Tasse

The Tasse were a long extinct tribe on the Seven Cities subcontinent, who once lived in the Tasse Hills in the far southwest region of the First Empire during the time of Dessimbelackis. Gral legend recalled a Gral commander named Sidilack serving under Vorlock Duven in the Karasch Legion. Two months before the Great Fall of the Crippled God, Duven sent Sidilack and his seventy-four Gral warriors into the Tasse Hills to subjugate the Tasse. The Gral were to draw out the Tasse to a place of ambush.
But instead of a fierce warrior tribe, the Gral found only a handful of woad-painted savages whose civilization seemed to have degenerated from some distant period of civilisation. The Tasse were physically unlike the other tribes in the region. They were tall and lithe with strangely small hands and feet, and elongated faces with weak chins and oversized teeth. Their eyes were close-set with irises the colour of pale grass and whites blistered by blood vessels. They spoke a language unlike any the Gral had ever heard. They showed obvious signs of dehydration and malnutrition, and were ineffective with stone-tipped spears and knotted clubs.
The Tasse's scraggy huts and rock shelters were built amongst the ruins of much more impressive structures. The ancient terraced fields about them were dusty and lifeless with dry stone-lined water channels that no longer functioned. Stone tombs featured phallic capstones, and potsherds and bone fragments littered the ground. 
Sidilack and his warriors had dispatched the last handful of starving Tasse men and women when the clearing was swallowed by shadows and seven terrible hounds surrounded the remaining two- or three-year-old girl. An unnamed god with cold blue eyes, long black hair, broad shoulders, and an ankle-length coat of blued chain. He told Sidilack that the Tasse had been abandoned by the Deragoth and lived in fear, unable to live off the land. The god did not decry their slaughter, but announced his claim on the girl and took her away.Reaper's Gale, Chapter 15, US HC p.426-428
Long afterwards, Sidilack was disturbed by the memory of the slaughter and the less-than-human girl who had survived it. He recalled she had small hands and feet, a sloped chin, large canines, and luminous eyes the hue of savannah grasses.
==Notes and references==
Category:Seven Cities natives
Category:Tribes