Cubare
Basic Information
Anatomy
Cubare are demons of beauty. Subjective as it is, they consider themselves the most fetching beings in existence in at least someone’s tastes, even if it is not their own. In their limited travels to the surface, they have most often encountered either variants of arren in the southern hemisphere - particularly around the Penja’at-founded settlements in Sur’Dhanza’s deserts - and humanity in the north. This has affected their concepts of beauty somewhat, leading to three distinct styles of cubare. The first is the modern ‘natural’ cubare, which is distinctly humanoid but with a smooth, plated, almost fish-like appearance to their features. The second form are the reptilian cubare, influenced by their exposure to the arren to take on more snouted faces, scalier skin, and more lithe, elongated forms. Finally, there are the human-like cubare, looking exactly as one might expect; humanesque but for their unnatural skin tones and more glaringly obvious cubaren traits.
The shared traits from top to bottom are as follows: First are their horns - a common trait across nearly all demons - which tend to be flat and wide, curling or spiraling from around the temples or crown of the head. Next come the wings, which are typically bat-like in appearance. Third are their tails, which are thick and reptilian in general shape, but have been accented with everything from fur to hair tufts, pointed barbs to fish-like fins. And finally are their legs, which are digitigrade in shape, with each foot ending in a bestial hoof.
Cubare also happen to be unique among demons by being the only ones with any form of gendered sexual characteristics. As most demons were part of something of a trial run at living beings, their relevant organs function for pleasurable purposes, but are unrelated to the act of procreation, unlike their mortal-borne counterparts. This makes them the only demonic species to display sexual dimorphism of any kind, but as their relevant bits are largely aesthetic, it means little as far as their total appearances go.
Civilization and Culture
Naming Traditions
The demon language is the closest in the setting to something wholly unique, but what that currently means is that most individual demons’ names and things named by them are tentative and prone to change. The only significant exception at the moment is the suffix “-a’at”, which is used as a shorthand for ‘of the demons’. Seen in places like the names of their world and city (Doma’at and Urba’at), as well as their two major gods, it’s reserved for only the most significant and universal aspects of demon-kind.
Beyond that, with many demons dipping into and out of the mortal world, they’ve brought many things back with them as novelties, foreign languages among them. For demons born in the mortal world, or to parents who are fascinated by it, their names are likely to mimic the formatting and languages of the races that most caught the parents’ eyes.
Culture and Cultural Heritage
Cubaren society revolves around image and ownership. With natural beauty being a given, the burden of representing one’s status in the world falls to worldly possessions and reputation. The wealthy are powerful by virtue of their wealth, while the less fortunate pawn off their skills to the highest bidder in the hopes of one day joining them. Everyone is involved in high-level politics in their world, not only the nobility.
Family is held in high regard among the Cubare. Not because of affection or love or anything like that, but because family holds legal weight both in their society and among demons in general, granting one more resources to work with towards accumulating wealth and status. Large families are formed only as a calculated risk, however. More family members pooling their resources is a wonderful thing, but these larger groups carry a greater risk of one individual’s public shaming or blackmailing bringing everyone down alongside them. As such, the most powerful families in Urba’at feature a relatively stable mix of families of varying sizes and a scant few shrewd individuals.
From time to time, particularly in the advent of demons’ escape in the Brightlands, Cubaren families will simply drop off the grid. They sever all contact with the leading nobility, no longer seek employment in order to improve their status, and simply live out their lives on their own terms. Those still stuck in the rat race of Urba’atan living look upon these strange folk with everything from disgust to jealousy to adulation, but they frequently have the same term for them: The Unfettered. These folk - whether inspired by the outside world to seek for something new and different or scared away from what they had by seeing its worst elements reflected in foreign societies - live their lives entirely apart from the political, paranoid, back-stabbing-filled world of traditional Cubaren society. Do note that this doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve entirely given up on the sorts of greed and lust for power that they escaped from; merely that they are no longer tied to the system that enforced it in quite the same way.
Common Taboos
Among the cubare, information is just as much a form of wealth as currency itself. As such, it is considered not only foolish to readily and freely provide someone with it, but almost insulting, as if suggesting that they could not somehow discover it or coax it from you themselves. Even something as simple as providing one’s full name upon introduction can be seen as a subtle slight, resulting in most Cubare defaulting to introducing themselves using a nickname or more familiar version of their given name.
Historical Figures
- Leyona’an Karnavi - Cubare representative to the Yu’urn and once the lover of the reigning Duwallish Empress, Leyona’an wields a great deal of power in both the demon world and the mortal one. She is a physically imposing individual, and an excellent tactician to boot. Thanks to her efforts - and the unintentional formation of her relationship with the human monarch - the demon realms have benefited immensely in modern years. Some have termed it a Second Deluge, claiming it to be the greatest leap forward in demon history since the cracking of the Brightworld gifted their own world with water and magic.
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