The equine tribes of Zhuru defy simple categories. Each tribe is vast, numbering in the hundreds, splintered into clans that may feud bitterly yet rally in unison when their livelihood is threatened. The wide grasslands make them wanderers, but they are not drifters. They are caravaneers, mercenaries, merchants, and memory-keepers—a people who have turned the endless horizon into their ledger.
Caravans and Commerce
Their greatest strength lies in commerce. Stallions and mares alike are bred to haul great cargo across the vast distances of the Zhuru steppe, moving goods from coast to hinterland, from barbarian raiders to the court of distant cities. The braves take contracts as mercenaries, their hooves steady in war, while trademares handle the market-end of exchange. Every deal, every handshake, is a vow, for they believe reputation to be worth more than coin.
Where other merchants are whispered about as cheats, the equines of Zhuru enforce their honesty with violence. To slander their name—whether by word, tusk-carving, or whisper—is to invite a visit from the caravan guard, whose response may range from a stern rebuke to a brutal dismemberment. Thus, their word is iron, their ledger blood.
Temper and Discipline
Stallions wear masks of serenity. They are stoic, calm, contemplative, their speech often measured like a trader weighing coin. Yet beneath this mask lies a dangerous core: once anger breaks its leash, a stallion becomes a storm. Towering over seven feet, hooves shod in iron, their fury is as ruinous as bulls in charge or bears in frenzy. Because of this, control is sacred. To lose temper lightly is shame. To master it is strength. To break it only at war or in lust is legend.
Females and Fertility
The mares are no less formidable. Their strength is expressed differently—ample hips for bearing, bosoms heavy and often uncovered, painted with henna dyes or pierced with silver. This baring is not merely vanity but ritual. Their bodies are living scripture, tied to a fertility culture that binds sexuality, agriculture, and abundance into one.
Religion among them is plural, but all agree on the central truth: bosoms, womb, and seed are sacred. Sky Tribes hold that the world is endlessly reseeded by divine stallion and mare riding the winds. Others carve rites of lust into their totems, teaching that every breast is a vessel of plenty, every act of mating a prayer for harvest.
Though agriculture is difficult on the barren steppe, they coax grain and fruit from the richer coasts and river-vales: barley, wheat, figs, apples. These, too, are folded into their rites—offered as much to altars as to bellies.
Totems and Territory
Borders are marked not with walls but with towering totems, single trunks carved into effigies of beasts, lovers, and ancestors. Painted with blood, ash, and horsehair, they serve as warning, testimony, and scripture. Travelers know when they enter Zhuru’s range, for the land itself begins to speak with these wooden tongues.
Sacred Stones and Endurance
Though nomadic in essence, the equines hold fast to several permanent sites. Chief among these is the Great Stone of Zhuru, a citadel-temple older than the Cataclysm. Toppled in that world-shaking ruin, it was rebuilt by their own hands, and when it fell again to raiders it was raised once more. They boast that even should the sea vomit demons upon their lands, they would rebuild it again, for endurance is their covenant with the world.
Summary
The equine folk of Zhuru are not merely nomads of the grass. They are caravan-nations whose strength is measured in both coin and covenant, whose bosoms are as sacred as their totems, whose fury and discipline shape wars, and whose stone temples rise again no matter how often the Cataclysm, the sea, or the sword topples them.
To understand them is to understand endurance: the road unending, the vow unbroken, the totem unfallen, the breast unveiled, the temple rebuilt.