Dran Tribal Zu'aan

History

the origin history of the Dran tribal zu'aan was never able to untie itself from the roots which all civilization is based off of: the land. This is a crucial piece of necessity which each zu'aan has to deal with within their lifetime regardless of where they live. This all leads to the development of the tale of a civilization that was quite literally buried by its own permanence, which leads to quite a marking historical moment where they realize the stability they often lived with would be responsible for spelling much of their demise if they failed to recognize what was truly important about the land they live in.

Before they were even known as the Dran amongst themselves, the ancestors of what is now the tribe were a proud and prosperous society that lived and inhabited the rocky plateaus that often looked over a series of undiscovered red sands. They were a tribe of formal architects, of strong and independent leaders divided by families according to their specialization around specific masonry and engineering skills. They were even able to build themselves a fort to have walls around them that kept them safe at all time.

This fort had aspects of stone and iron all around it, built into the highest cliffside, which often allowed them to look back into that red desert as nothing but a shifting wasteland. Oftentimes, a member of the group thought of themselves as the zu'aan who stood the safest within the current conditions of Taerel. Their prosperity was nothing but ephemeral, however. In the summer of the year of 4E 420, a tectonic shift took place within the region where they lived. This shift had unprecedented levels of magnitude; it was as though a scream from within the earth had struck the entire region of their settlement.

This was so great in size that while a big earthquake might have leveled many buildings, this one caused not only most of their units to collapse but also turned much of the plateaus where they lived into nothing but a memory of their past greatness, leveling them down onto the levels of the red desert they so dreaded. This made it so, within the span of only one hour, their entire society didn't just collapse; it slipped down and broke into what was before seen as trash. These tribe members struggled to resettle, with many of them being marked by the grief caused by the massive earthquake.

And of course, many others dying from the effects of it; but now they were forced to re-adapt. For days, the desert was silent, only for terrifying echoes of zu'aan who were still being crushed under rocks. A member of the tribe's past military, called Shuo Dran, was responsible for organizing expeditions that focused on recovering zu'aan stuck under rubble, but he too was a victim of that same rubble during an unstable operation. Due to his courage, the tribe then named themselves after him, and the now Dran tribal zu'aan was forced to resettle within the Hoerild Red Sand Dune, as if it were their destiny all along.

Psychology

The psychology of the Dran tribal zu'aan defines itself within the shackles of unresolved trauma, remaining neck-deep within seas of it. This often shapes their psyche into evolving toward a cultural philosophy that praises ideals of fluidity. This is something drawn from the fact that their ancestors were betrayed by what they saw as solid ground and settlements, which often makes the average Dran fully terrified of such a notion. This leads to their current mindset, one which rejects the very concept of anything that is permanent and its maintaining.

Which leads to quite a unique mental state where they only feel safe if they can see the motion in everything around them, if they can truly sense how ephemeral everything is, and how nothing but they have the right to be safe and permanent. This trauma, mixed with an overall developed fear of anything that is stable and permanent, causes the members of the tribe to have an incredibly prominent psychological trait that works around being afraid of anything that is fixed or stuck in place.

They have a profound distrust for stone, iron, or any material that doesn't give in and shift itself easily. Overall, this makes it so that for the average Dran, a stone building or something along those lines isn't seen as proper shelter; it is something that just holds the materialization of a potential coffin. This leads to an intense feeling of claustrophobia within the minds of the members of the Dran tribal zu'aan, which all gets mixed with anxiety and dread, the overall fear that something such as that great earthquake might happen again.

This fear of things that are solid, structured, and "permanent" creates a stark contrast to what they do value: things that hold themselves within light and weightless postures, basically the opposite of a really old cave. This leads to quite an interesting development, considering that the members of the Dran tribal zu'aan have an almost pathological obsession with anything that follows this light nature. To sum it all up: psychologically, the members of the tribe relate heavy possessions with death, and light and ephemeral things with safety.

This makes it so the average Dran has a sort of minimalist detachment that prepares them for abandonment at a moment's notice. The members of this tribe have also developed something within their psychological mindset that is commonly referred to as a sort of "sixth sense," due to how important and crucial it is for the functioning of their tribe: the ability to fully process and comprehend social cues and the emotions of others through a sort of inert resonance detection system. This makes it so the average Dran doesn't just listen to the words of their comrades.

They often feel the rhythm within the manner of speech in comparison to the heartbeat of the other, sometimes even adding the other party's velocity while stepping on sand to the calculation. This all builds toward a hyper-sensitiveness that is able to see when another member is lying, insecure, or anxious, since it is something transmitted indirectly through a sense only they can understand.

Culture

The culture of the Dran tribal zu'aan lies within an adaptation of life that dwells within deep realms of beauty and rhythmicism, which place their lives within constant notions of motion. This allows for the breeding of a society that is, in each of its aspects, designed in a way which attempts to maintain that light and resonant notion that their tribe is so famously obsessed with. Be it from the way they build their homes, to the way they dress, to how they eat, speak, or even celebrate, it is all done to try and ensure that they never become victims of the consequences drawn from relying too much on something with a lot of weight and presence.

The main form of transportation utilized within the Dran tribal zu'aan focuses heavily on the ties between the Dran and the land they inhabit, while never abandoning their logic that seeks non-permanence. These vehicles are called "vessels," which are extremely lightweight platforms built with aerodynamic proportions. They are designed in a way that allows them to slide on the sand of the Hoerild Red Sand Dune even without any wheels; they are simply smooth, waxed runners that let the members of the tribe sail down the dunes, sometimes even turning this into a sport where they race, catching thermal winds and adrenaline on the way.

The tribe's artistic expression also draws a lot of inspiration from their land once again, oftentimes utilizing this newfound inspiration to translate the sand into a more beautiful and refined form. This is done via the art of glass forging, taking their precious resource and utilizing it as a way to "pretty up" their whole settlement. This artistic expression is performed by utilizing massive curved lenses that are shaped from obsidian to take much of the solar energy drawn from the droughtful light of the desert sun and focus that entire intensity into a few points with sand-based compounds to liquefy said red sand.

This turns all of those compounds into liquid that is then placed within intricately built hollow structures. These are organized in a way that allows for the liquid to both get enough wind and cold to harden up during the night and also to maintain a sort of malleable structure that allows members of the Dran, sometimes regardless of age, to play around with it and create shapes and objects that might be useful in their day-to-day life, or they can sometimes just treat this resource as a proper toy.

The main end this glassy cultural thing does is the creation of a couple of hollowed out mini towers that are utilized for music, to put it within more simple terms, flutes, that are the main means for musical expression within the Dran tribal zu'aan, often utilized in both times of peace and warfare.

Government

The governance of the Dran tribal zu'aan attempts to shape itself within models of meritocracies that are macromanaged and organized by the means of their own individual council, a council which recognizes much of the tribe's notions around the denial of anything stable and permanent. It thus operates within a logic that follows the same one as the world: to agree upon a shifting, liquid feeling that denies many styles of rigid bureaucracies or hereditarily established chains of leaders.

These notions are replaced by the aforementioned meritocratic logic, where leadership is granted to the members of the tribe who are more capable within the understanding of the tribe's complex web of detection systems, being able to thus guide the tribe thoroughly around threats or toward possible opportunities. The governing body consists of members of the tribe who have an incredibly developed sense of hypersensitivity within their inherent senses and those that are pridefully claimed to be exclusive to the members of the Dran tribal zu'aan.

It is within the sense that these tribe members have some supernatural level of sensorial development and must, thus, be responsible for the managing of the tribe, since they are (regardless of it being something natural or something they trained) the most able-minded to be able to command and understand the needs of the tribe itself, as is claimed within their political structure and within the hegemonical thought of the Dran tribal zu'aan. The laws that are organized within the political and legal system of the Dran tribal zu'aan focus a whole lot around a poetic measure that seeks to keep the conditions of the tribe within realms of fluidity.

This is all done within an attempt to maintain collective "non-heavy" moments, since only a single one of those that comes from a non-complying member can be a threat and endanger things such as the tribe's transportation system or their infrastructure. This is all used as a justification for extremely strict laws when it comes to things such as resource management. These regulations take place in how the government imposes severe limits on personal property, be it how their means of transportation slows down movements of resources and zu'aan migration.

Or be it with regard to the amount of land a single member of the Dran tribal zu'aan is able to have. Again, this all follows the idea that it could compromise the mobility and well-being of the group as a whole. The justice system, as it is held and organized within the Dran tribal zu'aan, is also another societal development that has come to follow much of what the tribe has established as its founding principles. It is extremely swift and focused on restoring any sort of issues that might need remedying.

To complement their ideas of not needing any heavy monuments slowing them down, their legal system also doesn't provide the tribe with any prisons, which means that trials are done with extremely fast executions, oftentimes as if the only objective was to get them out of the way quickly. The means of punishment were, more often than not, simple and plain executions.

Military

The military power structure within the Dran tribal zu'aan is a force which designs itself around seeking alternative matters of dominance against their potential enemies, which is based within the idea of vibrations and disorganized matters of evasion, which is something crucial to allow for combat control within the Hoerild Red Sand Dune, favoring then a structure that doesn't follow the strictly and normally reinforced notions of strong and standing armies, instead a collection of small, disorganized, fluid and flexible divisions that utilize this instability beneath them as an advantage for their tactic functioning.

All of this, thus, leads to building a doctrine that is built upon the idea that enemies that aren't able to find solid footing are already doomed from the moment they even attempted to do so. The main units within the military functioning of the Dran tribal zu'aan tend to take to tactics that attempt to specialize the usage of the common red sandstorms of the Dran's biome as a means for tactical cover, which allows for them to organize themselves individually within quick and swift movements in a storm that would.

For any other being (be them other zu'aan that might be territory hungry, or be them kin'toni) be at best a veil of blindness, and, at worst, able to knock down whole divisions by rendering them useless, forcing them to go out and seek for shelter while the Dran's main division, named the Red Stalkers, are able to strike at peak during this storm, appearing as a blurred dot within the viewpoint of the enemies, often striking and vanishing before the Dran's opponents are even able to react properly.

One of the most common pieces of equipment that the members of the Dran tribal zu'aan utilize are those transporting boards that are able to slide across the dunes with a high level of efficiency, turning quite a common trait in technological development of the tribe into a weapon of warfare that is extremely useful during defenses and of escapes. The members of the Dran tribal zu'aan's military also engage in manners of warfare that tend to attempt to be rarely direct within their tactics.

Avoiding many works that focus on infantry or even organized cavalries, instead weaponizing, such as how they did to their transport boards, the environment around them and their properties within a specific set of metrics that only they know about as a way to destroy any incoming attacks that attempt to threaten the tribe's existence. The biggest example being how they often attempt to emulate what happened to their ancestors by also trying to do a sort of process where the sand under their enemy's foot is slowly turned into mush.

Done by devices that are built to attempt to force vibrations into the dunes that turn it unstable to stand on top of them, which is something highly effective especially when the enemy attempts to climb any structure, throwing them back down and leaving them open to any sort of ranged or physical attacks.

Religion

The religious belief system that is developed within the Dran tribal zu'aan attempts to be a spiritual mirror that is able to display and replicate much of the common norms and customs that have come to be developed within the specific conditions of the Dran tribal zu'aan, being a direct act upon the tribe's ancestry around the actions of earthquakes and the instability of the soil; this all leads to the creation and development of a belief system that attempts to reject any sort of worship that is directed to idols that are treated or regarded as solid and/or heavy.

Instead choosing to wear and worship the skin of the constantly unstable and rhythmic movements within the universe, which depersonifies the notion of God to instead replace it with a natural concept that is responsible for being a poetic allusion to the tribe's already well established behavior. The primordial force that is given the right to be deemed responsible for the shaping and the maintaining of the universe and of existence as we know it, is something drawn from what the tribe sees as a constant, massive, and cosmic hum, eternal and indistinguishable from the notion of existence.

Within the Dran's theology, we observe a great fear upon a notion that is seen as way more dangerous than any other, especially due to its stable and constant, almost permanent presence, that being the notion of silence; this is justified due to the undeniable role of silence within the universe, it is something always present unless one chooses to oppose it by their actions, and even then, silence still reigns in every empty gap that not every zu'aan is able to fill up and it, fundamentally, exists indifferent to time.

In a way where it has been there before the beginning of it all, and in a way that it'll remain in the exact same place after everything gets destroyed. Within their actually very well written mythological facts, we observe the treatment of what can only be seen as an Anti-God, but the only viable alternative that allows the members of the tribe to coexist within the doom-like conditions presented by the permanence of silence, that being their forever hum, a sort of great vibration that is given many names.

Often more commonly called Lylts, which is seen as a primordial force as well, basically operating within a logic that makes it so the Lylts and Silence are all that there are to exist; in one specific spot in a specific moment, there exists either Lylts or Silence, never both at once, and never neither, they are two opposing forces that compose all of reality. The issue with Lylts and how it's treated as an Anti-God is due to how such notion is also responsible for a couple of ills, being counteracting silence, who didn't choose their own definition.

And being responsible for upkeeping all of material reality and all of the possible issues that can come with that, ranging from the tribe having issues with food management to the entire kin'toni plague as a whole.