#carja

Mmmm posing with machines makes me feel cool

Nora || Carja || Oseram || Utaru

i saw no evidence that they eat people. some of the markings on their skin look like blood, but could just as easily be some kind of dye. my guess is the whole cannibalism thing was made up by the carja. which is good news, i have no interest to wind up on a buffet.

in times of need, the powers of shadow can accomplish what the Sun alone cannot

Colored version of Aloy dressed as a Carja noble woman.

So… I’ve been chewing on something for days, and I need to throw it into the void (hi, Tumblr).

This is all about the Tenakth — their discipline, their military precision, and that giant lore gap that, for some reason, nobody talks about.

The game tells us the Tenakth have no writing system.

Okay. Sure. Oral cultures exist

But how does a tribe that everyone calls “wild” and “brutal,” with zero written tradition, somehow build the most coordinated military force in the West?

Strong enough to push back actual Carja war-tech?

From Guerrilla Games — the same studio that will happily write a fully coded backstory for a rogue vacuum cleaner robot you find in some collapsed basement?

Really?

Something is clearly missing.

And when I started thinking about it, everything suddenly clicked.

Here’s the thought I can’t get out of my head now:

what if the Tenakth aren’t cradle-born at all, but descendants of people who survived the Faro Plague in real military bunkers?

Military infrastructure always includes sealed shelters — places built for exactly the scenario where the world outside is falling apart.

Inside those shelters, language, discipline, and social structure could easily survive.

But writing? Writing requires materials and technology.

And everything that supports writing dies first:

paper rots,

terminals shut down,

factories disappear,

and digital communication becomes outright deadly the moment the machines begin intercepting every signal.

So how would people coordinate without signing their own death warrant?

Here’s where it gets really interesting:

Morse code could have literally saved their lives.

Faro machines were tuned to extremely complex digital frequencies — encrypted channels, data packets, network signals.

They were NOT designed to perceive the analog frequencies Morse operates on.

A simple human “beep–pause–beep” doesn’t even register inside their sensor range.

For them it basically doesn’t exist — they can’t hear it and don’t try to process it.

Which means that as long as humans had even a few working antennas left, they could pass analog-frequency messages and the machines would never notice.

And when the antennas finally broke, the wires corroded, and all equipment died — the principle still survived.

It just fell back to its most primitive form: tapping on walls, rhythmic patterns, knots, beads, spacing between stitches and loops.

Centuries passed.

People emerged from bunkers with no technology left, but with a cultural memory of rhythm — and that memory became their new system.

They carried it into their bodies, their clothing, their everyday life.

And that’s the Tenakth.

That’s when everything starts to make perfect sense.

Look at them — their entire culture is built on rhythm.

Their tattoos? Rhythmic.

Their armor? Rhythmic.

Their movement style, their clan structure — same story.

And those tattoos aren’t random.

You can see the clean intervals, repeated blocks, mirrored elements.

It’s not just body paint.

It’s memory written on skin because there’s no paper left.

And now — please — Kotallo.

The best example.

Look at his chestplate.

Specifically the upper rows of beads.

They are absolutely not random — they repeat, they mirror, they follow a rhythm.

And Kotallo is definitely not the type to wear something “just because it looks nice.”

On him, everything is functional.

So why do the beads look like a sequence?

Why does the pattern repeat?

Why can you practically read it?

Because that’s exactly what it is.

A sequence.

A code.

A record.

A message another Tenakth would instantly understand.

And if you lose writing, what’s left?

Knots.

Straps.

Cloth.

Beads.

Braids.

And all the binary logic fits perfectly:

knot / no knot

tight / loose

bead / gap

short / long

To an outsider it looks like decoration.

To the Tenakth — it’s information.

The same logic works during the Red Raids.

You can’t coordinate your troops across a canyon by yelling.

But knots on a belt, beads on a wrist, the spacing of stitches across a strap — that can transmit everything:

how many enemies,

where they’re positioned,

when a patrol shifts,

which route is safe.

Carja could capture a scout and never realize that all the intel they needed was right in front of them — just disguised as “ornaments.”

And that sounds exactly like how the Tenakth would operate.

So yeah.

If this theory is even halfway true, the Tenakth aren’t “savages.”

They’re the people who survived the Faro Plague-the ones who preserved the last language machines could never hear:

rhythm.

Their tattoos are records.

Their armor is insignia.

Their knots and beads are identifiers.

Their discipline isn’t brutality — it’s inherited structure.

And now I can’t unsee it.

From what we know, the Tenakth, Utaru and Banuk don't really differenciate between the genders.

The Nora value mothers/grandmothers more, but they also don't discriminate by gender (but by their female ancestros?)

Now, the Carja sexism I get, it isn't anything we haven't seen before, whole "the sun is reborn as the first born son so obviously the daughters don't matter, there's now Sun Queen, yada yada" and with the Quen having a whole Empire I bet my organs they have a same system.

But the OSERAM?! They don't have a leader, they only value tinkering and being a master forger and stuff but WOMEN ARE STILL DISCRIMINATED AGAINST?! Like, we have Asera, who was aknowledged as one of the best forgers but couldn't have her own forge because she's a woman, and Petra also left the Oseram capital to build a place where everyone can be themselves!

Drawing a quick sketch of my favorite Tenakth as imagined in the third Horizon installment.

Imagining Kotallo taking a moment to himself to think and process his new role as ambassador to the Sundom as things potentially unravel in the capital. I’m intrigued by what his role could look like in Meridian navigating both preparations for Nemesis and Carja politics, but for right now wanted to see him looking less battlefield ready and more as a person processing how to help stop the end of the world (again).