Isles of Savagery
The Isles of Savagery are a set of small, low islands found towards the northwestern edge of Cattle Reef, far west of Wu Jian. The islands are highly inhospitable, with rocky surfaces and little soil supporting few plants save lichens. Despite their Western location, the islands have little in terms of water sources, and rainfall is minimal, making fresh water scarce.
The islands are home to a small population, considered by many to be tribal barbarians. In shallow-draft canoes, they navigate the dangerous waters of Cattle Reef, catching fish and diving for Flowering Sea Cows. Their cuisine, due to the lack of fuel and freshwater, sees such things consumed raw, seasoned directly with seawater and lichen. Even with experience in the Reef’s ways and dangers, this is risky work, and casualties are not infrequent.
While this allows the islanders to subsist, and even trade sea cows with passing vessels, the Savage Islanders often pursue more lucrative avenues as scavengers. Their homes stand as the only islands of any note above the surface, and so survivors of ships wrecked by the reef oft end up on their shores. The islanders have as much kindness to spare as they have water, and any such survivors are killed, looted, and devoured in acts of cannibalism. Should the islanders locate a shipwreck, this too they will loot, taking its wood for themselves and its cargo for trade: it is suspected by the Realm and The Guild that the Coral Archipelago maintains a clandestine alliance with the islanders, trading steel weapons and other goods for looted cargo that can be transported back for sale in Azure, though Coral denies this.
Purging the Isles of Savagery would seem an easy task: they have few defenses, lack resources to survive a siege, and are not great in numbers. And yet not even the Imperial Navy has been able to eliminate them: their islands are protected from larger vessels by the dangers of Cattle Reef, and when an invading force manages to pierce this obstacle the islanders merely take to their canoes and leave their barren homes… there are no cities to burn, no towers to topple, and the invader eventually tires and leaves, allowing them to return and resume their lives.
The only structure of any note is the ruin of a lighthouse, formed of blue-green Adamantine Glass, which stands on the largest of the isles. The light and upper tower shattered long ago, sharp edges worn smooth by the wind and waves, leaving only a hollow, empty shell, open to the sky. In this ruin, the Savage Islanders maintain a cult to the Western God of War, Siakal, who they hold as their patron.
