Serénez Tribes

The Serénez Tribes are a collection of clans scattered across southern Mencu, known as elusive and secretive knowledge-keepers. While they lack a specific field of study that they focus on, they are apt keepers of what they consider "forbidden knowledge", and protect it with dangerous binding rites known as Serénez Blood Rites, which are often taken as young children. While they lack formidable facilities and institutions devoted to archiving information, the Serénez have a vast network of underground halls known colloquially as the Sacred Realms, where they house information of all sorts. The exact location of these archives is unknown, since most entrances to the halls are via highly regulated portals, for the entire archives are and remain warded strongly enough that even the magically-inclined Renkida and the cunning reality-changing Jalenga were unable to break into these archives without the proper rites.

## History

While similar groups of knowledge-seekers have existed on most Facsimiles as well as The Archetype throughout much of history, the reclusive clans that dubbed themselves "Serénez" proved to be the longest lasting of these organizations, with the only other comparable entity being the Archivists of the Mazaduran Empire, headquartered in the Mazaduran city of Sajal on Kalmora (the Archetype).

### Origins

The notion of keeping knowledge was by no means a foreign concept, although it was only after the advent of the 1st Age of Aetheric Dissipation that the Jalenga realized the importance of travelling to the different Facsimiles to record their actions and cultures, in the event that their worlds dissipated too. Over the years and ages, they and others amassed various repositories in different locations, although many of these have also been lost to history, especially since some of them were established on worlds that no longer exist. However, the repository on Mencu soon became overseen by clans of tribal Serenza that devoted their lives to the preservation of this knowledge, and since Mencu has remained by far the most stable of the Facsimile worlds, the tribes flourished.

### Adoption of Blood Rites

As time went on, however, the type of knowledge kept by the Serénez became more sensitive, especially as they recorded and learned of the secrets to many of the different rituals and experiments conducted by the Jalenga, whether on their home of Sayenzi-Jorgomna, or right in the Serenez' home world of Mencu itself. Not just anyone would be trusted with such dangerous information that could jeopardize entire people and cultures, and so the Blood Rites were instigated as a way to make a permanently binding contract with anyone who was entrusted with this knowledge. The exact nature of these "Blood Rites" is unclear, apart from the "punishment" for breaking one being immediate and irreversible death by the magicks woven into the rites. This prevented defectors and also instilled a certain respect and even fear of this forbidden wisdom, which was taught culturally as a method of respecting the dangerous knowledge and swearing not to misuse it. Similarly, few people know the full expanse of wisdom kept in their Sacred Realms, although one of the most notable additions in (comparatively) recent times is the Rites of the Kumenza.

## See Also

* List of Factions on Mencu
* The Facsimiles
* Rites of the Kumenza
* Tzakani Nezami Serénez
* Jalenga
* Sayenzi-Jorgomna
* Kumenza