Life in Tosgiv

## Daily Experiences of an average Tosgivite

It’s early morning. First Light. The wind keens through your window, sounding like a whistle for a the few brief seconds it blows before you are roused, wake up, and cover the opening with your bedsheet. The colored cloth casts a faintly colored light into your room as the sun blooms through the window, occasionally broken by the movement of something outside your window. The color is mottled, as your cloth is only lightly dyed, with spots of brown, yellow, green, and red mixed in with little to no patterning. The same sight as every morning. Functional, yet pretty. Your house is one room, two if you have family.

The rest of the household rouses themselves as well, moving to the main room. One by one, they dress in their clothes to handle the day’s tasks. You are a mere farmer, your clothes are simple. Furs and leathers, with a few colored beads and linens to rest underneath it. Flashes of color that denote your rank and station. When dressed, you head outside. The sun is shining between the stone and mud huts you live in. Between the main circle of the huts, every blanket not used to cover the windows of the home are being strung up to cover the square. The result is a shaded central area in the middle of the land. Simple, but effective as dozens and dozens of blankets are linked together. The eldest members of your little dozen huts gather to relax and enjoy the day. You are young, and so you work while the elders sit about, smoking and eating breakfast that they all cook together.

The children and the adults flock to the fields that are arrayed out around your small collection of homes, at the base of the mountain. From your fields and all the others headed up the mountain, you can see the winding paths, dotted with the fabrics of your people. But there’s no time to absorb the beauty of the mountain right now. You set out into the field to toil until the sun is full above your head, baking you in the morning sun. At that time, you return to your small hut, finding a meal made by the elders. It is more than enough to gorge yourself and keep you fed well until dinner time. The food is simple but effective and everyone receives a portion. Potentially, if there are no good meals from the neighboring hovel-collections, they will join you and your meal will be less, but still enough.

You return to the fields to finish your day and as the sun sets, you rest at home, enjoying another large meal. As night falls, there is singing and dancing, led by the elders who have lounged all day in the shade. The entire collection of huts that makes up your small community will gather up and head into the city, further up the mountain to take part in the feasting of food with your family and your neighbors. The richer classes contribute just a few high-end ingredients and the lower ones contribute a significant portion of grains and maize to make up the substance of the meal. This has gone on since you were a child. Not every night, but weekly, you meet with the next caste and partake in a taste of the next life. It is a good feeling. There is laughter and singing and you see the smiling faces of those you know. The colors of drapes, cloth and blankets, mixed with the muted colors of the buildings and clothes of the lower class. When the partying is over, late into the night, you depart and head home.

Your bed welcomes you home and the cloths are pulled down from the center of town. You remove yours from the window and lay down, wrapping yourself in it. It is warm and the wind whistles softly through your window. And in the morning, it will all start again.

## Structure of the average day

The daily life of a Tosgivite is divided into two parts - work and play. As a child, a Tosgivite spends the day aiding their parents in whatever caste based work they may do. For the higher castes, this ranges from political work to religious ceremonies. For the Artisan and Soldier castes, a child will spend their time accounting and doing number work or cleaning tools for their parents. And for the farming peasant castes, a child spends their time in the fields, pulling weeds and working smaller plots of land. At midday, all people break from work and return to their communities to eat together. The center of their community is often arranged into a square or circle between many houses. After the meal has ended and the sun is no longer directly overhead, work resumes. At varying times each week, people are invited out as per custom to eat with others and allow them to revel in the brotherhood of food, life, and love.

This cycle repeats day to day, with the only breaks from the norm being special ceremonies, comings of age, seasonal traditions, or deaths in the family.