#kralle

next to colonize were the sifa people.  once they arrived in kralle, they gravitated northward to sefia (the land after which they take their name).  continuously fleeing the qahn (a massive, repetitive sandstorm that sweeps the desert predictably and cyclically), they transitioned into a nomadic, desert-wandering people.  evidence suggests that the qahn’s path was once irregular, but since the institution of the sifa’s mysterious religion, it became constant.  though some sifa eventually settled down at the desert’s fringes, those who maintained the nomadic caravan lifestyle became the walkers, ritualistic practitioners of arigation and keepers of the qahn’s cycle.  a lone walker and her mount are pictured in the first image above.

the final two groups occurred in rapid succession, only a few millennia separating their arrivals in kralle.  the first of these were the marshlander people, a small population of olive-skinned people who took up a simple, pastoral life on the eastern coast and marshy areas of daehrius.  a fairly peaceable people, they’ve historically enjoyed trade with the sifa, and are proficient boatmakers, craftsman, and fishers.  a marshlander is depicted in the second image above.

lastly, the derrish are a fair-skinned, militant, and strictly feudal people who have come to inhabit the mountainous reigions of daehrius.  shortly after their arrival they established a strict racial hierarchy and subjugated the marshlanders to their east.  they view the sifa to the north as inferior and have taken some as slaves, and the giants to the south as barbaric but too brutal to dominate.  their noble houses swear fealty to the ageing king, whose derrish capital stands where a major marshlander city once did.

birds

kralle has a lot of the same birds as we do, but there are some major outliers worth noting.  the first of these is the wisebirds, a species of colossal flying parrot endemic to the sagewood.  their intelligence rivals that of humans, though their intelligence manifests in different ways— they are not exceedingly social, at least by human standards, for instance.  they do have a loose social structure, however, and a vague understanding of morality and law.  because the sagewood is so seldom explored, they have something of a legendary status among humans.

the bravebirds are really a category of technically unrelated but superficially similar birds, similar to the label “bird of prey.”  they’re essentially extremely large versions of ordinary, familiar birds, with some supernatural properties.  though the term “bravebird” can technically apply to any extraordinarily large and supernatural bird, in execution it’s often only used for birds of prey that meet these standards.  bravebirds can still fly even when they grow to exceedingly large size due to the impossibly strong yet light substance their bones and feathers are made of.  they are biologically immortal (though they can be killed) and eventually lose the power of flight as they grow to heavy, usually centuries into their lives.  they often survive beyond this point, however, by extorting food from birds lower on the pecking order, which is dictated by size and nesting altitude.  extremely old bravebirds more closely resemble dragons than birds— the traditional god figure of the marshlanders is an infinitely old bravebird.

lastly, the term “drake” is an umbrella term for the non-avian theropods of kralle (i.e. dinosaurs).  these vary wildly from the spinosaur-esque swamp drakes to the microraptor-esque mountain drakes to the utahraptor-esque pack drakes, and so on forever.

mountain drakes

(Image by  Zhao Chuang; courtesy of Peking Natural Science Organization)

mountain drakes are based heavily on microraptors.  they’re quadruple-winged, with both their fore- and their hindlimbs serving as wings.  their feathers are black with a bluish sheen and they have short, toothy snouts for catching insects.  unlike microraptors, they are zygodactyls, i.e. they have H-shaped feet, like a macaw or a chameleon.  their feet and palms are outfitted with primitive setae, which facilitate their climbing abilities and enable them to (with some difficulty) scale virtually sheer cliffs.

true to their name, the mountain drakes inhabit mountains and cliffs in the northern derrish mountain range, up through southern sefia.  they feed on bugs and make their nests in the crags.  their small size, keen intellect, and evasive nature gives them the place of the trickster in traditional mythology, and they’re thought to have lifespans exceeding several centuries or even millennia.  their true lifespans are not known.  mountain drakes are most definitely the cleverest of the drakes— they’ve been shown to exhibit basic tool use, have passed the mirror test, can mimic human speech, and are even rumored to be able to perform basic mathematical calculations.

sandfowl

sandfowl are very large members of the order galliformes.  they somewhat resemble the wild turkey, though they’re a dull brown in coloration and notably larger, sometimes up to six feet long.  they’re ground-dwellers endemic to the deserts of sefia, with extremely thick, padded feet and pointed beaks to aid in breaking apart their main food source, the cactus.  like most animals that call the desert home, they’re a nomadic species, constantly fleeing the qahn.  like the turkey they resemble, their large size makes them ideal targets for domestication, and the walkers have a long history of such with them.  in fact, the sandfowl is instrumental to the walker religion— their blood is typically used to refill the blood shrines around the desert, thus making them a central part of the religious tradition.

wisebirds

the wisebirds are very large, very colorful, and very intelligent parrots endemic to the sagewood.  their social structure has selected for increasingly extravagant colorations throughout the years, leading to the radiant wisebirds seen today.  however, they still correspond to a naming scheme which describes the relatively simple colorations of their ancestors— for example, a valid wisebird name might be “tenec of the family of the red smattering of the verdant clan of the ancient order of the wise.”  in general, the wisebirds are known for being very verbose, descriptive, and somewhat whimsical.

standing about five and a half feet tall, they resemble very large macaws, and retain the power of flight.  they are capable of speech as well, not just through repetition but through the conscious construction of meaningful language— however, wisebirds speak their own language in addition to the languages of men, and their mother tongue sounds to the untrained listener like unremarkable squawking.

the languages i’ve selected are:

persian/farsi for the sifa

german for the derrish, including varieties of low german for those living in the country

albanian for the marshlanders, with a significant amount of linguistic variety between villages (although most villages are mutually intelligible with one another)

malay for the lowlanders

now for a bit of explanation.  to boot, i decided to assign indo-european languages to the sifa, derrish, and marshlanders in order to underscore the chronological closeness of their arrivals on kralle— or, perhaps more accurately, their mutual distance from the arrival of the lowlanders.  i wanted to give the lowlanders an african language, initially— the giants are the first humans on kralle, and i wanted to reflect that by choosing a language from the “homeland” of humanity in our own world.  however, i think there are some issues with assigning an african language to a stereotypically tribal and explicitly inhuman civilization, especially considering the racism which the lowlanders experience in-universe, so i decided not to go that route.  i also considered a semitic language; amharic, for example, is spoken in ethiopia, where some of the oldest human remains have been discovered.  but i thought that, geographically, semitic languages are situated a bit too close to persian ones, and i had already reserved persian for the sifa.  so, after a bit of browsing, i selected malay, which i tentatively accepted... later i discovered that this language has its roots in borneo, which is one of the few remaining habitats for the orangutan... which is one of the inspirations for the lowlander giant’s design as a species!  so i stuck with it.

the sifa were always going to speak a middle-eastern language, as they’re based heavily on middle-eastern culture.  the initial choice for this was arabic, but as i chose to select indo-european languages for the remaining cultures, i decided to choose persian instead.  i think persian spreads across an appropriately wide geographic range to match the sifa’s, while still corresponding culturally.

the derrish were originally far more culturally germanic than they are now, but there’s still no mistaking the influence.  they were inspired largely by my own experiences in germany— the ring itself is based on a similarly shaped area in the swabian jura surrounding the liechtenstein castle.  the decision to reflect this by making them into german speakers was an easy one.

finally, the marshlanders.  i originally considered having them speak basque, but again, not indo-european.  albanian came to mind as suitably ancient, which is the feeling i wanted to establish with the marshlanders.  furthermore, albanian is a language isolate; technically related, yet distant and unfamiliar to the languages of the people surrounding it.  additionally, albanian is a language with an unexpectedly large range, and quite a few dialects, both of which are true of the marshlander language.  in-universe, the marshlander language takes some influence (depending on the dialect) from both derrish and sifa languages, so imagine an odd bastardization of albanian with german and persian influences.  the marshlanders also take some influence from the pre-slavic balkans, so there’s an added geographical bonus, too. :p