Pronunciation: KAHN
Founding Date: 1316 DA
Dissolution Date: -
Demonym: Khanishi/Khanishi
Capital: Nildras
Racial Distribution: goblin (76%), halfling (12%), human (8%), other (4%)
Official Language: Nudrek
Khan is lead by a curious sort of monarchy. Their matriarchal queen is not chosen from a long lasting lineage, but selected from among the populace. When the time comes to chose a new queen, all eligible women of the kingdom receive a spore of the sacred whisper tree, a rare and delicate type of fungus. So fragile and particular is the whisper tree that only a few candidate will be able to successfully sprout it. The first among them becomes the new queen, and her reign lasts as long as her tree lives. The thriving of the tree is considered to be the thriving of the kingdom - a queen's reign marred by strife, battle, hunger, or incompetence may find itself cut short with the tree's life, while a queen that is intelligent, capable, and caring of her people and her may rule for decades. Should the tree outlive its queen, she is buried beneath it, and the tree is left to die with its caretaker.
The queen is aided by a council made up of various elders and whatever fresher faces were able to sprout their whisper trees, to represent the both the wisdom of the old and the new ideas of the future. Orders are passed down from there to territory leaders, then to city and town elders, then to the matriarchs and patriarchs of individual families and other communities leaders in a fairly organized chain of command.
Khan is best known for its various fungi, from the many edible varieties, to the sturdy shroom trees, to the delicate and strange lifeforms that may be used as specialty ink and spell components. Khan also deals in a variety of other niche trades, including decorative insect wings, lantern worms, and spider silk.
Khan is an entirely subterranean nation, nestled in the fungus-rich eastern caverns of Onureth. The caverns, though they wind and twist in strange ways, are more than large enough for the needs of Khan's robust population of giant bats, which the Khanishi people have tamed and ridden for centuries. The Khanishi have done little digging and excavating, preferring instead to stack up dried fungal pods for homes wherever they will fit, and rely on travel via bat, millipede, and rope-and-pulley platforms to navigate the landscape.
Khan boasts an extremely lush ecosystem compared to most caves. Endless sizes and shapes of fungus coats most available surfaces, many glowing with a soft light. Strange insects lurk in the nooks and crannies of the smaller passageways and fungal forests, feeding on each other and on the fungi around them. When viewed from a distance, Khan's forests almost look like the starry night, deep darkness lit by scattered points of bioluminescence.
Nildras: the capital city is built in and around a series of massive stalagmites that rise from one of the largest fungal reefs in the nation. Giant millipedes with rotating pods rigged to their many segments provide a public transportation capable of traversing both horizontal and vertical terrain. Tucked in a cavern high above the city, only accessible via bat flight, lies the Forest of Queens, where the living trees of the current queen and advisors dwell among the desiccated remains of trees belonging to queens and advisors long gone. At the heart of the forest is a copse of monarch-less trees, carefully tended to ensure the survival of the species beyond their use in Khan's succession process.
Khanese culture is quite communal, with individuals living in quite close quarters with each other and sharing resources somewhat freely among the community. A "pod hive" is a common living arrangement, consisting of hollowed out fungal pods stacked on top of one another in a ring shape, with a communal space in the middle. The members of a pod hive share cooking and cleaning duties, take turns contributing with other chores, and work together to care for any members that require extra attention. The elderly commonly take up residence on the first floor, while the more youthful take the upper reaches, and a pulley platform ferries upwards anyone who wishes access to the bat colony typically situated at the top, where the bats will have the easiest takeoff.
The Khanishi are also prone to reusing and recycling items rather than simply making them new or tossing them out. As the fungus takes the detritus of life and uses it to live, so too the Khanishi strive to ensure nothing goes to waste. Food uneaten by people feeds animals, waste products fertilize crop fields, discarded insect shell are used for various tools, and even the bodies of the dead don't go to waste. Most citizens of Khan feed the shroom trees in death, graveyards becoming ghost forests where the living may visit to enjoy the fruit produced there, but the most upstanding citizens are carefully preserved with special types of fungus. These Drohgull are animated in times of need, to serve as a fighting and labor force, effectively doubling or even tripling the manpower of their community. To have one's body used in such a way is considered a high honor.
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