Buhru

Buhru is an island and coastal settlement within the Serpent Isles, and the spiritual heart of the Buhru people. Its inhabitants worship Nagakabouros, the Great Kraken, their deity of life, motion, and change, whose golden temples rise along the coast and whose will shapes every part of Buhru society. The faith is served by a strict hierarchy of Truth Bearers, Hierophants, serpent callers, monks, and acolyte priestesses. Serpent callers, draped in rope vestments woven to resemble tentacles, summon the great children of Nagakabouros from the deep water, for only the mightiest of these beasts are strong enough to consume the Black Mist and drive back the Harrowing. Along the shoreline stand serpent-caller towers, whose lookouts ring alarm bells to warn of a Great Wave rushing in from the horizon. The Buhru are a seafaring people, and their wave-whisperers hire out to guide vessels safely past deadly reefs such as the Widow Makers, where foolish captains who refuse to pay are wrecked on blades hidden beneath the water. Buhru artisans are renowned for an unmistakable style, carving serpents into cavern walls and shaping rare serpent-amber, which they call Goddess's Tears, into amulets and carved relics. Long ago their scholars studied alongside those of the Shadow Isles, before that place was transformed. Outsiders, whom the Buhru call paylangi, are forbidden to set foot on the Serpent Isles except in nearby Bilgewater, a pirate city Illaoi's people regard as a fetid gutter. It was Illaoi, the most powerful and respected Truth Bearer in a hundred generations, who broke with tradition by leaving the golden temples of Buhru to shield Bilgewater's residents from the Harrowing and carry awareness of the Mother Serpent to the city. Buhru ruins and plundered temples across the isles still draw treasure hunters and grave robbers, yet the deep waters around them remain the domain of the great serpents the Buhru call up from below.