Vatarnkalar

**The Vatarnkalar**

*The Vatarnkalar are* the western brethren of the Noshkalar, living martial lives of

**Origin:** Natural Evolution, descended from Noshkalar

**Capital/original settlement:** Opuirn Embres

Natural lifespan: 60-85 years

**Traits:**

1) Amphibious; The Vatarnkalar are naturally affinitious with their life on land and their lives in the deeps, transitioning from one to another with relative ease.

2) Predatory; The Vatarnkalar use their martial culture and nature to their advantage, developing more significant musculature and an upright skeletal structure.

3) Proto-Reptilian physiology; the Vatarnkalar in their shamanic and savage physiology have evolved away distinctly from their fish-like common ancestors with the Jatairni, and have opted for a dryer and longer-living form. Their thickly-scaled form is reminiscent of the Noshkalar, however the Vatarni scales have thickened and become almost armor-like in places, allowing for naturally abrasion-resistant hides. They have grown taller and broader than their stunted ancestors, thriving physically where once the fish-folks suffered under labour. Their predatory nature has rendered them cold-blooded however, and incapable of satisfying the homeostatic needs of their bodies, lending to a greater reliance on wrappings and warm centrally heated huts and proto-sauna's. The Vatarnkalar are also hunters and predators by diet, choosing instead to eat the eggtides and lesser creatures that live in the fungal tundra's and forests of their homeland, with little significance of agriculture in their society. Their population is naturally lower than the Noshkalar and Jatairni only because they allow only their hatchings to happen in communal spawning pits from whence all the young are raised by the community at large.

4) **(Granted by Uode)** Danger Sense; The Vatarnkalar have developed keen interlinking of their senses, capable of processing incoming threats to their livelihood at exponentially greater rates, and thus can take action to dodge and evade potential predators or environmental risks.

**Society:**

The Vatarnkalar share many of the original precepts or society that the Noshkalar did, however where once was one race, there is now three. The Vatarni are a seemingly primitive race but socially still show some evolution over their fishy brethren. They worship Vynthrol exclusively as their lord and god, the god of the redeming fires. Perhaps this Vynthraism is what lead to their crocodilian mutations and evolution, the reliance on central ceremonial fires eventually became pragmatic to their needs as a species. Thusly their society for all of its ups and downs, is reliant on fire, a fire that they hold sacred over much of anything else.

Their spawning pits where the young are gestated are kept well-heated, the huts and halls of their people are well and centrally heated - indeed one of the few non-hunting professions of respect in their settlements are those that tend and keep the fires - reserved for learned and wisened hunters. That is to say hunters with few years left, even though unlike other species the Vatarni do not enter senesence and maintain physical primehood well into their twilight years. They are savage hunters and to go up against one in combat is like fighting all of the razor-sharp claws and thick hide of a predator in its domain with the cold and cunning intelligence of sentient mortal.

The Vatarnkalar despise their Noshi cousins, and hunt and eat them routinely. When the Noshkalar eggtides sweep in the Vatarnkalar will go out in numbers and net up the eggs they catch, letting them hatch and grow awhile before slaughtering the infantile fishfolk for their meat.

One of the advancements that the Vatarni have made in their brutal warfaring way of life; constantly hunting, is to build shields from the hides and bones of those they hunt. This is so as to ensure the protection and survival of the hunter from potentially fatal blows by its dangerous prey.

Although they are fundamentally not farmers, the Vatarni do engage in some mining and by that practice smithing of metalsl to create tools, trinkets, and weapons. Consequently when a Vatarni has reached significant recognition they have a totem forged for them in the shape and make of their chief prey that earned that recognition, so as to pay respect eternally to the sacrifices of the hunt.

These totem's form chains of metal effigies strew around the central spawning pits of different clans of Vatarnkalar, and serve as familial reminders of hunters long past, and as inspiration to the infants and younglings of a generation for future hunts. In this way the Vatarni have preserved ancestral knowledge of beasts long since extinct or changed, and while they appear savage in the ways of knowledge keeping, a deep oral tradition mandates knowledge of the land and its creatures to the Vatarni.

Although the Vatarni do use a twisted and deepened dialect of the Noshi language some , they have a uniquely social ability to intuit the meaning of another Vatarni from their stance and the position of their eyes/face and tilt of the neck, this nonverbal body language is capable of communicating complex messages through facial and bodily expression silently, a useful trait amongst hunting packs. To the Vatarni, bodily language is therefore incredibly important and one of the reasons they despise the aesthetically stunted and careless Noshkalar for their offensive body posture and language. It is a thing of honour and dominance amongst the ranks of the greatest Vatarni hunters of any generation, to show that dominance through bodily posture. the Sotul-lar is a ceremony and rite of passage from Hunter to the most respected of a clan by undergoing suffering. The Vatarni will receive a brutal beating from a group of their contemporaries and should their bodily language falter for even a moment, they will be beaten to death. However, should they succeed in maintaining their 'honour' through 'rite of suffering', they will be elevated to the ranks of elder or greater hunter and be respected by all.

**Advancements:**

n/a

**Sects:**

Nosh Embre: Vynthrol