In the south laid the strongest and most populous of the old peoples, ruled by chiefs who dared call themselves king, and who the others all feared in times of war.Īnd there were certainly wars, not in the style of the clan grudges and the raids of today’s Kentauri, but of mustered armies in open fields, like those of other armies. The West was the domain of fisherfolk, who first gave name to the Salt Coast, they who braved the sea on tiny coracles, and first charted the passages still used by today’s seafarers. ![]() The midlands were ruled by sheep-herders, who lived in great hill forts atop whose ruins many Aetorian towns now stand. In the North, men hunted the forests of what is now Wulfram. That is a conclusion I think ought to come more easily than it has to most, for even the most cursory glance at Tierra’s varied climes makes clear that the ways in which one might live in one region would prove entirely impractical in others. The truth was that in the times before the Settler-Lords, we were not one people, but many. The truth is, I think something far more complex, and far more dangerous to those who would see us only as animals – or worse – as victimised innocents. It is these customs which are so easily derided as the barbarous ways of half-literate savages, to the familiar images of half-naked men fighting over a sheep’s carcass filled with whisky, of backwards fools which look with disdain upon all pretense of learning, of a people who are as wild and stark as the harsh lands they live in – as if such “noble” fortitude could justify keeping us in such a place. Much of what is commonly understood of the Kentauri are the product not of our old ways, but of the new ones which we have had to adopt to survive in an environment which is as much foreign as it is ancestral. Even the name “Kentauri” itself is a sort of cheap generalisation, a term brought about only after the rise of the Settler-Lords, a name given to us by those who now live in the lands of our ancestors, as if it were the stakes of a pale, to pen us in to that part of our homeland which we still possess. It can be frighteningly easy to reduce the history of the Kentauri peoples to the shell which they now are. I speak of course, of the Tierra of my own people, the Tierra of the Kentauri. Before the stories of the many peoples, there were the stories of the ones who lived in this land before them, the ones whom many are descended, but whom few will adopt as their own. There is the Tierra of the M’hidiyossi corsairs and merchants and bankers, who would leave their legacy in the bastions of Leoniscourt, the parks of Aetoria, and the streets and monuments of a thousand other places.īut before them all, there is the Tierra that was before. There is the Tierra of the Calligian adventurers and opportunists who would make Wulfram. There is the Tierra of the Kian soldiers who would lay the stones of Cunaris and Warburton. ![]() ![]() There is the Tierra of the Unified Kingdom, born upon the field of Montjoy amidst Edwin the Strong’s statesmanship and Callum the Cruel’s intransigence. A history of this land is much like the history of many of its great families: united at present, but the result of many disparate roots, stretching across seas and mountains. To ask for a history of Tierra is to ask for the impossible, for just as the Tierra of today is now a land of many fiefs and lineages, it was once a land of many peoples and traditions, each with their own stories. January 2023: A History of Tierra and Her Peoples (Pt 1)
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