Ogiere

The Ogiere may be one of the oldest civilized races on Allornus. Descended from the Mariners, the creatures who mastered the seas, and explored a world larger than any today could even conceive. They foresaw the sundering, either warned by their divh or else by some ingenious divination, and abandoned the seas, fleeing into fastnesses beneath the earth to hide from the vengeance of the divh. But they never emerged again, instead turning from towering, proud creatures with bronzed skin and flowing manes into hunched hairless albinos, confined to cramped tunnels and blinded by the sight of the sun, or else giant, pale savages.

Origins


Of the early origins of the Mariners, few are entirely clear, for they were prolific travellers who traversed the world with greater ease than any before or since, and from whom we have our only pictures of the world as it was when it was young, before the horror of the divh-wrath broke it. Most claim that the came from a land across the souther oceans, now lost below the angry sea, but some claim that they are some kind of sea-myr, and others remark upon the resemblance between ogiere and man. Whatever the truth, the mhulak are the children of these travellers who came to the land to hide from the impending cataclysm that only they foresaw.

And when they made homes on land, artificial to them, they changed. The mhulak became hunched, pale, and hairless, by generations in cramped tunnels hiding under the earth. The caliban became bestial, solitary, savage and monstrous in their years wandering the surface world, persecuted by other races and harried by the terrors of the sundering, and those of the caliban who clung to civilization became barbaric, rude tribalism replacing what was once the loftiest culture Allornus has ever known.

Lands


Mhulak are a rarity now. Their abandoned deepings dot the southern lands of Ralstaa and Iria, where they have become mere legend, and in Haedrasia more deepings lie in unused disrepair, abandoned by those who would one day become the caliban , but in the great vales of the Ironheads, and along the shoulders of the world deepings still thrive. But nowhere so much as the mountainous domain known as the Mhul Pont, where many deepings have banded together to form what might even be described as a nation of mhulak.

Caliban and Kardes


The when the mariners fled beneath the earth to survive the sundering the most proud amongst them refused to hide, for it was the race of men and not they who had done wrong. These misguided creatures soon realized that their innocence did not make them exempt from the punishment visited upon the world, and those who could not flee and join their brethren beneath the earth became the degenerate and savage ogiere. While their bodies resemble the mariners, their culture was destroyed by living hard, and their numbers so depleted that they have never recovered. After years of in-breeding and desperate survival they became little better than beasts, and while a concentration of their kind around the northern glaciers meant that the Kardes were spared the words of this degeneration, even they lost the culture and wisdom that the mhulak retained in their deepings at the cost of their bodies.

While the frozen glaciers and mountains of Kardesia are the true home of the ogiere, where both the kardes and caliban dwell, it is far from the only place the creatures are found. Caliban live in the mountainous regions of Nardaan and the northern Ironheads, and also in the Bosots and the Shoulders of the World, and they dominate the Battlewaite - the battlefield that first broke their race. The caliban of the bosots have been bound to the nation of Maldaakore as soldiers in the armies of the torch lords, with hideous armour fused to their bodies and mighty weapons clutched in their massive hands. Although the ogiere are almost unknown south of the Mhul Pont, there is a concentration of the creatures in the Roughlands of Ahlonia, where the caliban have grown massively obese, and particularly bold.

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