Jeraxih Tribes

The peoples of the **Jeraxih Tribes** are nomadic herders, living in a state of constant flux. The only constant are the temples, huge stone structures that have existed longer than any man can recall. The temples, and the rituals, great sacrifices that occur at the beginning of every year to bring fortune and growth. Throughout the year, the tribes engage in near constant warfare, wandering the plains and raiding one another whenever there is an encounter. At the end of the year, all the spoils from the past year of raiding are collected and are burnt in the great temples sacrifices. Animals, foods, precious metals, even humans are all sacrificed, and the greater the offering, the better the next year will be, and the greater that next year's sacrifice will hopefully be. After the near month of celebration and sacrifice at the end of every year, the tribes are oftentimes left desolate and spent, having to rebuild their herds and sacrificial stocks through another year of raiding. This cycle generally prevents any one tribe from gaining dominance, and ensures that the Jeraxih tribes can do little more than fight one another.

## The Jungle Outbacks of Eastern Chakobsa

The Chakobsan Jungle covers a great portion of land between the prairies of Sidarí and the Neeugs and the Desert of Dirihadarir. It is a dark, humid, dense mass of trees and vines, with dangerous fauna and flora, full of all kinds of threatening creatures. The human population concentrates around the few clearings where the jungles are less plentiful. However, the eastern parts of the jungle are much less dense, and are meshed with areas of dry badlands. Many attribute this strange dichotomy to the numerous salt deposits in the area, blocking the correct growth of the jungle and most plant life in general. The land is particularly rocky as well, with a poorly developed floor that blocks the roots of trees, allowing only tropical bushes and other plants that can survive shallow soil. This gives the lands east of the Chakobsan Jungle a strange appearance, with pockets of dense jungle surrounded by rocky outback.

It is in the eastern side of the Chakobsan Jungle where we can find the **Great Stone Temples**, massive structures of unknown origin that dot the eastern side of the jungles. Nobody really knows who built them, when they were they built or why. The Great Stone Temples are of monumental size, easily big enough to be mistaken for small walled towns. They frequently follow a concentric pattern, with many rectangular or square buildings with an outdoor space within that includes a similar structure. This pattern repeats up to three times, and at the center of it all there lies a massive humanoid statue. Most of these statues have been heavily damaged by time, with erosion and plant life having taken away most of the detail. At most, we can identify a humanoid form sitting, wearing strange robes, and with strange symbols sculpted on its skin, but no statue has preserved the facial features of the effigies. The temples themselves have accumulated a lot of vegetation over the years, and many parts of the temples are crumbling down due to the weight of plant life and the roots undermining the foundations of the building.

## The Jungle Herders

In these lands, there live the **Jeraxih** herders. The Jeraxih are nomadic groups that live off both their sheep and horses and of pillaging and raiding nearby populations. Their culture is considerably primitive, and many speculate they are the original tribes that formed the Yagauran culture to the west. They live in groups of around a hundred people, with their leader being the oldest in the tribe. The Jeraxih are always on the move, going from temple to temple feeding their charges, always avoiding the spots of jungle where predators hide. The Jeraxih adore the temples, despite not having built them, thinking they were brought here by the **Precursors**, the beings that separated the land from the sky and the stars.

The Jeraxih are an extraordinarily violent people. They will declare war on each other on the spot, raiding each other and capturing as many prisoners as possible, though they will avoid exterminating each other when possible (after all, a tribe exterminated is a tribe less to raid in the future. Prisoners are blinded in one eye and have their arms broken, to avoid treachery during the period of capture. Once a year, the tribes will bring all their spoils and celebrate massive rituals, dances and prayers. The sacrifices will have their remaining eye blinded, and in front of the central statues, have their necks sliced. Then the tribe will partake in cannibalistic rituals. The Jeraxih believe the fortunes of the tribe will become greater the more human flesh they consume. Attacking a fellow Jeraxih tribe during their rituals is strictly forbidden, though there is nothing that forbids them from just waiting until they have finished their rituals to launch a surprise attack.

## History

Not much is known about the history or the origins of these tribes, since they keep no written records nor do they converse much with the rare foreigner that steps into their lands. The few scholars that have gotten the chance to study these primitive people have speculated that the Jeraxih might have common ancestors with the people of Chakobsa, with the ones that stayed in the eastern, less dense jungle keeping their nomadic culture, and the ones migrating to the west formed the Yaguaran culture, that eventually evolved into a more developed version of their eastern cousins.

As far as anyone can tell, the Jeraxih tribes have always been nomadic, and always numbered in the hundreds, spread around eastern Chakobsa, with their constant warring, cannibalism and self destructive tendecies keeping them away from any real societal or technological progress.

## Religion

The Jeraxih worship various unnamed beings known as the Precursors, who they believe are their creators who sculpted them based on their own image. The Jeraxih choose to depict the Precursors, on their various murals, in a similar fashion to the mysterious statues that are scattered around the Great Stone Temples. These Temples are more ancient than any culture in the region, and are built out of huge, chunks of stone with extremely precise geometrical shapes, which add to the overall sense of awe. The Temples are the location of various cannibalistic and sacrificial rituals performed by the Jeraxih, and are considered sacred sites by them, to the point where killing and attacking each other is strictly forbidden while a ritual is in proccess, or when they are within their sacred temples.

## Foreign Relations

The Jeraxih are usually too busy with fighting and warring against each other to bother raiding their neighbours. On the contrary, it is them that are usually getting raided and invaded by their neighbours, such as the alchemical beasts of the Strange Meadows, the slavers of Moridan and the warlike people of the  Bakir Sahabaharadad Sultanate. Most of these foreign invaders have been mostly unsuccessful in their attempts, either repelled by the hostile nomadic tribes or even the unforgiving jungle itself, with the exception of the Chakobsans, who, due to their mastery of traversing the jungle terrain, have learned to raid their neighbours -in search of prisoners to sacrifice- with relative success.