A Brief Discourse on Copper Men

“The Copper Men are not, as some claim, beasts. No beast builds with bronze. No beast carves idols taller than towers. And no beast stares back at you with such wretched knowing in its eyes.”

To speak of the Copper Men is to brush the frayed edges where civilization meets savagery, and where myth becomes unsettlingly tangible. These brutish, simian humanoids dwell in broken jungles, sun-scoured coasts, and crumbling highlands – always at the margins, always just beyond the reach of map and law. Squat and sinewy, with a lean muscularity that grants them great strength and speed, they are so named for their coppery coloration. It is not true copper, their hair, but rather the changeful shade of fire. Likewise, their hide is rough as bark and marked only with a faint metallic sheen, as though kissed by old blood and sunburnt ore.

Their culture, or what survives of it, is one of brutality and stark hierarchy. Strength is currency. Dominance is law. Their social structure is a pyramid held aloft by submission, and any challenge to it is met with immediate and horrifying violence. Cannibalism is not only ritual but also a form of governance. The devoured do not die in vain; they become a part of the victor. Power, in Copper Man society, is quite literally consumed.

Amongst themselves, they speak a guttural, staccato language that sounds to the untrained ear like the barks and howls of beasts. It is a language of rhythm and tone, where meaning is as much in the breath and the posture as it is in the sound. Scholars who have survived prolonged exposure to their camps report that its structure is surprisingly sophisticated, with several tenses and a rich vocabulary for describing pain, dominance, territory, and weather.

Some Copper Men, especially those who have wandered far from their tribal dens or who have served in the wars of foreign kings, have managed to learn the tongues of men. Their speech is as fine as any Argossian, although possessed of a brutal directness that may unnerve some. Where they struggle is with abstractions, particularly those relating to justice or morality. Concepts like "mercy," "grace," or "truce," have no true equivalents to their mother tongue. To the Copper Men, there is no fairness, only strength. Truce is a ploy. To lose is to be weak. To show mercy is to invite challenge.

And yet they are not entirely ungovernable. A few have served as mercenaries, especially in border wars or frontier skirmishes where their savagery is an asset. They do not haggle. They accept simple payment – usually in weapons or tools, sometimes in meat or wine, begrudgingly in coin – and will fulfill the terms of an agreement so long as the chain of command is clear and dominance undisputed.

But they will not till fields. They will not build walls. And they will not, under any circumstances, accept bondage. To enslave a Copper Man is to invite ruin. Placed in chains, they will claw, bite, and batter to break free, or failing this, kill themselves before submitting to a yoke. Death is preferable to captivity. This, perhaps, is the only nobility they recognize.

Curiously, they alone among the major races and nations do not keep thralls or slaves themselves. They may capture prisoners in war, but these are sacrificed and eaten, not bound. There is no economy of servitude in their culture, no concept of labor without struggle. A Copper Man earns what he takes, or he is nothing.

Their tools and weapons may seem rudimentary – clubs of knotted wood, old bronze blades, armor of hammered shell and scavenged plate – but they are wielded with unnerving efficiency. They know how to shape fire and the art of trapmaking, they know enough of anatomy to dismantle a man piece by piece while keeping him alive. They learn and they teach, although every lesson is in service to brutality.

And yet, despite their savage disposition, there are hints, tantalizing and terrible, of a bygone grandeur. Ruins beneath the sea, seen only by pearl divers and madmen, speak of temples carved from obsidian and capped with domes of salt-stained copper, towers inscribed with spiral glyphs no one living can read, metal idols whose shapes cannot be comfortably described. Could the Copper Men have once ruled something? Built something? The idea chills the spine.

Of their females, nothing is known. None have been seen. Not even amongst the tribes. This mystery has birthed a hundred theories, each more grotesque than the last. Some claim the females are kept underground in labyrinthine vaults. Others whisper that they are born only once a century and revered as living gods. A few darker-minded scholars suggest there are no females at all, that the Copper Men are something older than our understanding of breeding or life.

The Copper Men possess a latent affinity for mentalist powers, as do all the races of men and many beasts. Psionic emergence among the tribes is, thankfully, quite rare. Maybe one in a hundred will display talent at the level of a mentalist initiate, one in ten thousand the ability of a first rank master. And perhaps once a generation a Copper Man is born whose mind outpaces even the savants of the Sapphire Colleges.

The most infamous of these was Hruun the Starlion, a chieftain who rose to power nearly two hundred years ago. He remains the only Copper Man in recorded history to reach the third rank of mastery, and some claim he touched the threshold of the fourth before his death. With these powers, he gathered a horde numbering in the tens of thousands, and swept across three nations in as many years, leaving behind only smoking ruins and pyramids of skulls. It took an alliance of five city-states, and the sacrifice of two royal bloodlines, to stop him.

The Copper Men still speak his name with reverence, or with fear. It is difficult to tell the difference.

I end this account with a warning. Do not mistake the Copper Men for animals. They are something worse. Beasts kill for food. Copper Men kill for hierarchy, for memory, for something buried deep and old and perhaps best left forgotten. They are not beasts of the wild. They are ruins that still walk.

We may watch from a distance. We may name them monsters to comfort ourselves, to remind us that they are other, that they are less. But I wonder, when their temples still stood and their chants echoed across the waters, did they look upon us and think the same?