Fraki - Urman Ethnicity
“It is said that to ride with the Fraki is to forget stillness. I now believe this true. Not in the metaphorical sense beloved of poets, but in the hard marrow of the body. When I joined the Windshadow band as guest-scribe, they warned me: I would not ride like them. I would not sing like them. I would not understand the horse’s breath or the wind’s hunger. They were right. I did not. But I saw. And what I saw, I will never forget.”
“There is a moment — it came to me on the thirteenth day, crossing the ash-steppe south of Varnok’s Teeth — when you stop resisting the motion. The wind stings less. The ache in your thighs becomes rhythm. The dust ceases to be foreign. And in that moment, you glimpse it: the shape of a people not broken by history, but carved by it into something raw and terrible and alive.”
“They do not build cities. They do not record law. Their treaties are made by hoofprint, arrow, and oath. Yet I saw among them a structure of such precision it shames our courts. Every saddle-mark told a story. Every braid, every brand, every blade was a verse in the long poem of the clan. Their speech is sharp, their humour cruel, their rage like the summer storm — it builds without word, then strikes with sudden fury.”
“And yet there was worship. Not of gods in temples, but of the wind, of the land, of the Siriat. Yes, the Siriat — not named, but alluded to in stories of the great Striders who walked when the world was raw and broken, who carried fire in their eyes and green in their steps. The elders speak of them in dusk-tales, over bones and broth. They say the first Fraki were blessed by hoofprint and howl, made swift by the breath of those ancient healers. They do not pray. They ride. And in riding, they remember.”
“I left them before the fall snows. I could no longer keep their pace. My scribe-hand was stiff, and my stomach had long since made peace with salted marrow and horseblood broth. When I asked permission to leave, the war-mother did not answer. She simply gave me a scrap of hide — painted with wind-spirals and blood-lines — and said, ‘You rode. So now you are remembered.’”
I still carry it. It smells of dust and smoke and a kind of freedom I do not think I was meant to survive.”
Introduction
The Fraki Urmans are a people of dust and momentum, a storm of muscle, fur, and iron moving ceaselessly across the vast steppe-realms of central Frakal. Where others build, they ride. Where others root, they roam. To most of Arora’s cityfolk, they are a half-legendary scourge: raiders, horse-lords, the nightmare beneath the northern stars. Yet to reduce them to violence is to ignore the deeper rhythm beneath their thunder. For the Fraki are not lawless. They are not savages. They are a civilisation of the saddle, shaped by wind and war and something older still — memory passed not in stone or script, but in hoofbeat, braid, and blood.
Dominating the plains of Rakhana and the surrounding realms of Temin, Bashri, and Fornt, the Fraki are arguably the largest ethnic expression of Urman culture in the world. Unlike their Ralian cousins, they do not cling to jungle glades or build stilted dwellings in the shadows of the vine. Instead, they sleep beneath leather hides and open stars, follow ancient paths scored into the earth by generation after generation of mounted tread, and name their homelands not by border but by story: the Place of Split Salt, the Three Winds Crossing, the Ghost Ridge where the Siriat once walked.
The Fraki way of life is built upon the bond between rider and horse, clan and khan. Their political landscape is fractured but vast: the Rakhani Khanate spans all of Rakhana in name, but is better understood as a great braid of tribes, war-bands, matriarchal hearthholds, and shifting loyalties. The Temul Khanate in Temin is both rival and sibling, forged by isolation across the Dragon’s Back mountains. In the east, along the shores of the Sea of Flame, Fraki-speaking realms bicker and barter with merchants from the south, their loyalties bought not with coin, but with oaths, hostages, and glory-stories retold beside smoking firepits.
To understand the Fraki is to understand a people who see time differently. Not as a straight line from past to future, but as a circle of return — of names reborn in grandsons, of vengeance paid in kind a generation hence, of ancient vows upheld by those unborn when they were made. They live for honour, for song, for the clan. But more than anything, they live for the ride. In the saddle, they say, a Fraki is closest to freedom. And it is for that freedom — and the memory of what was lost — that they will draw blood without hesitation.
They are not a peaceful people. But they were not born for war. It is the world that made them thus — the pressures of conquest, the advance of walls, the slow suffocation of plains once open. In another age, they might have ridden only for the stars. Now, too often, they ride for survival.
“Let the cities mock us. They forget it was a rider who first scouted the ruins. It was a rider who saw the Strider pass, who knelt at the edge of the Burn and heard the land’s breath return. They think us rootless. Fools. Our roots are not in soil. They are in motion. In memory. In flame.”
“In the wind they smelled of horse-leather, smoke, and grass. Not unclean, never that. Just wild. You could smell the thunder before the hooves.”
“You could tell his clan from the stitching on his reins. You could tell his age from the knots in his braid. I asked no questions. His spear had three feathers. That was answer enough.”
“He wore no colours, but his hands told his story: the calluses of reins, the raised brand on his forearm, the broken left finger he never let heal straight. You could read his life as you read the land.”
Appearance and Lifestyle
Fraki Urmans are built for endurance over terrain that breaks lesser bodies. They are leaner than their jungle-dwelling cousins, with long limbs, powerful shoulders, and corded musculature that speaks of a life spent in the saddle. While still stocky by human standards, they carry themselves with a poised economy of motion. They crouch when still. They move with explosive speed.
Their faces are broad and bestial, framed by pointed ears and high, expressive brows. Many have slightly longer muzzles than Ralians. Their eyes are narrow, often a piercing shade of amber, pale green, or storm-grey.
Unlike the darker-furred Ralians of Erala, Fraki Urmans display a wider tonal range. Sandy taupe, pale rust, ash-grey, and speckled cream are all common. Their pelts are often bleached and thinned by years beneath the sun. Their fur tends to be coarser and shorter, except along the spine and shoulders where manes may form. These are plaited or bound in decorative rings.
Manes may be trimmed short or grown into braids. They serve as major markers of personal identity and tribal affiliation.
Fraki skin beneath the fur is a dark, earthen grey, resistant to sun and scarring. Scars, in fact, are cherished and often accentuated with tattoo-ink or burn-marking. Each one narrates a tale of battle, childbirth, exile, or ritual trial. Among warriors, chest scars may be inked in red ochre to represent wounds survived. Among elders, silver-flecked scarring may mark moments of deep spiritual insight or tragedy endured.
Hair grows thickest on the head, forearms, and upper back. It is plaited into long braids or corded into dread-like ropes, often wrapped with coloured thread, metal charms, or the bones of ancestral mounts. Some tribes shave the head partially to indicate rank or status. Others allow full manes to grow wild until a vow or vendetta is completed. Dyes from steppe herbs or sea-trade pigments mark initiates, war leaders, and deathbound warriors alike.
Fraki clothing is adapted for the harsh extremes of the steppe. Wind-scoured summers, freezing winters, and desert storms that blind both mount and rider. Layers are key. Tunics of woven horsehair or wool, leather leggings, thick sashes bound with bone toggles or knot-seals. Cloaks are often stitched from tanned hide. The most prized cloaks are made from the pelt of a warrior’s first slain plains-beast.
Jewellery is practical. It often doubles as tools or talismans. Knife-pendants, carved bone amulets, etched belt-disks, and symbol-wrapped reins are all common. Rather than pure decoration, each item usually carries meaning. These may represent the tale of a hunt, the symbol of a hearthhold, or a debt owed to an ancestor or god. Ornaments are usually worn in layers: rings, beads, fetishes. Every clatter is a signal.
Rakhana: The open steppes and semi-arid plains of Rakhana are the heartland of Fraki culture. Here, the clans are most numerous, and the landscape reflects their ways. Vast grasslands are dotted with smoke-camp rings, stone-piled ancestor shrines, and the black outlines of yurts moved with the seasons. Water is sparse. Wells are sacred and often guarded. Pastures shift with storms and prey movements. The inland Sea of Flame in south-east Rakhana serves as both holy site and battleground. Dozens of minor khans claim influence over its shores. Tribes erect tall spirit-poles decorated with hide, horn, and cloth, marking territory or past glories.
Temin: A rougher land of shallow valleys and windswept rock shelves, Temin shelters the Temul Khanate. This is a more centralised Fraki polity. Settlements here are semi-permanent, built into cliff edges and along caravan paths. Tensions with human settlers in neighbouring Rostoq have led to a warrior caste steeped in blood-feud and military training. Salt-mines and trade depots fund elite hearthholds. Many Temin clans boast fortified caravan-wagons. These are rolling houses adorned with ancestor sigils and hooked spears for boarding.
Sea of Flame Region: Though nominally part of Rakhana, the realm around the southern Sea of Flame is fragmented. It is divided into some thirty microstates, each ruled by a minor war-chief, prophet, or elder council. The landscape is shaped by dried salt-beds, deep lagoons, and dust-choked valleys. These states often follow strange hybrid rites, mixing Fraki customs with foreign traders’ religions. Despite this, they share one trait. Each claims descent from a long-lost Siriat said to have crossed the sea on hoof-shaped waves. Pilgrimages to ‘Tide Rock’ — a white-streaked pillar near the sea’s centre — are common but dangerous.
Physical difference among the Fraki is often read as omen or fate. Broad shoulders and thick limbs are associated with warrior blessing. Narrow, angular builds suggest spirit-sight. Pale fur tones are considered auspicious near birth, but ominous in adulthood unless ritually dyed. Children born with unusually dark or striped coats are sometimes marked for special roles. These may be storm-seers, dream-riders, or future blood-vessels of the khanate. The birth of twins is seen either as a grand blessing or a sign of spiritual imbalance, depending on clan custom.
Some nomadic clans in the east practice ritual scarification to signal personal oaths or kin-loyalty. Highland Temul hearthholds prefer piercings. Brass rings through brow, nose, or ear may denote age, battles fought, or mates lost.
Each day begins with care of the mounts. Horses are not merely tools. They are kin. They are sung to, brushed, and given offerings of dried root or flower. Children are placed atop steeds within weeks of walking. A child who cannot yet speak may already know the rhythm of the gallop. The camp rises with the sun. It collapses by dusk if the weather turns. Firepits are dug shallow. Shields are stacked as windbreaks. Elders are consulted on which star-routes to follow next.
Men train in arms, herd duty, or ride patrols. Women tend to tents, forage, raise children, prepare food, and recite memory-rites that teach the past. Both roles are honoured. Both are strict. A man who shirks the ride is shamed. A woman who neglects her tale-keeping may lose her braid. The hearthhold is everything. To care for it is no less sacred than to fight.
Fraki cuisine reflects mobility and scarcity. Meat — horse, goat, plains-hare — is roasted or preserved in blood-marrow paste wrapped in hide. Fermented mare’s milk, bitter graincakes, smoke-dried berries, and bone-fat broth form the staples. Food is heavily salted where possible. It is always shared. To eat alone is considered a mild sin, unless in mourning or exile.
Ceremonial dishes include fire-charred heart offered to spirits, roasted tailbone eaten only by proven riders, and stone-boiled root-stew drunk during harvest rites. Meals are communal. Even rival khans must eat together before negotiating war. The sharing of salt is a binding rite. To break bread, literally, is to offer peace. To spill water is to curse.
“There is no word in their tongue for hunger without shame. If one eats, all must eat. If the pot is empty, the clan rides.”
“She did not choose him because he was strong. She chose him because he knew when to lower his spear, and when to raise their child.”
Beliefs and Values
The Fraki place belief at the centre of all things — not as doctrine, but as lived rhythm. Their customs arise not from commandments, but from the need to survive with dignity, endure with memory, and live in balance with clan and wind.
Their values bind not only individuals, but whole hearthholds. Each rite, rule, and expectation is reinforced through story, example, and shared consequence. Belief is not professed. It is proven.
Among the Fraki, beauty is found not in softness, but in strength. It is found not in perfection, but in endurance. Scars are honoured, as are sun-darkened pelts, calloused hands, and the hard-earned stoop of a long rider. Grace is measured in how one sits a horse, how one loads a bow, and how one endures pain without yielding. A smooth face untouched by wind or fire is regarded with suspicion. Youth must prove itself before being spoken of with pride.
Courtship is formal and, at times, combative. A suitor will ride into the encampment of their intended and issue a challenge, not to the person themselves, but to their hearthhold. A test is given. It may be to hunt a great beast, retrieve a spirit-token from an ancestral cairn, or ride a ritual course while blindfolded and singing the suitor’s lineage. If passed, the intended must still consent. Marriage is never coerced. It is expected, however, that duty and desire find common ground.
Families are built around the hearthhold — a tightly knit unit of blood-kin, bonded mates, and dependents. Males are responsible for protection, riding, and outer negotiation. Females govern the inner realm: stories, inheritance, ritual, and child-rearing. Love is expected, not optional. A hearth without tenderness is said to rot from within. Those who abandon kin are not cursed. They are forgotten.
Fraki society is deeply bifurcated along gender lines, more so than most human polities. Male and female roles are codified not only by custom, but by sacred story. Males are warriors, riders, oath-bearers, and death-keepers. They are taught from youth to fight, to guard, and to endure. A male’s worth is measured in battles fought, raids led, and the silence with which he accepts hardship.
Females are the soul of the clan — keepers of hearth, bloodline, and song. They perform the memory-rites, tend to wounds, command the logistics of travel, and administer internal justice. A woman’s voice carries immense weight within her hearthhold. No pact is sealed without her consent. That said, women do not lead armies. They do not ride into open battle, except in times of utter desperation.
Other identities exist, but are often regarded as spiritual anomalies — dream-touched or storm-born. Such individuals are rare. They may be elevated or exiled depending on tribe. What matters most is not conformity, but the strength of one’s role and the integrity with which it is upheld.
Marriage among the Fraki is sacred and enduring. Though love may spark it, it is duty and legacy that bind it. A union is marked by the tying of reins — a literal knot binding the couples’ personal bridles together, performed before the hearth and witnessed by both families. These bonds are lifelong and rarely broken. To abandon a mate is to be marked in ash and unbraided before the clan. Only death or childlessness may sever such a tie. Even then, the dead are remembered daily by the surviving partner through dawn-offerings and spear rites.
Polygamy is rare and usually confined to elite khans or hearth-mothers who have inherited multiple bloodlines to maintain. Fidelity is not only cultural, but spiritual. To betray a mate is to betray the very balance of the hearthhold, and thus the clan. Vengeance for romantic betrayal is among the few accepted reasons for unsanctioned bloodshed between hearthholds.
Fraki children become adults not through age, but through trial. The most common rite is the Long Gallop — a day-long endurance ride through sacred territory without guidance, carrying only a skin of salt-water and a whisper from the hearth-mother. Success grants the right to braid one’s hair and bear weapons. Failure requires a year of silent service to the hearth.
Females undergo a different trial: the Song of Three Fires. She must tend three flames, for kin, for clan, and for self, over three nights of solitude, fasting, and ancestral communion. Only once she returns with an unburnt braid and a vision (symbolic or literal) is she considered full kin. Elders will interpret what she brings. Her future path will be guided accordingly.
Death is not an ending. It is a returning. The dead are wrapped in the hides of their mounts, tied to their weapons, and burned beneath sky-open cairns. Smoke carries the soul to the winds. Ash is mixed into hearth-coals and travel-salt to preserve memory in the body. Songs are sung thrice — once at death, once at the next full moon, and once a year later when the soul is believed to circle back to say goodbye.
Widowed mates wear ash on their brow and knot their braid into a noose until they choose to remarry or declare themselves hearthbound — a lifelong mourning rite. Children wear memory-bells on their wrists for a year after a parent dies. These bells are said to call the spirit to listen during rites and decisions.
The Fraki hold to a code older than any written law. Its core tenets are simple. Never abandon kin. Never lie before fire. Never take more than the land gives. Never raise steel without reason. Honour is measured not in wealth, but in steadiness — how one treats enemies, how one endures loss, how one repays debt.
Breaking bread binds. Spilling salt curses. To speak ill of a dead hearthmate is forbidden. To strike a child not of one’s hearth is cause for exile. The tongue is a weapon. Its misuse is a deeper wound than blade or hoof. Duels are allowed but rare, usually requiring a three-witness confirmation and an offering to the spirits of peace beforehand. Most disputes are settled by the council-fire or by exile — a fate feared far more than death.
Above all, treachery is the worst sin. To betray a blood-oath, to forsake the mount that carried you, to lie to a mate — these acts mark one for spiritual unraveling. Such individuals are ritually unbraided and their names stricken from fire-songs. They may walk the steppe again, but they will do so as ghosts.
“He died with no words, so we gave him our own. Three breaths, nine bells, and a sky-wide fire. That is how we say, ‘we remember’.”
“Ink fades. Voice endures. My ancestors did not write on stone — they wrote on storm, on scar, on song.”
Culture and Expression
To understand the Fraki is to hear them — not merely their words, but their rhythm, breath, and silence. Their culture lives in the voice and the hand, in fabric and smoke, in motion that remembers. It is neither static nor ornamental. It is survival made beautiful.
Art, song, and story are not professions. They are functions of hearth, memory, and honour. Every person is a vessel of history. Every ride is an act of expression.
The Fraki speak a family of closely related tongues descended from the Proto-Rakhanic root, including Forntish, Rakhan, and Tema. These languages are guttural, compact, and rich in metaphor drawn from sky, wind, hoof, and bone. Each is heavily tonal. Slight inflection shifts alter meaning. A word for “storm” in Rakhan may mean “vengeance” if spoken with a shortened final breath.
Fraki tongues are deeply tied to memory and identity. The names of the dead, the words of the hearthhold, and the rites of smoke and fire are all stored in chant and cadence. Writing is almost unknown. Memory is muscle. Stories are lived again in breath and blood. Message-knots — short cords braided with symbolic beads — are used to transmit orders or ritual formulae across the plains. These are read by touch more than sight. Each clan maintains unique codes passed from mother to daughter.
The Fraki are not builders of monuments. They are builders of motion. Their art is portable, wearable, and often ephemeral. Jewellery is carved from bone, shell, or horn. Tools are etched with sacred symbols. Riding harnesses bear stitched clan-signs. Every item a Fraki owns must serve both function and soul. A knife may butcher meat. It may also tell the tale of a brother lost in battle — its hilt wrapped in mourning-leather, its edge marked with charcoal runes.
Music is central to cultural memory. Long-necked lutes made from wood and gut, wind-drums stretched from herdskin, and the haunting bone flutes played at dusk all serve to keep ancestral rhythm alive. Music is never played idly. It accompanies ritual, mourning, oath-making, or the ride into war. Each hearthhold maintains at least one memory-singer. They teach children through verse and guide spirits of the dead with chant.
Clothwork is valued over painting. Thick felt banners, hide-masks, and horse-tapestries display the deeds of the hearth. These are not simply decoration. They are records. Lineage trees are stitched in gallop-form. Some clans carry great saddlecloths older than any living member. These are passed down and slowly added to across generations.
Fraki mythology is a braid of wind, hoof, blood, and fire. Their creation story begins not with the making of the world, but with its breaking — and the arrival of the Siriat. These striding gods walked across the wounded plains and seeded the grasses with memory. The Fraki claim descent from the First Gallop. Their ancestors rode behind a golden Siriat and learned the ways of movement, balance, and vengeance.
Most myths centre on riders who defy death, winds that speak, and beasts who trade wisdom for blood. The tale of Geshkar Long-Hoof, who outpaced a sandstorm to bring fire to a starving camp, is told in a single breath by hearth-singers — a test of lung and memory. The Twelve Oaths of Qemra Ironstep, a woman who bore her mate’s corpse across the plains to bury him in his clan’s cairn, are used as binding rites in many Khanate negotiations.
Spirits are not abstract. They ride with the wind, sleep beneath dunes, whisper in horse-breath. Children are taught to offer salt and ash before crossing rivers or high grass, lest the forgotten ones rise from the roots and pull them down.
The Fraki do not have saints in the religious sense. Instead, they revere ancestors who embody the balance of oath, movement, and might. Among the most famed is Khal Arnash the Sky-Taker — a warrior-poet who unified seventeen warbands by challenging their leaders to a week-long race across the Saltwind Expanse. He won but took no title. Instead, he cast his spear into the sea and founded the Rakhani Ring Pact — the ancient foundation of the present-day Khanates.
Temul Son-of-Hail is another. A war-singer who brokered peace between the storm-bound clans of western Temin by riding alone into the blizzard with nothing but a voice-stone and a blood-offering. The Temul Khanate is named in his honour, though its modern rulers often fail to live up to his restraint.
Among women, Sarei Hearth-Song of the Garan Clans is beloved. She was said to have carried her mate’s heart in a stone vial after he was slain by a rival khan. She sang it back to life with every dawn-chant. Some claim she founded the Whisper Pact — an alliance of hearth-mothers who guide warbands from behind the fires, through signal, breath, and threat of silence.
The Fraki are ancient — older than the Khanates, older than written memory. Once they roamed all of Frakal, before the jungles grew thick and the mountains rose like fists. They remember a time of darkness when fire failed and the land sickened. It was the Siriat, they say, who returned life to the grass. The Fraki remember this not in archive or tome, but in hoof and chant. Every great migration is a retelling of survival.
The first Fraki polities were not states, but rings — sacred oaths between hearthholds to ride together, share meat, and mourn the dead in unison. These grew into Khanates: Rakhani in the central plains, Temul in the west, and others lesser known — the Saltwind League, the Garan Accord, the Storm-Marked Pact of the Eastern Shore. These were never nations as humans understand them. They are not built of stone and census. They are built of rhythm, bond, and fire-spoken truth.
Many have tried to conquer the plains. The Causan warlords burned a thousand tents. The Bashri kings poisoned the southern wells. None held the land long. The Fraki do not fight for empire. They fight for breath, for kin, for oath. If they retreat, they do not surrender. They ride. They wait. They return.
“The land remembers what the city forgets. Every hoofprint is a word. Every fire is a voice. We are not storytellers. We are stories, riding.”
Naming and Lineage
A name is not decoration. It is duty. Among the Fraki, names are the living bonds between generations, spoken with reverence and remembered in fire, not ink. The act of naming sets the path — and seals the oaths to follow.
Kinship and memory bind harder than iron. To forget a name is to break the ring.
Fraki naming practices are formal, structured, and deeply symbolic. A full name carries with it a person's ancestry, obligations, and reputation. To speak it aloud is to call upon a history of bonds and blood. Names are given at birth by the father, whose role as protector and rider is marked through patrilineal descent. The mother may suggest or shape the name, but it is the father’s duty to speak it over the child’s first fire-breath — the moment when a child is held above the hearth and blessed with smoke and ash.
Most names are compound: a root name followed by a rider-name. The root name draws from ancestors, qualities, or omens witnessed at birth. Common roots include Qara ("black"), Temu ("iron"), Raka ("steppe"), and Sarn ("storm"). The rider-name may refer to a clan association, a totemic animal, a spiritual sign, or a weapon-form. Examples include Ashhoof, Skyborn, or Three-Spear.
Women typically inherit their father’s root name and retain it throughout life. Upon marriage, they adopt their mate’s rider-name and add a suffix denoting union — such as -thar (bonded) or -rei (joined). Thus, a woman named Sarn Tashak who marries a warrior called Qara Windthorn may become Sarn Windthorn-thar.
Fraki society is arranged in nested circles of kinship: the hearthhold, the bloodclan, and the ring. The hearthhold is the smallest, typically a single extended family. Several hearthholds form a bloodclan, united by a shared male ancestor. Bloodclans gather into rings — oathbound alliances which make up the political and military structure of the Khanates. Kinship is defined strictly patrilineally. Maternal lineage determines spiritual status, particularly in rites of vision or naming the dead.
Each ring maintains a name-archive — not written, but sung. Ancestral lines are recited during festivals, duels, and weddings. These songs are long, often taking days to complete, and are considered sacred duties. A forgotten name is a severed line. To fail in one’s lineage recitation is grounds for shame, and sometimes exile. Hearth-mothers, rather than hearth-fathers, serve as keepers of memory, ensuring that names are passed in order and without distortion.
Adoption is possible but rare, typically occurring only when a child is orphaned and the parents’ hearthhold is destroyed. In such cases, the adopted is given a scar-knot — a symbolic braid worn visibly to show the rupture and honour the lost name. These individuals are expected to prove their loyalty twice over and are often seen as spirit-touched, riding between kin and ghost.
The following names are drawn from common Fraki practice. Each carries layered meaning — bloodline, omen, and place in the ring.
- Temur Ashhoof — Rooted in strength and swiftness; a common war-name.
- Qara Windthorn — Signalling danger cloaked in calm.
- Sarn Blacktail — A name of mourning and memory.
- Raka Firestep — Refers to restless riders and fire-born oaths.
- Togren Skybite — Evokes storms and the high cry of eagles.
- Harik Stormbraid — Associated with seers and oath-breakers redeemed.
- Kelvan Smokehide — A scout’s name, signalling stealth and evasion.
- Doran Hoofmark — A travelling name passed through trade kin.
- Sarn Windthorn-thar — A bonded name taken through matrilineal honour.
- Temei Ashhoof-rei — Signifies an alliance between two warrior lines.
- Qaraya Embertrail-thar — Fireline descent, carried from a first-daughter.
- Rakai Sandvoice-rei — A desert rider’s marriage name, granted in union rite.
- Kelani Moonstride-thar — A traveller’s daughter, bonded by tradition.
- Harira Dustwake-rei — Legacy of a matriarch, returned from exile.
- Tashar Bonewake — Usually given to spirit-touched or adopted individuals.
- Orun Nightflame — Common among shamanic initiates and outcasts.
- Yaren Saltwhisper — A name from the southern sea clans, often used in trade rings.
Some names are seasonal. Others are gifted mid-life following a great act or trial. The name is never merely a title. It is an oath.
“Your name is not your own. It is your father’s blood, your mother’s breath, your clan’s fire. You carry it like a weapon — or like a wound.”
“The wind here is not empty. It is full of hoofbeat and war-chant, the scent of ash and promise. Rakhana is not a land. It is a vow.”
Geography and Demographics
The Fraki Urmans are the dominant ethnicity across the vast, wind-scoured plains and deserts of central Frakal. They range from the bloodgrass steppes of Rakhana to the dusty ridges of Temin. Their nomadic patterns are defined by water, herd-migration, and the politics of the many Khanates. Unlike most peoples, they do not mark territory in lines or stones. They mark it in remembered paths and oaths. What follows is a breakdown of the major realms they inhabit. Each is shaped by its own geography, rivalries, and the fractious web of kin-rings and warbands.
Rakhana is the heartland of the Fraki — a sprawling basin of amber grasses, dry rivers, and slate-flecked plateaus. It is bounded by mountain walls on three sides and opens eastward onto the immense Akari Sea. Rakhana is both crucible and corridor. It is a land of sudden storms and slow migrations. The terrain varies from open plains, where the herds gallop in wind-churned flocks, to sunburnt deserts threaded with salt veins and half-buried ruins of elder ages.
Politically, Rakhana is nominally unified under the banner of the Rakhani Khanate. In practice, it is a mosaic of over a hundred bloodclans and twenty major rings. Allegiances shift with the seasons, marriages, and victories. No single Khan rules in perpetuity. Power flows between rival claimants, each bolstered by hearthholds, fire-oaths, and ancestral debt. The central plains are dominated by old families such as the Khotari Ring, famed for their herds and storm-singers, and the Blackshale Pact, descended from the first ring said to follow the Siriat.
Rakhana’s spiritual life is thick with salt and flame. The high plateau of Karven Ridge holds the ash-circle of Qaramas — the greatest Siriatic site of the Fraki. It is a circle of stones scarred by age and lightning, where once, they claim, a great strider healed the land after the Long Dark. Pilgrims come here in summer to lay banners, burn salt, and whisper names into the earth.
West of Rakhana lies the realm of Temin, separated by the grey-clawed spines of the Mirosk Mountains. Though smaller than Rakhana, Temin is no less fierce. Its soil is red with iron. Its grasses are brittle with drought. The Temul Khanate rules here — or claims to. As with Rakhana, power is fragmented among competing rings. Many trace their lineage to exiles or oathbreakers from the central steppe.
Temin’s identity is marked by struggle: against famine, against Bashri incursions, against its own fractious nobility. Its warriors are hard-eyed and lean. Its shamans are bitter-breathed. Clan alliances here are built on survival, not tradition. That said, Temin remains a cultural hearth for the Fraki. Its southern lakes are homes to story-tents and memorial poles older than any fortress in Flybatia. Its moonsong rites — where warriors sing their lineage beneath the waxing moon — are regarded as the purest form of Fraki chant by many eastern pilgrims.
The realm’s northern plains slope toward the frozen border with Skiftesvik, where Altic Urmans once skirmished with Fraki riders in long-forgotten turf wars. To this day, Temin clans burn silverbark in rites of truce when crossing the northern winds. This tradition is said to have begun when a lost Fraki warband was sheltered by a white-furred Altic kin-keeper in an age of storm and famine.
Along the shores of the great inland Akari Sea in southeastern Rakhana lies a web of twenty to thirty loosely affiliated city-states, kin-rings, and salt-clan enclaves. This region is often overlooked by scholars focused on the plains — a mistake. Here, Fraki culture bends towards the maritime. Canoes of hide and bone skim the brackish waves. Salt-fisher clans trade preserved meat, dried eels, and storm-herbs with inland warbands and even Bashri coastal towns. The sea is sacred. Not in worship, but in fear and contract. It gives. It takes. It remembers who drowned unbound.
These states are ruled not by Khans, but by Tide-Wardens and Salt-Lords — matrilineal positions passed down through ritual seafire and rope-binding ceremonies. Their politics are complex, a web of trade, blood-feud, and rite. Some sea-clans, like the Faresha Salt-Born, trace their ancestry not to Rakhani warbands, but to Siriat who strode across the waves and left hoofprints in coral. Whether myth or memory, it shapes their worldview. They are riders of tides, not of herds. Their songs echo with different winds.
Unlike the steppe-bound Fraki, these peoples wear layered clothes of woven sea-grass and knotted rope. They pierce their lips with bone-salt pins and raise stone-beacon towers covered in driftwood charms. Yet they still speak Rakhan, still sing the rider-laments, and still name their sons with the hoof-marks of old.
The mountainous and fertile highlands of Bashri lie just east of Temin and southeast of Rakhana, forming a natural convergence zone between the Fraki and the Varlimni peoples. While Bashri today is officially a Varlimni-majority realm, many of its central valleys, canyon-villages, and wind-worn ridgelands remain culturally Fraki. These are not recent settlers, but descendants of the old hill-rings — Fraki clans who stormed down from Rakhana centuries ago and carved out territory in the name of the first Sky-Oath Khans.
These Bashric Fraki are no longer nomadic. They ride less, till more, and build stone-ring holds with lookout pyres and cave-sanctuaries. Yet they retain much of the old steppe memory. Their hearth-oaths, blade-names, and fire-rites still echo the Khanic tradition, and though many have taken on Varlimni customs of dress or architecture, their tongues still speak Tema in the home and Rakhan in the shrine.
Intermarriage, conquest, and the shared reverence for the Siriat — who are said to have passed through the southern Bashric passes in ages long buried — have created a hybrid religious culture here. Pilgrimage sites in the Bashric highlands often draw both Varlimni forest-priests and Fraki fire-singers, each interpreting the ancient hoof-shaped cairns in their own ways. Some elders claim the Siriat walked here not to bless the land, but to test it. Others believe the Siriat left behind a riddle, still unsolved.
Bashri's significance to the Fraki is dual: it is a cradle of old conquest, and a faultline of identity. The Khanates claim it as ancestral ground, yet many Bashric Fraki see themselves as something distinct — not ring-bound nomads, but highland kin who carry the fire in stone instead of saddle. To some Fraki elders, this is heresy. To others, it is simply the tide of time.
While the Fraki are a plains people, echoes of their culture stretch far beyond Frakal. In the highlands of Bashri, Fraki-descended warbands once conquered entire valleys. They left behind oaths, names, and flame-temples. Though many have been assimilated into the more sedentary Varlimni population, their surnames, saddle-blessings, and war-rites remain. Among the Yrannic Hordes of the east, Fraki bloodlines mix with others. Some say there are kin-rings in those high deserts who speak a forgotten dialect of Tema and light fire-piles with the old symbols still etched into their bone-knives.
Urban Fraki exist too, though rarely by choice. In border cities such as those in Flybatia or Rostoq, Fraki exiles, orphans, or outcast warriors have established fringeward camps. These are smoke-wrapped shanties where story-chants are sung quietly by firelight, and children are taught not to forget the name of their last true fire. Some serve in mercenary bands, bringing Fraki tactics to bear for coin. Most elders, however, spit upon the idea.
The Fraki diaspora carries with it all the marks of dislocation: borrowed customs, broken hearths, and hybrid oaths that speak of both loss and resilience. Yet even in exile, their words run with rhythm. Their knives remember the name of their rider-fathers.
“They do not gallop, but they ride. The salt clans speak of waves as you or I speak of wind. Their steeds are boats. Their herds are shoals. Yet when they name the ancestors, we speak the same words.”
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