The Zami'ite Clans

The legends tell that one half of humanity, sundered from their brothers and sisters in the east by an encroaching chill, migrated south-west across Karn in search of greener pastures - what they found was the peninsula of Karokarn, or Thaneki in Zamish, which was peopled by (at the time) the whole known kraal species. The kraal of the north, led by the ancient sage Gidur, were intensely suspicious of the newcomers, a race like the elves (whom the kraal had repelled an invasion of not two centuries before) but apparently native to their home tundra; they wished to simply repel the human refugees, and would have gotten their way were it not for the intervention of the southern kraal, led by the kamuk Zanor.

Zanor offered a home to humans: the surface land above which the subterranean nests of her people stretched; she appeased Gidur and her followers with promises that the humans would be not only contained, but educated in the orderly, pacifistic ways of the kraal, as well as their native tongue. The men of western Karn were lead to the southern tip of Karokarn, where they lived for 500 years as vassals of the kraal living below the ground they tilled; in this time, the Old Mortaani-Egaric fusion language of Zamish first developed, as well as the syncretic pantheon of deities worshipped by the majority of the Zami'ites today, with both Zanor and her miserly sister Gidur featuring prominently in the mythos.

After nearly five centuries of this compromise holding, the unexpected ballooning of the Zami'ite population, combined with the continually chilling northern climate, forced a reckoning between Zanor and Gidur once more - their lengthy deliberations drove a wedge between the kraal of the north and the south, the former of whom distrusted the humans still and the latter who had come to view them, if not as siblings, then beloved cousins; ultimately, the escalating tension drove Zanor to take the drastic move of leading all the kraal who would follow her and the humans of Karokarn through a great tunnel constructed under the Sea of Glass and into Revenoth. Roughly one third of the kraal race, an astonishing number for the tradition-bound race, chose to follow the southern kamuk in her pilgrimage; as well as the whole human population, numerous torochs and even lenks who encountered the great procession chose to join on, making it the single largest mass migration of people in recorded history (legend states that at its largest a million souls marched behind Zanor, stretching back 10 kilometers, but modern scholars have set the estimate at closer to 300,000 at most).

Passing over the land of Zamiel, Zanor encouraged groups of humans, torochs, lenks and kraal, who had formed individual parties to travel together and made fast friendships on the road, to split off and settle in the land they passed; as the expedition went on, more and more of these groups departed - the descendants of many persist today as the Zami'ite clans. Finally, with just her most loyal kraal at her side, Zanor reached the southern tip of Zamiel, where she founded the legendary nest of Kûl Zanor, today the largest kraal settlement on Revenoth.

Zami'ite clans are incredibly diverse, and their religious, governmental and cultural practices share few common factors; other than the shared language, they tend to bear a similar semi-religious view on property ownership, codified in the Law of Stone, as well as a similar level of technological advancement due to the frequent interchange of members between clans. Nevertheless, to outsiders these clan distinctions can often seem inscrutable, especially due to the tendency for regional conquerors to run roughshod over them in efforts to unite large chunks of Zamiel. Some of the notable clans include:

* Clan Ininzikzi

* Clan Odarezi