Guide to Lower Heaven 3: The Zuri
from the introduction to “Teaming with Life: An exploration of Zuri Folkways” published by [SUBLIMATED]*, Year 189
While the Founders brought the Valley its first architecture, technology, and vestiges of civilization, the Zuri were its first people. Since before the dawn of time on Day 1 of Year 1, the Zuri have lived as a conscious matter extension of of the jungle’s ecosystem, living so close to the forested land, the word “Zuri” in their language refers both to the Valley and they as a people in it.
Despite recognizing each other under this collective name, no central authority speaks for all tribes. Each of the at least six hundred tribes vary in their social construction, but do observe many common customs. Each Zuri tribe links itself in function and spirit to a totem species from the forest— animals primarily, but plants and fungus as well in some cases. Each tribe lives in deep interaction with their surrounding ecology, but treat their chosen totem with special attention. Daily practice and tribal life patterns are shaped by a mix of emulation and stewardship of their chosen species. This means some tribes migrate through territory as food is available, others loop cyclically through the seasons, still others remain immotile, stabilized in ancestral homesites.
Tribes communicate with their immediate neighbors, often in symbiotic relationships that mimic their totem counterparts. A common misconception is that prey-totem Zuri are hunted or eaten by predator-Zuri tribes. While cannabilism does have a place in ceremony among certain tribes, the eating of human flesh is treated with great gravity and insofar as Heaven’s scholars have been able to observe, is not a regularly-practiced trait of any tribe. Rather, it seems tribes of competing and hunting species work to manage the health of local populations of wildlife, meeting in temporary councils to share information and make decisions that will affect each tribe.
The organization of Zuri tribes is also subject to much misinterpretation. It is easy to assume from their primitive technology that Zuri tribes are simply familial groups. While Zuri families do keep the traditional structure of mother, father, young children, and often grandparents or other relatives living together, every Zuri home is a broken one by design.
Core to Zuri identity is the ritual of the lifequest. On the last day of the wet season, marked as the starting day of the Zuri Lunar Calendar) all Zuri tribes cease all work for their most holy day of the year, a dawn to dusk event consumed by a ceremony that the average Heavenite would compare to students graduating from the Youth Spire on their sixteenth year.
On this day, all Zuri who have come of age since the last lifequest ceremony are bade to stand forth, to be ritually ejected from tribal life and stripped of their childhood name. The youth of each tribe are given to the world, and allowed to make a choice of tribe to return to once the world has finished shaping them.
While away, Zuri youth are technically tribeless, though their original tribe remains a deep part of their identity throughout their life. This strange societal mechanism seems to be a way of venting the high emotions of adolescents, and balancing the desire for freedom with the millennial-stretching stability of Zuri tribal life. Upon returning to the tribe of their choosing (often their home tribe, but sometimes that of a mate, or a new favored totem) a Zuri is asked to identify themselves, taking on a new name for themselves that encapsulates their travels, accomplishments, and truths learned in during their abroad, and live beneath this name for their remaining days.
Not all Zuri return to a tribe. Some remain aloof for their duration, living in small roving packs that scavenge where they can and do not observe tribal or city treaties, surviving through a mix of banditry, raiding, and trap-hunting. And others, such as tribal members affected by the Pinyon Events, are permanently banished, posing like the City’s “Stormtouched”, a permanent threat to stability and normal existence. These “Xxiros” are made unwelcome to the food and support of any tribe, and are sometimes struck down if exhibiting erratic behavior or loitering too long in one place. These, and other anomalies and oddities of Zuri life as it has evolved to the present day will each be explored in their own chapters herein.
*This note in Academocratic text notes the work of an author later Sublimated into the Edifice, the highest marker of Wizard achievement. Upon entering into the Edifice all record of individuality and identity are struck from Historical record to prevent corruption in the name of legacy. (also see: ‘The Founders’)
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