Tagra

Major cities:

• Tsang-ha. The capital; home to over a million people, large parts of the city are taken by the Imperial Citadel, effectively a vast, contiguous building, and its gardens.
• Hang-ngah
• Ahtlang. City sacred to the god whose name it bears. Ahtlang's cult is popular as he is granter of fortune and fecundity and protector of families; green flags mark the places consecrated to him.
• Ngangtah. Built on the shores of Lake Ngang, it's a rather sparse and underbuilt city for three quarters of the year, though its inhabitants assemble a massive floating market on the lake's water around summer solstice, when the spring floods are over.
• Qacha
• Tlaqah
• Chah-hang. An important trade center, as it's located on the river Chah, which flows into the Throat of the Sea. A semi-permanent Chaatai population dwells here.

Formally, the Takrakaya empire is an absolute monarchy, ruled by the Divine Empress (khatatlaha). In practice, the actual governance is entrusted to a caste of functionaries (qaha) who must meet several requirements: they may not be related within a certain degree to other functionaries; they may not administer the province or municipality in which they were born; they may not marry or have legitimate children. These measures are meant to ensure that the functionaries will have no other object of loyalty than the Empress and her will. A secondary network of officials watches over the conduct of the qaha.

The person of the Divine Empress is kept to an extremely high standard of ritual purity. For one, she (always female) must be born from a very specific bloodline. (It is generally speculated that an imperial consort would brood the eggs of a slave whenever the rate of stillbirths due to endogamy becomes excessive.) She also must be isolated from contact with all 'ikra out of the imperial family, except for a small number of functionaries who have purified themselves with special rites. In addition, the Empress may be taught only to speak the archaic court dialect, which hasn't been spoken outside of the imperial citadel for several centuries.

Despite this ostensible centralization, the sheer size of Takrakaya, combined with the fact that proper rituals are poorly compatible with modern communication technology, most of the empire is de facto controlled by local interests. Regional functionaries, who might not even speak fluently the local dialect, often rely on village heads, religious authorities, wealthy patrons, or even criminal organizations for their revenue and mobilization of labor.

Also see: Cosmology

The Takrakaya conception of the world is fundamentally monist: there is one driving force of all that exists, tahtla, sometimes rendered as “the Divine”. Individual beings with their apparent oppositions, including gods, are fragments or portions of tahtla, which is seen most clearly in fire, blood, copper, the midday Sun, sex, and bees. Because of this unity, all things in the universe reflect each other in a sort of sympathetic magic. In antiquity it was a common custom by Takrakaya people to give little offers of their own blood, and that is still practiced in some rural regions.

A key concept of Takrakaya philosophy is “domain” (qa). Domain in this sense is the authority or stewardship over a certain sector of the world. Qa streams down from the Divine into the multiple divine beings of the universe, one of which is the Divine Empress. All legitimate qa of 'ikra passes through the Empress, and streams down in turn through the hierarchy of functionaries and officials. Even the meanest peasants have domain over their tools and crops (though no more than their superiors), and slaves have domain over their wraps, even as they are object of the domain of others.

Takrakayan philosophy does not make a sharp distinction between morals, law, and technology. Every aspect of the universe has a proper way to be, which follows from the will of the beings that hold qa over it. The proper use of medical and farming techniques is a moral matter as much as charity and virtue; spiritual violations result in physical disaster, and vice versa. This is often misunderstood in other countries as much cruder superstition. Any attempt to gain something against qa is balanced out by an equal loss (this may be achieved intentionally through mostly-symbolic sacrificial rituals).

The scrupulous respect of the qa makes Takrakayan society stable and prosperous, but also slow to innovate. Forbidden but useful practices, such as raising exotic species for which there are no traditional prescriptions, are entrusted to enclosed foreigner enclaves, which are simultaneously prized and mistrusted.