Eastern Tritons
Despite a peninsula dividing them, western and eastern tritons have many common cultural features. Firstly, religion: Eastern and Western Astralist cults can all be seen as branches of the same creed, with pilgrims providing an idea exchange network, traveling back and forth around the peninsula, or taking shortcuts through the mountain passes.
The two tritons communities also share many values, like openness, trust, and sincerity. In the West, the Mind Reef and the diffuse empathy it causes act as a guarantor for honesty, making hidden agendas hard to conceal. In the East, a very strict honor code takes the place of the Astral Shard, with people uploading vows and promises at the cost of their lives. Eastern tritons are brutally honest and demand the same from everybody, outsiders included: lying is seen as a sin, not only a character failure. Their blunt truth-spewing, often deliberately taunting, is a way to test the interlocutor and assess their trustworthiness. Once a person is considered sincere the tritons will accept them with open arms. Breaking that trust is a crime, and many tongueless pirates can attest to the severity of the punishment. The rites that seal deals and pacts are more complicated than in the West, with pain and blood often involved to assure the commitment of the two parties.
The east coast of the peninsula is not shielded by shallow waters and many islands like the west and has been a target for conquest by many. The Orc kingdom has repeatedly attempted to put a foothold on the peninsula, succeeding only in founding small settlements that eventually all flip to the Confederacy. Orcs are notoriously good at taking land but bad at keeping it, more interested in the glory of battle than in infrastructure building and administration.
Tritons are unconsciously complicit in these recurring invasions, as they are enamored with narratives of resistance and defiance. These two nations of proud and honor-bound warriors are in a hostile yet symbiotic relationship, a perpetuating cycle of victories and defeats that fuel their collective spirits. Proof of that is the highly stylized battles, relying more on direct one-on-one melee combat rather than more efficient tactics, sometimes using the archaic method of the champions’ duel to determine the winner.
As the civil war made the orcs look inward, the Tritons started some uncharacteristically aggressive action against the orcish territory, nominally to secure their position with strategic outposts, but also, in a way, to taunt their enemy to “come out and play”.
The fighting spirit of the tritons and their admiration for resilience, physical and mental, mirror the astralist currents that originated here. In the East, the relationship between the mind and the world is not a dialogue but a confrontation, where the will has first to impose itself on reality. Here, the ascetic bent of astralism is brought to the extreme, with wise men relinquishing all material comforts to transcend the mundane. Outsiders lumped all these ascetic practitioners under the improper name Fakirs, even if fakirs are just one sect, albeit the most striking of them.
The Mana Field can be manipulated by focusing on just one of its colors to gain some predictable patterns. For example, alchemists use ingredients and mixtures because they focus on the red mana of Substance, while the practitioners of the Scribal Arts use shapes to wield the yellow mana of Form.
Fakirs use meditation and visualization to manipulate the Magenta Mana of Cognition, as other Astralists but they also use the very rare approach of manipulating the Green Mana of Vitality. Fakirs use controlled breathing and complex body positions to manipulate mana into spell-knots. Most surprising is their use of carefully managed self-harm as an incantation method: sticking pins or even blades in specific parts of their body, they can do what an “ordinary” wizard would do with gestures, chanting, and waving of a wand. Fakirs put themselves deliberately into discomforting situations like hunger, sleep deprivation, or fevers to access unique spells.
Fakirs focus on Green Mana both as a tool and as a goal: they have perfect control over their bodily functions and can easily transform their body, both in shape and substance. One of the ultimate feats, attempted by Fakirs who feel death coming, is to become “sentient water” and merge into the sea. This expertise makes them renowned healers and people from far away come to see them, hoping their strange method could cure the uncurable. Some of these methods, like acupuncture, have seen some diffusion, while others, like being hugged by chains piercing the muscles, have remained confined on the East Coast of the Peninsula despite their efficacy.
Interestingly, Orcs have similar practices concerning Vitality manipulation, like piercings, scarifications, and other body modifications, but the two cultures will deny any connection despite the obvious similarity.
