Yagi

[This one gets a bit personal. I’m going to save it for the end, when I get there.]
There was a time the world ended in all places but one.
That one untouched place was not special. The people there were not destined. They were not particularly wise or particularly strong, and they had certainly not seen the devastation that would fall just short of their homes. They were simply a lucky people, fortunate enough to be in a particular place at a particular time.
The ground rippled and toppled the edges of their forests. The sky above roiled through impossible colors and violent weather. The ground beneath slumped from melted permafrost and then froze back the instant after.
Then it ceased, just as gradually as it had built. It felt that whatever had its jaws on the world had grown bored with worrying it and let it roll away.
It was not a particularly thorough end, as far as ends go.
The people saw a world beyond them twisted, but alive. Broken and strange, but in ways that felt different rather than alien. It was the most awful, inviting kind of normal.
Most of them stayed and recovered. A few ventured out, seeking the truths of what had happened.
Stories came back of sights like walking a battlefield after a war.

The decision was simple:
The Yagi would stay within their borders until the world found them again.

So the world rose again, as gradual as it fell.
Old allies came with surprise and fearful stories, with trades motivated first by survival and second by goodwill. It was a gentle connection, then a forgotten one, and then a routine.
Routine was enough. Yagi again struck out into the world, coming back with stories of a world living anew. More followed them. More. Arteries of travel slowly filled again with new life, carrying people far and away. Gentle, forgotten, routine.
Thus passed a generation, maybe two.
The end was not particularly thorough, but it was patient.
The strangeness came in sudden waves, without pattern or precedent. The trees near the furthest villages buckled and warped. The air around them crackled with strange energies.
Some of the returned travelers recognized it as some telltale sign of magic they’d seen in the outside world, miracles that proved themselves possible, but always muted from what they were told to expect. Not one of them had ever managed to learn the skill of working those acts for themselves.
All they had from there was guesswork. It was an act of chance, of an angered god, of some accidental ritual, of the aftershocks of the Cataclysm .
Apocryphally the truth comes by way of a group of scouts, unknown to the village they found themselves in except by the mess and ruckus they left behind. There was just enough time for peace of mind from their leaving before another wave of disaster tore the town in half.
Dead long enough to be forgotten, it remembered the one place it hadn’t reached.
Those scouts had left nothing behind but a brief impression.
The other evidence came gradually, through stories, through discovered logs and directions, through chasing faded trails. Through careful calculations. Through further chance.
The end could never reach them, even now, where they lived. It could not reach them where they traveled, marked as they were.
That mark was a thing of memory, the memory of the places they lived and the people they were. They were known as the untouched survivors. They were known.
But that knowing stretched away as they traveled, a long and harsh way away. And if you forgot one of those far-wanderers, if they vanished from too many thoughts, that presence would stretch to breaking.
Enough to cause a wound, where the magic could get in where it had never touched before. Quick to heal, but leaving that memory ever weaker.
The end let the Yagi know it had not forgotten them.
If they faded, so would the story that any had survived that old disaster. The story told thereafter would be of an end that swept the world entire. The end would claim everything.
All that ambient ending would settle into that space it had been denied. The scattered echoes of the cataclysm, long-fed and poisonous and angry, would rush in to fill that untouched little vacuum.
It would be a spark of ruin, collapsed and concentrated and furious, set to finally finish what it had begun so long ago.
The end let the Yagi know they would be the last thing to be forgotten.

[From “Noted Apocalypses of the People of Lyx”, Chapter FINAL of ??? ]
[Okay, maybe not for the end of THIS paper.]
[Some may think I’m jumping the gun to include this here before I publish it, but….]
[Call me a trailblazer for getting the first ever pre-citation.]
[So I’ll give you what you wanted in return. All’s fair.]

The Yagi walk the world carrying a terrible tension.
It is a figurative thing, in the shape of the things they must do. If they roam too long that they cease to be part of their home, that home grows weaker. If they don’t roam enough, the other people of Lyx will forget them. If all their focus becomes straddling this balance, nothing else will define them.
Put succinctly, there’s an old saying: “You must not forget the world. The world must not forget you. You must not forget yourself.”
The goats of the Nosevi Range have thus slowly and carefully extended their presence back across the world. Their reach is still fairly short - they only have regular contact with the Amkha, and only really the Helleborus at that - but even that is far better than it once was.

Forgetting Home

Knowing they’d otherwise have little reason to get out into the world, adolescent Yagi are encouraged to travel as far as they dare and experience as much as they can along the way. Most of the solitary goats seen beyond the range come by way of this, the old practice known as Forgetting Home.
Before a Yagi sets out on this journey, they’ll work with their friends and family on making a pair of identical coats, one to be carried with them, and one left behind. This is a way of holding their presence in the community, some ballast in case they’re lost out in the world or choose never to return.
If they return, they’re given a choice: surrender and burn the coat of their journey and return lastingly to their original home, or burn the one here and leave, free of the long burden of memory.

[There’s also “decide to stay but then decide to leave again later.”]
[This is exactly the same as leaving, but you make everyone angry instead of sad before you go.]
[Know that one from experience.]

Names and the Sharing of Legends

Even minus a cloak or an artifact or another physical thing, the presence of a Yagi lingers in their name. Communities keep careful track of the names of those scattered or lost, striking them out or letting them gently loose into obscurity only as needed or necessary.
Incidentally, this is also the reason for the goats’ reputations as being surprisingly gifted singers. Tales of folk heroes and myths and those who otherwise made their mark on Lyx are told and retold with riffs and tweaks and cadences, a way of keeping them from going stale through repetition after repetition. This makes the average Yagi a talented balladeer, especially after good food and drink. (That this is their notoriously low tolerance kindling the courage of alcohol alone is, of course, only a rumor.)

[I’d offer that I could do just as well with as without, but you’d probably have to buy me a drink to be sure.]
[Don’t worry, you’ll be the first one.]

This is also why the Yagi sent out on their trip of Forgetting Home are encouraged to make their presence known and leave change in their wake. What better way to be remembered than to be immortalized forever in story and song?

Unseen by the Wyrd

The Yagi understand the Wyrd as the lingering detritus of the apocalypse that would not claim them, and by all metrics the Wyrd treats this like it is so.
Affecting a goat with magic is notoriously hard, much the same as it would be difficult to soak a waterproof coat. It’s certainly possible with the right approach and enough force, but is rarely worth the effort.
This resistance is strong enough that sometimes magic fails to work around the Yagi at all. Speculation why this is so varies, with the leading answer being a matter of direction. While not consistent enough to be wholly proven, it seems to be that magic is weakest when between a Yagi and the long, unseen shadow they cast back towards the Nosevi Range.
[This is incidentally one of the reasons I always carry a compass. You never know.]


[Notes from ${name-to-be-determined-by-datas-still}, Yagi Archivist.]

---

[OLD ARTICLE]
Goats. Hard-headed, stubborn, innately resistant to Wyrd.
Agrarian people that live in the remote north of the Nosevi Range , having very little to do with their southern neighbors- though known among the Amkha , specifically the Helleborous , as willing to trade & reliable if need be. Folksy, talkative, lovers of food and unusually good singers.
While the stereotype is that the Yagi can be grumpy or humorless, in reality they are practical to a fault & have very little patience for what they consider 'nonsense. They seem to carry a genetic disposition to be wholly unaffected by Wyrd, and the phenomenon seems to actively be dampened in the presence of any Yagi.

Watchful yet neutral

Trusik

0

Yagi

-25

Trusik tend not to think much of the goats of the Yagi clan- they merely see them as an oddity in the wastes. The Yagi, however, have wisely identified the Consortium as a threat, and treat them with appropriate apprehension.