The Asreih
Today we'll take a look at the asreih, one of the species that players can select when they make a character in the Kazarim Campaign Setting. Of the ten playable species in the setting, there are three that are more alien in nature than the others. The asreih are one of these stranger species, as they are creatures descended from intelligent plants.
Although one of the most important species on Desara (the world where the Kazarim Campaign Setting occurs) the asreih are also the least numerous. Their culture is the ur-culture for most of the other cultures world, but they have long since fallen into ruin as a people.
According to ancient legends, when Desara was a world fresh from creation and her only inhabitants were the unthinking animals and plants, the great champion of the Laeran gods, Eshfel Eronsifac, known as the Starflower, created the asreih in his image out of the blooms of the magnolia tree. The asreih were firstborn among mortals, the first creatures with wills of their own who were not also deities. They lived in a golden age, led directly by their god in the celestial city of Nishel Erosh, which was at the top of the great stairway that connected the Mortal Realm of Necumen to the Realm of the Laeran pantheon, Sahbana. However, as all things must fade, Eshfel Eronsifac eventually succumbed to the corruption of the his brother, the demon-god Vadek. When the Starflower fell from grace, he took the asreih and Nishel Erosh down with him, severing the conduit that allowed mortals direct access to the gods, and inflicting a terrible curse on both the asreih and the world itself.
They are a people who have lost so much: their civilization, their god, their hope. The asreih suffer from a malignancy of the spirit, knowing that the divine being who created them submitted to a madness that expelled him from the Laeran pantheon, and condemned the asreih by expelling them from paradise and polluting their spirits with a curse. Asreih are extremely long-lived, but the affliction of their god is also their own, and eventually they begin the same slow spiral into madness and psychotic behavior that Eshfel Eronsifac suffered. This curse turns the most powerful and longest-lived asreih into the demonic err’ahael. Most avoid this fate by taking up dangerous professions later in life, hoping that the world ends them before they succumb to corruption. Others take their own lives when they feel the madness coming on, determined to die with dignity rather than terrorize their families.
Asreih have smooth, hairless skin that comes in some shade of brown, green, yellow, or grayish-white. Asreih do have “hair” on their heads, a coarse mat of fibers that falls into the same range of colors as their eyes: pink, red, yellow, green, purple, lavender, orange, or white. White is the most common eye and hair color. Asreih possess no visual separation in the various parts of the eye; instead it is a solid, slightly luminescent orb of color. Asreih have a distinctive scent, evocative of lemon mixed with licorice.
Typical asreih, in chevan life stage. Image by Karen Neil.
Over the course of their lives, asreih undergo a series of metamorphoses. The first of these occurs during late puberty and officially announces the fertility of adults, while the later instances occur in intervals of approximately ten to twelve years. While experiencing this process, the asreih begins to feel lethargic, their skin turns coarse and dry, and it peels off in long strips. The experience can be painful, but the intensity varies greatly between individuals. After several days, the old skin sloughs off and a new, perfectly smooth layer of skin feels the air for the first time.
For up to three years after the new skin appears (or longer, if proper maintenance occurs, such as applying oil to the skin every day), words can be seen embedded in the flesh of the asreih. These are the verahim, the divine writings, and they are unique to every individual. Although the writing appears to be in Atarmesh (the liturgical language of the Laeran religion), the words themselves often don’t make sense, as if some divine agent wrote gibberish using variations of the Atarmesh characters. Deciphering the meaning of the verahim has become a favorite topic of sages and seers, and a whole category of asren astrology and fortune telling focuses on this skin writing.
Prior to their first metamorphosis, asreih do not have a biological gender (a term they call chadok'hemd, or "fresh growth"). The first peeling and the revelation of the verahim transforms them into biological females until the verahim start to fade. The term for this is nashak, or "illuminated," a phrase with a strong religious undercurrent in the asren language of Syren and in the holy language of Atarmesh. Once the skin thickens and the verahim fade, the asreih become biologically male (or chevan, "bound shut") until the next time their skin begins to peel. Because of their limited fertility period as females, visible verahim are part of the mating rituals in traditional asren culture, and many asreih remain covered in public during their female life stage unless they are actively looking for a mate.
When asreih become pregnant, their biology remains in their female form until a month or so after birth. Asreih have live births, developing a bud nodule over their torsos that they sustain for approximately a year. When the asreih fetus reaches maturity, the bud nodule opens up like a flower, releasing the bright red infant. Over the next few weeks, the infant slowly gains its normal coloration. At this point, the parent’s hormones tend to reverse quickly, causing the asreih to rapidly transition to their male life stage. Regardless of their current biological gender, asreih can care for the nourishment needs of their infants.
Most asreih live in small enclaves on Arganaen, or in the two predominately asren nations in southern Arandikis, Erensey and Senedar Aman. Although they do pick up some cultural traits from living among other cultures, asreih retain fragments of the memories of their ancestors, and are thus generally quite traditional, with very few major cultural variations across the species.
Among the asreih, worship of their creator, Eshfel Eronsifac, is a grave taboo, and is considered the societal equivalent of a human becoming a cannibal and murderer. Devotees of the Starflower are hunted down and killed by their kin. Most asreih instead worship Intarel or Lohle. Asreih often become wizards, although they are as likely to be generalists as they are specialists of one type or another. They also have a predisposition for becoming barbarians, and many also search for answers to their spiritual condition as clerics or inquisitors of the Laera. Most asreih are lawful neutral.
Asren names are complicated things, much like the native language that births them. Syren is tonal, has difficult grammar that conjugates for many different degrees of past-tense, and a portion of the emotional content is based in smell—a refinement of scents that most non-asreih cannot hope to understand or even notice (and find it impossible to emulate without magic). Only the atama have a sensitive enough sense of smell to routinely notice this portion of the Syren language, and of course cannot reproduce it. As such, when dealing with outsiders, asreih typically use a less complicated name. This fits in well with their culture, too—asreih have personal names that they hide even from other asreih, so in most public interactions they use their “face name.” Asreih do have family names, although they tend to use them only in formal situations. They do not have a cultural tradition of marriage or of monogamy, instead tracing family decent through the asreih’s birthing parent exclusively, and raising families in small communal groups that often change over time.