Nakaal
The first civilization known to exist in the Great Ring was the Nakaal. They were an ethnic group of the Kikipua, and the Naga are descended from their lower castes. The Nakaal were a highly advanced magical society, mostly due to the gifts of the 'High Nakaal' who ruled. But their magical gifts required a terrible price, and the attempts to maintain their magical power ultimately led to their downfall.
During its heyday, the Nakaal ruled nearly all of the islands in the Great Ring. The only exceptions were Chichyū Islands which were already the realm of the Kitsunejin, and the islands of the far north, which the Nakaal considered barren and inhospitable, and ceded to the Zmei. This is before any humans arrived in the islands, and before the great journey of the Mu'o'a brought them from across the sea. They called their empire Muria, and nothing since its fall has ruled as much.
The High Nakaal were born different from the common folk. The most obvious sign of their difference was the absence of eyes. Instead, they had patches of skin that were sensitive to light and spiritual energies. This was only the exterior marker of a more significant difference, however - the High Nakaal could also manipulate those spiritual energies to perform magic. However, their methods were destructive to those energies. Unlike the magic users descended from the Clarati, the High Nakaal could not use their own internal energies without destroying themselves. Instead, they harvested the spiritual energies of others, harnessing their souls to their own and using them to power their magics.
In the early days of the empire, the High Nakaal fueled their powers entirely from the spirits of animals. But as Muria grew and developed, the needs of the people and their rulers grew as well. Animal sacrifices expanded to enormous proportions, but they still struggled to supply the desired power. Criminals were added to the sacrifices first, and these more potent sacrifices served for a time. But the need for more energy did not cease, and criminals could not keep the fires burning forever. Additionally, the low Nakaal were restless and unhappy - they saw more and more arrests and sacrifices, and feared a future where nobody was safe. Fearing a rebellion, the High Nakaal sought another source of souls.
They cast magical tendrils deep into The Dream, reaching out into realms beyond their own. There, they connected various islands in the Great Ring with places where they sought fresh spirits. Many creatures followed the paths laid down between the realms, lost and wandering through The Dream to emerge in lands both strange and familiar. The ways of The Dream had followed lines of similarity, and while many worlds were connected, each person dragged through The Dream emerged in a place similar to where they left. In this way did the many human societies emerge into the Islands.
The High Nakaal believed they had succeeded. They saw the humans as ready fuel for their magics - they possessed a potency similar to the Low Nakaal, but did not have the numbers or the technological sophistication to stand against the empire. But humans are not all who the spells had drawn into this world - they also brought the Clarati.
At first, the Clarati left the Nakaal alone. They were interested in the new world they found themselves in, and set out to explore it. Their magical skills were the equal of any in the Empire and they rapidly proved that they could not be effectively contained. The High Nakaal reacted badly to this turn of events. They lashed out at the Clarati, trying to subdue them and make them compliant sacrifices. In their turn, the Clarati attacked. They severed the spiritual links that held the magics of Muria together, and brought about the collapse of its infrastructure. This set the human population free, and they attacked every Nakaal they could reach, high and low. Between them, the Clarati and the humans drenched the islands in Nakaal blood, and only those who could hide survived.
The collapse of Muria was swift and catastrophic. The connections to other realms shattered with the other magical infrastructure of the empire, stranding the human population in their new home. For generations after the war, the Clarati would seek out any High Nakaal that still existed, often wiping out whole communities to destroy a single eyeless individual. The low Nakaal took to killing any child born without eyes, to forestall any Clarati attack. Over time, the low Nakaal became the Naga, the Aeta, and the Chilseongsin. Stories of blind souleaters faded into distant legend, and new tales rose to take their place.
The Nakaal are long gone, and their works have vanished into dust and ashes. But they had left their mark upon the Million Islands, in the form of the creatures they brought there. Humans, Clarati, and other things traveled into this world on paths created by the Nakaal, and the current world is, in a way, their legacy.
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