NYRVANI

🐱Nyrvani: Honor in the Sand, Claws in the Dark
In the far west of Scorrachai, where the dunes meet the sea and the wind sings stories through canyon walls, live the Nyrvani—feline folk born of sun, salt, and survival. Ranging from nimble sand cats to towering lionfolk, their society thrives on three pillars: clan, pride, and the chase.
Each Nyrvani belongs to a tightly knit clan, where roles are earned and identity is tied to action. Warriors stalk great beasts to feed their people. Merchants trade salt-dried fish, rugged cloth, and polished stone with North Rojourian caravans. Scouts tread the horizon, mapping uncharted dunes and retrieving lost relics. All walk with pride, all defend their name.
"Step where you please. But step on our rugs, and we shall duel."
I. Zafarruq
Nyrvani territory spans the western coast of Scorrachai, where sandstone homes rise like sunbaked cliffs and every door is draped with a tapestry—woven not just with thread, but memory. Passed from claw to claw, these rugs are heirlooms, scratching mats, status symbols, and sacred art.
On the first Swayday of every Chorus, beneath the shifting gaze of what the Luna's moon may provide—be it crescent, full, or veiled in cloud—the Nyrvani prepare for a rite as old as their bloodlines.
They gather outside their village walls in ceremonial rows for the age-old rite of Zafarruq—“The Great Beating of thy Rug.”
With hoots and roars, laughter and solemn grace, they raise their rugs high and flap them eastward with rhythm and pride. Dust blooms like smoke. Sand scatters into the breeze. To flap is to purge. To flap is to remember. And always, always, to the east—where the Swayday winds may carry the burdens they no longer wish to bear.
“We beat the sand out—to reveal the spirit within.”
Even in war, the rugs are flapped. For the Nyrvani, no enemy is feared more than dust left to settle.
Zafarruq is cleansing. Zafarruq is legacy.
Zafarruq is a warning to the dunes:
This land is lived in. And loved.
II. The Honor Among Thieves
In the early Scores of Nyrvani migration, tensions ran high with the Scaverin of the southern caverns. Boundaries were blurred. Supplies vanished. Trail marks crossed—paws and claws in quiet conflict.
One tale survives from this shadow war: the story of Zhurran, a wiry Nyrvani thief born of drought and dust. Hunger made him quick. Poverty made him silent. He didn’t steal out of greed—he stole to live.
On a night blanketed in moonless quiet, Zhurran crept into a Scaverin storehouse on the edge of their burrowed border. He moved like smoke—filling his sack with water gourds, dried roots, and a small stuffed toy he mistook for a ration pillow. Just as he turned to slip away, he froze.
Another thief stood at the exit: a Scaverin, sack in hand.
They locked eyes.
"What’s in your bag?" asked the Scaverin.
"What’s in yours?" Zhurran replied.
The silence broke into a blur—sacks dropped, claws unsheathed, limbs tangled. Supplies spilled across the stone. But when the dust settled, neither struck. For in that messy heap, they saw their own theft mirrored.
Then came the chase—light and shadow weaving between rafters and archways, a dance of predator and prey where neither knew which was which. But in the end, the Scaverin vanished—slipping through a tunnel too tight for even Zhurran’s wiry frame.
He hissed, but accepted the loss.
Instead, he returned to the scuffle site, where both sacks lay open and scattered. He knelt. In the Scaverin’s stolen stash, something familiar caught his eye: a Nyrvani woven rug, marked by sun-faded patterns and clawed fringe.
Zhurran paused. His tail twitched.
He gathered both sacks. From the Scaverin’s, he took the rug and rations that had belonged to his people. From his own, he retrieved the sack of Scaverin goods—water, roots, and the odd stuffed toy—and climbed a lone desert palm, its spine reaching over seventy feet into the sky.
At the top, he tied the sack to a hanging branch, slid by claw down to the trunk and carved a note within the bark.
“Quick paws, quick mind. You won the chase. But if you want your prize back… seek to the stars.”
He returned to his village under starlight, dusty and unsure.
He presented the rug to the crowd and asked, “Who does this belong to?”
A voice cracked the silence.
An elderly Nyrvani woman rushed forward, tears streaking her fur. “That was my daughter’s. I thought it lost forever.” She pulled Zhurran close, offered him a meal, and called him a hero.
Zhurran sat that night in quiet thought—no coin, no stolen trinkets, just the warmth of a full belly and a home that whispered thanks.
From that day on, he chose a new path—not as a thief in shadow, but as a claw among kin.
Among thieves, he learned, there could still be honor.
And among kin, there could still be redemption.
III. Moondim Night
Not long after, Ra'den heard whispers of strange structures buried in the scorched heart of Scorrachai—Nyari temples that jutted from the sands like sleeping titans.
The Nyari: starlit beings with constellation eyes and wind-whisper voices. Guided, some say, by fate. Others, by secrets too dangerous for daylight. Their pyramids were said to house forbidden truths, treasures unseen, and tunnel maps that crisscrossed beneath all of Scorrachai.
Ra'den, of course, heard only one word: treasure.
So he ventured alone.
With dagger, cloak, and a half-squashed cantaloupe, he crossed the dunes and approached one of the great Nyari structures cloaked in silence. He dodged sentries, crept between pillars, and found it: one stone—just slightly out of place.
Too perfect.
He pried it loose and slipped inside.
What greeted him was not gold, nor scrolls, nor wine—but a sapphire-lit maze that twisted in on itself like a serpent chasing its tail. The walls whispered in tongues no throat could speak. Symbols pulsed with light, then darkness. The blue glow slowly gave way to blood-red shadows.
He wandered. Starved. Laughed. Cried. Spoke to reflections that weren’t his. Time stopped meaning anything.
At the heart of the madness, he found it:
An altar—carved from blackened stone, glowing faintly. Upon it, a single scroll rested. No chains. No lock. Just... waiting.
Ra'den narrowed his one good eye and pulled the scroll from the pedestal—replacing it with a sandbag from his satchel in a move so graceful, it would’ve made ancient Solian thieves weep.
Click.
A wall snapped open. Arrows shot from every crevice.
One grazed his left eye—the good one.
Blind and howling, he tumbled through traps, dodged spinning blades by sheer accident, and followed hallucinations that somehow led him back to the entrance. He clawed his way into the open air, collapsed onto the scorching sand, and crawled away until he could crawl no more.
There, beneath the Moondim, the smallest and most mischievous moon of Pentara—known to show itself only when irony is highest—Ra'den lay flat on his back, clutching the scroll like a relic of destiny.
He unrolled it, blood dripping from his cheek, heart pounding.
It read:
“Haha, SUCKER! Nice try.”
Ra'den stared. His ears twitched.
He crumpled the scroll, hurled it into the night, and watched it tumble across the dunes like a mocking weed with wings.
He never spoke of what he saw again.
And no one ever found the scroll.
But some say the temple still waits.
And sometimes, late at night, the winds echo faint laughter…
IV. Rug and Rule
Among Nyrvani, thieving from outsiders is a game. But stealing from kin is sin.
Tales tell of a Nyrvani who betrayed his own. For punishment, he was buried in the desert with only his head above the sand, left to bake in the sun and tremble as scorpions crept near.
He dug himself free.
Returned.
They stared.
And so they buried him again—this time headfirst, with only a reed poking from the sand to grant him breath.
"You may escape the sand, but not your sentence."
V. Flap the Seas, Not Our Sleep
It was only a matter of time.
For moons upon moons, the Scaverin of the southern caverns had endured the thunderous echo of rug flapping from the Nyrvani above. What began as distant thumps turned into nightly sonic booms—like an army of percussionists slapping the earth with sand-soaked carpets.
At first, the Scaverin grumbled.
Then they hissed.
Eventually, they surfaced.
One first Sunday of a Moondim night, as the dunes trembled beneath a thousand celebratory flaps, a delegation of soot-covered Scaverin emerged from their stone halls, dark eyes squinting, ears pinned back.
They didn’t come with weapons.
They came with bags under their eyes.
The lead Scaverin, a wiry elder named Skreekis Hollowtongue, raised a claw and shouted over the rhythmic storm:
“COULD YOU NOT?!”
The flapping paused. Silence hit the desert like a dropped stone.
A thousand Nyrvani stared.
Skreekis continued, teeth gritted:
“We get the ritual. We respect the legacy. But maybe—just maybe—you could do it somewhere that doesn’t vibrate our pictures off the wall?”
The Nyrvani hissed back. Words flew.
Pride met pragmatism.
“What do you want us to do—flap in silence?!”
“Have quiet rugs!”
“Why don’t you plug your ears, mole-face!”
"Why don’t you build a temple that doesn’t echo like a gourd!"
The argument spiraled into an all-night yelling match.
No claws. No blood. Just deeply personal insults and a whole lot of gesturing.
Until one Scaverin—an old merchant named Grebbil Geargut—raised a paw.
“Alright, alright, what if—hear me out—we trade peace for a favor?”
The crowd hushed. He pointed south.
“We’ve got this shipwreck. Been sittin’ on our land since the last dune quake. Ugly thing. Covered in barnacles, cracked hull, rotten sails. But the frame’s still good.”
Grebbil adjusted his goggles.
“You Nyrvani love flapping rugs, yeah? What if you… did it out there? We’ll help you fix the ship. You take it out to sea. Flap to your heart’s content. Out on the waves. Not over our sleep.”
The Nyrvani blinked. A cruise?
Powered by flapping?
Their eyes sparkled.
“…deal.”
And so, the work began.
Nyrvani paws and Scaverin claws labored side by side, dragging the ship from the sand like a buried leviathan. They hauled beams. Sewed sails. Scrubbed deckwood until it gleamed like polished coral.
They didn’t just repair the wreck—they rebuilt it into a floating temple of wind and pride.
By the end of the month, it stood ready: a three-mast vessel with rugs draped from every railing, flapping mechanisms built into the stern, and a giant wooden plaque on the bow that read:
“THE FLAPTUARY.”
The Nyrvani invited the Scaverin to join the maiden voyage.
Some declined, citing “cruise-induced nausea.”
Others agreed, intrigued by the novelty of rug-based propulsion.
They loaded up fish, figs, fermented cactus juice, and sailed off into the Azure Rift—flapping in synchronized bursts, the sails snapping with power, laughter echoing across the sea.
It was no longer just Zafarruq.
It was Zafarruq: At Sea™.
And on the horizon, as the sun dipped low and waves rolled beneath their paws and claws, a Nyrvani scout turned to Grebbil and said:
“You know… you’re alright.”
Grebbil smiled, adjusted his goggles again, and replied,
“Don’t get used to it.”
VI. Notable Nyrvani
Ra'den the Mirage – The half-blind thief who snuck into a Nyari temple, survived its cursed maze, and escaped with nothing but trauma and a sarcastic scroll. Lives in a shaded tent on the western dunes, still flapping rugs like everyone else—except with one good eye and zero patience.
Zhurran the Sand-Eater – The only Nyrvani ever to survive the Sun Buried punishment: being buried up to the neck for a day beneath the desert sun. Zhurran dug himself free with his teeth, returned to camp covered in bite marks and defiance... and was promptly buried again—upside down, with a straw for air. Legend says he chewed through the straw too.
Sharna Clawmark – Lionfolk general who united four rival clans to drive back a Dravolkin raid with only thirty warriors. Known for her blood-red war braids and thunderous roar, Sharna’s statue now stands over the western cliffs, watching for invaders.
Bikku the Vendor-King – A street merchant turned tycoon, Bikku made a fortune exporting Nyrvani rugs to northern kingdoms. His trade empire became so vast he founded his own artisan clan—and now wears a ceremonial rug as a royal cape.
Sirra of the Scarred Loom – A battle-weaver whose rugs depicted ancient wars. When one of her masterpieces was stolen by a North Rojourian noble, she tracked it across the continent and challenged the thief to a ceremonial duel. She won—and rewove the story into the next rug using thread dyed with his blood.
VII. What the Dust Remembers
The Nyrvani remain fiercely proud and quietly honorable. They distrust easily, but respect boldness. Their markets brim with trade. Their warriors hunt the sands. Their scouts vanish and return with legends.
And every First Sunday of the month, when the moons shift and memories stir, they take to the sea—not the dunes.
Thanks to a peculiar alliance with their once-annoyed neighbors, the Scaverin, the rite of Zafarruq has found a new home: a refurbished ship sailing the Azure Rift, powered entirely by the thunderous flapping of rugs.
No longer do they beat their heirlooms eastward into dry winds. Now, they flap them seaward, sending bursts of dust and laughter across the tides. Some Scaverin even join in, gripping tiny rugs and flapping with unsure but determined zeal.
To outsiders, it may seem absurd.
But to the Nyrvani, it is remembrance.
For every flap casts off more than dust. It shakes loose regret, grief, shame, and the echo of old rivalries.
Because if you let the dust settle too long… it remembers.
And so they flap—not just to clean the rugs, but to cleanse the past.
Not toward the east.
But toward the horizon.