Monday, May 23, 2016

Further Tales of Vo

There are two human(-ish) tribes dwelling in the Vale of Vo. Both are likely the descendants of the folk who crashed their ship into Vo sometime in the distant past, and both claim the ancestral hero of Liberator-Vo.

The Vozerai are a pious people who live an austere and simple life, rejecting of physical pleasures, that dwell in the nose section of the ship. Even dama-fruit is not to be overly enjoyed, lest it lead one to impiety, and from impiety to death in the jaws of the bugbears. This ultimately serves the wheel of life, true, but it is impious to throw away existence lightly. Vozerai society is somewhat theocratic, ruled by cleric scholars, but theses Learned Ones only wield as much power as the number of folk they can sway to their interpretation of the record of accumulated utterances and noises of the bugbears. One thing all Vozerai Learned Ones agree on, whatever their other doctrinal differences, is that the Voyanki are heretics deserving of devouring by bugbears.

The Vozerai are all invisible as is typical from creatures in the Vale of Vo. They have the cultural habit of murmuring or mumbling to themselves, either their inner thoughts or scraps of prayer, so as to make others of their kind aware of their presence. They try to stifle this habit when bugbears may be in hearing.

The Voyanki live in the former tail section of the ship. They hate the preachy, milksop Vozerai for long-nursed but vaguely-remembered grudges, but it may be that they are also a bit jealous. By some trick of heredity, the Voyanki are not completely invisible but only mostly so. Their flesh is utterly transparent and their bones are a very pale white with a faint pinkish tinge. For this reason, Voyanki are somewhat more likely to be meals for the bugbears. They have become into strong warriors for their own defense--and to raid the better supplied Vozerai. The war chants and cries of the Voyanki sound like an attempt to mimic the bugbear voices. Their greatest warriors claim to wear bugbear skull headdresses, but of course, no one has ever seen them.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do the Vo have any access to strange technological remnants from the wreckage of the spaceship or has it all been lost or simply fallen apart?

Trey said...

Mostly it's broken. They simply scavenge it for more primitive tools. There may be a few things left over though.