If you listen to the bardic teaching songs, they’ll tell you that whenever one devises a rule of thumb for civilisations, one must count the Quongols as an exception. While serious scholars will of course take a more differentiated view than can be portrayed in songs meant for fledglings, it is undeniably true that they are indeed the only culture to use sheepguana for riding.
Indeed, their Khaw sheepguana are so popular with the Quongols that in the relatively short time since the creation of their species, they have completely displaced the horses that once were the pride of these nomadic herders and the sheepguana in turn have adapted so thoroughly to their role in Quongol society that it is quite impossible to discuss the Khaw independently from the Quongols and vice-versa. Thus the gentle reader will have to excuse a brief excursion into the somewhat esoteric field of ornithopology in order to get a proper impression of the Khaw’s nature.
The Quongols are a race of quail who inhabit the steppes of the far east, between the eleven kingdoms and the Crane Empire. They mostly live simple pastoral lives, tending their herds, hunting and worshipping the Hen of the Grasses, and every few centuries the tribes will unite under a great Khan and sweep across the continent as an unstoppable avalanche of fire and death, conquering all that stand against them and building sprawling empires that are typically characterized by brutal efficiency, religious tolerance and advancement to the nobility being strictly dependent on individual merit. Thankfully these barbaric empires never last very long. Within a few decades at most, the Quongols will grow bored and disgusted with politics and drift back to their homelands, leaving the rest of the world to return to a more civilized style of government.
Quongol society is organized in tribes made up of extended families lead by a chieftain. Their lives are centred around the needs of their large herds consisting of sheepguana, cattle and goats with some camels as beasts of burden. To prevent overgrazing their pastures, tribes are constantly on the move, the only permanent settlements being marketplaces and holy sites. To accommodate this nomadic lifestyle, they live in huts made of a wooden frame covered in felt called gers that can be broken down and folded to be easily transported on pack animals and can be erected in a new location within less than two hours.
They have a warlike culture and conflict between tribes is frequent but is usually resolved with minimal bloodshed via ritual combat or contests in which the tribes’ warriors demonstrate the skills at riding and archery that make the Quongols such a fearsome enemy. And thus the sheepguana enters the picture. The Khaw are, uniquely among the many breeds of sheepguana, bred to serve as mounts rather than livestock. As such they are leaner of build than their cousins, with long legs and muscular tails. They have a two-layered coat that starts out white in lambs and darkens to various shades of brown before maturity. Their wool is hard to work and of low quality by the standards of wool merchants but it serves well for producing the Quongol’s tough outer garments and the felt covering of their gers. In keeping with their role as warriors’ mounts, they have either four or, in some rare and highly prized bloodlines, six magnificent horns, whereof the lower pair frames and protects the animal’s head while the upper horns curve forward into weapons of impressive reach and strength.
While they cannot match horses in terms of pure speed and carrying capacity, the Khaw are more nimble and have almost legendary endurance. To extend their ability to run seemingly without tiring, a Quongol warrior usually has around five sheepguana with her, switching between them at regular intervals, allowing her to outdistance birds mounted on horses on all but the shortest distances. If they do get caught, the sheepguana will wheel around as one and present a phalanx of horns that only the best trained destriers will charge.
Quongol chicks are trained to the saddle from such a young age that they are often said to be hatched on the backs of sheepguana. While this is usually taken as a flight of fancy on the bards’ part, the truth is even stranger: Being constantly on the move to feed their herds, the Quongols had never been able to find a way to incubate their eggs that kept them at a suitable temperature without exposing them to the risk of damage. This predicament was finally solved when they were introduced to the sheepguana with its gentle intelligence and multi-chambered stomach. These days, eweguanas selected for their soft gait and even temper are trained to carefully swallow the Quongol’s eggs to serve as living nests in which the eggs lie safely cradled in a bed of fermenting grass. Hatchlings will not emerge while the sheepguana is walking, so when a halt is called, one will sometimes witness a Khaw vomit forth a seething mass of quail chicks.
Khaw are rarely seen outside Quongol lands as their horns and aggressive temper make them dangerous and they have trouble carrying larger birds, but they do serve as the traditional mount of the Order of Quailadins and small flocks will be kept around their monasteries. Much of the Order’s popularity stems from the memorable image of their sheepguana, bedecked in armour, horns sheathed in gleaming metal etched with holy symbols, the Quailadin, armed and armoured, perched between them as bird and beast fearlessly charge against evil with fire and steel.
Inspired by sarawithtea ‘s twitch livestream of sheepguana animation in which a quail chick was sitting on a sheepguana’s head:
Sheepguana facts 