“As long as they behaved, the humans of today, be they kept in the habitat or privately owned, should be treated no worse than any other beast of burden.
The humans of today. That was the crucial distinction.
The habitats were not punishment. They were protection. They were created because no one should ever suffer from humans again. Humans must be kept apart from the world. They must never again be mistaken for people.” [B1.C18]
The Human Restrict Act (342) was established to confine ever-growing tribes of humans who started raiding and claiming tairan settlements, thereby enslaving or extinguisihing the tairan peoples. Since then, humans live in human habitats, where their populations are monitored and controlled.
TRIVIA
HISTORY
Background information on the development of the habitats.
Human-Tairan-Wars
In 279, Tairan arrive on the continent from the Northlandic Sea. They explore and settle around the barren, uninhabited Northlands coast, where they develop a thriving society. Regular contact and trading with humans is established 20 years later. However, ever-growing tribes of humans start raiding and claiming tairan settlements, enslaving or extinguisihing the tairan peoples, which results in an ongoing war from 316-342. With the Human Restrict Act, human tribes are eventually split and confined to designated habitats where they live without contact to other peoples.
CONSENSUS ON HUMANS
Common beliefs and convictions regarding the human peoples.
Inherent Aggression
“They need a release,” Tria had explained to Yu, her voice clinical and distant. “A common enemy to bind them, to channel their brutish impulses. The greater the losses they suffer, the more grateful they become for what remains. Pain has a way of making the intolerable seem preferable. It will make their previous living conditions and struggles, harsh as they may have been, seem safe and even desirable by comparison.”
Yu had listened in silence as she expanded on her philosophy. Humans, she believed, were creatures incapable of thriving in idleness. They required constant threat — a persistent edge of danger to tether their chaos, be it an actual physical threat or an imagined one.
“It must not overwhelm them,” Tria had continued, her gaze faraway. “But it must linger, just at the periphery of their awareness. There, where perception blurs with fear, where the mind merges imagination and undeniable truth into one. That fear will drive them. Keep it alive, and they will produce, they will obey, they will survive …”
In core, humans were primitive beasts dressed in the guise of people. They mimicked tairan behaviours and, on occasion, even appeared sensible. Almost reasonable. But those fleeting moments of imitation had been the downfall of many tairan settlements before the Human Restrict Act. [B1.C15]
MANAGEMENT
Insight into the ongoing operation of habitats.
Directory
Every director handles their humans differently, each imposing their own rules and methods. There are restrictions, of course. You cannot not punish the humans to the point of collapse, not repeatedly, or permit them to escape. Beyond that, you are free to use them to your liking and handle them as you please.
"Some allowed the humans to live with a degree of autonomy, while others interfered heavily. Some directors, like Tria, granted their humans a productive purpose. Her fishing communities, for instance, sustained her domain with a grim efficiency. Others used them in less self-fulfilling ways. Wizards, Tria said, were particularly notorious for experimenting with their humans. They sought ways to suppress or recondition humanity’s destructive nature, bending it to their will. Some, for example, employed Lightshifters to weave illusions; entire pantheons of false gods and horrifying phantoms, conjured to distort reality and thus fracture, restructure and control the human mind." [B1.C15]
Tairn Integration
When habitat-born humans display distinct Tairan traits, they are handed over to a Tairan community. The only exception is for those children who are deemed mentally impaired. If they are unable to sustain themselves, they either die in infancy or are removed from the habitat and disposed of. Otherwise, they are sterilised and kept among the other humans until they pass away.
Selling Humans
Some habitats still engage in the sale of surplus humans to private owners. These transactions are formalised through a contract of purchase and ownership, as outlined in [B1.C19]. Under the Reparations Agreement, humans sold to Bormen are exchanged for no more than a token price, serving as a symbolic gesture rather than a true transaction.
Tria, the director of the Barnstream Habitat, enforced a ban on such practices. She vehemently protested and eventually abolished the Reparation Rights for bormen, which grated one human to each settlement borman.
INDIVIDUAL HABITATS
Barnstream Habitat [08]
Barnstream Habitat [08]
Located at Undertellems, settlement amongst the Barnstreams.
Directed by Tria.
THE ESTATE
Tria rules and runs the Barnstream Habitat from her residence. The estate is the most progressive building in Undertellems. The living quarters resemble a mansion with spacious rooms, an opulent bathouse, a well-equipped kitchen and full storage rooms, which are all maintained and managed by maids and servants.
Craftsmen and artisans have access to specialised workrooms to further their industry and educate their apprentices. The estate also features defensive mechanisms such as magical warding.
LAYOUT
Information on this habitat will be added once it is revealed within the narration.
POPULATION
For decades, there had been roughly 200 humans at any given time.
This number was halfed in 640, when Tria released three funners into the habitat to quell the quarrelling of fractions that had developed amongst the humans. Still, with the reduced deaths to drowning and childbirth, and given that young humans were no longer taken out and given to the bormen, the population had recovered and grown back quickly. In 646, the number had climbed back to 150.
HUMAN INDUSTRY
Since acquiring the habitat, Tria bred humans for efficiency. She trained them, optimising their labour to expand the river system and cultivate the garanger, a hardy, nutrient-rich fish bred to thrive in her controlled waterways. When the Shaira had drained the rivers during the crisis years of 616 to 619, Tria’s artificial channels, sealed within the protected habitat, had endured. She had single-handedly kept the north-eastern region from starving, which brought her wealth and power.
By [B1.C15], her humans barely need oversight. The operation had long since outgrown her direct involvement. The workers are highly skilled, well, for humans, and capable of managing vast aspects of their routines independently. With that, the whole enterprise basically runs itself.
MEDICAL CARE
Tria generally does not intervene when humans are injured.
"Injuries in the settlements were lessons, left to mend or to kill. Humans bled, or drowned, or birthed themselves into graves. It was part of what she called natural selection. Yu had seen that indifference far more often than he had seen care. Instead of intervening, Tria observed. She evaluated how her humans dealt with their injured, and marked which of endured and which were discarded." [B1.C19]
"So in core, be it drowning or broken bones, Tria let the humans learn through suffering. Injuries were left to run their course. She intervened only in rare cases, mainly with the very young or those in whom she suspected a trace of tairan blood. Otherwise, her wing extended only as far as culling the deranged, or, if they were left to survive into adulthood, ensuring they would not breed. Before her final refusal to uphold the Reparation Treaty, the castration of males and the sterilisation of females had been routine for those sold or given to bormen." [B1.C19]
A CULTURE REVOLVING AROUND WATER
This excerpt from [B1.C19] well summarises how the humans' culture developed and improved their lives:
"When Tria first took control of the habitat, the second most common cause of death was drowning, simply because of the many streams running through the territory. The first was childbirth, with high tolls for both infants and females. Despite that, Tria did not restrict the humans’ access to water. In fact, she did the opposite. She forced their lives into it and made fishing the centre of their survival. Unlike what you would expect, drowning actually became less frequent. Surprisingly, the humans learned to swim, all on their own. At first they waded while working their nets in the shallows. As they started to move into deeper waters, they found ways to keep their head above the surface even when the ground dropped away. Then they discovered how to float for long stretches of time, and eventually, they could drift and move with their limbs in steady rhythm. In the end, they swam while handling their gear. Some even dove.
They grew so bold that Tria had to reinforce the fencing and send patrols along the habitat streams. By the time Yu came to the estate, swimming had become not only a necessary discipline for survival and industry, but also a significant part of their – for the lack of better word – culture: children were taught to swim almost as early as they could walk or knot nets. They had a recognisable hierarchy, where older children supervised the younger ones by the rivers. There were crude rituals and challenges to fetch stones or trinkets from deeper waters, all primitive and rather stupid, of course, but still, recognisable as ambition.
That they learned to swim was astonishing, though not unthinkable. To some measure, you could have even expected it. Human and tairan bodies were alike enough. The tairan of today bore no likeness whatsoever to the creatures that thrived in water, yet within their given limitations, they swam passably well. [...]
But the habitat humans had gone even further. They had let the streams seep into their lives, until their rituals shifted entirely to water. They began to give birth there. At first, it was crude. They had determined a designated bend in the river, where the females gathered and waded in whenever one was ready. Then, seven years ago, they had diverted a branch, cut a side-channel and made a pond for that purpose alone. [...]
From the top, they had looked down through their field-glasses upon thirty-one females, young and old. They had gathered waist-deep, clutching one among them as she writhed. Her convulsions lasted for what was one of the longest hours in Yu’s life. It had been so violent that she once struck her head against the stones, and yet the others carried on and held her steady, as if this agony were expected. They revelled in it. Then the child came, breaking surface in a smear of blood and river foam, hauled from the murk into the air and passed from hand to hand, while all of them shrieked and cried and ran around like mad things. [...]
With the shift to the waters, birthing had become a conscious and collective thing. What had a been a secret and solitary ordeal became a communal rite, exposed and exalted as a shared experience amongst all females. By now, they had a head female with several subordinates. These attendants oversaw each pregnancy, long before the birth itself. As savage as it may be, they instructed one another in the process. From that crude violence, they wove a system. They built order from it. And with that order, refined over the years, came survival: the deaths fell away, first the drownings, then even the deaths of childbirth.
From an economic view, this was more than sufficient. From Tria’s perspective, it was progress. From Yu’s, it was obscene. From any other, it was unnerving. It was a stark reminder of how grotesquely alien humans were; how swiftly one generation dissolved into the next, how fast they reshaped themselves, how rapidly habit hardened into ritual, and ritual ossified into rule." [B1.C19]
Yet Unnamed Habitat [05]
Yet Unnamed Habitat [05]
Located bordering the swamplands of the south-western Northlands.
As the story progresses, information on this habitat will follow.