Koyenu Lively Savannah

Place

Place Name:

Koyenu Lively Savannah

Biome:

Lively Savannah

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

The savannah of Koyenu is enormous, but no part of it ever gets snow. It’s warm here for half the year and extremely hot for the other half. Some men divide the year this way. But the other way of dividing the year is by dividing it between the wet season and the dry season, which don’t line up with the warm season and the hot season. Village elders, when they have nothing better to do (which is seldom), love having arguments about which way is the proper way of dividing the year. The borders of the savannah are hilly and sometimes mountainous.

If you watch these hills and mountains, occasionally you’ll see an army of some sort or other marching off to war, trying to surprise its enemies by taking a difficult route through the borders of Koyenu. These mountains are difficult to pass through if you don’t know the proper paths to take. A few men do know the proper paths and sometimes they still get lost. Whole armies have disappeared into these mountains only to show up again fifteen days later somewhere else where they didn’t mean to be. Water also flows through these mountains and hills, into Koyenu.

The rivers that come from the mountains sometimes disappear during the dry season, but they always come back during the wet season. There are few naturally occurring land formations that break up the flat plains of the savannah. There are some plateaus near the southern border, some depressions that become water pools during the wet season, some rivers, some large stones, some interestingly shaped trees. Other than these things, there aren’t many naturally occurring formations. The savannah is pretty much the same no matter where you go within it.

There is one river that never completely goes away during the dry season, called the Constant River. The water it’s filled with during the dry season can often be quite disgusting, but it’s better than nothing, and it does get purer the further upstream you go. Many villages, including the largest one in Koyenu, are built on the banks of the Constant River, since it’s nice to have a backup supply of water just in case your stone jars, which are full of your family’s water for the dry season, happen to leak. But there are villages built elsewhere that aren’t particularly worried about their stone jars leaking.

These villages are often the more prosperous, since they trade away a constant supply of water for other commodities which are probably far more valuable — such as metal, or larger populations of animals that they know how to hunt. The majority of the Ryxucaw live in the center of Koyenu, where there are some stone formations and caves that will protect them from the light, which their sensitive skin cannot stand. Any new villages that the zu’aan build, they take care to construct far away from such places of darkness, so that the Ryxucaw have to travel very far to hunt their children.

Plants

There are lots of a certain kind of tree in Koyenu, but they grow far apart from each other in order to not interfere with each other’s gathering of water and nutrients. This tree is called the dominating daereli — usually just ‘daereli tree’ or ‘daereli’. Daereli, in order to protect themselves from grasses and weeds, suck up as much water and as many nutrients as they can find, then proceeding to store those precious things for years until they need them. You can see why this would cause issues if daereli grew too close together. There are long streaks of dead grass at the base of every daereli tree, often extending out in all directions like long thorns: these are where the roots of the daereli have grown.

Some streaks of dead grass are extremely long, implying enormous roots. Daereli spread their kind by flinging their seeds out in all directions. The way they do this is by growing branches that are restrained by a layer of bark. These branches hold daereli seeds. Eventually, the bark grows weak and the branch grows strong; the branch will tear the bark apart and spring into the straight position it was always meant to grow in. A single springing action can cast over fifty seeds up to half a mile away in a particular direction.

A single daereli can grow more than five springing branches in a single year. Tales have been told of men getting pelted with daereli seeds. It’s a fairly common occurrence — fortunately, even if it hits someone in the eye, he’s usually fine afterwards. daereli seeds aren’t heavy at all. Many different kinds of berry bushes grow in Koyenu, and their berries form much of the diet of many animals. Zu’aan eat them as well, of course; they also farm them as best they can whilst trying to protect the precious berries from the animals that want to steal them.

There’s the usual kinds of berries — but there are also some more exotic ones, like ekanvor, yteith, itaere, and mothri. ekanvor are much like itaere, except they’re yellow, and they taste different. The taste has been likened to some mixture of yteith and mothri, but it also has something beyond both. Something savoury, almost. yteith, have enormous numbers of seeds that are annoying to chew around. They’re even more annoying because they’re sharp.

That’s why yteith are usually juiced before they’re eaten. Still, the seeds are quite healthy to eat, so long as you don’t scratch your tongue too much while eating them. itaere are tough, like nuts made of thin sheets of metal, but their centers and juices are definitely fruity. It takes some effort to eat one, but it’s worth it; itaere are the tastiest berry in existence, some say. Feel free to argue with them, but don’t say that they have no grounds for their claim. mothri are self-explanatory. They have some trick of staying cold in even the hottest weather.

So long as they’re still on the bush they grew on. If you pick them, they soon lose any chill they had in this hot climate. Mothri aren’t sweet, but it’s easy enough to add something sweet to them.

Animals

ialrs used to be the undisputed kings of the savannah. But then the zu’aan arrived. And then, after the zu’aan, all manner of other animals arrived, including other predators, driven there by fierce wars in other lands. And then wars drove in the Ryxucaw kin’toni clan. Ialrs thus being deposed from their position as the undisputed kings of the savannah — they became fiercer, as though they were fighting to reclaim their rightful title. No longer was there room for the weaker ialrs, when easy prey was becoming harder to come by.

It became commonplace for male ialrs to slay and devour each other for being weak, and commonplace for female ialrs to slay and devour each other for being infertile. This ferocity, while vicious enough when directed towards other ialrs, was only more vicious when directed towards anything else. Ialrs hunted other hunters for touching the prey of ialrs, even hunters far more dangerous than themselves, such as the great serpents of the east, or the Ryxucaw clan. This in turn caused the ialrs to be in complete enmity with every single animal except for the iairaes.

The iairaes followed ialrs around and cleaned up the corpses the ialrs left behind, and also the corpses of the ialrs themselves. The ialrs tolerate this because of the way the iairaes scrape the knee to them. Every hunter, whether man or beast, now considers killing a ialr when he sees one. As a grand result, the ialrs are now even further from their original throne than they ever have been — but they are still far more dangerous. The animals most commonly hunted by zu’aan are lairas, tag'wis, ialrs, var'eeks, chaa'rra, and tarl'as.

The kin’toni will hunt down anything with a lot of blood. Next to lairas, tag'wis are generally considered the tastiest animals in Koyenu. They’re surprisingly hardy, though: they take a long time to die and generally spend their last moments chasing down the thing that struck them, seeking revenge with kicks capable of damaging the thickest armour. And of course, it’s not safe to hunt them from the trees, either: they’ll shove you down to your demise. The greatest difficulty with hunting tag'wis is that they are seldom alone. var'eeks are like tag'wis but worse.

Chaa'rra are like var'eeks, but they have extremely poor eyesight. They will assume that they have been attacked from the direction that they were hit from, and keep running until they hit something with their horn. Clever zu’aan hunters have found out a way to trick a chaa'rra into charging a tree, whereupon the hunter will behead the chaa'rra with a mighty axe blow: boomerangs. By flinging the boomerang in such a way that it strikes the chaa'rra in the direction of a tree, the hunter may follow behind the chaa'rra in more or less complete safety.

This boomerang trick is extremely difficult, however. Only the oldest and wisest hunters attempt it. tarl'as are the only place where master archers will get their feathers from. It’s a matter of personal dignity, but also, no other fletching is nearly so reliable as tarl'a fletching.

Historical Timeline of Ages

Age Name	Dates	Controller
Stone Age	Before 1E 0	Unknown
Copper Age	1E 1–1E 2200	Unknown
Bronze Age	1E 2200–1E 4400	Unknown
Iron Age	2E 0–2E 700	Unknown
Ancient Age	2E 700–2E 2200	Unknown
Middle Age	3E 0–3E 2050	Unknown
Early Modern Age	3E 2050–3E 2600	Unknown
Industrial Age	3E 2600–3E 2700	Unknown
Machine Age	3E 2700–3E 2800	Unknown
Atomic Age	3E 2800–3E 2850	Unknown
Space Age	3E 2850–3E 2875	Unknown
Information Age	3E 2875–3E 2900	Unknown
Genetic Age	3E 2950–3E 3000	Unknown
Awakening Age	3E 3000–3E 3415	Unknown
Twilight Age	4E 0–4E 500	Ryxucaw Kin'toni Clan

Place

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Koyenu Lively Savannah

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This article is written by Xerxes Worldweaver. Copyright 2026 Xerxes Worldweaver. All rights reserved.