#kellabor

That willful man, held fast did he

To his hammer, carried on high

The ruhk did cry, beat great wings up to the sky

Stubborn a beast was he

The ruhk bore the smith to a mountain cliff

dropped hammer and he there

And said to him, “man of iron, teach me this:

Kanai Idol, item plundered from a noble's home in Kellabor sometime during the Sorian Wars, dated to the early 2nd Age. From the Lapri History Museum Collection.

Ancient artifacts depicting Kanai are extremely rare, for reasons unknown.

this animal!!!!! it's called a bep because it goes "bep bep bep bep bep!" I love them.

been thinking about Kellaborn folk tales.

3. What's the common lifespan for Kanai and (Mountain) Sphinx? Does it vary in different regions?

2. Kanai can catch anything a human can catch, but unless they're very very young or very very old, their bodies will fight it off without them even noticing. Rarely, Kanai can get bacterial infections from really bad wounds, and they can also catch parasites, but it's very unusual for these things to be dangerous to them. Sphinx, on the other hand, won't catch all the same illnesses as humans (they wouldn't catch a cold or the flu) but in theory they could still catch zoonotic diseases and bacterial infections, and there are likely some viruses specific to them. They don't have any special ability to fight stuff off like Kanai do.

Why? It's because Kanai and sphinx don't come from the same place. They're... made of different stuff, so to speak.

A fabulous question with a complicated answer!

So worldbuilding spoilers ahead (if that's a thing), but for thousands of years Kanai and humans actually got along! Though for most of that history they didn't really live together or interact closely, they were very cooperative. Kanai eating humans was basically unthinkable.

A few hundred years before the story takes place, a series of events (some war, some drought, more war, a lot of fire, the beginnings of industrialization, etc) caused a lot of devastation to Kellabor's ecosystem. For several years some Kanai tried to negotiate with the then-government (a monarchy) to stabilize things, but there were problems. Kanai have never had any kind of centralized government or representatives for themselves, outside of very localized elder groups, and so the Kingdom of Kellabor disregarded their petitions (remember that until now Kanai had been nothing but peaceful and helpful).

Pregnant Kanai that go into wintersleep without enough fat on their bodies will reabsorb their embryos. Things were so bad for a few seasons that no Kanai were born for several years, and many perished of winterfright or good old fashioned regular starvation. Kanai were staring extinction in the face.

And then a few of them had the bright idea to just, y'know... eat the humans. Those that did survived, and the idea soon spread like a plague.

Almost immediately the old Kellabor government collapsed. Most records were lost and the country regressed technologically by several hundred years. Humans fled to walled cities like Loske and hunkered down. Over the next century, humans started to learn to defend themselves, and the ecosystem healed enough that Kanai mostly returned to their normal habits and became more secretive. However, most Kanai maintain a belief that negotiating with humans is stupid, and that humans need to be managed the same way every other animal is: by eating them when they get out of hand. While humans have ventured out of their walled cities and started reestablishing themselves, they do so at huge risk.

The "modern" government, the Sutzgrad government, is only a few hundred years old, if that. The country is still rebuilding.