HARATHI

The harathi are the divergent, reclusive siblings to humanity. Generations ago, the ancestors common to humans and harathi came to understand the nature of the energy wells that had begun to surface from the depths of the vestige. These wells are sources of a strong and often dangerous energy that misshaped and changed the children that these people bore while they lived near them. Often these children would be incapable of bearing offspring on their own, but every so often, a child changed by these wells would retain the ability to bear children and would come to pass on their altered heritage.

Though many of the ancestors shied away from the depths, and evolved to become human as we know them today, a small community went to live below the surface. They believed that these wells might create a new, stronger descendant, and in time they proved their ancestors right. They lived beneath the surface for many years, ritually reproducing, adapting to their subterranean environments, and developing a strong resistance to the wells while cultivating a vast spectrum of biodiversity. Now, having reemerged from the depths, many harathi seek to reintegrate humans into their genetic pool.

Though you’ll meet many different varieties of harathi in all shapes and sizes, most of them have some unusually coloured, faintly bioluminescent skin tone. They tend to be much larger than humans, and they often bear a bestial skeletal structure and physiological traits, such as antlers and a tail.

The influence of the wells has had its own toll on the harathi folk, however. Some who wandered too close or who spent too much time in sequestered colonies became irrevocably corrupted by the energy emanating from the vestige. Overcome by violent primal fervor, these hardly recognizable descendants ravage communities across the globe. When faced with this threat, the harathi must often choose between their own death or the death of their distant kin.