity among the slaves whos heritage belonged to different tribes, and provided a way for them to reconnect with their longstanding tribal practises while they were away from their homes in a way that was institutionalized and facilitated by their Kostuan overlords.

Resentment and hatred had grown and festered like a hideous, gnarled weed among the Thayyae slaves over centuries of enslavement and cruelty. This weed was fertilised by the empire’s slow meandering death and their forced conscription in the armies of the local Kostuan lords who sought their own freedom from a rotten empire, breaking away like so many other vassals. In 150 BTF, the region had gained independence from the empire, though the Khemakhs had not gained any for themselves. They were still slaves, they now belonged to a minority rule of the great grandsons of Kostua’s nobility.

When the black fault erupted from the depths of the world 150 years later, so too rebellion erupt from the khemakh slaves. The outpour of hellish abominations and otherworldly spawn to their north was a grave insult to the world and everything else in existence, and it cut deeply and severely among the superstitious khemakh population, motivating and fuelling the Thayyae rebellion. The bloody revolt began in 1 BTF and ended by the turn of the era as the khemakh majority were able to quickly outnumber the remnant Kostuan rulers.

And as the blood of their human lords stained the streets of Haspela that their ancestors had built in chains centuries ago, they knew what freedom truely felt like.