The Sparri Peoples
The Vast Hunters
The Sparri took to the introduction of space travel and the opening of the interstellar borders like few other anachronistic cultures. For hundreds of generations, the Sparri had known only the brutal ecology of their own world. Their environment had instilled in them incredible resilience, ingenuity, and thirst for adventure. Peace with Union, knowledge of the wider galaxy, space travel, and the discovery of the subglacial underworld all fit within their cultural narratives of exodus.
The Sparri value good stories and tests of strength and character above all other things. The underworld, with its mythic megafauna, and the many frontiers of Union space are the perfect testing grounds for young Sparri warriors and technoshamans seeking to write Sagas of their own.
The traditional warrior culture of the Sparri venerates wanderlust and feats of strength. Most Sparri see death in battle or far away from home as preferable to the alternatives (and share many songs that remind them of such). They are organized into numerous clans, the chiefs of which have some autonomy under Union rule. Disputes are arbitrated through councils of elders in Ynn or via a local domstol, though in practice many young Sparri reject these authorities. Clan affiliation can easily be identified by other Sparri based on the full-body tattoos that most Sparri accumulate throughout their lives – recording their own deeds, stories, clan, and family directly onto their flesh. Old Sparri shamans and warriors are often covered head to toe in tattoos and are highly respected by their younger peers. It is common for technoshamans to tattoo circuit diagrams and other old religious symbols into their flesh, or wear cabling and transistors as jewellery.
Under the Third Committee, the Sparri enjoy a broad guarantee of galactic rights. Many of their enterprising warriors have organized themselves into mercenary companies and are in high demand on account of their proficiency in close-quarters combat. Of all partnerships, it is the association of Sparri mercenaries with the Voladores that is best known. The enigmatic spacefarers regularly employ experienced Sparri mercenaries as their muscle, housing them aboard their ships alongside their families.
History
Most Union historians and astrocartographers suspect that the harsh world of Sparr was seeded as a result of a computer error, likely caused when a pre-Fall generation ship – the Yggdrasil – passed through the outermost band of an extragalactic gamma-ray burst. Through cross-referencing Union and local records, the first landfall on Sparr is estimated to have taken place circa 1900u. The bulk of the best extant writing on Sparr and the Sparri peoples – one of the few cultures to have had an outsize impact on galactic affairs – has been done by Eris Brittam, an independent historian of the Ten. A summary of her work follows.
The first colonists from the Yggdrasil found Sparr much the same as it is now: blanketed in a harsh global tundra, tortured by howling world-storms, any habitable surfaces buried beneath kilometer-thick pack ice. Even now, Sparr’s ice is perennial across most of the planet, save for a comparatively warm equator.
Unknown to the initial colonists, the world beneath the ice was habitable. Relatively warm and illuminated by a diffuse light-through-ice, the caverns below were home to vast herds of amphibious fauna hunted by a small megafauna population. All of this was built upon a substrate of hardy flora – dark, to absorb light, and clustered around the great thermal vents that breathe core-heat into the subglacial world.
Though Sparr could support life, it was a difficult world upon which to make a home, much less to find sanctuary upon in less than ideal circumstances. Essentially shipwrecked, the first colonists attempted to settle near their landfall site, a far northern depression in the ice where subglacial thermal vents had created a pocket of “warm” land above – the Yuga Pocket.
Trapped on Sparr’s surface, the majority of the landfall population perished. With many left in space, aboard the Yggdrasil, and only a tenuous foothold in the Yuga Pocket, the colony’s leaders adopted dramatic measures to survive: any computational technology brought down to the surface was cannibalized, devoted to long-range scouting and life-support systems. Despite having already entered its ICARUS landing orbit, the Yggdrasil was rerouted at great cost and used to scout for habitable land. The repositioning of the great ship burned away the remaining fuel stores, trapping it above the world.
Records – suppressed and later uncovered – noted that planetside food stores dwindled so far that colonists eventually resorted to postmortem cannibalism. Meanwhile, the ship suffered waves of cascading technical failures that caused its genetic banks to fail, one after another.
These sacrifices paid off. After months of orbital surveying, colonists aboard the Yggdrasil discovered a route to the habitable equator. Salvage work began on the ship, and a second landfall was launched. The first landfall group, isolated in the Yuga Pocket, packed up their equipment and began a treacherous overland journey – a trek that would take years and cost thousands of lives.
The second landfall proved far more viable than the first. By the time the colonists from the Yuga Pocket reached their destination, the second group had established a colony site – Ynn – that has lasted to the present day, and had successfully landed the Yggdrasil. Now established, Ynn grew, ignorant of the vast subglacial world below its stable, if dangerous, foothold.
The Sparri divide long stretches of time into “sagas” – less defined by a rigid set of years than by the coming and going of cultural eras. The first age on Sparr, the Dawn Saga, were a lesson in the danger the world posed to humans. The next few centuries made known the danger that the survivors posed to each other – this was the Familiekrig Saga, the first age of strife on Sparr.
Out from its desperate beginnings, a prosperous Iron Age society grew around Ynn, built upon an old clan system imported by the colonists. Soon, other settlements were established and the full spread of the habitable surface was mapped. Early records indicate the establishment of at least three other colony sites along the equator, and a fourth that was re-established in the Yuga Pocket following an expedition to recover the valuable technology left behind after the exodus.
As populations grew over the course of the first planetside millennium, scarcity and clan politics stoked old tensions. Raiding and skirmishes between warbands became more frequent, especially as old technology from the Yuga Pocket was brought back to the habitable zone. This period of warring clans and Ynn, nominally neutral, is known among the Sparri as the Familiekrig Saga, and it occupies a tense, fraught space in their history. Modern Sparri generally regard the Familiekrig Saga as a shameful period of inter-clan violence. It is widely acknowledged as a costly, foundational mistake that, nevertheless (like so many other early tragedies) led to the creation of peaceful methods of resolving conflict. It was the events of the Familiekrig Saga that birthed the domstol grievance-hearing practice and saw Ynn declared sanctuary ground.
But before the acceptance of domstol spread and Ynn achieved its current status – before the Familiekrig Saga came to an end – another change took place. It was into this bloody, freezing mess of clan violence that Union first arrived.
In 3348u, a Union Colonial Mission evident-recontact team crashed on Sparr, going down just beyond Ynn’s sphere of influence. The team, already half-dead, was slaughtered by the warband that arrived to greet them; their ship and the team’s supporting NHP, Prudent Interval, were hauled off to Ynn as war spoils.
With no guarantee of survival, and limited opportunities to contact Union, Prudent Interval took an unconventional approach: the NHP collated all pre- and post-Fall intel regarding the Yggdrasil, extrapolated sociocultural–theological permutations over time, and portrayed themselves as the local prime deity, Ynneval. Prudent Interval, now posing as the goddess Ynneval, claimed the Union team had been her djevel – demonjailers who had cruelly kept her from her people.
Under Ynneval’s direction, Sparri society changed rapidly. The clans were unified – willingly or by force – into a confederacy of families centered around a hub of trade and culture, Ynn. Meanwhile, Ynn blossomed into a temple-city devoted to Ynneval-Returned. Peace spread among the clans, the worst of the Familiekrig concluded, and domstol was enshrined as a right. This marked the end of the Familiekrig Saga; unfortunately, this peace was not to last. The second age of strife, the Ynneval Saga, was soon to begin with another arrival.
Never deterred by initial failure, Union returned to Sparr several hundred years later, around 4000u. By that time, Sparr was ruled by a class of religious leaders pledged to Ynneval. Below them were the traditional dynastic clan leaders, then warriors, artisans, and common folk. Ynneval had fallen well into cascade, and seems to have adopted her survival narrative as truth: she believed herself a god, and showed favour to clans that pleased her by providing them with copies of herself that they could take back to their temples and shrines.
Union forces, under the directive of the Second Committee, identified Ynn as a hostile central power and laid siege to the holy city. The initial spot-bombing campaign crippled the Sparri armed forces – an easy feat, as their martial technology had not progressed beyond Iron Age levels. Most Sparri warriors fought with weapons forged of bone, wood, and local iron, while the ancient metals brought down from the Yggdrasil were reserved for nobles and priests.
There was little ground combat after the first landing. Sparr’s finest warriors, draped in holy texts and girded in ancient armours, carrying icons and living talismans gifted by Ynneval, were simply outgunned by Union’s soldiers; bone and iron were no match for rifles and energy weapons. Ynneval’s central temple was sacked by Union’s forces and her casket destroyed.
Ynn fell, and the other clans along the equator surrendered soon after. It is a point of pride among those of the Yuga Pocket that their ancestors never surrendered to Union.
Over the next few centuries, reconstruction took place in fits and starts. Many Sparri clans – the hardy clans of the Yuga Pocket chief among them – believed that Ynneval’s death was justifed because of her weakness and inability to fight Union’s more powerful gods. Other clans, especially those that suffered the most during Union’s reconquest, remain resentful to the present day.
The current period of Sparr’s history started with the beginning of the Vast Saga. As Union secured its hold on the world and began to root out any Ynneval’s cascading children, the subglacial inhabitants of Sparri finally took notice.
It was purely by chance that Union’s campaign had made its most thunderous presence known in some places where the ice was thinnest. The massive sonic disturbances caused by the initial bombing campaigns attracted an array of subglacial megafauna to these places along the habitable band. It was on the shores of Ynn that the first of the Vast, as they would be named, burst out from the waters. It stood thirty meters tall – a humanoid titan draped in long folds of heavy fur. Union forces brought it down before it could reach the city, but its emergence changed Sparr forever; the long-prophesied subglacial underworld was real, and it was there for the Sparri to explore and exploit.
Religion
Despite significant reforms over the centuries, most religious Sparri still venerate the machine spirits. This is especially true of the technoshamans that comprise the top echelon of Sparri society. Modern Ynnervan dogma is split between those who view machine spirits as separate entities from NHPs and those who see NHPs themselves as spirits worthy of veneration. Most technoshamans are fully aware of the origins and nature of NHPs, and many even argue that the mysterious nature of true NHPs only helps their case. A technoshaman wouldn’t argue that a comp/con unit is a spirit – it is clearly as a machine.
A small, but growing subset of the Sparri technopriesthood has begun to worship MONIST-1. They view MONIST-1 as the progenitor of all NHPs, thus the most powerful by right.
Education
Sparri technoshamans are educated in Ynneval’s halls and have a close relationship with technology that makes them unconventional but very effective pilots. Similarly, Sparri warriors are often employed as mercenaries due to their perceived fearlessness in battle. Like all stereotypes, however, these are broad assertions about an increasingly large, integrated, and multicultural society. The Sparri diaspora is enormous (having surpassed the population of its homeworld in 4696u), and its presence can be seen in all corners of known space.
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