Ancestors

In a world full of strange magic, the Ancestors are still a race apart.
Though they are a peaceful culture with little interest beyond their own territory, the Ancestors are both feared and envied for their unique power: the ability to 'live on' in a new body after death. This ability serves to make the Ancestors a powerful force, whatever their intentions. Skills and knowledge are never lost; their craftsmanship is unmatched throughout Genesis and few are willing to antagonize a foe capable of drawing on a hundred lifetime's worth of experience. However, for all of their marvelous powers, they are also avoided and shunned by most. To the Ancestors, this is just fine; they are by and large a reclusive race, with no interest in the others who live beyond their borders. They live a solitary existence and seek nothing more.

Typical Physical Characteristics

Ancestors are relatively humanlike in appearance, though greater in stature and more heavily muscled. They have a pronounced, strong bone structure that can be unsettling to those initially mistaking them for human. Ancestors as a whole have little variation in appearance, likely due to their small population size; they have uniformly dark skin and pale gray or blue eyes. Their hair is dark and textured, generally worn to the waist in a series of elaborate braids that are subtly different depending on gender and social status.
Tattooing is a traditional practice among Ancestors, marking their all-important skin with the intricate lines of their soul inheritance. It's both a practical way to convey information and also a matter of intense pride, and once reaching adulthood and undergoing Devouring Ancestors wear minimal clothing in order to display as much of their skin as possible. Scarring or injuring the skin is a matter for grief and seen as intensely disfiguring.
Due to the convoluted mix of souls inside their single body, Ancestors have very little capacity for natural magic due to the instability of their lifeforce. They don't regret its absence, more than compensating for it with their vast accumulated knowledge and physical prowess.

Natural Abilities

The defining trait of the Ancestors as a race is their soul inheritance. Through some unknown twist of genetics, their memories and essential personality can be passed on to another member of the group by having the new host consume their flesh after death; the collection of individuals then live in a kind of symbiotic relationship, sharing a single body. It's racial memory advanced a further degree, allowing individuals to persist complete with their distinct personalities in a sort of immortality.
This unique ability is manifested via the process of Devouring, or highly ritualized consumption of the dead. The consumption of the flesh encodes the experience and memories of the Devoured into the new host; with proper ritual and through use of an associated mask, the memories and even personality of the deceased can be brought to the fore in a fashion reminiscent of possession while still preserving the individuality of the host. All adult members of Ancestor society play host to the souls of their predecessors, though there's an elaborate 'matchmaking' process governing inheritance in all but emergency situations where souls would otherwise be lost.

Life Cycle

Ancestors are naturally long-lived even without taking into account their soul inheritance, and typically live somewhere in the range of 150-200 years. They stay vigorous well into their old age, with only the most extreme cases becoming frail. Many Ancestors who reach such an advanced age choose to end their own natural lives in favor of continuing on with a new host.
Ancestor childhood is long, with most not considered fully grown until approximately thirty years of age. This is the typical age where they're considered responsible and capable enough to undergo the process of Devouring; an Ancestor isn't considered a full member of society until they've taken up their inheritance, meaning that a lack of deaths in the community can sometimes lead to awkward extended childhoods. Adults typically begin considering children by age 50, and their peak childbearing years are anywhere from here to about 120 years of age.

Reputation

Though they're intensely reclusive and have little to do with those outside the boundaries of their home shard of Nysa, the Ancestors are well-known from the days before the Shattering. They're known as intensely talented warriors and craftsmen, taking full advantage of their collective knowledge; it was well-understood that few could match up to them in battle, but the fact that the Ancestors had little desire for warfare meant that they were welcome neighbors.
Individually, Ancestors are slightly unsettling for members of other races to interact with. While they present as individuals, it's common for them to seem lost in thought or distracted as a result of inner dialogue, and their demeanor and tone can shift fluidly based on which souls are more present at any given time. Talking with one Ancestor, even without the full control that a soul can exert while wearing their accompanying mask, can feel like talking to several different people in a single conversation.

Social Structure

Due to the layered distribution of a much larger population within limited bodies, governance would be a nightmare to try and institute within Ancestor society; thankfully, the race tends to naturally function as a collective with little internal conflict, and have no real need for higher authority.
The closest thing to 'rulership' among the Ancestors is the authority of the capital city of Ankara, which serves as the largest single collection of the population and therefore governs widespread decisions. This is also the seat of the historian-priest caste, who hold a special sort of authority due to their role managing the careful inheritance process of Devouring. Within the smaller villages of the shard, typically averaging 50-150 individuals, there's no higher governance and the population lives and works communally.
Ancestor family structure is loose as a result of the complex layering of relationships between individuals and their inherited souls. Children 'belong' to the whole community regardless of their biological parentage, and often present the greatest challenge to group authority due to having a much greater degree of individuality before they undergo Devouring and take their place in adult society.

Societal Norms and Values

For more specific racial customs, see Ancestor Customs.
TRADITION AND CEREMONY
Tradition is everything to the Ancestors; while the Devouring is the obvious and key example, keeping cultural identity alive is important to helping ancient souls retain a sense of stability and self. They see their ritual practices as necessary and don't take skipping them lightly. They're also important to help maintain mental stability, a potentially tenuous thing when so many minds are so closely overlapped.
LOVE, SEX, AND MARRIAGE
The Ancestors love each other dearly, even though individuality is such a blurred thing within their society. It's fair to say that they instead love one another as a collective, meaning that there's little specific monogamy so much as a wider sort of polygamous/polyamorous structure of relationships. Sex is seen as a pleasant physical intimacy with no larger implications, and low fertility rates mean that children are a rare blessing when they happen without much regard for parentage.
There's no formal marriage within Ancestors, but they typically share a closer bond with their local community or specific circles of individuals than they do with the race as a whole. Integrating social circles into their elaborate body tattooing is considered a deeply sentimental and heartfelt gesture, essentially describing those included as part of their personal identity despite not sharing souls.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
There's little crime in adult Ancestor society due to their natural inclination towards the community, but younger, pre-Devouring Ancestor children can and do cause trouble. It's very rare that they do anything overly serious, but they're prone to risk-taking behavior that adult Ancestors consider unthinkably dangerous; the ultimate punishment for such a socially-oriented society is isolation, but since this doesn't hold the same gravity for youth it's replaced by the closest counterpart of sensory deprivation. Ancestors who worship Lore have some small capacity for shadow-based magic, and can use it to temporarily blind and deafen a lawbreaker to make them understand how reliant on trust and the community they subsequently become.
In the exceedingly rare case of serious crime among adult Ancestors, the only punishment is execution. The guilty party's body will be prepared in order to facilitate soul inheritance as usual, sparing their otherwise innocent souls from oblivion, but the criminal's skin won't be made into the mask that would let them properly manifest as an individual. It's considered the closest option to erasing a member of the otherwise-immortal race from existence, and is the ultimate punishment reserved for only the most serious of crimes.
DEATH
Though Devouring and the soul inheritance are of ultimate importance among the Ancestors, the physical death of a body is considered a relatively minor event and isn't seen as a reason for mourning. What is important is the sanctity of the body and ensuring that it undergoes the proper process to preserve the souls it contains; for the Ancestors, the greatest horror is the risk of losing an entire lineage through a single individual's untimely death. The potential loss is made even greater by the fact that Ancestors have no written language, meaning that losing souls can result in the total loss of their sum experience and knowledge. This is the primary reason behind their largely nonviolent and isolationist policies, and the reason that Ancestors so rarely leave their homeland. They're almost never alone, doing in everything in pairs or larger groups out of an excess of caution.

Relevant Articles

INDIVIDUALS

LOCATIONS
Nysa Shard 

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