Retaea: the Lashunta Moorland Cradle (re.ta.e:a)
On Castrovel everyone knows Qabarat, the greatest Lashunta city on the continent of Asana. From there, if one goes straight northward along the great Yaro River for a thousand miles, there the headwaters go west into the Stormshield Mountains. Yet if one instead goes eastward and crosses the great jungle swamp, the land slowly rises and dries out. The swamps give way to bamboo-like canegrass, home to thurse-lizards and wild pack-hunting Shota. Then further the canegrass thins out to one of the planet’s few places where one can see the unbroken clouds. Welcome to the Retaea, the savannah-moors.
Even here, civilization makes a presence, especially toward Lake Arasene’s shores. There rises Lea, reputed the world’s second-oldest city and founded by the Warrior-Queens, according to legend, atop a stronghold conquered from the Moqeva. It was wiped out when the moldstorms first broke, but then resettled from Son. Further north, Tihes lies at the lake’s northern end. These towns trade all along the lakeshore and with the moorland clans, provided valuable citycraft goods in return for ~Qoelu~ hides, tusks, and bonework.
Further north, the land gives way to the Shemez Desert and wild, unknown folktales, until one comes to a massive mesa dominating the surrounding wastes, home to Ofu-Laubu, the Northern Jewel. This city is almost legendary to most other Lashunta and is home to the Thakasa, great flying steeds with leathery wings and their riders, who make the sky their city’s realm. Here is also one of the last Lashunta cities still ruled by a queen, who claims descent from demigoddesses, and which also holds a peculiar connection to Qabarat far in the south, for an ~aiudara~ Elf-gate stands here, proof that the Elves too once walked upon this mesa.which some say is the home to the ghostly White Coeurl and the poison-clawed, sabertooth Tiaru.
Geography
Expanding in a band from the Yaro’s swamps, the Southern Retaea lies between the Central Stormshield Mountains to the west and Lake Arasene in the east. North of the lake the moors dry out until they shift into the Shemez Desert that hugs the great northern Voliahu rainforest beyond Ofu-Laubu (Laubu Mesa)Lashunta geographers estimate the moor’s total length at over 270 ~sem~ (1,000 miles / 1,700 kilometers), composing some of the most diverse habitats on Castrovel.
A few days inland from Tihes, a top a great rocky crag that breaks the moor’s starkness, rises Azaryau, a megadendron Soul-Tree hosting what some believe is the oldest Overmind in the world, whom the Retaea Clanfolk worship as a living god. Its priesthood every Blighttide host the great Clanmoot, when the southern clans come north and the northern clans come south, to trade, find lovers, and try to mediate the ever-simmering feuds.
Ecosystem
Temperate to tropical savannah.
Ecosystem Cycles
The moorlands team with life upcaught in a neverending cyclical migration: birds, swift-running thurse-lizards from whom domestic meat stock are descended, and then the great Megafauna ~Qoelu~ from stalwart Shieldheads to stampeding Duckbills, and overall the mighty, hill-like Yaruks, while phantom-like, with the terror of dragons, the dreaded Nysshalora, nicknamed Queenslayers, deem what they shall make their prey.
Localized Phenomena
This part of Castrovel has more moldstorms than any other, a recurring, flesh-rotting phenomenon that gave birth to one of the Lashunta’s name for the seasons: ~Daviathi~ - Blighttide. Curiously, the great ~Qoelu~ migrations seemingly predict the next moldstorm’s path. How these creatures know stays a mystery.
Climate
While Lashunta in ignorance may speak of the Retaea in the same way as Humans speak of the Sahara or Golarion’s Osirion Deserts, it is nowhere nearly so arid (nor even so dry as the Shemez further north). Instead, a strong monsoon pattern dominates, with seasonal Floodtide (spring) rains that slowly weaken and dissipate, after which the turns dry until Heaventide (winter) when the sky may be cloudless for days and nights on end, and rain may not fall for thirty or forty days. Neither is it wholly treeless, though wood growth tends to follow the rivers but for odd ~Onyhu~ baobab trees that swell with as much water as they can suck. Instead of giant Megadendra, most trees are what Humans would deem normal size (for California Redwoods).
Fauna & Flora
~Qoelu~ (dinosaurid megafauna)
Natural Resources
Ivory, Hides, Boneware, Grassberry
History
Lashunta dwell here as well, and have (if one believes the legends) for more than thirty thousand years. The people of the Yaro Valley believe their foremothers came from the Retaea, after Tess the First Queen tamed Shotaviras and led her people against the alien Moqeva. For six thousand years tree-worshipping priest-queens led their clans and tribes in a war for the Retaea’s dominance. Some even blame the moldstorms on the Moqeva: a biological weapon over which they lost control, wreaking as much or more damage on themselves as on their Shota-riding, psychically linked foes. More interestingly, the Lashunta’s first legends of the Elves, whom they deemed trickster-witches, come from this time and place as well, long before Sovyrian sent forth its colonies, and even before the Warrior-Queens began the Yaro Valley’s conquest with eager allies recruited from the moorland tribes.
The Retaea’s current nomad inhabitants, however, do not claim descent from the Warrior-Queens, but instead from an ancestor much more maligned (if equally barbaric). These Lashunta clans are named ~Uthama Shaverazea~ - the Children of the Thief-Queens, after the Retaea warriors who first went southward as mercenaries to fight the First Formian Invasion, but who then overthrew the Yaro Valley’s last Sage-Queens, set their skulls on spears, and precipitated the Lashunta dark age of seven thousand years. The Thief-Queens’ legacy still darkens the Retaea, giving a taste of barbaric prejudice among more civilized southern visitors, even though the Retaea Clans in their penitence chose to cast off the Thief-Queens as well. Like their southern cousins, no queen rules the Retaea, at least not in the South.
Type
Moor
Related Tradition (Primary)
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