They are blind, yes. As part of a rite of adulthood, they each undergo a ritual in which they give up their physical sight to the goddess, Feruza, and are instead granted the ability to “see” (for lack of a better word) where things are going to be. 

“Within the first week of my half-year stay among the Helani, they confiscated and destroyed all my books. They caught me scribbling down words to better remember their strange language, and in a fit of pious fury they ransacked my belongings and burned every scrap of writing they could find. To them, the written word is too sacred to be profaned by the very act of existing. They do not tolerate writing in their presence, and they execute iconographers who dare depict the most holy image of Feruza, Goddess of Conquest and Destruction, whom they revere above all others. In lieu of the written word, they commit uninflammatory imagery to only practical items; finer craftsmen you will not find. Scabbards and cloth and rugs are artforms as much as they are tools.

This is far from where their eccentricities end. They​ drink only after sundown. They roam the earth rather than settle in one location. They treat their horses better than they treat their guests. They hail from the rugged frosty steppes to the west and so clad themselves in thick furs that can be smelled from across a field, a stench I still pale to recall -- sweat and horseshit and rancid butter. Upon reaching maturity, they undergo a sacred ritual from which they emerge with covered eyes. They are most iconic for the headgear that obscures their faces in battle, but even through the mundanities of everyday life they veil their eyes with thick strips of patterned cloth. I once asked a man how he could fire a bow with pinhole precision under such circumstances and, laughing, he told me that once one's eyes have been opened what else need be seen? They delight in riddles like this. Their tongue is well suited to enigma.

For all their peculiarities, I have discovered that the Helani are above all else a hardy, colourful, life-loving people. This account of my time among them I write from memory alone, but I do not struggle to recall those days; they return to me as I long to return to them: with ineffable clarity. My eyes have been opened.”

-Nikephoros Lector, Imperial Historian, “On the Subject of Horselords”

[[an additional note has been scribbled beneath the text]]