And the Elder Dragons, watching from their lairs, made their armies: the dragonborn, the yuan-ti, the kobolds. And they waited.

-- Annalo Baelobane, "The Elder Giants and their Kin"

"It was long since the Ssthessic-Vrasa had dominated the surface world, and in that time, Issalic’s people had been waiting, gathering their strength and power, biding their time. In the dim caverns beneath the surface, they dug their homes into the bedrock, raised their families, and waited. They gathered their lore, rewrote their books of knowledge as they faded to time, and waited. But she was not content to wait."

-- Gandelione the Bard, "Walker in the Night"

The yuan-ti who have lived in Endon since the days that their empire fell differ greater from their kinsmen in other lands. Hiding desperately in the shadows, away from the violence and the lust for power that characterised their cousins, the yuan-ti have become a more quiet people in their exile. When their empire fell, they learned from the mistakes of their forefathers, and have adopted a way of life that is more passive and more patient, content to wait. 

DESCENT FROM THE DRAGONS

Endonic lore holds that the Elder Dragons, in days long lost to memory, some thousands of years ago, created their own armies to battle against the Elder Giants. They created the Dragonborn, their proud and strong firstborn children, the yuan-ti as the merchants and intelligensia, and the kobolds as a working class. As such, like their distant relatives, the yuan-ti retain much of their reptilian characteristics, despite thousands of years in hiding. 

While other lore holds that the yuan-ti were once humans, changed by dark magic, the Endonic yuan-ti take pride in their claims to their creation as children of the Elder Dragons. Most yuan-ti are what other adventurers would call halfbloods – a serpentine tail, the legs of a human, and their skin is a mottling of hard scales. They stand at roughly 5’ with their tail dragging behind them for a further 4’. However, some few, that the other yuan-ti refer to as Walkers-in-Day, gifted the ability to transform their tail into legs, transforming them into purebloods. Due to their instant recognisability and their reverence, the yuan-ti abominations – who rule their castes in other yuan-ti societies – were all wiped out in the Sunderking’s genocide. 

HIDING IN THE SHADOWS

Since their empire, the Ssthessic Vrasa, was toppled some 980 years ago, the refugees either fled – most being caught at the border and executed, or killed in the freezing mountain passes – or delved into the secret places that their ancestors had dug: tunnels in the mountains, passes in remote gorges, or cellars in the abandoned ruins of the Kingdom of Endon. Some youngsters born in each generation refuse to continue hiding, and make their way out into the lands of daylight and try to flee Endon, but most are, for one reason or another, never heard from again. 

The societies in the dim refuges retain some similarities to their old ways: they are ruled by their loremasters and religious leaders, who maintain their certainty that one day their luck will change, their power will grow, and the human kingdoms above them will topple, ready for their people to emerge. They are primarily matriarchal, though due to the small, condensed nature of their communities, each with little to no contact with one another, there is very little in the way of formal leadership: they work as a community, in secrecy and shadows.