Khasari

The Khasari are a nocturnal people native to the Karsenic Mountains of southern and eastern Mediath. They inhabit a vast region of tropical jungle, broken limestone, underground rivers, deep caverns, and mountain passages. Although humans commonly call them goblins, the word is a foreign name and often an insult. Khasar refers to one individual, while Khasari serves as the plural and adjective.

Khasari have traded with neighbouring peoples for hundreds of Cycles. They maintain permanent settlements, territorial law, written records, extensive trade networks, and sophisticated traditions of hunting, engineering, metalwork, and environmental management. They are not one nation, however. Khasari communities are divided among thousands of packs, settlements, and regional coalitions with their own rivalries, agreements, and political interests.

Relations between Khasari and human states have deteriorated sharply during the industrial age. Mines, railways, logging operations, and settlement projects have expanded into territories that human governments often describe as unoccupied wilderness. To the Khasari, these lands contain homes, food systems, burial places, roads, water rights, and boundaries established long before the arrival of modern surveyors.

Appearance

Khasari are short, powerfully built bipeds. Most adults stand between 1.25 and 1.5 metres tall and weigh between 35 and 60 kilograms. Their bodies are compact through the trunk, with long forearms, mobile shoulders, strong hips, and digitigrade legs. They stand fully upright but are visibly adapted for climbing, crouching, and rapid movement across broken ground.

Their hands have five long fingers, opposable thumbs, gripping pads, and short retractile claws. These claws assist with climbing rather than combat and do not interfere with fine work. Khasari can write, operate machinery, pick locks, perform surgery, and handle firearms as precisely as humans. Their broad, padded feet have flexible toes capable of gripping bark, stone, ropes, and narrow ledges.

A Khasar has a short projecting muzzle, broad nose, forward-facing eyes, and large mobile ears. Their teeth include prominent canines, shearing cheek teeth, and heavy rear teeth suited to cracking small bones and opening joints for marrow. Because their ears move with their attention and emotional state, much of Khasari expression is lost on outsiders. Humans sometimes mistake an attentive stare and forward-turned ears for hostility.

Khasari are covered in fur, usually slate gray, charcoal, dark brown, dull russet, or mottled green-brown. Cave-dwelling populations tend to have heavier underfur, while jungle populations possess shorter coats that shed water more readily. Their hands, feet, muzzle, and the skin around their eyes carry little fur. Males are somewhat heavier on average, but the sexes overlap considerably in height, build, coloration, and canine size.

Senses and Movement

Khasari are most comfortable in darkness. Their eyes contain a reflective layer that greatly improves vision under moonlight, lantern light, or distant fire. This same adaptation causes their eyes to shine when struck by light. They cannot see in complete darkness and instead rely upon hearing, scent, touch, memory, and the movement of air through enclosed spaces.

Bright daylight is not physically harmful, but sudden exposure can be painful and disorienting. Khasari who regularly work during the day often wear shaded goggles, veils, broad hats, or deeply hooded clothing. Human settlements with harsh industrial lighting can be uncomfortable even at night.

Their hearing and sense of smell are both substantially sharper than a human's. A Khasar can often recognize familiar individuals by scent at close range, identify recent movement through an enclosed passage, and locate faint sounds with considerable precision. These senses are useful but not infallible. Strong chemicals, smoke, machinery, gunfire, and crowded cities can overwhelm them.

Khasari move exceptionally well through jungles, caves, ruined structures, and mountain terrain. Their padded feet and compact bodies allow them to travel quietly when lightly equipped. They are strong climbers and capable jumpers, but they are not supernatural acrobats. Falls, poor footing, damaged tendons, and badly fitted equipment remain serious dangers.

Their digitigrade gait is less efficient on long, level roads. Humans and Azraqan generally possess greater endurance across open country, while Khasari hold the advantage in steep, cluttered, or vertical environments.

Diet

Khasari are obligate carnivores. They require animal protein and fat and depend particularly upon organs, marrow, eggs, fish, insects, and other nutrient-dense tissues. They may consume small amounts of plant matter as flavouring, medicine, intoxicant, or preservative, but grains, roots, fruit, and vegetables cannot sustain them.

This does not mean that Khasari rely entirely upon wild hunting. Established communities manage animal populations, protect breeding grounds, maintain fish pools and cave fisheries, collect eggs, raise small livestock, and cultivate insects. Seasonal hunts are often regulated to prevent the destruction of breeding stock.

Khasari also cultivate numerous subterranean fungi. Most are not eaten directly. They are used in medicine, tanning, fermentation, dyes, animal feed, poisons, and other crafts. Several Karsenic varieties are valuable exports because attempts to cultivate them elsewhere have repeatedly failed.

Producing carnivorous food requires a great deal of territory. The Karsenic Mountains provide little level pasture, and every animal population depends upon a much larger underlying ecosystem. Hunting grounds, fish-bearing streams, bat caves, nesting cliffs, breeding pools, and migration corridors are therefore as important to Khasari survival as farms are to humans.

This difference is a frequent source of conflict. A human surveyor may find no houses or planted fields and conclude that a valley is unused. A Khasar may know it as the breeding ground that feeds three settlements through the following winter.

Packs and Community

The foundation of Khasari society is the extended den-kindred, normally translated as a pack. A pack is not simply a mating pair and its children. It may contain several households, elderly relatives, apprentices, adopted children, fosterlings, refugees, married partners, and unrelated members accepted through oath or long service.

Pack membership is a legal and social relationship. It determines obligations of protection, access to food, inheritance, responsibility for children, and the settlement of debts. A Khasar may be born into one pack, fostered by another, and formally accepted into a third during adulthood.

Children are raised with the involvement of the wider pack, although parents retain primary authority. Young Khasari learn climbing, scent recognition, hunting law, safe water sources, territorial boundaries, and cave navigation from an early age. A child is not trusted to travel independently until they can identify safe routes and emergency refuges from memory.

Partnership customs differ widely. Some regions favour durable pairs, others recognize plural households, and some accept temporary unions associated with seasonal gatherings. Inheritance usually concerns tools, weapons, debts, trade rights, and access to hunting grounds rather than absolute ownership of land.

Khasari mature at approximately the same rate as humans. Those who survive childhood, disease, violence, and occupational hazards commonly live 70–90 Cycles (about 102.3–131.5 Veyrathian years).

Settlements and Territory

Khasari settlements are commonly built where several food systems and travel routes meet. Underground communities may contain carved platforms, timber bridges, cisterns, drainage works, workshops, smoke shafts, cold-storage chambers, and narrow defensive approaches. Surface structures are usually dispersed beneath heavy jungle cover rather than concentrated in an obvious town.

Large settlements maintain separate areas for butchery, tanning, metalwork, sleeping, childcare, trade, storage, and waste disposal. Fire is carefully controlled underground through enclosed hearths, charcoal braziers, heated stone, and ventilation shafts. Wealthier communities use imported lamps, pumps, stoves, and mechanical ventilation.

Khasari are not opposed to machinery. They value useful technology and have adopted foreign tools wherever trade and maintenance allow. The principal obstacles are cost, supply, and the fact that most industrial equipment is designed for human bodies and human working spaces.

A Khasari territory includes far more than its permanent settlement. It may contain seasonal camps, food reserves, hunting routes, fungal beds, burial places, water sources, flood refuges, warning trails, and negotiated boundaries. These claims can be difficult for outsiders to recognize because they are marked through local knowledge, scent, carved signs, oral agreement, and landmarks rather than fences.

Authority and Law

Khasari society begins with the pack but extends into larger coalitions. Neighbouring packs cooperate to regulate hunting, maintain routes and waterworks, negotiate trade, settle disputes, or respond to common threats. Some coalitions endure for generations. Others dissolve once a particular dispute or crisis has passed.

Authority is usually divided according to function. A skilled hunter may command an expedition without having any right to negotiate a treaty. A respected merchant may speak for several packs in matters of trade but possess little influence over domestic law. Healers, armourers, water keepers, route wardens, and memory keepers often hold considerable authority because their knowledge is essential to the settlement.

Hereditary rulers exist in some wealthy regions, particularly around major mines and trade routes, but they are not typical of all Khasari societies.

Khasari law concentrates heavily upon access, obligation, and restitution. Important questions include who may hunt a territory, how much may be taken, who maintains a water source, who is responsible for an injured guest, and what compensation is owed for death, theft, or ecological damage. Poisoning water, concealing a known cave hazard, or killing breeding animals out of season are regarded as especially serious crimes.

Exile is among the harshest punishments. An exile loses recognized access to routes, food rights, shelter, and pack protection. In the Karsenics, this can amount to a delayed death sentence.

Language, Memory, and Belief

The Khasari speak several related Karsenic languages rather than one universal tongue. Communities involved in trade are often multilingual. Merchants, guides, and negotiators may speak several human languages in addition to their own. Outsiders sometimes mistake short or imperfect trade speech for limited intelligence, particularly when a Khasar is communicating in a third or fourth language.

Writing practices vary between regions. Boundaries, water rights, hazards, and memorials may be carved into stone. Portable records are kept on paper, treated hide, thin wood, or carved bone. Memory keepers preserve genealogy, legal precedent, migration routes, treaties, and accounts of disasters.

Khasari place considerable importance upon accurately remembering obligations. However, their legal traditions generally recognize that floods, cave-ins, prey collapse, and other changes can make an old promise impossible to perform exactly as written.

There is no single Khasari religion. Many traditions treat water sources, breeding grounds, ancestral refuges, and places where a pack survived catastrophe as morally significant. Ancestors are remembered through names, tools, stories, route marks, and inherited duties. Khasari living near other peoples may follow human or Azraqi religions while retaining pack-based ideas about obligation, territory, and ancestry.

Trade and Foreign Relations

For hundreds of Cycles, Khasari communities controlled many of the difficult mountain passes and underground routes through the Karsenics. They traded ores, mineral salts, gems, medicinal fungi, hides, venom, and guide services. In return they purchased steel, cloth, medicines, livestock, glass, tools, firearms, and ammunition.

Khasari merchants have a reputation for careful inspection, precise weights, and long memories. A profitable agreement may bind the same families together for generations. Fraud and deliberate ambiguity can produce equally durable hostility.

Where Khasari and Avar territories overlap, the two peoples often occupy different layers of the same environment. Avar communities dominate the upper canopy and aerial routes, while Khasari control much of the ground, cave system, and night travel. Relations may involve trade, shared warning systems, competition over prey, or rival agreements with nearby human settlements.

Khasari are also found beyond the mountains. They work in ports, mining towns, railway yards, military establishments, and urban trade districts as mechanics, guards, guides, interpreters, hunters, gunsmiths, and merchants. Urban Khasari often remain members of distant packs and send money, equipment, ammunition, and information home.

The Karsenic Conflicts

Industrialization changed the scale of contact between the Khasari and neighbouring states. Earlier merchants generally purchased resources or passage from the communities controlling them. Modern companies arrive with government charters, survey teams, explosives, steam pumps, railways, and armed labour forces. Many regard Khasari claims as informal custom rather than ownership.

Mining and construction can damage far more than the immediate worksite. Blasting collapses caverns, nurseries, burial chambers, and hidden routes. Pumps lower water tables or redirect underground streams. Industrial waste poisons fish, insects, and drinking water. Logging changes drainage and opens hunting grounds to settlement. Railways interrupt animal migrations while bringing commercial hunters and new livestock into the region.

There is no unified Khasari response. Some communities negotiate profitable concessions, accept company employment, or continue older trade agreements. Others seek recognized borders, compensation, or restrictions on mining and logging. Some have withdrawn deeper into the mountains. Others have taken up arms.

A single railway may employ one Khasari pack as guides while another pack sabotages its bridges. A gunsmith might repair company rifles and quietly sell ammunition to relatives involved in resistance. A coalition may honour its agreement with one government while attacking contractors from another.

Human newspapers and military reports frequently describe all such violence as a single goblin uprising. This is convenient but inaccurate. The Karsenic conflicts are hundreds of overlapping territorial disputes, labour arrangements, broken treaties, private wars, refugee movements, and local insurgencies.

Warfare

Khasari communities cannot match the industrial output of major human states. Most modern rifles, metallic cartridges, machine tools, and blasting compounds must be purchased, smuggled, stolen, or captured. Ammunition is often more valuable than the firearm using it.

Khasari armourers nevertheless possess considerable skill. They manufacture bows, crossbows, knives, spears, traps, climbing gear, and simple firearms. Gunsmiths repair imported weapons, reload used cartridge cases, replace damaged stocks, and standardize local arsenals around a small number of available calibres.

When Khasari forces fight, they favour night operations, broken terrain, hidden routes, vertical ambushes, traps, snipers, and attacks against infrastructure. Bridges, pumps, rail lines, ventilation systems, telegraph stations, depots, and supply columns are more vulnerable than formed infantry. Khasari rarely accept open battle against artillery and disciplined rifle formations unless they are covering an escape or protecting a settlement.

Conduct toward civilians varies between commanders and communities. Some distinguish carefully between soldiers, company officials, labourers, settlers, and negotiators. Others consider anyone supporting an invading concession a legitimate target. Mining camps have been destroyed and their inhabitants killed. Human forces have answered with burned food reserves, sealed caves, punitive expeditions, and collective reprisals.

The Khasari are feared on the Karsenic frontier because they understand the terrain, operate beyond ordinary supply lines, and attack the systems that make industrial occupation possible. Their resistance can be ruthless, but it is not mindless. It grows from particular claims, particular losses, and particular decisions made by people who do not agree among themselves.