Ashaara

“Mind your mother, child, or the snake-men will steal you away and turn you into a piglet, curly tail and all!”

— Belhacinti cautionary tale

The Witchmire is an inhospitable place, overgrown with toxic flora and rife with dangerous beasts. While there are communities that survive—and even thrive—in the region’s swamps and jungles, they are scarce and small. Only one nation in the Witchmire is powerful enough to have earned a place on the world stage: Ashaara, Mother of Flesh.
From the safety of their three stronghold-cities, the Ashaarin have extended their control over the Witchmire. For a long time, that control was very nearly absolute. Now Ashaara is splintered by a civil war, divided along class lines, and the very foundations upon which the country is built are trembling.
Ashaara has always been a somewhat isolated, isolationist nation, and as a result, there is a surfeit of dark rumors about it. According to these rumors, the Ashaarin wear masks, underneath which they are not always human; they practice unwholesome magics and engage in unwholesome worship; they have no children; unnatural creatures stalk the streets of their benighted cities; and so forth. Some of these rumors are false. Some of them are not.

Life in the Three Sisters

The vast majority of the Ashaarin population has always dwelt within the walls of three pre-Shattering cities: Qhayaharaat, Umharaat, and Sunashir, collectively called the Three Sisters. The Three Sisters are a large part of the reason why Ashaara has grown so powerful—not only are they built on prodigious veins of the valuable mineral witchstone, but their fortified walls also offer refuge from the many dangers of the Witchmire’s wilderness.
Still, for all that Ashaarin live separate from the swamps and jungles of the Witchmire, these wild places loom large in the nation’s consciousness. Ashaarin culture exhibits a fascination with the region’s flora and fauna, and particularly with reptiles; there is a great deal of reptile iconography in Ashaarin art and architecture. Look no further than the nation’s flag for an example.
Ashaarin fashions, especially among the noble castes, tend towards the gaudy. The Three Sisters are decorated in a similar style, with awnings, tapestries, and murals in every imaginable hue. Against a backdrop of black, cyclopean stones, and under the eerie green glow of witchstone lamps, the effect is usually more foreboding than anything.

A Sacred Art

Ashaara’s principal industry is the extraction and refinement of witchstone. A potently magical mineral, witchstone has a number of peculiar properties, not the least of which is that it warps flesh both living and dead. As such, its presence has shaped Ashaarin society in ways both literal and figurative.
Early experiments with the mineral led to the founding of the arcane discipline of glyptomancy, also called flesh-shaping, which now pervades every aspect of Ashaarin life. Ashaarin society has no taboo against practicing glyptomancy on living creatures, and over the centuries, the Ashaarin have perfected the art of creating chimeras out of both human and nonhuman stock.
There is a spiritual aspect to this: in Ashaarin society, metamorphosis is a holy thing, and the mutability of the flesh is regarded as a thing of beauty. Though not the only expression of this philosophy—the Ashaarin also practice scarification and other forms of body modification—the art of glyptomancy is perhaps the purest.

The Queen of Flesh

Ashaara was once governed by a triumvirate of regents, each one ruling over one of the Three Sisters. This arrangement came to an end almost two centuries ago, when the queen of Qhayaharaat slew her fellow regents in a bloody coup and proclaimed herself the country’s sole ruler. Today, almost two hundred years later, the same queen still reigns.
The queen is worshiped as a living embodiment of the Ashaarin ideal of metamorphosis. She is a masterwork of glyptomancy, an enormous monstrosity no longer even remotely recognizable as human; the flesh-shaping procedures she has undergone are also the cause of her unnatural longevity.
Some detractors have pointed out the irony of this—that an avatar of mutability and change like her has ruled for so long at the head of a stagnant, unchanging regime. Such detractors have often met with grisly fates. In the later years of the queen’s rule, repression has been rife, the gulfs between the castes have widened, and many members of the lower castes have been subjected to glyptomantic procedures against their will. Given these factors, it was perhaps only a matter of time before things came to a head.

Tsura’s War

Tsura was the daughter of a lower-caste family, a beautiful young woman who caught the eye of a highborn glyptomancer. She became his obsession, his muse, and eventually his victim. Rumor and hearsay have muddled the grotesque details of her metamorphosis, but one thing is certain: she did not survive it.
This incident became the spark that ignited the powder keg. The lower castes of Qhayaharaat rose up in a vengeful fury. Their revolt spread, and eventually turned into an all-out war. Qhayaharaat now lies in smoldering ruins, destroyed by the queen rather than let it fall into the rebels’ hands. The queen has holed up in Umharaat along with what remains of her court; the rebels have taken Sunashir.
The rebels’ name for the conflict has spread through the Aether and entered common usage. They call it Tsura’s War.

Worse Things in Store

Qhayaharaat was built atop the Witchmire’s largest known witchstone deposit. Now, with Qhayaharaat in ruins, that deposit is inaccessible, and the mines beneath Umharaat are not nearly productive enough to furnish the old regime with the amount of witchstone it needs. A catastrophic shortage looms on the horizon.
In light of this, the old regime has turned its attention towards the Witchmire’s northern swamps, an area which has long been avoided due to the presence of an anomalous, subterranean superorganism—a great yawning pit of hungry flesh. Still, for all the danger this organism poses, its unnatural existence suggests the presence of a vast and untapped vein of witchstone—a possibility that the old regime can no longer afford to ignore.
There are rumors that Tsura’s War has become a proxy war between Belhacint and Dhavashri. It’s certainly true that Dhavashri, whose economy is dependent on a steady supply of witchstone, is attempting to prop up the old regime. The rumors claim that Belhacint, meanwhile, is bankrolling the rebels in order to destabilize its ancient enemy—and if this should turn all of Ashaara into a smoldering ruin, then so be it.

ASHAARA, MOTHER OF FLESH

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Capital city: Umharaat (formerly Qhayaharaat)
Head of state: The Heir of Flesh, Queen Qhayansashyys I
Languages: Ashaarin
Currency: Ashaarin aata

Ashaarin, though closely related to Dhavashrin, has a sharp-edged, serpentine quality that the latter lacks.
Example names: Alazar, Ashjira, Atzaqh, Azharjin, Daanesh, Dhesra, Erastih, Haresh, Miros, Qhatyayana, Qhos, Razhaan, Saara, Sithra, Tzaniya, Vashra, Vizani, Yaqhaara, Zanjir, Zhura.