Ashling
The gluttonous daughters of the Ashy Mother.
Ashlings serve, in a sense, as the middle ground between the solitary Palespawn huntresses and the organized cult comprising the Midnighters, as far as the threat presented is concerned. While a Palespawn can be handled by a well-armed traveler and is mostly just a nuisance even for a hamlet and while the Midnighters' prongs can make a village disappear within the night, the Ashling raiders stands on even ground with the villages of Anicoja. Sometimes they sack the place; sometimes they are driven off from their feasting grounds and their camps torched. Unlike the Palespawn, who are typically subsistence hunters, and unlike the Midnighters, who take their victims as cattle (and are believed to do any number of other things with them) and only do so to maintain their secrecy & reputation, the Ashlings do not see their raids as grim necessity. The Ashlings just want to feast. The corest tenet of their tribe's philosophy is that if it isn't a blockhead, it's food, and Anicoja is a land of plenty. This planet is their feasting grounds.
Fortunately, the Ashlings have slowed their expansion from their territory in the Triad of Ash in recent years. Some believe this is because their collection of clans has grown too large and unstable to expand without exganigin in internal conflict. Others believe they're gearing up for something big and conserving their resources and boredom until then.
As a sidenote, the accepted English terms for the ash-hued race of blockhead that constitutes the Ashlings are "silver" and "asher". "Ashy" was found to too closely resemble "Ashling" in the Yansaw dialect.
Naming Traditions
Family names
"of the Ashlings" - English suffix for any members of the Ashlings that, for whatever reason, are on speaking terms with the meat;
"ex Ashling" - English suffix for any proud former members of the Ashlings
Culture
Major language groups and dialects
The Ashlings communicate exclusively using their pheromones. They are unwilling to learn Blockhead Signlang and most are illiterate in Blockhead Braille.
Culture and cultural heritage
The Ashlings are perhaps the least cohesive of the Five-and-One Tribes that actually qualify as tribes. The clans war between themselves as much as they war against the other species. The only thing that truly ties them together is their respect for their mutual ancestor, the Ashy Mother, and their opinions on other species.
Shared customary codes and values
The Ashlings place a strong emphasis on the authority of their clan chieftesses and of the Ashy Mother. If an Ashling refuses to respect either of her mothers-by-authority, she can either shut up or fuck off and start a new clan. This is how every clan is formed-- someone, usually a powerful, bored, and/or egotistical veteran reveler, vows to leave her mother clan and start her own, bringing any admirers and usually a couple slaves with her. Such secession is seldom immediately punished, but it usually sets the two clans at odds with each other.
There's also the whole "if it's not a blockhead, it's food" thing. This much holds true throughout all the clans. It varies by clan, however, what else qualifies as food. To some, the other blockhead races (including or excluding the other gray race which formed the Slatespawn) also qualify as food. To even fewer, other clans' girls qualify as food. And in the most desperate and pathetic of Ashling settlements, a free Ashling must watch her back around her kin and even family.
Average technological level
The technology of the Ashlings is all over the place, as can be expected of a tribe founded with very specific knowledge in one scientific field, very little knowledge elsewhere, and an extremely brutal philosophy.
In terms of technology both military and architectural, the Ashlings are approximately on-par with the darker-skinned Slatespawn, perhaps a couple notches lower. They forge metal, boil leather, shape boards, collect rainwater, and sometimes even pave their streets with flagstone.
In terms of medicine, however, Ashling techniques are rivaled only by the city physicians who have entire institutes established to teach them how to heal people. Sickness is rare, especially for how many wounds their raiders earn, and prognoses for infections of any sort are generally quite positive. They boil their water, keep their tools as clean as they can, wash their hands, administer plant-derived poultices and drugs for all sorts of purposes, quarantine the ill, and bathe regularly. This didn't make much sense to non-blockheads until Beet-Red revealed to the merfolk of Thriving and thus to the whole of urban Anicoja that the Ashy Mother was the head doctor and chef on the FIEBE.
Common Dress code
The Ashlings are not overly fond of clothing, wearing clothes strictly for protection, either from the elements or from injury. For the former, simple shoes and boots keep the mud and sharp foliage off one's feet, while hats, hoods, and cloaks keep off the rain. For the latter, plates of metal or boiled leather deflect the blows of prey. Most Ashling clothing is made of wood, leather, metal, and bone. Plant-based textiles are very rare.
Though their armories are only a little less advanced than those of the Slatespawn, their weapons and armor are designed with a much different philosophy. The Slatespawn cover their whole bodies in armor and arm themselves to kill quickly, cleanly, and safely. The Ashlings, meanwhile, are armed to facilitate their gluttony. Their weapons are designed to intimidate, maim, incapacitate, and/or help devour. Clubs, spears, pitchforks, cleavers, and lassos abound. Their armor, then, is built only to protect the bits that would be most vulnerable during the process of eating their victims with their favored organs. It serves as an indicator of precisely which orifice one wants to avoid, in a way. Sometimes the armor is plain and slick to prevent the prey from grappling, other times it's spiked and adorned to intimidate and also prevent the prey from grappling.
Art & Architecture
The camps and towns that the Ashlings build can be quite impressive, if you can get past the viscera and bone-trophies. No two clans build and decorate in precisely the same way, as the only architectural traditions are oral in nature. When a clan splits from its mother clan, they forget much of the old design and so must fill in the gaps with their own ingenuity.
The chieftess's hut, house, or tent is invariably the biggest residence in town. Most other buildings are also residences, and it is customary for a working woman's house to contain her work space.
Smaller-scale Ashling art is dominated by sculpture. The aforementioned bone-trophies are the most well-known example, built from the bones and sinews of their prey, mainly to intimidate their enemies and inspire their own. It's ghoulish, but one must admit that the Ashlings can get quite creative with skeletons.
Among the clans to the west, among the dykes of Arsonist's Crucible, the Ashlings have also taken to carving petroglyphs in the basalt ridges and remains of the ancients' megastructures. The subjects of these glyphs are usually past conquests and raids, successful or otherwise, but occasionally a petroglyph is employed instead to record a bit of knowledge or tell a story in image form. These petroglyphs tend to betray a general poor grasp of perspective and proportion, though it is clear that this is not a stylistic choice, as there exist numerous petroglyphs which are more gracefully carved.
Common Customs, traditions and rituals
There are few, if any, customs and traditions that function and perform exactly the same throughout every clan.
Birth & Baptismal Rites
It varies wildly between clans how likely it is for an Ashling bearer to unintentionally get pregnant. Some clans treat treat the act of fucking a sire as a dirty act only performed out of necessity and others use their sires like stress balls. When an Ashling does discover that she is pregnant, it is common practice that she quit raiding and pick up a trade while she waits for the pregnancy to be over. When the kid's out, the mother will then either continue to ply her new trade for the clan or hand the kid off to someone else and go back to raiding.
Coming of Age Rites
Whenever an Ashling bearer turns fifteen (18.75 Earthly years) or so, she gets with the other young adults of the clan and starts raiding easy targets at the chieftess's discretion. Coming back from such a raid with a scar or a meal is the Ashling's preferred division between youth and adulthood.
Funerary and Memorial customs
Deaths outside of conflict are few, thanks to the tribe's uncanny medicinal knowledge. When an Ashling does die at camp, standard practice is to check if any of her parts could be used as a transplant before eating the rest. The trend with this practice is that, the larger the clan, the more extravagant the meal cooked from the corpse is.
Common Taboos
Poisons and other methods of making a body inedible are very frowned-upon in Ashling warfare.
Ideals
Beauty Ideals
To many Ashlings, an Ashling is at her most beautiful if she's currently churning some poor fool, be it within a conventional or an unusual chamber of her body. Barring that, the fat and scarred are also the objects of much attraction, as their blubber and wounds are trophies from their revelry. They're also the most liable to form a new clan, perfect for anyone dissatisfied with the original clan's matriarch or hunting grounds to try something new.
When it comes to the perceptions of Ashlings by other tribes of blockhead, Ashlings are, generally, seen as exceptionally ugly. Even other species who deal with the both Ashlings and other tribes tend to pick up on the somewhat striking visual dissimilarities-- taller heads, missing or shrunken foot-cartilage, club-tails-- that many Ashlings, particularly among the clans that split from the progenitor Ashborn clan early, are prone to. This is because said Ashling clans were slower to discover that the Brier-granted immunity to inbreeding no longer applied.
Courtship Ideals
As is prevalent among the other tribes where Blockhead Signlang is not understood (bar the Midnighters), Ashling sires do not get much of a say in things. Reveling bearers will pull sires aside for a quick fuck and either toss her into the mud, incorporate her into the harem, or eat her.
The only way out of this abuse is for the sire to kill the bearer that would have her way with her. This is not the easiest task, as sires seldom know more about fighting that what they got from watching bearers roughhouse. A sire that manages to kill a bearer and does not flee the clan tends to either, depending on jurisdiction, be killed herself or be marked in some way to indicate her prowess and, to varying degrees, the sire is then treated with as much respect as a mute Ashling could expect to get. Such sires are known in English as "proven" and by numerous other appellations out in the sticks.
Of course, Ashling revelers do partake in romance as well, and not strictly with other bearers (although those who treat sires as people do get weird looks). These romantic bonds are developed through revelry and raids and tend to last until one of them dies or, more rarely, forsakes the clan to start her own.
Relationship Ideals
Relationships among the Ashlings, both platonic and romantic, revolve around fighting at each others' side, sharing food, and casual sex. One's raiding crew is like one's sorority, if sororities as they exist in human space were somehow more inclined towards to revelry, violence, and vore.
Major organizations
They have camps and villages all throughout Anicoja but particularly in the west.
Diverged ethnicities
Encompassed species
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