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==Ascaria==

'''Icons''':  The Wolf-Chosen

Ascaria is a vast landscape, home to innumerable blood-clans of Ascari tribesmen connected together by trade-towns and Ash Lodges.  In past ages, the Ascarians were a huge and terrible army, united under the banner of the Steel Lion, who crashed against the walls of northern lands, sacked their cities and reduced their lands to ashes.  They danced and slew in honour of the Steel Lion, they drove themselves into the frigid southern wastes to offer the heat of their blood to the Lion's own progenitor Shauku, and when the Dawn War came the thundering legions of the Ascarian praetorians were amongst the most terrifying of the Elder Gods' servant-armies; once Dharummut won their loyalty and slew the Steel Lion, they strove with mighty effort against their former masters and won great victories at vast cost of Ascarian lives.  But the Ascari of today seem a pale shadow beside that terrifying horde from the distant past; they are numerous, yes, and they are brave, yes, but they are not united.  Before the great advance of the iron-disciplined war machine of High Kyros, they fight with glorious strength and, with tragic inevitability, they lose.

The Ascarian steppes are an immense swathe of rolling steppelands and taiga, broken up by hills and occasional proud mountains that rear up from the landscape.  To the south, the landscape eventually chills into the tundra, where the far-flung Ascari still roam; further south still, where more mountains erupt and the frigid southern coast can be found, where glaciers hold court amidst the crags and where icebergs clamour and clash in the waters, even the Ascari blood-clans give up and leave the wilds untouched.  West, far west, and the Munerik hold sway; a different people with different traditions, alternately allies, kinsmen and enemies of the Ascari over centuries of feuding, trading and squabbling.  The steppes and tundra are so vast that even though the Ascarians are great in number, one can travel long beneath the open sky and never see another human being.

The blood-clans are strung together by a network of bloodlines and marriages that create small federations, each led by an arslan, a 'lion' who serves as overall chieftain of several clans.  Arslans contest with one another over grazing lands or feuds, maintaining an ongoing, internecine series of minor conflicts that largely keep Ascarian society from truly unifying.  Many Ascarians have long though a unified nation would be a grand thing - and they all believe their arslan is the one who should rule it.  This has served them poorly in the face of Kyros aggression; the superior arcane science and discipline of the Kyros advance has been met with loose alliances between desperate arslans, but nothing like the steppe-wide federation of arslans that could actually halt and even drive back the mountain-people.  Mobility is another issue; unlike the Huronese far to the north, the Ascarians are not a horse-people; horses are common, but many Ascarians still fight and travel on foot, accompanying their herds in great migratory patterns around their grazing lands.

Ascarian life is one filled with ritual, fire and sacrifice.  They are an immensely devout people, honouring Dharummut above all but revering every Younger God they know of in the appropriate element of life for that deity.  In the course of the year, the migratory patterns of the blood-clans lead them to various sacred sites on their territory, most of which will be sanctified to a given Younger who is then offered appropriate devotion and sacrifice.  On a regular basis, especially around battle and warfare, sacrifices of beasts (and, very rarely, people) are made to the gods.  The ancestors are deeply, deeply revered, especially what is known as the Eaten - the event that turned the Ascarians from loyal Elder servants to rebels was when Dharummut tore open the belly of the Steel Lion, revealing that the immensely powerful servitor had actually been devouring the spirits of the dead Ascari people.  The eating of sacrificed animals is an important part of Ascari rituals, as animal flesh consumed in this way is thought to go some measure towards restoring the souls of the Eaten.

At the centre of Ascari spirituality is the organisation of the Ash Lodges.  These shamanic priests of Dharummut hold sway as intermediaries and advisors amongst the Ascari blood-clans; they maintain the most sacred sites of the Great Wolf, and oversee the cross-clan ceremonies when the people come together in winter to partake of the fire dances and the reading of old memory-wolves.  Ash Brothers and Sisters are commonly thought of as some sort of savage mystics by northerners, but the truth is that they maintain libraries of lore and storehouses of relics of their people; they take on a fierce appearance as suits their patron deity, but they are by no means bestial of mind.  They have long held together the society of the Ascarians; now, under the leadership of the fire-scarred Wolf-Chosen, they look set to transform it.  Having defeated the fiery avatar of the Great Wolf, this high priest is set on aggressively unifying the arslans, planning to force them into a federation that seeks not just to fight the Kyrosi but also to remake the entire people into a powerful, aggressive nation.

The most sacred site in Ascaria is the Wolf Excarnate, the carcass of Dharummut.  When flung to earth by an Elder God, the grievously wounded god crashed through the Sarok Expanse and on into the Ascari heartlands, tearing a series of gorges, canyons and craters until it came to rest and excarnated into true divinity; here, the remnants of the body are zealously guarded by the Ash Lodge.  To eat of the flesh of Dharummut is to gain great power, and it is an honour only rarely gifted by the Brothers and Sisters to great leaders and heroes.  The scrimshawed claws and bones of the god are amongst the most holy relics of the Dharummut faith, enough so that grand thearchs and high priests of far distant lands have come seeking such precious talismans for their home countries.

Since the death of Dharummut, wolves have become a common animal in Ascaria, and they are considered as holy creatures; hunting wolves is a sacred act.  A peculiar rite has grown up around the notion of 'memory-wolves' - the capture of a wild wolf, followed by dying or scarring it with patterns and words that tell the name and story of a recently dead man or woman whose life has been worth recording.  When Ascari come across a dead memory-wolf, it is their duty to capture a new wolf and copy the old tale across to the new one, preserving it for future generations.  In this way, a great number of Ascarian wolves have painted or tattooed hides, their flesh bearing words in scars; to kill a memory-wolf, or to ritually capture one for a great ceremony, brings the memory of the dead man or woman back to the fore of the minds of the living, letting them reread the tale of the deceased and remember it afresh.

Other unusual elements of Ascarian society can be seen in their magic and warrior-traditions.  Certain warrior-brotherhoods exist across blood-clans, often long and storied associations of fighters, martial exponents and hunters that have ther own traditions, tactics and folklore.  Some rare few are associated with the Ash Lodge, and these practice esoteric and spiritual techniques of the furies.  In general, the Ascarians make more use of ritual tattooing and scarification to open up the body's elemental channels than the Drak people do, and an extensive body of lore has grown up around using and manipulating these channels to heal - and to harm.  Ascarian magi are rare, but the elementalists that do emerge amongst the blood-clans often use extensive scarification to further strengthen their magic.  In recent times, faced with Kyrosi arcane supremacy, many elementalists have voluntarily engaged in dangerous levels of scarification, acupuncture and alchemy to fully open their elemental channels to a dangerous, consuming level, making them incredibly potent arcanists for brief periods of time to battle the Frost Council before their flaring magic overwhelms them.

Despite its disunified nature, Ascaria is as a whole a serious economic element in the Drakkath region.  Trade in hides, pelts, furs (especially the precious seremat), herbs and drugs from steppe-plants and flowers, ivory and woven cloth are important for both the Drakkath and the Ascari people, as well as trade with the Munerik and Masked Kateni farther west.  Amongst the lands of the blood-clans, permanent trade-towns have grown up, and certain routes through the steppes are so well-travelled as to be roads with waystations growing up around them - and, unfortunately, raids on caravans and travellers by the more lawless blood-clans.  Further south, in the tundra itself, the trade-towns peter out; once per year, the southern blood-clans drive north to the towns to trade and sell their goods.

The Ascaria blood-clans are not the only inhabitants of the steppe and tundra.  Savage gnoll bands roam far and wide, selling their services to the arslans for their feuds and battles, or just pillaging and raiding.  These gnolls have a distinct culture from their kindred in the Drakkath and further north; they still offer propitiation to the Elder Gods in strange, remote shrines and are sometimes accused of encouraging and aiding the sporadic Elder cults that lurk in Ascarian society.  They also have a tradition of selling the self; band-members take on a contract of service wherein they render themselves another's property, voluntary slavery, an act that is apparently of important significance and personal development in their spiritual code.  Most commonly, this comes in the form of making themselves the bodyguard of an Ascarian willing to pay the band the appropriate price; gnoll slave-bodyguards are devoted and willing to die for their chosen master, and their ferocious and dark reputation earns their owner a great deal of respect and fear.  Beyond gnolls, the steppes also see goblin clans and the occasional ogre phratrie lurking amongst the hills, timelong enemies of the blood-clans where both sides have often tested each others' mettle; far south, in the tundra, a series of goblin towns stand in a confederation that has enough strength to seriously threaten the nearby Ascarians.  Other creatures terrorise the great expanse; winged beasts strike the most fear as there is no-where to easily hide from them, and hippogriffs and drazhikar are both held in high esteem in Ascarian culture as symbols of terror, strength and speed.

Signs of Ascaria's past still scar the landscape; from the wounds carved by the Great Wolf's death, to the rusted, collapsed fortresses of the Steel Lion.  Several regions, damaged badly during the Dawn War, have become geologically active spots with geysers and steam vents, chemical pools and steaming lakes; some hold ancient meteorites at their hearts.  A few examples of Ephras's library-forests still stand - woodlands of strange, gnarled trunks and boughs interlaced with one another, where the bark is twisted into the forms of bizarre words and the soft wood beneath can be scraped away into pages and pages of weird, babbling text.  A rare few areas have eerie 'hidden hills', where the air itself seems to warp and twist light; from a distance, one can see a great hill, but on getting closer said earth formation fades away.  Surviving warbands of the Steel Lion's servitors often lair and lurk in such places of broken reality.  Immense, lumbering behemoths with fuming vents on their carapaced backs slowly prowl the southern reaches, where steppe becomes tundra; their shells, metal-threaded internal organs and ivory are highly prized, and an arslan whose home is a behemoth shell is a powerful figure indeed.


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