East of Saresh, among the foothills of the northern mountains, one might happen to come upon a group that calls itself Kae’rim. The next year, should one return, they might very well come across another group by the same name. But every face among that group will be different from every face among the first, for the Kae’rim are a group of nomadic peoples, which live in a cyclical relationship with one another.
In a sense, while the Kae’rim are individually nomadic, they are, collectively, sedentary. This is a strange contradiction for those that aren’t familiar with them, who sometimes dismiss them as ‘aimless wanderers’. In truth, each group of Kae’rim follows a fairly rigid path through the desert, which changes only gradually over time, much like the Ukor River as it slowly carves its way through sand and stone.
It takes about three years for a given group to return to the same spot. Along the way, they do much the same as anyone else: They forage from the land, they trade with foreigners, they even occupy permanent settlements, built collectively by them, for their collective use. The difference is that, once their time in a given place is up, they’ll leave the land and foreigners and settlements behind for the next group of Kae’rim to use, and move on, taking the place of another group further ahead of them.
In this way, the Kae’rim have access to everything the desert has to offer. In one spring, a group shears the wool from a flock of wild sheep that they know will be in the same area at that time. A month later, they arrive at one of their outposts containing, among other things, looms for weaving that wool into warm clothes for the Dominion’s cold nights. The group behind them took a slightly different path, to harvest herbs that wouldn’t have been blooming earlier in the spring.
This dance goes on all across the cherrik, which is the Kae’rim name for the path that they follow through the desert. It’s a term that roughly translates to ‘the circle’, despite the fact that from above this path meanders, crosses over itself, and appears at times to be random. But nothing about it is random. The Kae’rim have an extremely sophisticated understanding of the ecology of the Dominion, the cyclical influences of the year, and seem to have an uncanny ability to predict the weather, migration of animals, and even the behaviors of other groups of people.
The cherrik is the path of least resistance for the Kae’rim to enjoy a comfortable life, and yet is the result of phenomenal foresight, conservation, communication, logistics, and mathematics. When the unexpected happens, horse riders deliver messages encoded with dense information communicating the situation and the workaround to the next group in the cycle, which is passed in a chain to the rest of the Kae’rim down the line. This coordination is mandatory- different groups supplement each other even when they aren’t directly interacting, and so a disruption risks affecting everyone. One group might plant a seed, so that another might harvest what grows years in the future.
To see the Kae’rim traveling is said to be a wondrous experience. A parade of men, women, and children, all wearing bright, vibrant clothing made from linen colored with all the dyes the desert has to offer. Most walk on foot, but a few drive bison-led wagons filled with expertly packed goods awaiting their next destination. Many are accompanied by dogs, which themselves move in family units amongst the large group. The group spreads out wide, to cover a large amount of ground, and occasionally breaks out into a call-and-response song which serves in part to repeat and reinforce their oral history, but also ensure that no one is left behind by the group.
The Kae’rim are self-sufficient in the extreme. Almost everything they wear and carry is made by them, from the clothing on their backs, to the tools and weapons that they hold and the wagons that carry everything they can’t. Even talent is managed carefully both within and between groups, with experts being temporarily shuttled around to ensure that no group is missing an essential skill. They trade to get the things they cannot get themselves, bartering with the various peoples they run into along the cherrik with small surpluses of goods harvested just for that purpose, sometimes buying something just to sell it elsewhere. In this way, the Kae’rim act almost like pollinators, uniting the desert in a great inexorable churn of movement.
The existence of the Kae’rim has been deeply frustrating to May’Kar’s various administrative systems. They’re not the only nomadic group in the Dominion, but they have the widest range in territory, to the point that trying to mark them on a map is meaningless. They refuse to do battle, going so far collectively as to refuse to tend to the wounds of those that would wage war on the living, so as to not be complicit in blood shed by their patients, and so are seen as a ‘dead weight’ in the Auxiliaries by the Dominion. Additionally, their lifestyle is predicated on taking as little as possible from the land, which leaves them with little surplus to owe in taxes. Over the years, small opportunities for compromise have come through, with tax collectors finding coins deposited in a Kae’rim outpost twice a year, but the tribute is largely not worth the effort.
The Kae’rim faith, to the extent that it can be called a singular faith, is called Kae’ruj. Its particulars vary greatly across the many groups of the cherrik, with some incorporating figures and elements from other belief sets, but the common concept describes the origin of humanity, in which two men and two women were forged into being at the beginning of creation. These humans have many names, but the ones catalogued as ‘primary’ by the Register are Ul-Weithe, Al-Khara, Al-Nulpun, and Ul-Brana. The humans were different from each other, extremely so, each fashioned from one of the primordial elements of nature: Ul-Brana from fire, Al-Nalpin from air, Ul-Weithe from earth and Al-Khara from water. Despite this, they loved each other deeply, and in joining with each other, they formed the great diversity in humanity seen today. These humans are seen as the true divine: The purest expression of humanity, separated into four forms.
A common attitude cultivated by the Kae’ruj is one of self-imposed exclusion and isolation. The four humans, gods in their own way, mingled together, and in doing so created something vast, but lesser. Kae’ruj devotees use isolation as a way of attempting to focus on one of these ancestors and cleave away the influences of the rest, leaving only purity and purpose. It’s rare for many Kae’rim to actively pursue this ideal, but a more subtle version of it has caused elements of caste systems to appear within various groups, often denoted with markings like colorful tattoos or accented clothing.
Ultimately, the Kae’rim as a whole tend to be exclusionary towards outsiders. Within each group, a few are designated to act as liaisons and intermediaries, but the majority treat non-Kae’rim (and sometimes, even Kae’rim from other groups) with apathy, disdain, and occasionally even disgust. This response has become all the more common with the Dominion having further and further urbanized the territory around the Ukor. The river was once a major stopping point for many Kae’rim groups, but has since been taken over by tall walls and sprawling streets. Some Kae’rim have taken to intentionally lying to interlopers, to minimize the chance that they might act on knowledge that will somehow come to harm the whole.
The Kae’rim operate on a large-scale prohibition against violence against living things, which has led some to conclude that they’re total pacifists. They abstain from hunting, and strongly discourage physical violence against one another that rises above wrestling. They have a reputation for fleeing even when they outnumber their attackers, relying on the support of communities they interact with to protect them, or offering tribute in exchange for peace.
Yet, those familiar with them know that they nearly all, adults and children and elderly alike, carry blades notched with use. Though these blades are typically used against the undead, there have been very rare occasions when the Kae’rim are forced, by their very desire to protect life, to take it. When beset upon by a tenacious foe, who will not give up, nor be talked down or negotiated with, the Kae’rim have been known to brand that foe a chemidir or ‘circle-breaker’. At that point, the prohibition on violence ends. The chemidir is no longer considered ‘alive’ in a sense to the Kae’rim, and they descend in full force with skill honed for this very purpose. Even so, they employ the least amount of violence necessary to resolve their circumstances, allowing their attackers to surrender or flee, and capturing them when possible, either stranding them in the desert or delivering them to nearby settlements along the cherrik. Even when they have no choice but to kill, once the fighting is over, they mourn the dead and give them the same funerary rites that they might to one of their own. The branding of the chemidir is a decision made by a group of Kae’rim as a collective, but even within that collective, some refuse to raise arms under any circumstances, such is their commitment to peace and nonviolence.
Curiously, the cherrik seems to cause the Kae’rim to run into undead unusually often, which they also generally refer to as chemidir, having no general word for them beyond that. They slaughter these undead whenever they come upon them, and seem to treat doing so as a moral obligation. Paladins have been known to follow groups of Kae’rim for a time from the periphery, assisting in the dispatching of these creatures, and some of these Paladins are among the few people of the Dominion that the Kae’rim will cordially communicate and coordinate with.