Exploring River Neath

Exploring River Neath

People, Part I

The Djosé

The Djosé are a tall, fur covered humanoid with two horns. To us, they would look like a bison-person in the same way a minotaur is a bull-person and a fawn is a goat-person. Despite their size and relative strength they are generally peaceful and gentle people, unless provoked.

The Djosé of the Great Stone Desert and the Moody Mountains of the northern Dawnlands have no gods, they are ancestor worshipers. Due to their unique physiology, they don't breed and have children like we do, they die, and eventually the body regenerates and is born again with no memory of the previous life. They quite literally reincarnate as a means of reproduction. A quirk of this method is they have need of only one gender, or to be more precise, are genderless.

Djosians believe that you as a living individual only exist in the speck of time when your soul (or Djo) and your body (or Sé) are combined. When you die your body awaits regeneration and your soul moves on to a new body. Therefore, all individuals you ever know or come before you are truly unique. A death is therefore both tragic and wonderful, and the Djosians hold those who have died with great regard (hence Ancestor Worship).

The purpose for existence, they believe, is to experience every possible thing through the eyes of every possible person. They believe that one day the universe woke up and went mad from the sheer immensity of everything, so it split itself into shards (Djo) to better understand itself, and that one day, all souls will have lived in all bodies, and the souls shall combine into the Great Djo (essentially the first "god") and the bodies shall combine into the Great Sé (essentially a new world).

The Djosé have a very significant funeral right that each individual begins at reincarnation (birth). Each Djosian will build an intricate stone stack throughout their lives, into which they will incorporate items or carvings to represent pivotal times or experiences in said life. Upon death, a Djosian is tied in a funeral sack filled with a specially bred moth that dehydrates the body and organs, preserving them. The moths are then released, never to be reused, and the body is intermed in the stone stack to await its next life.

This process is timely and difficult, as the stacks are not in specific locations such as a cemetery, but a location of significance chosen by the Djosian who builds it. The stacks, once vacated, act as memorials and shrines at which the living meditate.

On very rare and momentous occasions two Djosians might meet who's souls and/or bodies once formed another individual, a common Ancestor. This Reunion is very special, as Djosians can't remember past lives, and this chance encounter allows both of them to commune with their common Ancestor. Such a meeting is marked out by their horns starting to glow as they get closer to each other. Such events occur once or twice in a generation, and are celebrated in a holy festival known as Séjoar in Djorian (their language).

Both individuals meditate and receive three visions, a shared memory that they both see, and one separate vision each. By tradition they must never speak of these visions, except for the shared memory. This is followed by feasting and celebration.

The Djosé come from the harsh Stone Dessert, that according to legends was swept clear of all earth and vegetation by a thousand years of rain that wore the mountains flat. The Djosé are the only race hardy enough to call it home, and live off lichens and mosses, which is about the only things that grow there. The stone desert resembles a real world mesa dessert, but instead of warm reds and terracotta oranges, it is coloured grey blue slate, with bands of green and turquoise, laced with fine golden veins. The area's mineral resources are of great interest to outsiders, if they could only figure out a way of surviving it.

On the rare occasion a Djosian might venture beyond its homeland, it might discover it is known by another name; Troll.

Shiny boi

It's funny how small this looks in the photo. It was nearly twice my height. And it was a lot steeper than it looks here too.

Flying Ant Day

I wrote a haiku about Dare Valley, where I grew up.