Asa
The people who are no more
The Asa were an ancient pre-historic culture that arose in western Khelegan, at what historians refer to as the West Khelegaian Cradle of Civilization, on the southern banks of a river whose original name has been lost to time. The nearby Bay of Sharassa, into which the river empties, marks the furthest point south any explorer has ventured in all recorded history, and returned alive.
Little is known of the Asa, save what survives in the lore of their nearest known modern descendants, the Tanaari of the Great Khelegaian Desert.
The First Migration
Millennia before The Godswar, for many generations, the Asa had dwelt in relative peace and harmony, trading across the river with their Proto-Targotian neighbors and living a pastoral lifestyle, herding and farming with the flow of the seasons. Around 1000BTC, coinciding with the Conjunction of the Suns that is spoken of only in the oldest legends of modern day societies, fully one half of the Asa population vanished without word or trace, disappearing within the space of a week to never been seen or heard from again. Even among the Tanaari, the closest living modern relatives of those who remained, this "1st Asa Migration" is one of the past's greatest mysteries, and is believed by some to be a myth (some have postulated it is a legend that hides some darker or grimmer event that resulted in a massive reduction of the Asa population at the time).
The Second Migration
In the 6th century BTC, a plague known to legend as "the Silence" struck the West Khelegaian Cradle of Civilization, ravaging the Proto-Targotian and Asa cultures who lived there. Though the sickness killed its victims quickly, limiting the severity of individual outbreaks, the sheer number and repetition of outbreaks over the course of a few short years led both cultures to abandon their ancestral homelands, hoping to flee the plague's recurring devastation.
Though the Proto-Targotians, who had always held a fondness for the sea, moved north along the coast to establish their mighty capital Targos, the Asa migrated inland, following the course of the river to its main tributary and moving up into what at that time were the central highlands of Khelegan to take up their herding lifestyle on the vast grassy plains.
The Desert Folk
Sometime during the 4th or 5th centuries BTC, the Asa encountered westward-migrating D'itri, exiles from the far eastern country of Ekkac. The two cultures welcomed each other, with the peaceable Asa feeding and helping their new neighbors survive, and the D'itri providing surprisingly advanced knowledge of agriculture and animal husbandry, gleaned from their generations of servitude under the Ekkaci.
For several centuries the two peoples interacted and traded, yet remained distinct. When the Targotian Cataclysm struck however, their lifestyle and world was changed drastically and forever, as new mountains raised in the west caused the once grassy and fertile highlands of central Khelegan to turn rapidly to desert. Thrust into a new struggle for survival in an increasingly harsh landscape, the two cultures began to fuse and merge, shedding any insistence upon distinction in the face of the death of their peoples.
It was during this time that the wind god Sorya-Dama arose in Khelegan, and finding the sands of the desert much to their liking, took pity upon the Asa and D'itri. Teaching them how to survive, the wind god gave their chosen people a new Spirit, forever bonding them together and severing the past, giving rise to the nomadic Desert Folk of Khelegan, the Tanaari.
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