A poſt that has been sitting in my drafts for a while.
Sword Tigers
Their coats are the white of ice floes and the black of the deep still waters that sluice between. Red-eyed, like cheetahs, with a strange solemn mien. They speak, naturally—both the crooning purrs that they use to communicate from afar, tuning the resonance of their voices just right to echo off the glaciers and dells and reach astonishing distances, and the voice they put on to speak to humans, baritone and deeply pleasing to the ear, with an inexplicable Ysjan accent. The men all sound like the narrator guy from Disco Elysium, and the women all sound like Estelle. They have no opposable thumbs, but their tails are prehensile, and remarkably strong.
They are wise animals, with a material culture and complex societal norms. Their chief cultural preoccupation is with swords and sharpness. Their central myth-cycle centers around ancestor-worship of their revered sabertooth'd predecessors, and they seek to emulate them by arming themselves with long blades and hide armor. Antemuralia's dearth of metal resources and their own limited manual dexterity forced them to work with bone, chunks of flint, and traded obsidian, and consequently they got very, very good at knapping with their tails. An authentic tiger-knapped knife is a classic luxury souvenir item in the austral parts of the Upper World.
Since the 98th century, trade and the increasing presence of humans in Antemuralia has given them access to new options. The first metal swords and fang-covers were obtained by exchanging pelts and claw-scrimshawed bones with the Dagger Islands; later, as the colony steamers rolled in, they began to take a more adversarial view. A considerable percentage of the tiger streaks adopted the practice of thrall-taking (well-educated in the matter by the colonists, who came with their own Pythian and Chthon slaves and indentures), staging lightning-fast raids on the settlers and pressing their captives into working looted metal according to their specifications.
Certain successful guerillas amassed enough power and personal honor through this practice to become de facto warlords, and brought about such innovations as the first autochthonous-Antemuralian postal service, a standardized system of weights and measures (based on "strides"), and a comprehensive cartographic survey of Inner Antemuralia that remained the standard item of reference for hexographers until 9912. The image of these fierce tiger-lords provoked a fairly standard mix of repulsion and fascination on the Continent—newspapers ran constant articles about them, and lurid tiger imagery was a common fixation in high Exocoronal art. Indeed, the greatest of these noble and terrible fighters, a tigress known to the settlers as "Black Valorine" (for her coat was all-black, in truth because of congenital melanism, but commonly believed to have been burnt by a colonist's firebomb in the displacement of her streak from their home turf) was said to be so humble in her conduct and forthright in her conversation that many of her captives swore unforced oaths of true loyalty to her, and were manumitted to serve as huskarls and ashigaru in her irregular army.
Unfortunately, as it so often goes, martial excellence and fighting spirit proved ultimately insufficient in the face of the finest new slaughterguns from the Ballistree works. Though the tigrish insurgency was never truly defeated, the warriors were forced further and further into the hinterlands and, deprived of a ready source of new slave-labor and unable to keep their existing labor-pool in good health through the frigid winter, their metal industry collapsed and their actionism was limited to ambushing expeditionary groups and stymying cable-laying projects in Inner Antemuralia. Black Valorine herself led her “Free Army” in a final, doomed offensive against the settlers, and reached as far as Siglithe before being reportedly gunned down in a blaze of glory, though rumors of her unlikely survival immediately sprung up and didn’t really die down until her life expectancy had passed thrice over.
The tiger-lords left behind a complex and controversial legacy. Many invoke them as symbols of unrelenting anticolonial resistance, and celebrate their bravery and their victories over the Continental settlers; on the other hand, their heavy reliance on slave-labor and the naked profiteering of some of the less-scrupulous guerilla leaders leaves an undeniable sour taste in the mouths of even the most ardent Anticontinentalist.
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