Altan - Urman Ethnicity
“They stood at the ridgeline, four of them, cloaked in ash-fur and silence. The snow had not heard them come, and I would not have either, had I not looked up. One turned its head, slowly, like a thing carved from wind-worn stone, and stared. Not with curiosity. Not with fear. Just... recognition. I do not know how I earned it.”
Later, my guide told me I had seen a ‘Mournband’. He said they walk in silence when a seer has died, bearing no fire, no name, only memory. If that was true, I do not know. He would say no more. But I remember their eyes: pale, colourless, wide. Like glass catching the moon.”
| From Whispers Beyond the Pineveil: Notes on the Frakal North, by Scholar-Envoy Thellen MarqIntroduction
Their home is the high north of Frakal, a region of glacial wastes and whispering pines, where the wind sings and the earth remembers. No formal state bears their name. No trade routes pass through their frozen hollows. And yet, travellers speak of figures glimpsed through the snow, of songs heard without voice, and of bone-chimes hanging from frost-cracked trees. The Altan do not welcome visitors. Most who see them do so only once, and seldom up close.
Reports describe them as pale-furred, broad-shouldered, and slow in movement. They do not speak often. When they do, their voices carry strange echoes. Some claim they are dying out. Others say they are watching, waiting, guarding some ancient truth beneath the ice. There are even stories, dismissed by most, that they can hear the breath of the world itself and speak its forgotten name.
Among the few accounts we possess, one thing is constant: their silence. Not emptiness, but presence unspoken. The Altan are a people who carry memory like a fire under snow. They carve their stories into ice, ash, and breath. Whether they are myth or nation, we do not know. But they are real. And they remember.
“One saw me, I think. Or maybe it smelled me. It paused, half-crouched on the ridge, the fur around its shoulders blowing out like a shroud. Then it moved on. I’d never felt so lucky to be ignored.”
Appearance and Lifestyle
Of all the peoples of Arora, none are so physically adapted to their homeland as the Altan Urmans. Yet even their appearance is the subject of debate. Accounts from trappers, reindeer herders, and lost expeditionaries vary. Some describe them as towering. Others claim they are squat and broad. Some say their eyes glow faintly in the dark. Others insist they cover their faces entirely. None who claim to have seen them agree on whether what they saw was one Urman or five moving as one. What little agreement exists centres on a few features: thick fur, pale tones, and a presence that stills the wind around them.
Their fur ranges from bone-white to ashen grey, often layered in ways that suggest both adaptation and ritual grooming. In warmer months, though such terms are relative in the high north, their coats thin slightly, but remain dense enough to blunt blades and scatter snow. Beneath, their skin is said to be mottled grey, with areas of thickened callus on the joints, knees, and back. There are whispers that their breath mists even when it should not. Some say they carry a cold inside them deeper than winter.
No confirmed sketches or specimens exist. The one known illustration, a charcoal smear allegedly drawn by a dying Roseni scout, depicts a figure cloaked in furs with no visible face. Whether this reflects fashion or physiology remains unknown.
Like their fur, Altan skin is reported as grey to almost charcoal black in tone. Some say it bears a faint marbling, as if patterned like stone or ice-cracked earth. Hair, when not obscured, is said to be wiry, coarse, and pale, though in truth most observers cannot distinguish between hair and outer pelt. Decorative markings have been observed only in myth. Old frontier tales describe Altan warriors whose fur was stained with coal-dust and chalk, arranged in sacred symbols that shifted with the wind. Most scholars assume these are embellishments or misreadings of frost patterns.
No Altan garb has ever been recovered. Descriptions from distant sightings suggest they wear cloaks or wrappings of hide and fur, layered tightly to trap warmth and silence motion. Some wear bone charms at the wrist or neck, carved with spirals, wind-shapes, or eye-like sigils. Others adorn themselves with ice-lens pendants or woven cords tipped with feathers. Whether these mark clan, deed, or status is unknown. The most consistent claim is that they do not carry metal. Their tools, if any, are bone, flint, or obsidian — not due to ignorance, but choice.
Altan Urmans dwell in the northernmost reaches of Frakal, particularly in the realms of Skiftesvik and Fornt. These regions are dominated by permafrost plains, boreal forest, tundra, and ice-locked fjords. Altan dwellings are rarely found, but a few explorers speak of snow-buried domes or hidden cliffside warrens, camouflaged by windblown ash and ice. One rumour, persistent if unverified, holds that they live beneath the ground in hollowed glacial tunnels warmed by geothermal vents. Another suggests they migrate with the snowdrifts, building nothing, leaving no trace save for smoke that never rises and footprints that vanish before dawn.
What is certain is that no Altan city has ever been recorded. They are a people of small bands, if they gather at all — more like kin-clusters or wind-groups than tribes. Their hearthfires, if such things exist, burn in secret places. Even the Varlimni, who share the north, claim they’ve never been invited to an Altan gathering. They do admit, however, that some elders remember gifts left on stone altars being accepted — and sometimes returned.
Due to the scarcity of sustained contact, no clear record exists of Altan subgroups, phenotypes, or regional traits. However, there are scattered accounts that suggest some Altan wear their fur long and unbound, while others braid it with frost-thread and bone. One record from a Fornti fishing camp claims certain individuals have silvered brows or blue-flecked eyes, considered marks of seerhood or winter-birth. Another claims that warriors of a certain lineage file their claws into razored points. None of this is confirmed. Perhaps it is all true. Perhaps none of it is.
If Altan daily life follows any rhythm, it is one hidden from outsiders. Foragers speak of trees whose bark has been stripped in ritual spirals, of animal carcasses laid in precise patterns, and of song-lines etched into cliff ice with heat-darkened stone. But the Altan themselves do not share. Whether they farm, herd, or trap is unknown. Some scholars speculate that they follow seasonal migrations of snow-beasts or cave-elk. Others propose that they live as semi-hibernating hunter-clans, active only during moon-cycles or specific winds. The Altan, it seems, are not concerned with being understood.
Altan cuisine is a matter of speculation. What is known is that their environment allows for little agriculture. Instead, they likely subsist on snow hares, burrowing birds, cavefish, and the occasional large herd-beast. Foraged lichen, tree resin, and fermented bone marrow have been proposed as staples, with smoke-curing and ice-caching as preservation methods. One recovered pot-shard from Skiftesvik showed traces of rendered fat and charred pine-needle, possibly used as a form of broth. Whether the Altan cook communally or in solitude is unknown. Some claim their feasts are entirely silent, shared in breath, not word.
“They say nothing of gods, yet they leave carved tusks in the snow, spiralled and stained with ochre. No words. No names. But once, I saw one kneel before a melt-stone where the ice never grew back. I watched it hold silence like a blade, then leave behind a tooth—not its own, I think, but something older.”
Beliefs and Values
The Altan Urmans are a people of silence and snow, and their beliefs, such as they are known, reflect this. While the Fraki chant to the sky and the Ralian whisper to roots and rivers, the Altan offer no such clarities. Their spirituality is layered in breath and frost, not easily spoken of, and even less often shared. What can be discerned is gleaned from patterns of action, from shaped ice and abandoned relics, from what they do not destroy, and what they bury with care. Theirs is not a faith of temples. It is a practice of breath, bone, and distance.
Their reverence for the Siriat is perhaps the only certainty. While other Urman tribes worship these great wandering titans as avatars of harmony or judges of balance, the Altan see them as something deeper. To them, the Siriat are not gods, but memories: walking echoes of a world healed by presence alone. Elders of the Forntic border tribes claim the Altan tell no stories about the Siriat, because they do not need to. The world itself is the tale, and the Siriat are its final breath. When the world breaks again, they say, it will be a Siriat that treads across it last.
Nothing is known of Altan courtship from direct source. The few surviving cross-winter trade accounts speak only of pairs, never groups — always two shadows sharing firelight, never touching, never speaking while others watched. If beauty is valued among them, it is likely in strength, quiet, or cold endurance. Some believe that partners are chosen by shared survival of ordeal. Others posit that mating is arranged by vision or dream-signs. One piece of ur-oral lore claims Altan mothers sing to unborn cubs using drumbeats made by heartbeat alone.
It is difficult to speculate on gender norms within Altan culture, as no Altan individual has ever identified themselves to outsiders in any capacity. Based on comparative extrapolation from the Fraki and Ralian, and from various patterns observed in clothing and posture, some researchers suspect a sharp division of role exists, but that it is not based on the gender binary familiar to humans. There is suggestion of a third or liminal status, a ‘windborn’, held by some individuals who neither lead nor labour, but move between bands during seasonal transitions. Others dismiss this as confusion with shamanic practice.
The Altan concept of union, if it exists, is likely to be lifelong and ritually encoded. One Fraki tale tells of “the Snow-Knot,” a ritual binding in which two Altan clasp claws over a glacier pool and are never seen apart again. Another border song claims that Altan pairs remain silent to each other in public until one dies. No Altan burial site has been discovered that contains only a single adult. All known cairns have held pairs, often curled around each other or back-to-back with tools clasped between.
Rites of passage appear to revolve around exposure, silence, and isolation. A widely repeated, though unverifiable, story tells of an Altan cub left atop a ridgeline during an ice storm, given only a carved tooth and a thin braid of resin-sealed hair. If they return with the braid intact, they are marked as grown. Whether this is tradition or tall tale is unclear. What is certain is that many explorers report faint chants in the high passes — wordless tones that seem to echo breath rather than voice, and which always fall silent when approached.
Death, for the Altan, appears to be sacred. Stone-carved cairns have been found bearing not names, but spiral sigils and animal shapes — elk, bear, strider. These markers are never elaborate, but always precise. No signs of burning or internment are found. Only bone arranged in patterns, and occasionally melted snow that never re-freezes. It is believed the Altan practice sky-burial or bone-rituals that return remains to the tundra. One Bashri scout swears he found a corpse ringed in snow-lanterns made of hollowed antler and frostwax, still burning three days after death, untouched by wind.
Among all the guesses scholars have made, one belief recurs: the Altan abhor waste. Every story speaks of their precision, their refusal to leave behind unnecessary sign, and their patient unmaking of whatever they build. Some frontier cults revere them as avatars of purity for this very reason. Violence, when it comes, is swift and clean. They kill only when forced, and they never boast. To betray a partner, it is said, is a death-mark. To speak above a whisper in a white gale is to tempt the ghosts. To light a fire where the snow has not yet fallen is to call the silence to watch you burn.
“No songs. But they left seven black stones arranged like a crescent, each one carved with a different claw-mark. That night, the ice cracked like laughter. When we woke, they were gone, and so was our map.”
Culture and Expression
What little is known of Altan cultural expression comes to us second-hand, as no Altan Urman has ever been known to trade stories with outsiders. Unlike the song-rich Fraki or the saga-minded Ralians, the Altan seem to guard their culture like breath in winter — tightly, quietly, and only ever shared when no one else is watching. Yet the traces remain. Glyphs carved into antler. Patterns of soot and ash in abandoned shelters. Flickers of shadow play cast against snowdrifts. There is a rhythm to their world. But to hear it, one must be still a very long time.
The Altan tongue, if it may be called one, is almost entirely unknown. Fraki herders who border the north speak of a language made of breath, not voice — gusts, whistles, and pulse-like clicks formed in the back of the throat or through hollow tubes. Some suspect this may be merely code or ritual speech, used for travel across blizzard-bound wastes. Others believe it is the full language, entirely distinct from Maric roots. One Ralian exile claimed the Altan “speak with their bones,” by which he may have meant gesture, posture, and carving. Communication, for the Altan, is less about exchange and more about resonance.
If the Altan make music, it is lost to us. However, numerous finely honed objects have been found in abandoned cairns or lost caches — wind-flutes made of snowcat femur, drums of woven hide too brittle to move, and lenses carved from ice-amber said to reflect only the shapes of predators. Their tools are minimalistic yet elegant — bone chisels, flint strikers, antler combs — and often bear intricate spiral motifs, usually hidden on the reverse side. Art is likely devotional, encoded, and never ornamental. The Altan do not make things to be admired. They make things to be remembered.
What stories the Altan tell, they tell only to each other. Still, fragments remain. The tale of the Frostmother, who birthed her sons in silence and taught them to walk without shadow. The legend of the Wind-Eater, a figure who drinks storm and dreams of the Siriat walking on ice that burns. Bashri sages claim the Altan remember a time when no land was warm, and the stars were hunted like prey. In these myths, there is no war, no glory, no empires. Only endurance, witness, and the slow ache of memory carved into mountainbone.
No known civic figures or historical Altan leaders exist in written record. However, Fraki wind-chant archives, kept by memory-priests in Temin, speak of “Shul the Stiller,” a white-clad giant who quelled a blizzard by sitting in it for three nights. Another chant tells of “Lakar’s Fang,” a tooth said to grant clear breath and stillness in battle, passed down by ghost-hand every generation. Whether these figures were Altan or merely borrowed spectres from other Urman folklore remains contested. The Altan themselves offer no clarification. If they remember heroes, they do not name them aloud.
Any detailed history of the Altan Urmans must, by necessity, be filled with silences. Their presence is recorded only by its absences — vanished camps, scavenged caravans, stories left half-said by Fraki riders who refuse to speak further. They have never claimed territory, never signed a treaty, and never responded to envoys. They have no known writing system, no known cities. And yet, they persist. For centuries, maps of northern Frakal have simply marked the vast tundra with a word in Old Eralic: Tregatha, “the Unknown.” Beneath it, the scholars now whisper one word in awe and caution: Altan.
“I asked his name. He blinked once, slow as meltwater. Then he pressed a claw to his ribs and carved a crescent in the snow. Later I learned it was the sign for hunger. I do not think I was asking the right question.”
Naming and Lineage
No scholar has ever been offered the true name of an Altan Urman. What names we possess are likely mishearings, codenames, or designations bestowed by outsiders. Among the Fraki and Ralian, tales circulate of Altan names being “carried by breath,” too subtle to trap in written script, or composed of soundless inflection — like frost forming on a branch before the crack. Others believe names are given only once, in private, during a ritual at first snowfall, and never spoken again until death. Perhaps names are not spoken at all, but carved in pattern, worn into fur, or traced in ash across the skin.
While most Urman cultures favour parent-chosen or deed-earned names, the Altan appear to resist any such simplicity. It is speculated that each individual has several names — one for use within the hearth-circle, one for the spirit rites, one carved into memory, and perhaps one that is never spoken aloud at all. Fraki who claim to have heard Altan speech describe it as layered: a single utterance conveying mood, ancestry, and purpose. This may reflect a naming practice in which identification is not fixed, but fluid — an echo of what the self is in the moment, not what it was born as.
Altan social organisation, if it exists in ways we understand, is entirely obscured. They do not build large settlements, and they do not mark territory in ways other Urman tribes do. Yet they move in units. Tracks suggest travel in groups of five to twelve, often all adults, sometimes with one or two juveniles. One prevailing theory holds that the Altan operate in bonded circles rather than blood families — temporary alliances of survival chosen each winter and dissolved in spring. Others propose extended matrilineal kin lines marked through dental etching or fur-braid pattern, though this remains speculative.
It is possible that the Altan do not distinguish between family and tribe at all. They may see all who endure the snow together as one body, fractal and self-contained, until divided by death. Or perhaps they do not think of themselves as individuals at all. Among the Urmans, it is said: “In the North, the name is the pack.”
All examples here are reconstructed or borrowed. Use caution when repeating them, especially in sacred spaces.
- Male-coded: Vashok, Lenkrin, Hroda, Takar, Yushak
- Female-coded: Eshani, Orka, Braleth, Vennari, Tokka
- Neutral or unclear: Senn, Gharu, Nokh, Uven, Keshk
Note: These names are Fraki approximations based on echo-sign and battlefield recollection. It is likely none of them are accurate.
“We set up camp in a crater of black stone. In the morning, it was gone. Not the camp — the crater. The snow had risen, or shifted, or perhaps we had dreamed the whole thing. One of the dogs wouldn’t stop whining. That night, we heard whistling. But the wind was still.”
Geography and Demographics
Altan Urmans inhabit the northernmost reaches of Frakal, in realms that even maps hesitate to name. Unlike the Fraki with their sweeping plains, or the Ralians whose jungles teem with visible life, the Altan domain is one of silence and depth. Snow covers what lies beneath, and what lies beneath is rarely told. Scholars mark the realms of Fornt and Skiftesvik as Altan, but these are lines drawn by cartographers, not Urmans. No Altan has claimed them aloud.
Settlement patterns are all but invisible. Altan tribes do not build permanent dwellings; they carve hollows into snowbanks, retreat into caves warmed by geothermal vents, or raise hide domes that vanish with the wind. Their passage through the land is light, but not forgotten. Bones, charred spirals, ice-etched glyphs — all mark places of ritual and survival. It is said they follow the migration of cold itself, appearing only when the temperature drops below memory.
The realm of Fornt is a near-arctic wasteland, a place of frozen silence and sunless days. Blizzards erase even mountain contours, and much of the terrain is glacier-locked and studded with fumaroles. Despite this, Altan presence is strongest here — if not in number, then in silence. Sentries from the Rakhani Khanate report seeing shadowy figures descending icy ridgelines with no tracks left behind, or great bonfires burning far from wood, ringed by figures in stillness.
No human or Fraki settlement has taken root in Fornt. Those who try either leave or vanish. Rumours persist of “ice-marked” children born in Fraki camps — silent, pale-eyed, resistant to cold. Superstition, perhaps. But among the Fraki, such children are left at the edge of the wind, with gifts of salt and stone. The Altan, they say, will take what is theirs.
Skiftesvik lies to the west of Fornt, a land of broken stone, wind-scoured forests, and frigid deltas that never thaw. Here the Altan are less mythical, more hunted. Skiftesvik borders Fraki and Rostoqi lands, and conflicts arise — over territory, over trade, over silence. Fraki warbands have clashed with what they call the Snow-Touched, Altan raiders whose attacks leave no wounded, only vanished. Wounds inflicted by the Altan do not always bleed, but fester with frostbite even in the heat of the tent.
Some claim Skiftesvik hosts permanent Altan hearths, protected by white-stone markers visible only in moonlight. Others believe no Altan truly lives there — they pass through, like owls or stormfronts, pausing only long enough to count the stars. Either way, the region is rich in sacred sites, and Fraki song-scouts report carved bones strung in trees, chimes made of antler, and ice-lens circles that reflect no face when gazed into.
Altan Urmans do not travel. At least, not in the way other peoples do. One might find the occasional outcast in Rakhana or Temin — silent mercenaries, mute scouts, pale-furred wanderers with scars that seem etched by wind. But they do not claim kin, and no kin claim them. Their presence is never permanent. It is often said that to see an Altan outside the north is either a sign of exile — or an omen of cold yet to come.
Some scholars suggest that Altan bloodlines may survive in the highland reaches of Bashri and even as far west as Kraynor, especially in ancient Urman enclaves now long dissolved. But these are conjectures built from cold bones and colder guesses. The Altan do not confirm. They do not correct. They do not explain. They simply vanish.
“I asked the old trail-singer if he had ever spoken with an Altan. He did not answer at first. He just stirred the fire with a bone pick and watched the sparks vanish into the snow. Then he said: ‘You do not speak with the Altan. You listen. And if you listen well enough, they might let you forget what you thought you knew.’”
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