Dwellers

"Our people have lived in these land since before your empire was founded, southerner, and we have forgotten more about the trees and mountains that you will ever learn. Cut down our trees, tempt our young with false promises of riches, despoil the land that once was bountiful, but we shall always be here."

Dwellers is the best translation given by themselves to a widely disparate group of people who inhabit the northern continent. Whilst colonists and settlers from Imperial lands have started to create nations and cities in these lands, the Dwellers have occupied them for their entire history. Marginalised by the newcomers, the Dwellers have a rich oral history, a multitude of customs and languages, and a knowledge of the lands they live in that far surpass anything Imperial colonists have achieved.
Creative and less discriminating arrivals from the Empire have realised this rich source of information, and employ Dwellers as scouts and trackers for exploring the deeper interior of the northern continent. More aware and far-sighted long-term residents realised that the northern continent is vast, with hundreds of very different tribes and customs, and widely varying environments, and know that even Dwellers can be unaware of their surroundings.
Despite this, Dweller scouts are almost a necessity for settler caravans heading north across the continent, and a lot of new settlements find themselves adopting a lot of the customs and practices of the locals as a matter of survival. The northern continent is an inhospitable place, with many diseases and dangerous animals. That the Dwellers have thrived in such a place, unlike the Imperials, whose divinely chosen homelands are almost perfect, is testament to the tenacity and skills of this widespread people group.

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Culture

Major language groups and dialects

Whilst there appears to be a linguistic commonality between Dweller tribes, language varies considerably across the continent, and even neighbouring tribes can have very different words for the same things.

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Common Customs, traditions and rituals

All Dwellers appear to worships a generalised pantheon that, whilst has different names for each of them, is based loosely on the group of Secundae known as the Usurpers. Imperial historians and theologians have used this as evidence that this indicates that these lands were once the homelands of all humanity, and where the Imperial people were taken from by the Inheritors after the war against the Usurpers. This is further consolidated by the myth known as 'The Leaving'.
Unfortunately, this association with the Secondae opens up the Dwellers to widespread discrimination, and over-zealous attempts to convert them to worship of the Inheritor gods. Whilst the Dwellers are receptive to these newer gods, they tend to just put them alongside their existing pantheon.

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Common Myths and Legends

Despite their widely disparate cultures and traditions, one myth appears to be universal across all Dweller communities, that of 'The Leaving'. There are many variations of it, but it ultimately can be reduced to the Dwellers being part of a wider group of humanity, and that they are those who remain after the others were taken away after a large event (the nature of which varies). The focus of the myth also varies, with some using it to show how the Dwellers passed some kind of test and were allowed to remain in the lands of their ancestors, but others using it to show that the Dwellers were left behind when others were chosen to be taken somewhere better.

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Female hunter of the Yalow tribe, who live in the uplands near Rynes, the capital of Liras.