Sulaki

The Sulaki are one of the four tribes of cat warriors that inhabited oases in the Sukurvian Desert in the time of Jedit Ojanen.

Their oasis was located southeast of the Hooraree, a green jungle girded by gray-yellow dunes. Being only a half a day's walk westward, it was the closest to Scarwood, which put the Sulaki directly at odds with the Scarwood elves, with whom they met and fought regularly.

All the Sulaki, males and females and cubs, wore masks of rawhide sliced into strings and tied beneath their jaws, with bird feather jutted from the tops. Around their loins, they wore rawhide sliced into rude nets. They all carried short spears tipped with jagged copper, made by the Scarwood elves.

Like all other tribes of cat warriors from the Sukurvian Desert, they are descendants of the original tribe created by the planeswalker Terrent Amese to guard the Dark Heart of the Wood. Yet, the Sulaki were the only tribe to reject the 'god' Terrent Amese from their pantheon, preferring to worship Ergerborg, the god of death, instead.

Ergerborg was symbolized by an enormous conical stone anchored in the middle of the Sulaki stronghold, with bold tiger eyes rudely carved. Tainted brown by decades if not centuries of blood offering poured atop, it was circled by mounts of skulls, both tigers and elves. The sinister reputation of this god of death made the Sulaki both feared and frowned upon by the other tribes; and their fanatical practice of regular sacrifices led to them being seen as bloodthirsty.

When Jedit Ojanen tried to unite the cat warrior tribes against the menace of Johan, the Sulaki first refused to ally with anyone not worshiping Ergerborg, seeing any other gods (and especially Tererent Amese) as weaklings. Jedit used the skyship of the Robaran Mercenaries to uproot the giant brown-stone and cast it to the side, explaining that while Egerborg might be master of his domain, foreign gods were still able to defeat him on their own term. Accepting the reality that fighting outside their land meant having to side with a believer of other faiths, the Sulaki were the first cat warrior tribe to officially ally with the humans and Efravans, even if they mostly saw the war as an opportunity for sacrifices to their god.