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Description
***THIS DESCRIPTION IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS***

Introduction

The Akka'o (pronounced a-kʼa-ʔo~ː according to the IPA) are a mountain-dwelling offshoot of the dwarves who are believed to have settled in and around the cool alpine valleys of the Angvollo mountain range some 18,000 years ago. There are numerous tribes within this group, though they all share a common culture and trace the founding of their people to the mythic hero 'Akka', who was believed to have appeared to them in their time of need and guided them to a new land among the mountain peaks. The Mai, or more specifically the Hemme people call them the 'Zwovoler', meaning 'People of the Mountain Peaks'. This name managed to stick around and later spread south to both the Southern and Central Mai, though it evolved along the way to fit the phonetic constraints of their languages - hence, Hemme 'Zwovoler' became the Southern Mayic 'Soboleru.'

The picture on the left depicts a male and female Akka'o with a pair of domesticated animals. The long-necked creature is called a Ngao, whereas its shorter, stout-bodied counterpart is called an Angdzaza. The female Akka'o can be seen guiding the Ngao-beast by a rope as her male relative proudly brandishes a wooden goad. The images on the right show an example of an Akka'o dwelling. The images on the right show the interior and exterior of a typical dwelling built by the one of the tribes of the Great Lake Confederacy. The following sections will expand upon the content of this illustration and hopefully give the reader a glimpse into the rich complexities of this alien culture.

Physiology

The dwarves are a species of eight-limbed nonhuman sophonts who were transplanted to this World from some distant unknown planet many tens of thousands of years ago. Their biochemistry is based on the same DNA that is the basis for our own genetic code, though they possess several amino acids that are not present among terrestrial life. Moreover, even though most of the amino acids and the sugars they use to sustain their metabolism are nearly or entirely chemically identical to the ones found here on Earth, they are not structurally identical. They are dextro-amino acid and dextro-carbohydrate based organisms. In other words, they cannot digest or derive nutrition from any creature that uses biomolecules of the opposite chirality. This means that they range is effectively limited to where other creatures from their native ecosystem exist in sufficient numbers to sustain them, though it also means that humans and any other levo-amino acid, levo-carbohydrate based organism could never hope to conquer and rule over their lands because they would soon starve to death after occupying their territory for any significant length of time.

The average male dwarf stands around 1.3 meters tall and weighs about 40 kilos, whereas females are typically about 6 centimeters shorter and somewhat lighter. With the obvious exception of size and their primary sexual characteristics, humans often have a hard time distinguishing a male dwarf from a female dwarf, as they don't sound all that different when they speak, and they generally cannot notice the subtle differences in their facial features either. In addition to being slightly smaller and more gracile than her male counterpart, the she-dwarf usually has a larger, plumper tail, a longer, less tapered seeming head crest, and a longer, more rounded snout. They have a distinct, centauroid body structure, loping about on their four hind limbs, and using their long and dexterous secondary limbs for fine manipulation. Their first set of limbs are heavily reduced, as is typical of many of the different animal-analogs that hail from their native biosphere, but they are not vestigial. These limbs serve as gonapods.  The male's gonapods are designed to handle and convey his sperm packet to the female. The female's gonapods are larger and wider than the males and are used to carry around their ootheca (i.e., egg sac) and infant conspecifics. That being said, these limbs are not visible on the illustration, since the two Akka'o pictured above have chosen to cover them with a chitin-cloth garment called a 'phaōpot.' All of their limbs aside from their gonapods have four digits. In addition to having one less digit than a human hand, their disproportionately long thumb has a third joint that gives it unusual degree of flexibility and their third and four digit are partially fused together at the point of the proximal phalanges. Their upper trunk contains their lungs, reproductive organs, and one of their hearts, as well as several organs relevant to the function of their immune system, whereas their lower body contains their other heart and most of their other organ systems. They respire through two, flexible nostril slits that abut a syrinx-like structure that they can manipulate in order to produce various vocalizations. They are remarkably skilled mimics, and they can even emulate human speech, but their voices always retain a somewhat nasal, lilting tone that some people find humorous and yet others find annoying. Their jaw is tetrapartite including a maxilla and three mandibles. The maxilla and the lower mandible are used for chewing up their food, whereas the lateral pair of mandibles also have small teeth, but they primarily serve to convey food down the throat. They are also lined with bristly hairs and chemoreceptive pits that they can use to pick up scents and taste their food. Dwarves have a notoriously poor sense of smell, owing to the fact that they can't actively draw in a scent towards their olfactory organs, and they are known to love pungent, heavily spiced cuisine that most humans can't stomach. Their eyes are extremely large for an animal of their size, and they possess amazing visual acuity. Moreover, as is the case with many other kinds of animals from their home planet, the dwarves possess four types of cones in their eye instead of just three. The first three roughly correspond to those found among our own species (i.e., red, green, and blue), but the fourth and final type of cone gives them the ability to perceive several colors that extend out into the ultraviolet. Their 'red' cones are unable to see most shades of red, as it cannot pick up any wavelengths of light exceeding 630 nm.

A typical member of their species has an average life span of about 25 years, though they can theoretically live far longer provided they do not die of any of the myriad maladies that often afflict primitive societies. Under the best circumstances, the most venerable among their kind could expect to live up to 85 years, but most dwarves are considered extremely aged by the time they reach their early sixties. Dwarves usually enter pubescence between the ages of 7 and 9 and are considered physically mature by the time they are 11 to 12 years old. Their brains finish developing sometime around the beginning of their second decade of life. Although they do not live as long as humans, they do not begin showing any real signs of mental or physical decline until they reach their early forties, though once it starts it usually occurs more rapidly. The dwarves are oviparous, that is to say, egg-laying, though the eggs they lay are not quite the same as the hard-shelled kinds laid by reptiles, but are instead more like an elastic, tri-lobular leather sac. Infant dwarves incubate for around 4 and 1/2 months, and emerge from the egg blind, deaf, and completely helpless. An unhatched dwarf cuts its way through the leathery skin of the ootheca using a protuberance of bone on the back of their skull similar to the egg teeth seen in many species of birds and reptiles, though this structure is lost soon afterwards. They are finally able to see and hear by the time they are one month old, though they will continue to struggle with regulating their temperature for quite some time. Female dwarves sprout thick, feathery hairs along the interior of her gonapods shortly after laying their eggs in order to insulate it from the elements, and they will retain these hairs after their offspring have hatched in order to continue to protect them from the cold. Young dwarves are usually able to walk about unassisted 4 months after hatching. Their species only grows a single set of teeth throughout their lifetime, and they will have usually finished erupting by around two months of life. Prior to eating solid food and even for some time after that, both the male and female produce a nutrient rich fluid within an epigonadal gland which they can regurgitate in order to feed their young.

The Akka'o are smaller than the average dwarf (approx. 8 cm shorter on average) and develop more slowly than their low-lying cousins due to the strain placed on them by their high-altitude environment. Hypoxia and the scarcity of many resources in alpine ecosystems can be a significant problem for people living at higher elevations, so like the hill peoples of our own world, they evolved a smaller body size in order to reduce the energy requirements while also having proportionally larger lungs for increased respiratory volume. Their nasal slits are also longer and proportionally larger than in other ethnicities of dwarf so as to allow them to better heat the air during inspiration. The small-feathery hairs that cover their body are thicker too, though not quite so thick as to afford them any real protection against the cold of their mountainous home. Their complexion resembles the dwarves who dwell in the eastern climes of the vast northern desert, though they are somewhat paler overall. The areas of darker pigmentation found along the head, neck, back, and the outer surface of their limbs has a distinctive piebald pattern which can vary considerably from individual to individual while their desert-dwelling cousins are speckled like an Appaloosa. All dwarves have green eyes, but the precise shade can vary. Most Akka'o have lime green eyes, though there are others that are more forest green, and a very rare few with orbs of teal. Infant dwarves have blue eyes, but they will slowly turn green as they age.

Psychology

The Akka'o and other dwarves have smaller brains than humans, though they aren't any less intelligent than two-legged primates like us. Their general mentality is also not too dissimilar to humans, though there are several differences worth noting between the two.

The dwarves, not unlike us, largely rely on visual cues to assess the emotional states of their conspecifics, though they also rely on various vocalizations to convey this kind of information. Dwarves express their interest in something by bearing their lateral mandibles towards the object of their fascination so as to allow the chemoreceptive ducts and hairs lining these jaws to pick up important information about it. They push their lateral mandibles together and pull them towards the back of their throats when they feel disgust in order to sequester these receptors from the offending object. They will do this regardless of whether it's some scent, a sight, or something they hear. Feelings of fear cause their eyes to partially retract into their orbital cups in order to protect them from harm in the event of a confrontation, the back to arch so as to appear taller and increase the size of their airways, and the surrounding skin to grow flushed with blood and an ultraviolet pigment to make them appear more threatening. Dwarves are often very quiet when they are scared, though they been known to produce a keening, tremulous whistle reminiscent of a goat's bleating cry. An Akka'o roused to anger appears similar to when he is frightened, but he will instead shrink in upon himself to seclude his vital organs and evert his lower lip to show off his sharp teeth. The Akka'o do have tear ducts for keeping their eyes moist and free of irritants, but they do not cry in response to sadness. The Hemme have oft described the sounds of their sorrow as a low, breathy sort of vocalization similar to laughter, but bereft of any mirth. Their eyes are also known to grow wide and saucer-like and they will part their lips as though they were smiling. The Akka'o don't laugh, but they will sometimes let their jaws go slack and gape when they are amused or excited. They express their happiness in the same manner they express their amusement, though their 'smile' is usually less pronounced than their 'laugh.'

Society

The Akka'o are comprised of 12 tribes. Four of these tribes have adapted a sedentary lifestyle as 'worm-farmers', while the remainder are nomadic or semi-nomadic herdsmen. Of the four farming tribes, the two easternmost tribes laid claim to the same river system, whereas the other two each had a river to themselves.  The eastern tribes had once been bitter enemies of one another fighting over their claim to the great alpine lake they call the Eye of the World, but they have since consolidated themselves into a primitive trade state following prolonged contact with the low-lying Hemme.

Both of the farming tribes and the seminomadic bands of wandering Akka'o practiced agriculture, though neither of them had done so for nearly as long as their human neighbors. Around this period in time, the Southern and Central Mai had been farming and cultivating crops for over four thousand years. The Akka'o, on the other hand, had only been doing so for about a millennium. The kinds of ‘plants’ they cultivated were very different from those grown by the Mai since the photosynthetic organisms from their home planet were actually highly derived animals. Akka'o ‘plants’ began life as wriggling, worm-like larva and would slither around in their environments until they could locate a place suitable for them to metamorphose into their sessile adult forms. Sedentary tribes constructed terraced farm plots with walls of tightly packed mud and a raised lip to prevent worms from escaping their enclosures. They were originally unable to control where the larva chose to undergo its metamorphosis, but they eventually discovered that maturing larva exude an antipathic pheromone that can repel competing larva from trying to settle down in the same location and stealing its resources. The Akka'o learned to harvest this pheromone and treated the plot with it to ensure the space was used as efficiently as possible.  The farming tribes were localized to three fertile river valleys nestled in the crooks and recesses of the Angvollo Vara.

The Soboleru managed to domesticate several different species during the millennia they’ve spent living in the Northern Mountains, though the most significant and recognizable was the long-necked Ngao. These creatures carried themselves on four stilt like legs with large flexible pads and sharp nails for helping them keep their balance when navigating the rocky terrain of mountain plateaus. Their third pair of limbs were heavily reduced and were not used for locomotion. They served no function in the female population, but they were used for sexual displays by the males. These decorative structures bore the semblance of wings and were adorned with brilliant ultraviolet hues, though they were neither so large or flexible as to permit the animal the ability to fly or glide about. Their second pair of legs have long, bony spurs that the males use to do battle with one another when competing for mates among the herd. The Akka'o primarily raised these animals for their meat, but they also used them to carry their belongings. They did not have the strength or temperament to be used as riding animals. Some gelded Ngao were specially trained to herd and protect another of their domesticated species called Angdzaza. These specialized geldings were called khuwanzop. The Northern Mai called these beasts Ngaha, or Naha. The Southern and the Central Mai use this name too, but there are very few among them who have ever actually seen these creatures. The angdzaza were a species of squat, six-limbed creatures about as large as a medium-sized dog, though it neither resembles one nor shared it predilections towards carnivory. The legs of these animals were splayed out to either side of their trunk such that their bodies lay low to the ground like a lizard and their toes faced inwards towards their midlines. They normally plod about with no urgency, content to make a meal of the local wormgrasses, but they can move with surprising rapidity when threatened with predation. Angdzaza are social animals, and they have extremely large nasal cavities that allow them to produce a loud, croaking sound that they use to communicate the presence of danger to their conspecifics. The males are not especially prone to aggression, but they do at times use their bony forelimbs to box one another for dominance. The Akka'o raise these animals for their meat and hides, but they also value their dung. It is not only a good fertilizer, but it also burns readily and does not stink as strongly as Ngao droppings. The angdzaza is a relative of a much larger herbivore called an Omza.

Technology

The Akka'o have most of the hallmarks of an early Neolithic society, though they have an advanced understanding of metallurgy relative to their apparent level of technology. They invented furnaces capable of reaching temperatures capable of melting copper ores around 2,000 years before it ever occurred to the Mai to fashion metal tools, and they had uncovered the secrets of brassworking not long afterwards. They called brass, 'khohokh' (i.e., 'stirred together'), as they learned they could imbue base copper with greater durability and tensile strength by smelting it together with zinc oxide. The Akka'o and most of the rest of the people who would later develop metalworking usually made brass instead of bronze because the tin needed for making this alloy was around 2.5 times as scarce on this World as it is on ours. Other bronze-like alloys like arsenic bronze were formed incidentally due to impurities found in some types of copper ore, but it never managed to become quite so popular as brass. The Mai learned of the methods needed for making brass from the Akka'o, having first passed on to the Hemme through trade with these eight-limbed aliens, and later being learned by the more 'civilized' Mai around 300 years later. This culminated in the beginning of the aptly named 'Age of Brass' which lasted from around 2100 years before the present (BP) to 600 BP. Much of their progress in other areas such as the construction of building and crafting complex tools were greatly retarded by the fact that their lands lacked any materials analogous to wood. Their 'plants', for lack of a better word, aren't really plants at all, but highly derived animal-analogs that undergo a metamorphosis into sessile photosynthetic organisms. Their cells lack a rigid cellulose cell wall; hence they are often quite small compared to proper woody plants from here on Earth. Their internal structures contain nets of chitinous fibers and even tubes of ossified bony materials to help support their bulk, but these cannot be shaped and carved with the same ease as wood from a tree. Moreover, once dried, any bone they do have is much more brittle than wood, so tools made from them are prone to breaking down rather quickly. This all culminated in most of their early tools being nothing more than chipped stones. Even after discovering how to smelt copper and cast brass, many of their implements were just full tanged lengths of metal without any kind of handle to hold on to.

The Akka'o know of writing, but they did not develop it on their own. They initially adopted this technology from the Mai, though they had to go to great lengths to redesign the body of glyphs in order to better accommodate the features of their language not found in the languages of the Mai such as plurals, tonality, and the presence of different vocal registers. They used the system as a basis for designing their own glyphs. For example, the glyph shown in the top left-hand side of the illustration does not exist in any Mayic writing system but was instead invented by the Akka'o by modifying the glyph for 'person' to better align with their own physiology. Although the Mayic writing system was ostensibly one of several hundred semantically distinct logograms, the average scribe would often create rebuses by stringing several glyphs together in order to reduce the overall number of glyphs they needed to memorize. Akka'o scribes also borrowed the use of rebuses, though their language sounded nothing like any Mayic one. Since rebuses rely on the pronunciation of their component parts to accurately convey their meaning most Mayic rebuses would be completely unintelligible to someone who only spoke Xo'ungakka'o (i.e., the name of the most common Akka'o dialect, pronounced xo-ʔʌŋ-a-kʼa-ʔo~ː).  Some Akka'o scribes chose to rebuild the system from the ground up in order to fit their own pronunciations, but others chose to stick with the older Hemme spellings in an effort to preserve the original tradition and the power thought to reside in those spellings.  The Akka'o believed glyphs could channel mystical forces, so they often adorned themselves with clay charms and cloth talismans decorated with these ‘words of power.’ According to their beliefs, all things are formed from the corpse of the Azga, so all things hold magical power, however, its powers remain inaccessible without the proper form. Writing the name of something more mystically potent (e.g., a medicinal herb) onto an innocuous lump or clay or strip of chitin cloth is thought to be able to unlock those same properties in these objects. It’s almost like hacking reality and tricking it into treating one object as if it were something else entirely, though the Akka'o would never describe it in such terms.

Religious Beliefs

The Akka'o practice religion like humans, but the nature of their faith and beliefs are very different. According to their creation myth, the world came into being with the hatching of a primordial cosmic egg. When the egg hatched it created two gods, and they were called the Oba and the Azga (i.e., the Heavens and the Earth). The Oba was hale and healthy, but the Azga grew sick and died soon after being born. Its body became the foundation of the World. Its flesh became the earth, and its blood was the waters that sprang forth from the high places and fed the lakes, oceans, and seas. The Oba was left incomplete in the absence of its other half, and so it felt a deep yearning to be made whole. The Oba was not the being that created the universe, but it was instead a kind of deus faber that imbued the essence of its spirit into the corpse-stuff of the Azga and brought life into being. The living things formed out of this interplay of Heaven and Earth were to be its companions in the wake of the void left by the death of its primeval egg-mate. The Akka'o believe that they and all other living things are the creation of the Oba, and all things die because they are formed from the stuff of the Azga.

The Soboleru religion did not have the concept of an afterlife. When a person died, they believed their spiritual essence would begin to decompose and break down into several smaller fragments. These baser elements of the soul would be dispersed for a time and mingle with the fragments of other dead beings before later joining back together to form new living things. Although these components would rarely come back together in any recognizable form, aspects of the original individual would be able to ‘live on’ through future incarnations. The Akka'o also believed that the Oba would sometimes intervene in the transmigration of souls to reincarnate past heroes to guide and protect their people. They are fascinated by human descriptions of the afterlife, but rather than believe it does not exist, they generally believe that the human soul is simply different from their own. The Akka'o did not bury their dead but would instead leave them behind to be consumed by scavengers. Some Akka'o believed that this was necessary to free the soul from its body, whereas other members of their culture thought the corpse no longer bore a soul at all, and so it should be disposed of like any other piece of waste.

Relationship to Humans

The Akka'o have a broadly amicable view of their human neighbors, though some of their tribes interact with the two-legged lowlanders more than others. They usually called the Mai the Ma'o, though they would also sometimes refer to them and other humans as Mazgo'o (i.e., 'giants'). Since they could not abide in human lands for long periods of time, most of their interactions with the Hemme and other human polities was largely relegated to bartering for various goods.  They traded copper, zinc, salt, semiprecious stones, carved bones, jewelry, sugar, exotic furs, and hides in exchange for commodities like wood, ceramics, preserved fruits, spices, fine cloth, feathers, turquoise, beads, and alcohol.  The Akka'o could not derive nutrition from the foods they received by trading with the Mai, but they were quite fond of their novel flavors.

The Akka'o sometimes ventured down into Hemme lands to conduct trade with their human neighbors, but they rarely ever travelled further south due to the constraints placed upon them by their unique biochemistry. Prior to the end of the Age of Brass, they had only ever visited the kingdoms of the Southern and the Central Mai twice. The first and most famous of these great journeys to the south was compiled into a poetic epic called the "Dzapha'abdo" or the "Story of Pha'abdo."

Description
***THIS DESCRIPTION IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS***

Introduction

The Akka'o (pronounced a-kʼa-ʔo~ː according to the IPA) are a mountain-dwelling offshoot of the dwarves who are believed to have settled in and around the cool alpine valleys of the Angvollo mountain range some 18,000 years ago. There are numerous tribes within this group, though they all share a common culture and trace the founding of their people to the mythic hero 'Akka', who was believed to have appeared to them in their time of need and guided them to a new land among the mountain peaks. The Mai, or more specifically the Hemme people call them the 'Zwovoler', meaning 'People of the Mountain Peaks'. This name managed to stick around and later spread south to both the Southern and Central Mai, though it evolved along the way to fit the phonetic constraints of their languages - hence, Hemme 'Zwovoler' became the Southern Mayic 'Soboleru.'

The picture on the left depicts a male and female Akka'o with a pair of domesticated animals. The long-necked creature is called a Ngao, whereas its shorter, stout-bodied counterpart is called an Angdzaza. The female Akka'o can be seen guiding the Ngao-beast by a rope as her male relative proudly brandishes a wooden goad. The images on the right show an example of an Akka'o dwelling. The images on the right show the interior and exterior of a typical dwelling built by the one of the tribes of the Great Lake Confederacy. The following sections will expand upon the content of this illustration and hopefully give the reader a glimpse into the rich complexities of this alien culture.

Physiology

The dwarves are a species of eight-limbed nonhuman sophonts who were transplanted to this World from some distant unknown planet many tens of thousands of years ago. Their biochemistry is based on the same DNA that is the basis for our own genetic code, though they possess several amino acids that are not present among terrestrial life. Moreover, even though most of the amino acids and the sugars they use to sustain their metabolism are nearly or entirely chemically identical to the ones found here on Earth, they are not structurally identical. They are dextro-amino acid and dextro-carbohydrate based organisms. In other words, they cannot digest or derive nutrition from any creature that uses biomolecules of the opposite chirality. This means that they range is effectively limited to where other creatures from their native ecosystem exist in sufficient numbers to sustain them, though it also means that humans and any other levo-amino acid, levo-carbohydrate based organism could never hope to conquer and rule over their lands because they would soon starve to death after occupying their territory for any significant length of time.

The average male dwarf stands around 1.3 meters tall and weighs about 40 kilos, whereas females are typically about 6 centimeters shorter and somewhat lighter. With the obvious exception of size and their primary sexual characteristics, humans often have a hard time distinguishing a male dwarf from a female dwarf, as they don't sound all that different when they speak, and they generally cannot notice the subtle differences in their facial features either. In addition to being slightly smaller and more gracile than her male counterpart, the she-dwarf usually has a larger, plumper tail, a longer, less tapered seeming head crest, and a longer, more rounded snout. They have a distinct, centauroid body structure, loping about on their four hind limbs, and using their long and dexterous secondary limbs for fine manipulation. Their first set of limbs are heavily reduced, as is typical of many of the different animal-analogs that hail from their native biosphere, but they are not vestigial. These limbs serve as gonapods.  The male's gonapods are designed to handle and convey his sperm packet to the female. The female's gonapods are larger and wider than the males and are used to carry around their ootheca (i.e., egg sac) and infant conspecifics. That being said, these limbs are not visible on the illustration, since the two Akka'o pictured above have chosen to cover them with a chitin-cloth garment called a 'phaōpot.' All of their limbs aside from their gonapods have four digits. In addition to having one less digit than a human hand, their disproportionately long thumb has a third joint that gives it unusual degree of flexibility and their third and four digit are partially fused together at the point of the proximal phalanges. Their upper trunk contains their lungs, reproductive organs, and one of their hearts, as well as several organs relevant to the function of their immune system, whereas their lower body contains their other heart and most of their other organ systems. They respire through two, flexible nostril slits that abut a syrinx-like structure that they can manipulate in order to produce various vocalizations. They are remarkably skilled mimics, and they can even emulate human speech, but their voices always retain a somewhat nasal, lilting tone that some people find humorous and yet others find annoying. Their jaw is tetrapartite including a maxilla and three mandibles. The maxilla and the lower mandible are used for chewing up their food, whereas the lateral pair of mandibles also have small teeth, but they primarily serve to convey food down the throat. They are also lined with bristly hairs and chemoreceptive pits that they can use to pick up scents and taste their food. Dwarves have a notoriously poor sense of smell, owing to the fact that they can't actively draw in a scent towards their olfactory organs, and they are known to love pungent, heavily spiced cuisine that most humans can't stomach. Their eyes are extremely large for an animal of their size, and they possess amazing visual acuity. Moreover, as is the case with many other kinds of animals from their home planet, the dwarves possess four types of cones in their eye instead of just three. The first three roughly correspond to those found among our own species (i.e., red, green, and blue), but the fourth and final type of cone gives them the ability to perceive several colors that extend out into the ultraviolet. Their 'red' cones are unable to see most shades of red, as it cannot pick up any wavelengths of light exceeding 630 nm.

A typical member of their species has an average life span of about 25 years, though they can theoretically live far longer provided they do not die of any of the myriad maladies that often afflict primitive societies. Under the best circumstances, the most venerable among their kind could expect to live up to 85 years, but most dwarves are considered extremely aged by the time they reach their early sixties. Dwarves usually enter pubescence between the ages of 7 and 9 and are considered physically mature by the time they are 11 to 12 years old. Their brains finish developing sometime around the beginning of their second decade of life. Although they do not live as long as humans, they do not begin showing any real signs of mental or physical decline until they reach their early forties, though once it starts it usually occurs more rapidly. The dwarves are oviparous, that is to say, egg-laying, though the eggs they lay are not quite the same as the hard-shelled kinds laid by reptiles, but are instead more like an elastic, tri-lobular leather sac. Infant dwarves incubate for around 4 and 1/2 months, and emerge from the egg blind, deaf, and completely helpless. An unhatched dwarf cuts its way through the leathery skin of the ootheca using a protuberance of bone on the back of their skull similar to the egg teeth seen in many species of birds and reptiles, though this structure is lost soon afterwards. They are finally able to see and hear by the time they are one month old, though they will continue to struggle with regulating their temperature for quite some time. Female dwarves sprout thick, feathery hairs along the interior of her gonapods shortly after laying their eggs in order to insulate it from the elements, and they will retain these hairs after their offspring have hatched in order to continue to protect them from the cold. Young dwarves are usually able to walk about unassisted 4 months after hatching. Their species only grows a single set of teeth throughout their lifetime, and they will have usually finished erupting by around two months of life. Prior to eating solid food and even for some time after that, both the male and female produce a nutrient rich fluid within an epigonadal gland which they can regurgitate in order to feed their young.

The Akka'o are smaller than the average dwarf (approx. 8 cm shorter on average) and develop more slowly than their low-lying cousins due to the strain placed on them by their high-altitude environment. Hypoxia and the scarcity of many resources in alpine ecosystems can be a significant problem for people living at higher elevations, so like the hill peoples of our own world, they evolved a smaller body size in order to reduce the energy requirements while also having proportionally larger lungs for increased respiratory volume. Their nasal slits are also longer and proportionally larger than in other ethnicities of dwarf so as to allow them to better heat the air during inspiration. The small-feathery hairs that cover their body are thicker too, though not quite so thick as to afford them any real protection against the cold of their mountainous home. Their complexion resembles the dwarves who dwell in the eastern climes of the vast northern desert, though they are somewhat paler overall. The areas of darker pigmentation found along the head, neck, back, and the outer surface of their limbs has a distinctive piebald pattern which can vary considerably from individual to individual while their desert-dwelling cousins are speckled like an Appaloosa. All dwarves have green eyes, but the precise shade can vary. Most Akka'o have lime green eyes, though there are others that are more forest green, and a very rare few with orbs of teal. Infant dwarves have blue eyes, but they will slowly turn green as they age.

Psychology

The Akka'o and other dwarves have smaller brains than humans, though they aren't any less intelligent than two-legged primates like us. Their general mentality is also not too dissimilar to humans, though there are several differences worth noting between the two.

The dwarves, not unlike us, largely rely on visual cues to assess the emotional states of their conspecifics, though they also rely on various vocalizations to convey this kind of information. Dwarves express their interest in something by bearing their lateral mandibles towards the object of their fascination so as to allow the chemoreceptive ducts and hairs lining these jaws to pick up important information about it. They push their lateral mandibles together and pull them towards the back of their throats when they feel disgust in order to sequester these receptors from the offending object. They will do this regardless of whether it's some scent, a sight, or something they hear. Feelings of fear cause their eyes to partially retract into their orbital cups in order to protect them from harm in the event of a confrontation, the back to arch so as to appear taller and increase the size of their airways, and the surrounding skin to grow flushed with blood and an ultraviolet pigment to make them appear more threatening. Dwarves are often very quiet when they are scared, though they been known to produce a keening, tremulous whistle reminiscent of a goat's bleating cry. An Akka'o roused to anger appears similar to when he is frightened, but he will instead shrink in upon himself to seclude his vital organs and evert his lower lip to show off his sharp teeth. The Akka'o do have tear ducts for keeping their eyes moist and free of irritants, but they do not cry in response to sadness. The Hemme have oft described the sounds of their sorrow as a low, breathy sort of vocalization similar to laughter, but bereft of any mirth. Their eyes are also known to grow wide and saucer-like and they will part their lips as though they were smiling. The Akka'o don't laugh, but they will sometimes let their jaws go slack and gape when they are amused or excited. They express their happiness in the same manner they express their amusement, though their 'smile' is usually less pronounced than their 'laugh.'

Society

The Akka'o are comprised of 12 tribes. Four of these tribes have adapted a sedentary lifestyle as 'worm-farmers', while the remainder are nomadic or semi-nomadic herdsmen. Of the four farming tribes, the two easternmost tribes laid claim to the same river system, whereas the other two each had a river to themselves.  The eastern tribes had once been bitter enemies of one another fighting over their claim to the great alpine lake they call the Eye of the World, but they have since consolidated themselves into a primitive trade state following prolonged contact with the low-lying Hemme.

Both of the farming tribes and the seminomadic bands of wandering Akka'o practiced agriculture, though neither of them had done so for nearly as long as their human neighbors. Around this period in time, the Southern and Central Mai had been farming and cultivating crops for over four thousand years. The Akka'o, on the other hand, had only been doing so for about a millennium. The kinds of ‘plants’ they cultivated were very different from those grown by the Mai since the photosynthetic organisms from their home planet were actually highly derived animals. Akka'o ‘plants’ began life as wriggling, worm-like larva and would slither around in their environments until they could locate a place suitable for them to metamorphose into their sessile adult forms. Sedentary tribes constructed terraced farm plots with walls of tightly packed mud and a raised lip to prevent worms from escaping their enclosures. They were originally unable to control where the larva chose to undergo its metamorphosis, but they eventually discovered that maturing larva exude an antipathic pheromone that can repel competing larva from trying to settle down in the same location and stealing its resources. The Akka'o learned to harvest this pheromone and treated the plot with it to ensure the space was used as efficiently as possible.  The farming tribes were localized to three fertile river valleys nestled in the crooks and recesses of the Angvollo Vara.

The Soboleru managed to domesticate several different species during the millennia they’ve spent living in the Northern Mountains, though the most significant and recognizable was the long-necked Ngao. These creatures carried themselves on four stilt like legs with large flexible pads and sharp nails for helping them keep their balance when navigating the rocky terrain of mountain plateaus. Their third pair of limbs were heavily reduced and were not used for locomotion. They served no function in the female population, but they were used for sexual displays by the males. These decorative structures bore the semblance of wings and were adorned with brilliant ultraviolet hues, though they were neither so large or flexible as to permit the animal the ability to fly or glide about. Their second pair of legs have long, bony spurs that the males use to do battle with one another when competing for mates among the herd. The Akka'o primarily raised these animals for their meat, but they also used them to carry their belongings. They did not have the strength or temperament to be used as riding animals. Some gelded Ngao were specially trained to herd and protect another of their domesticated species called Angdzaza. These specialized geldings were called khuwanzop. The Northern Mai called these beasts Ngaha, or Naha. The Southern and the Central Mai use this name too, but there are very few among them who have ever actually seen these creatures. The angdzaza were a species of squat, six-limbed creatures about as large as a medium-sized dog, though it neither resembles one nor shared it predilections towards carnivory. The legs of these animals were splayed out to either side of their trunk such that their bodies lay low to the ground like a lizard and their toes faced inwards towards their midlines. They normally plod about with no urgency, content to make a meal of the local wormgrasses, but they can move with surprising rapidity when threatened with predation. Angdzaza are social animals, and they have extremely large nasal cavities that allow them to produce a loud, croaking sound that they use to communicate the presence of danger to their conspecifics. The males are not especially prone to aggression, but they do at times use their bony forelimbs to box one another for dominance. The Akka'o raise these animals for their meat and hides, but they also value their dung. It is not only a good fertilizer, but it also burns readily and does not stink as strongly as Ngao droppings. The angdzaza is a relative of a much larger herbivore called an Omza.

Technology

The Akka'o have most of the hallmarks of an early Neolithic society, though they have an advanced understanding of metallurgy relative to their apparent level of technology. They invented furnaces capable of reaching temperatures capable of melting copper ores around 2,000 years before it ever occurred to the Mai to fashion metal tools, and they had uncovered the secrets of brassworking not long afterwards. They called brass, 'khohokh' (i.e., 'stirred together'), as they learned they could imbue base copper with greater durability and tensile strength by smelting it together with zinc oxide. The Akka'o and most of the rest of the people who would later develop metalworking usually made brass instead of bronze because the tin needed for making this alloy was around 2.5 times as scarce on this World as it is on ours. Other bronze-like alloys like arsenic bronze were formed incidentally due to impurities found in some types of copper ore, but it never managed to become quite so popular as brass. The Mai learned of the methods needed for making brass from the Akka'o, having first passed on to the Hemme through trade with these eight-limbed aliens, and later being learned by the more 'civilized' Mai around 300 years later. This culminated in the beginning of the aptly named 'Age of Brass' which lasted from around 2100 years before the present (BP) to 600 BP. Much of their progress in other areas such as the construction of building and crafting complex tools were greatly retarded by the fact that their lands lacked any materials analogous to wood. Their 'plants', for lack of a better word, aren't really plants at all, but highly derived animal-analogs that undergo a metamorphosis into sessile photosynthetic organisms. Their cells lack a rigid cellulose cell wall; hence they are often quite small compared to proper woody plants from here on Earth. Their internal structures contain nets of chitinous fibers and even tubes of ossified bony materials to help support their bulk, but these cannot be shaped and carved with the same ease as wood from a tree. Moreover, once dried, any bone they do have is much more brittle than wood, so tools made from them are prone to breaking down rather quickly. This all culminated in most of their early tools being nothing more than chipped stones. Even after discovering how to smelt copper and cast brass, many of their implements were just full tanged lengths of metal without any kind of handle to hold on to.

The Akka'o know of writing, but they did not develop it on their own. They initially adopted this technology from the Mai, though they had to go to great lengths to redesign the body of glyphs in order to better accommodate the features of their language not found in the languages of the Mai such as plurals, tonality, and the presence of different vocal registers. They used the system as a basis for designing their own glyphs. For example, the glyph shown in the top left-hand side of the illustration does not exist in any Mayic writing system but was instead invented by the Akka'o by modifying the glyph for 'person' to better align with their own physiology. Although the Mayic writing system was ostensibly one of several hundred semantically distinct logograms, the average scribe would often create rebuses by stringing several glyphs together in order to reduce the overall number of glyphs they needed to memorize. Akka'o scribes also borrowed the use of rebuses, though their language sounded nothing like any Mayic one. Since rebuses rely on the pronunciation of their component parts to accurately convey their meaning most Mayic rebuses would be completely unintelligible to someone who only spoke Xo'ungakka'o (i.e., the name of the most common Akka'o dialect, pronounced xo-ʔʌŋ-a-kʼa-ʔo~ː).  Some Akka'o scribes chose to rebuild the system from the ground up in order to fit their own pronunciations, but others chose to stick with the older Hemme spellings in an effort to preserve the original tradition and the power thought to reside in those spellings.  The Akka'o believed glyphs could channel mystical forces, so they often adorned themselves with clay charms and cloth talismans decorated with these ‘words of power.’ According to their beliefs, all things are formed from the corpse of the Azga, so all things hold magical power, however, its powers remain inaccessible without the proper form. Writing the name of something more mystically potent (e.g., a medicinal herb) onto an innocuous lump or clay or strip of chitin cloth is thought to be able to unlock those same properties in these objects. It’s almost like hacking reality and tricking it into treating one object as if it were something else entirely, though the Akka'o would never describe it in such terms.

Religious Beliefs

The Akka'o practice religion like humans, but the nature of their faith and beliefs are very different. According to their creation myth, the world came into being with the hatching of a primordial cosmic egg. When the egg hatched it created two gods, and they were called the Oba and the Azga (i.e., the Heavens and the Earth). The Oba was hale and healthy, but the Azga grew sick and died soon after being born. Its body became the foundation of the World. Its flesh became the earth, and its blood was the waters that sprang forth from the high places and fed the lakes, oceans, and seas. The Oba was left incomplete in the absence of its other half, and so it felt a deep yearning to be made whole. The Oba was not the being that created the universe, but it was instead a kind of deus faber that imbued the essence of its spirit into the corpse-stuff of the Azga and brought life into being. The living things formed out of this interplay of Heaven and Earth were to be its companions in the wake of the void left by the death of its primeval egg-mate. The Akka'o believe that they and all other living things are the creation of the Oba, and all things die because they are formed from the stuff of the Azga.

The Soboleru religion did not have the concept of an afterlife. When a person died, they believed their spiritual essence would begin to decompose and break down into several smaller fragments. These baser elements of the soul would be dispersed for a time and mingle with the fragments of other dead beings before later joining back together to form new living things. Although these components would rarely come back together in any recognizable form, aspects of the original individual would be able to ‘live on’ through future incarnations. The Akka'o also believed that the Oba would sometimes intervene in the transmigration of souls to reincarnate past heroes to guide and protect their people. They are fascinated by human descriptions of the afterlife, but rather than believe it does not exist, they generally believe that the human soul is simply different from their own. The Akka'o did not bury their dead but would instead leave them behind to be consumed by scavengers. Some Akka'o believed that this was necessary to free the soul from its body, whereas other members of their culture thought the corpse no longer bore a soul at all, and so it should be disposed of like any other piece of waste.

Relationship to Humans

The Akka'o have a broadly amicable view of their human neighbors, though some of their tribes interact with the two-legged lowlanders more than others. They usually called the Mai the Ma'o, though they would also sometimes refer to them and other humans as Mazgo'o (i.e., 'giants'). Since they could not abide in human lands for long periods of time, most of their interactions with the Hemme and other human polities was largely relegated to bartering for various goods.  They traded copper, zinc, salt, semiprecious stones, carved bones, jewelry, sugar, exotic furs, and hides in exchange for commodities like wood, ceramics, preserved fruits, spices, fine cloth, feathers, turquoise, beads, and alcohol.  The Akka'o could not derive nutrition from the foods they received by trading with the Mai, but they were quite fond of their novel flavors.

The Akka'o sometimes ventured down into Hemme lands to conduct trade with their human neighbors, but they rarely ever travelled further south due to the constraints placed upon them by their unique biochemistry. Prior to the end of the Age of Brass, they had only ever visited the kingdoms of the Southern and the Central Mai twice. The first and most famous of these great journeys to the south was compiled into a poetic epic called the "Dzapha'abdo" or the "Story of Pha'abdo."