Carving Mouths with which to Scream.

The forested hills that the Esgodarrans now call home boast considerable farmland, dug into the slopes and concealed by the trees. These terraced gardens favor smaller numbers of nutrient-rich crops quite unlike the vast fields of grains from the plains dominated by modern Ersuunians. Among these staple crops are included a variety of gourd vegetables in diverse colors and shapes. Just as diverse are the customs and cultural traditions surrounding many of them.

Some gourds are grown solely for the purpose of housing medicines or sacred substances for the holy folk of the hill people. Others are used as food, or animal fodder, or their rinds are ground up for several purposes. One type of spotted vine fruit is even known as a source of a potent intoxicant, when fermented properly. All of these uses and more are ingrained in Esgodarran tribal memory by a wealth of stories and songs.

One story in particular is told and retold every harvest season, to explain why so many of the hill tribes hollow out different gourds, carve their sides into elaborate shapes, and then plant them around the tops of specially prepared torches as part of seasonal celebrations.

Once, long ago, the Esgodarrans were fighting a losing war against the encroaching Haraalians. Before the chariots and the saddled archers of the horsemen, they fell like so much scythed wheat. As they retreated into the hills where they eventually built their holdfasts and villages, they brought the bodies of their dead with them.

When the first crops were planted in soil ill-suited for farming, pragmatism led to a creative, albeit somewhat grim, use for those bodies. The dead became fertilizer, so that their families could live to see the coming year. And their sacrifice was not in vain: the legend claims that the hills bloomed with produce, chief among them being swollen gourds of proportions that any farmer then and now would be envious of.

But when the harvest season drew close, the Esgodarrans sensed that something was wrong. The gourds seemed to be disturbed ever so slightly when looked over every morning, and at night strange sounds could be heard coming from the gardens. These happenings continued and intensified over the following weeks until the hills were weighed down upon by a terrible pall- the people were sure that a curse had settled upon them like clinging spider's silk.

Eventually, the source of the omens was discovered. It was the gourds themselves, writhing and moaning upon their vines as if they were alive. When terrified tribespeople dared to stalk closer, they found that they could recognize the pained, muffled sounds as human- even as the voices belonging to their deceased loved ones. Terror gripped one and all as they realized that in growing their food from the corpses of their kin, they had unwittingly trapped their souls.

A wise and skilled woodsman proved to be their salvation, as he stepped forward brandishing his biggest and sharpest knife. One by one, he cut the gourds from their vines and then cut into their sides, carving faces into their hard outer layers and allowing their soft insides to spill forth. Blessed with eyes that could weep and mouths that could scream, the gourds wailed their horrors out. They had been reliving the moments of their deaths over and over again while trapped in the blind silence of the earth, and only through the woodsman's cuts were they able to rid themselves of the accumulated pain.

Days passed as the hillsides screamed and lamented, the sound of which drove even the most stalwart of god-king Haraal's soldiers away from the hills in fear. The Esgodarrans stuffed their ears with tree cotton dipped in beeswax to block out the worst of the wailing, but it grated terribly at even those steady folk before the end.

One by one, the gourds expelled their anguish and gave up their ghosts. The nightmare ended at last when the final gourd's voice quieted to a pulpy sputter, in which it thanked the woodsman and their tribe for the mercy. It bequeathed the banquet of their bodies to the people of the hills, but warned them that never again could anyone be buried beneath a garden. With that, the last trapped Esgodarran soul sloughed out and moved on to the afterlife.

Ever since that day, the use of human fertilizer has been strictly forbidden among all of the Esgodarran tribes. As a reminder of that grave mistake, the people carve more mundane fruits into contorted faces or depictions of other mythological scenes every year, and place them on display for all to see.

A popular trick aimed at children or very wayward lowlanders is to throw one's voice so that it sounds as if a gourd is speaking--or screaming--at the observer.

Woeful Errands and Mighty Dooms.

The Esgodarrans of the peripheral hill and highland regions of the Ersuunian Basin are a people who have witnessed their fare share of hardship. I have written with no shortage of attitude on this subject in the past. But there is one facet of Esgodarran culture which I believe needs no opinionated foreign input in order to get the gravity of its meaning and history across. It simply need speak for itself.

I write of the cycle of myths surrounding their dozens, if not hundreds of folk-heroes and legendary ancestors. Each geographic enclave of Esgodarran clans is fairly well separated from the others in this day and age, though their legendary cycles maintain similarities and traditions well into the semi-modern generations. For that reason, the myths are treated as being different variations of a single unifying system of beliefs and epics, rather than being genuinely separate siblings descended from the same parent-culture.

In particular, this cycle is somewhat unique for the way in which these important cultural icons are treated. Generally speaking, heroes embody or come to embody a culture's highest ideals (or flirt with their most decried iniquities), while struggling against some great threat. They then tend to succeed against their greatest foe or monster, and return home to wealth, or with wealth. At the very least, they meet a just and appropriate fate which instills in the audience an appreciation of the virtues of which the hero was lacking. Esgodarran heroes, meanwhile, do not always meet such tidy bookends.

Esgodarran heroes stumble.

Esgodarran heroes die.

Esgodarran heroes lose.

Two concepts are central to the Esgodarran heroic myth; the Woeful Errand, and the Mighty Doom.

The Woeful Errand is the challenge, foe, or catastrophe which has demanded that the hero rise to the occasion. Widespread famine, earthquakes, evil magic, and other invading tribes are common causes of conflict for the people and their hero, but there are many. The hero can come from a diverse set of backgrounds, not all of them particularly well to do, and the lack of spoken grammatical gender or particularly gendered names in many Esgodarran dialects means that self-reflection on, or personalization of, a hero's identity is common among audience members of a traditional oratory performance. When the hero becomes distinguished for some reason or another, they take on the Woeful Errand of saving the land or community from danger. Completion of the errand would be success in the quest, and is what each hero strives for.

The Mighty Doom is what they end up receiving, however. It is their ultimate fate, normally at least one step removed from success, and often involving the death of the hero. The hero, recognizing their looming destruction as well as the futility of their attempts to avert it, proceed to meet as glorious an end as possible. I want to emphasis that point- they recognize the ultimate futility of their deeds. Warriors throw themselves upon an army until their bodies are like pincushions of spears and arrows, chieftains and other leaders commit ritual suicide or endure total disgrace after failing to protect their tribes from treachery, and great hunters are torn to pieces by mythical beasts who will continue to stalk human meals in the absence of their traps.

Supposedly none of it matters in the end. But they continue to act, regardless.

Like the Pem-Pah of the far southwest, these stories tell of a grim world in which loss is to be expected. But unlike the guardians of Anqoh, the loss and failure are not random events in a chaotic world governed by uncaring chance. The dignified tragedies of Esgodarran folk-heroes are treated as inevitable in the extreme, and in some cases even preordained by seers or their gods.

I say that their deeds supposedly do not matter, because that is the exact language typically used in an epic's delivery. However, the fact that they are one and all remembered and venerated despite and because of their failures is emblematic of the great importance of fatalistic struggle in modern Esgodarran narratives. Family lines have even been known to have long-running disputes over whose ancestor was greater in their defeat, based off of the qualified fierceness of the thing which finally killed them. These doomed heroes play an integral role in the way Esgodarrans regard themselves and their place in the world.

A world which they recognize their own setbacks in, but which they will not back down from.

And judging from the number of heroes whose Mighty Doom involves them being crushed beneath the hooves of a thousand horses driven by a giant with golden skin, the historical interactions between Esgodarrans and Ersuunians have not gone without comment or consideration on the part of the highland folk.

Riverine Despotism in the Ersuunian & Early Haraalian Periods.

As we pass farther away from the cesspits downhill from the alehouse, my mind relaxes as chances of some strange tricks on the part of Elrusyo diminish down to the minimum level of risk one always runs when consorting with herb-hermits.

In place of that mental exertion, I'm able to appreciate the river, now broadening and clarifying steadily, for what it is. It, like so many other bodies of running water across the Basin, is a vein of life running through the heartland of so many former states.

And, like real arteries, one need only apply a little pressure to them in order to affect change in the body at large.

The Ersuunians, and the people of Haraal who would eventually subsume or supplant them, are famed in written history as well as modern popular culture for their vast forces of cavalry, able to wash over any opposition like crashing waves. They conquered their enemies and then held onto their winnings through the threat and force of that mounted elite, which would grow increasingly landed and powerful as time went on. They remained the focus of warfare and political might until the appropriation of dry-stone building from Esgodarran architecture eventually met with mortar and resulted in the first fortified and stone-walled cities, which complicated the art of the siege and seriously hampered a cavalry focus.

But an equally important component of control was water access. As mixed and settled Esgodarran-Ersuunian petty-kingdoms formed, pastoralists and montane herders alike became more and more discouraged from true nomadism, and the ability for them together with their entirely agricultural neighbors to move to a new area in the event of drought became practically nonexistent. Recognizing this, chieftain-kings along the Basin's periphery exercised control over the wealthier heartlands by building the most elaborate series of earth dams the world has ever known- excepting the irrigation systems of inland Nambar of course. By limiting or allowing the flow of water into a particular region, the rulers of the northeastern reaches (where the highest percentage of rivers have their source) were able to exert formal or de facto control over groups who were downstream of them and had no way to rectify the issue or displace some other tribe in a better position.

We know this because the descendants of Haraal utilized the exact same methods of control centuries later, as evidenced by one passage offered by our ever-present friend Yashka the Sage, in which "the sons of the conqueror restored to use the old choke points of the rivers."¹ Opposition to this view traditionally argues that the dams must have been an invention of Haraal himself, and the restoration was by many later generations of his descendants whose forebears had let them fall into disrepair. I would argue against that by pointing toward the trend in existing literature of painstakingly and in excruciating detail exulting all of the achievements and creations of Haraal or his known lieutenants. Nowhere within that swollen body of chronicles can be found mention of the river controls. I know- every sophomore-level student at the ITU is expected to have them memorized.²

Today, the majority of the dams and other earthworks are lost along with much of the rest of the architecture present during the height of the Haraalians. Those that remain have been converted from weapons of war to tools of commerce, being used to aid river navigation or at times irrigation. If we are fortunate enough to develop a funded archaeological community in the near future however, I do not doubt that many spectacular artifacts of that bygone age could be found.

It could even shine light on--or put to rest for good--the notion that once upon a time, up until the migrations of the Ersuunians through the eastern highlands, the River Khesh flowed not south into what would become the Deltas region, but east into what we now know to be foreboding wastelands.

What cataclysmic event could have caused that? Had there once been a green east?



¹ Verse 28,441, line 8 of the Histories of All, Yashka the Sage, 1284 BR.

² And while it is officially attributed to Haraal's spontaneous knowledge and intuitive battle-prowess, I would argue that a broad, inherited cultural knowledge of the Ersuunian Basin's waterways from preceding generations played a large role in his conquest of the western reaches. This was one of his last campaigns, which culminated in the battle at the Masib River, south of the Oron'er Mountains. The river's original name is unknown, but today it bears the name of the Masibi people, apparently a distant offshoot of one of the mountain tribes, who believed that the river was the gateway into the afterlife, and as such traditionally set their dead adrift on rafts down its current. Haraal demonstrated that he was no stranger to dramatic irony when he first ordered the flow of the river to be cut to a trickle,  then released it in a flood that swept away the surviving Masibs who hadn't been pinned and cut down upon its banks by his army.

On the Arrival of the Ancient Ersuunians.

It occurred to me as I wrote the last complete parchment of my current travelogue that I have never given a great deal of attention to those commonly alluded-to progenitors of ours, the Ersuunians. I often write as if my audience has received the same general schooling in history as I have, or at least a fraction of it, but as I try to write for a readership not confined to the upper levels of Deneroth, I realize now that I leave far too many gaps and vistas of untouched possibility in my works. This will never be completely remedied, but I will attempt to remain conscious of the issue while moving forward.

Or in this case, even farther backward.

Disregarding for a moment the Esgodarrans, the Pach-Pah lineages, the tribes of the Oron'er Mountains, half of the ethnic admixture of the Nambarish, the Gertish, the aboriginals of the Khokhantipa Mudflats, and the Delta-dwellers¹, the Ersuunians were the catalyst for the development of complex and wide-reaching civilizations in all of the known world.

According to classical depictions, they were a tall and broad-shouldered folk with dark hair and dark or sometimes blue eyes, possessed of a bronze complexion and, in the case of the men, truly impressive mustaches. With that said, I point to the much wider diversity exhibited by the groups descended from them as an indicator that this was simply one of many phenotypes found among them and their constituent peoples at the time of their arrival on the landmass.

More verifiably, the Ersuunians were well-established pastoralists who carried or carted what little material wealth of theirs which couldn't be herded. According to tradition these other articles of wealth included finely crafted iron tools and weaponry, and the materials used to create them, but it is unclear how they managed to maintain both a pioneering lifestyle and a long tradition of blacksmithing. Perhaps their carts were larger and more numerous than commonly reported, or perhaps the speed of their expansion across the continent should be measured more in centuries than in decades.

The Ersuunians were accomplished riders, and the horse is strongly associated with their culture to this day, though it is unclear whether they had such a surplus of horses that all had a mount, or only the nobility and warriors--those most likely groups to have records or accounts about them extant--had access to such resources. By "nobles", I mean the tribal chieftains who led a group in practical as well as ritual affairs, and who commonly passed their title down through a patrilineal like of succession. These chieftains would host a court and establish fortified camps for at least as long as winter lasted, often building them so that they resembled an ovoid or more rarely crescent (perhaps even horseshoe?) shape.

They originated from somewhere far to the east, beyond the lands which have since become dried and parched. Either they dwelt in those regions soon to become desert until they became less favorable, or they passed them up directly in their efforts to find or claim a new homeland for themselves. Wherever they or their own ancestors originated from beyond what is now wasteland is lost to unwritten history, for the extent of those trackless and dangerous lands is unknown either by land route or sea. Whether the Fokari lived in the area at that time is also unclear, but I speculate that if they did, the Ersuunians had one more reason to push further west, rather than contend with established tribes and their herds.

Settling first in the highlands to the east of the rivers and the corridors of steppe country north of there, the Ersuunians spread out over the region over a period of time which might be better guessed at if the University begins to develop an archaeological studies group in the next few years. I imagine that they moved with less than burning purpose, with those who arrived first establishing themselves and their families in decent grazing lands while those behind either passed beyond into the newest frontiers, or forced their erstwhile neighbors ahead of them in return.

Eventually, or "forty-by-forty generations before the cracking of the alabaster bristlecone pine's trunk and the birthing of Haraal" to be exact ³, the Ersuunians would come to the basin which now bears their name.

When they did happen upon this vast and comparatively quite verdant depression, they also encountered the Esgodarrans living there. Exactly how these two peoples related to one another at first is unclear, but at some point their relations turned hostile. It may have been a matter of land dispute, because the mounted Ersuunians were victorious over the Esgodarrans and "drove them into the hills" of the basin according to the Histories of All written by the sage Yashka, circa 1284 BR.⁴ The implication is that the Esgodarrans were present outside of the hills prior to that conflict, and the resulting clashes allowed the Ersuunians to move in and occupy the territory by themselves. This too needs better research than I am able to attempt at the time being, but were I to make the attempt, I would seek to cross-reference these histories with those surviving in Esgodarran accounts, oral or otherwise.

Whatever the catalyst or the series of events, the result was that the Ersuunian tribes now controlled vast swathes of rich new territory, which they quickly adapted to their lifestyle. It was only so long until exploration into the agriculture practiced by several of their new neighbors began, and after that it was a sad inevitability that the first chieftain arose up among them who got the wild horsehair up his backside and decided that he wanted all to refer to him as "king".

Fans of my short piece on the Pach-Pah Empire might be able to spot history repeating itself here.



¹ Why yes, that is quite a substantial list of peoples to ignore when discussing the qualifications for "original" civilizations.² Almost seems like our definition of the term is worth revisiting, doesn't it?

² Let me also preemptively admit to my bold-faced hypocrisy in not including the Longfolk of the Reossos or the Fokari of the eastern wastelands in this list. Much to my chagrin, I cannot treat all of my sources on those peoples as accurate after two to four hundred years have passed since their (arguably) shaky formation. In the latter case, sheer distance has prevented recent exploration by any daring adventurers, and in the case of the former, our modern brand of daring adventurer tends not to be very arrow-proof. Let me also acknowledge the unwritten word which must remain so even now, lest I return home to find my accommodations back at the ITU completely and wholly dismantled despite what any technicalities in the University's code of law and conduct might say otherwise about the matter. Even so far south, I can still feel the shadow of Adelbramp's black marker looming close.

³ Verse eight, line eleven of the Histories of All, Yashka the Sage, 1284 BR.

⁴ Because the passage in question is not drilled into each and every freshman's brain by orientation courses for three semesters straight like the citation just above, and because I am far away from the text at this moment, I cannot state with a great degree of accuracy where in the Histories this information may be found. However, I am reasonably confident that it is located somewhere within the first 48,000 verses of the narrative, narrowing one's search down considerably.

Looking Southward and Backward, Part 6.

The dense concentrations of homes and workshops gradually diffuse now. The imperfect circle of cityscape draws inward and pinches along the causeway as the land suddenly slopes downward. Far to either side, the city continues for a short time, now up above our heads, but soon nothing but the clouds of smoke and the stunted outermost walls can be seen. The upper reaches of Deneroth continue to thrust up into the sky, of course. When one crosses through the First Gate, the world opens up. When one leaves the fringes of the False City, it expands. The vastness of the south-central Ersuunian Basin, ancestral homeland of the Esgodarrans, yawns before us. Its breath is cold and bitter, having few windbreaks along the flattened road, but the view of the land makes up for it, in my eyes at least.

To the east, the land slowly rises until the horizon is obscured from view, but we know that the elevation continues to climb that way until one reaches the uplands and river cascades which once formed the eastern borders of the old empire. It flattens out into a narrow corridor of steppe to the northeast somewhat behind us, and that way once offered one of the few dependable routes east which was not too close to the hill and riverside people to the south or the impenetrable forests of the Reossos which dominates much of the north. The Axebite lies somewhere thereabouts, and stretches as far east and west as any explorer on foot has ever cared to venture. While my own writing and that of others would make it seem as if Deneroth were the only city in all the land (with the begrudging exception of Nambar), several large towns do still dot this great northeastern frontier. Hard people who live hard lives, but undeniably kin to anyone who still tries to call themselves a Haraalian. I am remound of my desire to travel east someday and conduct research probing into the truth behind their tales of the wastelands even farther beyond, for I was lambasted by my colleagues (with some good reason) for my weakly-sourced compositions on the Fokari some time ago. Of course I am aware that even if I were to procure funding for such an adventure to meet distant people, my work would never see publication through the ITU. I know this from personal experience.

In any case, we are heading south- not east. Though the road does drift westward for a short while, giving our party a decent peripheral view of the gentler heights of the west. It's a far cry from the hyper-taiga of the Reossos, but the woodlands of the west have provided Deneroth with timber and firewood for centuries to come, and yet they seem far from depleted. Or at least, they seem to be from our point of view. Those who dwell in and around the hilly forests might find that their homeland is sorely lacking in 80-90% of its biomass, as one study slipped under the noses of the Department of Ecological Philosophies argues. Sharp-eyed Sarq claims that he can see people moving back and forth around the nearest pines. I would not be surprised if they are woodsmen making one last round in search of adequate firewood for the winter. It is said that the highest points in those hills cause a mild rainshadow for the west, explaining the relative dryness of the climate surrounding Nambar and its coast. I would dare to say that this is true, but that it is a rainshadow of the mind, and that it works the other way.

Closer to the roads, we begin to see small hamlets dotting the peripheries between landscapes. Our hired assistants and guides become chattier now, as they describe which village they or their family come from, or which one has the finest hidden orchards or fishing ponds. An argument over which has the prettiest women is now brewing, so I will turn my focus toward other things. Such as scanning the horizon for our next addition to the crew. We will be meeting up with an old correspondent of mine, though it is not entirely clear when, where, or for how long.

Hedge magicians tend to operate on a timescale like that.

Elrusyo is his name, and he has been one of my precious few sources for knowledge on the overt supernatural during my time in the ITU, given the longstanding bans on all things akin to conjuration. While this does not extend to the herblore which is his livelihood, passed down to him by a mother who'd reportedly wanted a daughter, the man has immersed himself extensively in the literature of all forms of magic. Of course if I were to ask him, he would remind me at length that they are all the same thing, in the end. I do still wonder how he's afforded even a quarter of the material he has referenced in our letters, however. Many traditions are quite unique to their parts of the world, yet leeches and caraway seeds can only earn a man so much. I have never met him in person, but I was told that I would have no difficulty in telling that it is him when he does finally make his appearance.

I pray that he won't be distinguishable by a pointed hat and staff, or some embarrassment of that sort.