Sigil:Kindreds
Kindreds
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A land is more than its crowns and borders. Kingdoms rise, banners change, and cities burn. The kindreds endure.
The peoples of the Sigil Lands are traditionally called Kindreds. Six great Kindreds share the lands of the known world: the Rhone, Seylandri, Vulkah, Tobon, Uragh, and Gholibin. Kindred is not nationality. The Rhone alone encompass many peoples and cultures, while members of every Kindred may live far from the lands most closely associated with them. Nor does Kindred determine character. Customs and history shape people, but individuals remain individuals.
The Kindreds have fought, traded, borrowed from one another, and sometimes survived only through one another. Each carries its own understanding of the past and its own place in the Age of the Comet.
The Six Kindreds
[edit]Heirs of Ash and Tide
The Rhone are the most numerous Kindred of the present age and the founders of most of its realms. Once scattered tribal peoples living beneath far older powers, they now range across much of the Sigil Lands.
There is no single Rhone culture. Highlanders, Lowlanders, Northerlings, Stormlanders, Maritimers, Riverborn, and many other Rhone peoples have their own histories and ways of life. A Rhessian herder, an Angharan knight, a merchant of Corvessa, and a fisher of the Maeron Isles may all be Rhone while considering one another distinctly foreign.
Ancient songs and records sometimes call the Rhone Wraeth, an archaic name for their ancestors.
The Uncanny Ones
The Seylandri are survivors of an elder world. Their living cities once spread through the great forests, and their singers worked the Saël—the Breath of the World—with arts scarcely understood by later peoples.
The Great Wrath against the Dragha shattered that civilization. Most Seylandri now dwell within hidden Seylandra, guarding what remains of their ancient culture. Only a few, especially the Wayfarers, regularly travel among the younger Kindreds.
Their long lives give them a very different relationship with history. To the Seylandri, events that are ancient legend to the Rhone may remain within living memory.
Scions of the Deep Dark
The Vulkah came upward from beneath the earth. In the mountains of Vulk they built basalt fortress-cities and the ancient Septs that still shape much of Vulkah society.
They are renowned as miners, metalworkers, and stoneworkers, but Vulkah civilization encompasses far more than its crafts. Memory, obligation, family, trade, and carefully kept promises stand near its heart.
Among the Vulkah, an oath may be remembered long after everyone who heard it has died.
Folk of Road and Hearth
The Tobon came into the Sigil Lands from the east in comparatively recent centuries and have since spread along its roads, towns, and cities.
Tobon traditionally distinguish between Wanderfolk, whose families travel the roads in extended communities, and Stayfolk, whose families have settled in permanent homes. Neither is considered more truly Tobon than the other.
Family, hospitality, trade, news, craft, and the ties between distant communities are central to Tobon life. Wanderfolk may travel hundreds of leagues while remaining part of a social world invisible to most settled neighbors.
Children of Rhugash
The Uragh are the great people of the northern plains, particularly the lands of Kuragh Torr. Their skin ranges from deep green to grey, and their size and powerful voices make them immediately recognizable.
Horses fear Uragh scent and growls, so the Uragh instead herd and ride Torrak, powerful horned animals of the plains.
Uragh civilization is built around clan, herd, hospitality, law, trade, seasonal gathering, and the open country. Southern chroniclers have too often remembered only their warriors and raiders. The Uragh have never needed walls in order to have a civilization.
The Long Survivors
The Gholibin are among the oldest peoples of the Sigil Lands. Their presence predates the Rhone kingdoms, the Great Wrath, and perhaps even the arrival of the Seylandri.
Their communities live in Hollowholds, shallow networks of chambers and passages organized around family Hearths. Their history is preserved not in libraries but through elaborate memory-songs carried faithfully from one generation to another.
The Gholibin fought beside the Dragha during the Great Wrath and survived the destruction of that age. They have endured fallen civilizations, wars, persecution, and repeated attempts by other peoples to dismiss them as primitive.
They are still here.
Kindred and Culture
[edit]The six Kindreds are broad peoples, not six cultures.
This is clearest among the Rhone. A Highlander and a Stormlander share a Kindred but not necessarily a culture, homeland, ruler, or way of life. The same principle applies elsewhere. An Uragh does not cease to be Uragh by leaving Kuragh Torr, nor does a Tobon become Rhone by settling permanently in a Rhone city.
Kindred is therefore only one part of identity. Homeland, family, language, faith, livelihood, and personal allegiance may matter just as much.
Memory of the World
[edit]The Kindreds also remember the past differently.
For the Rhone, Brannais belongs to the heroic past. A Seylandri may have known people who remembered events far older than Brannais. Gholibin preserve ancient history through memory-songs. Vulkah carve remembrance into stone. Tobon carry stories along the roads, while Uragh keep them beside the fire.
Their histories do not always agree.
That does not mean one of them must be lying.
The Age of the Comet
[edit]The Age of the Comet has brought the Kindreds together in ways unseen for centuries.
The struggle against the Vorghol has put Rhone soldiers, Tobon travelers, Gholibin fighters, Uragh warbands, Vulkah warriors, and Seylandri wanderers upon the same roads. They bring ancient grievances and incompatible customs with them, but they also face dangers inherited from a past belonging to all the Kindreds.
The Sigil Lands have never belonged to one people.
What happens to them now will not be decided by one people either.