Mwennin

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The **Mwennin** were a small minority culture in the hexarchate. Notable Mwennin characters include Ajewen Cheris, her mother and father, and Moroish Nija.

## Overview

The hexarchate's estimated population of 58,000 Mwennin were already an extinct community by the larger realm's standards. Their numbers miniscule in the only system in which they were settled, they were concentrated on Bonepyre, in scattered communities on the planet's second-largest continent. The City of Ravens Feasting and the City of Hollow Processions had Mwennin communities.

Many old-fashioned Mwennin beliefs, including their calendar, bordered on heresy under the high calendar and were taught and practiced only in secret. Among other cultural quirks, the Mwennin predominantly avoided faction service and, unusually for their era, practiced natural birth. They were not inclined to fancy body-mods. Individual Mwennin tended to live with other family members. Cultural cuisine included lamb with yogurt sauce, meat pasties, and pastries with poppyseed filling. Special birthday pastries were made for clandestine Mwennin birthdays: "fine flaky dough with sweet almond paste and rosewater syrup, or little kumquat candies, goat's milk caramels with little crunchy flecks of pistachios."

## Beliefs

The Mwennin had no planet or territory of their own, but a concept of home, called Mwen-denerra ("the scatter-home"), represented the weaving together of the small communities sharing their blood and customs.

Mwennin prayers invoked raven prophets, heron oracles, and the queen of birds in the wood-with-no-boundaries. Though the prayers were forbidden in the hexarchate, devout Mwennin still prayed in secret. Stories and mythology included "the one-eyed saint who kept a casket with no lock, and what became of her lovers" who opened it; "the half-tailed cat who lived in the world's oldest library"; "the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds" for an assault on the heavens; and saints who left the sea to complete quests, returning afterwards "to feast in their palaces of coral and bone." Mwennin mirror-sorcery folktales involve anything that happens to one person being "mirrored" on another

Other customs include luckstone pendants, given to offspring on the birthday corresponding to their birth date. Cheris received her pendant on her twenty-third birthday.

The Mwennin accept "adoptive" Mwennin who learn their traditions, a custom that helped keep the minority alive despite small numbers of adherents. Ajewen Derow was one, entering the group by marriage.

## Language

The Mwennin have a language, Mwen-dal, considered a low language in the hexarchate. To an outsider, Mwennin poetry chants sound like "a rapid torrent of sibilants." Pitch accents are involved in correct pronunciation.

On birthdays, hidden behind closed doors, songs would be sung in archaic Mwen-dal. The language also has an impressive array of obscenities. "For saint's sake" is one of its oaths.

Cheris spoke Mwen-dal exclusively until she entered school, and had an accent in the high language until shedding it in Kel Academy. She no longer speaks it well, but used to write to her mother in Mwen-dal and later as the basis for a code to communicate with Servitor 1491625. Moroish Nija is a fluent speaker.

## Calendar

The Mwennin religious calendar, which was suppressed as heretical, had a list of calendar-saints and feast-days. Carrion Day celebrated the importance of scavengers. Various icons were associated with birthday-saints; Cheris's was represented by a raven.

Children also had counting-games, risky in the hexarchate but still played in Mwennin ghettos.

### Names

In the Mwennin tradition, Cheris would have been named after a saint's day in their calendar. Because of the mortal danger to anyone openly acknowledging a heretical calendar, her parents named her "Cheris" ("twenty-three") for the high calendar day on which she was born.

## History

The Mwennin were barely tolerated by the hexarchate, surviving due to their insignificant numbers and secretiveness in practicing their beliefs.

During the Hafn invasion, the hexarchs authorized the extermination of the Mwennin as an attempt to control Ajewen Cheris. Most of the Mwennin were rounded up by the Vidona and executed. On secret orders from Hexarch Shuos Mikodez, approximately 5,000 Mwennin were safely evacuated: a small number, but the most the Shuos were able to extract without the operation being exposed.

With Shuos support, the refugees formed a Mwennin settlement on Esrala, an out-of-the-way planet, after the broadcast of the revised calendar. Over the next decade, they began to raise families and accept new settlers.

## References

1. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 13
2. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 1
3. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 13
4. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 7
5. ↑ Birthdays; Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20
6. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 13
7. ↑ Revenant Gun, Epilogue
8. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
9. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon
10. ↑ Birthdays
11. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 9
12. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
13. ↑ Cheris and the Sea
14. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon
15. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 2
16. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
17. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 1
18. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon, p.282
19. ↑ Birthdays
20. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 27
21. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon, p.282
22. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20
23. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 7
24. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon, p.236
25. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 27
26. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 27
27. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
28. ↑ Birthdays
29. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 1
30. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 9
31. ↑ Birthdays
32. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20
33. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20
34. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
35. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 27
36. ↑ Revenant Gun, Epilogue