Daria

Reported By: Jedikiah Drake

The quickest way to understand the Darian culture ("Culture A") is to note that nearly everything that the scientists abouard the Garrulous believed about them was completely wrong. They believed the Darians to be a remnant culture, founded by survivors of a global societal collapse, marking time in a mean existence before the inevitable extinction of the Polveran race. Of course, we now know that Culture A has a history that predates Culture B and almost all of the minor Polveran cultures, and was largely identical to its final state through that entire long history.

The residents of the Darian continent (or sub-continent, depending on how one chooses to regard the four eastern landmasses that are joined or separated by a network of narrow straits, isthmuses, dense arcapelgios, and land-bridges formed by kilometer-wide clumps of the aquatic variety of Polveran Lavender Moss) certainly did lead extremely violent lives, putting into practice what other cultures only depicted artistically. But, again contra the Garrulous report, these were not largely survival-oriented. Rather, survival seems entirely incidental to the Darian mindset, judging from their technology.

Although Polvarans are omnivorous generally, the Darians were strict carnivores. Even in times when meat was profoundly scarce and Darians were literally starving to death, forests full of edible fruit would be left to rot. All of their major rites of passage, including the passage into manhood, marriage, and the celebration of the birth of a child, as well as several with no clear analogs in human culture, require the participant to kill at least one other Darian (usually an adolsecent, but always old enough to carry a weapon.) Assumption of even the most minor leadership positions required a journey to the Aurocha Expanse, usually undertaken with dozens of henchmen accompanying the candidate, none of whom were expected to return alive. This massive attrition is balanced by their extremely high birthrate, which, once again contra the Garrulous report, was not unique to the Darians but rather the natural state of Polverans, with other planetary Cultures using drugs to reduce the size of their litters).

See Also:
Aurocha Expanse
Garrulous
Lavender Moss


This is an DEF entry in the Polvera Lexicon

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