Another random doodle of 'concept art' for the Sarathi'rah race (which, literally translated from the Sarathi language, means 'Some random word that means nothing that Shade made up because he hasn't gotten around to creating the language or fully developing the culture yet, and he had to call them something' (it's a very compact language)).

Mostly, the entire race and everything about them is still a bunch of loosely connected vague ideas in my head, but I'm slowly connecting them during drives to and from work and during lunch breaks.

This is some random enforcer. A very small minority of Sarathi'rah are capable of magic. Those few are separated from their families at a young age and trained from then on by the enforcer society. As a whole, they're a big highly secretive organization semi-independent, but heavily influenced by the engineering guild (a guild that is in charge of creating life, modifying existing creations, and maintaining the infrastructure of society (everything from keeping buildings from dying of starvation to researching new ways to keep the island safe)).

Enforcers completely reject the practice of creating life, and keep their usage of creations to a minimum (usually limited to only tools specially approved by a council). This is largely because their primary task is to prevent, within the island walls, the abuse of creating life, and they believe that by not being involved in it, they are beyond temptation to begin abusing it themselves. As such, they're especially skilled in use of non-living weapons such as blades, and they are one of the few that are capable of crafting non-living things with any amount of skill. Of course, compared to us, their still in stone age in that respect, but regardless, the use of non-living things is one aspect that tends to lend an air of mystery and fear to the rest of their race (they find using most non-living tools to be unnatural in the same way we'd view using dead body parts to make things).

They also enforce more mundane laws, and are often charged with killing anyone who they deem to be a threat that must be removed from society, or any creations that people lose control of. They also do a great deal of monitoring in an effort to catch threats early. They're sort of a cross between cops, spies, and assassins.

While it isn't completely necessary, they almost always use long strings to weave about their fingers (sort of like that child's game I don't remember the name of) to represent manipulation of ley lines, magical nodes, and other such forces and keep track of it without having to think a whole lot - sort of like using an abacus to do math with a sort of manual thinking rather than mental. Unlike math, very few are skilled enough to do anything but the most simple spells without these string things, which shall have a cool name eventually.

I have vague ideas for Sarathi'rah fashion, but I haven't gotten to far, so I'm pretty much randomly playing with different ideas in this part. Cloaks of some sort seemed appropriate for a big secret guild of assassins =P.

And the thing on his back, is one of the creations their allowed to use - a staff weapon that is a delicate combination of plant and animal which can fire large (sometimes poisonous) thorns at extremely high velocities. Of course, the enforcers tend to prefer the smaller versions, but I think the bigger ones that aren't like little sticks look cooler.

I haven't made up the language yet, so the stuff on the side is just random scribbling, although it's sort of a conceptual practice for the general look and feel I want for the language.