relating to my last reblog about nevarra, i've been thinking a lot about what life must be like for nevarran peasants!
if you're a peasant in nevarra, i imagine like in tevinter and like in all slave societies, you have very little opportunity to rise beyond your status—because you're not getting paid. any labor that must urgently be completed will not result in work for you: the nobles will raise skeletons to do it for them!
(of course, this requires patronizing the mortalitasi right? and paying the mortalitasi in some way—either with coin, food or favors? so i imagine some peasants still get jobs. nobles who dislike the mortalitasi, nobles who've offended the mortalitasi, nobles who are devout orelsian/ferelden andrastians—all of those nobles probably still need labor done and must therefore still hire peasants! but i imagine it's a much more precarious existence—gig labor instead of guild labor)
all this to say—as a peasant in nevarra, there must be a thriving market of peasants trying to sell their healthy bodies to the mortalitasi, right? as one of the only ways to get yourself stable access to money and food? because you are much more guaranteed to get used for labor in death, than in life?
thinking of peasant families that maybe bank their fortunes on a healthy son/daughter—try to funnel all your food and nutrition to them, so they have healthy bones/muscle. then, you try and sell them to the mortalitasi. you ask the mortalitasi to kill them now—they'll be ideal laborers. pay us, the family, a stipend or lease fee, and you'll be guaranteed a much better corpse than the corpses of those who've died from illness/old age. for the mortalitasi, any fee paid would probably be minimal compared to the eternal work you can get from a good body, so i imagine they cultivate this necropolitical market. get the peasants to vie and compete to sell their bodies to the mortalitasi.
(it happens all the time when there's a surplus of women in historical feudal societies, where the economy's starting to really plummet. sell women to brothels, use the money to feed the family back home, spin the money earnt as part of filial piety)
and of course, to justify such horrible deeds, i imagine there must then be a cult of death. all sorts of books and slogans and songs encouraging peasants to see death and service in death as honorable, good and aspirational.
not certain how that might mix with andrastianism, but i think there's something about sins being forgiven in death—through eternal toil? every soul that willingly goes purifies the black city further, or something? idk!
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