South of the Pearly Mountains, where the land descends toward the coast, Tyberoskos spreads across rolling hills of limestone and clay. This is not a forest that welcomes travelers. The ground is treacherous, riddled with sinkholes that open without warning, swallowing the unwary into darkness. The trees have adapted with vast root systems that grip the unstable earth, their canopy so thick that the forest floor exists in perpetual twilight.
Two peoples call Tyberoskos home, bound together by necessity and lunar rhythm.
The Weretigers
The weretigers of Tyberoskos are not monsters, most of the time. For twenty-two days of the month, they live as humans do: hunting, trading, raising families in scattered camps throughout the forest. They're suspicious of outsiders but not hostile, willing to guide travelers through safe paths for fair payment.
Then the new moon comes.
When Nyxara goes dark, the weretigers lose themselves. The transformation is involuntary and total, physical and mental. They become apex predators driven by instinct, hunting anything that moves with terrible efficiency. Even their own families are not safe; weretiger camps scatter before the new moon, individuals isolating themselves to minimize the carnage.
The change lasts three nights. When Nyxara's first sliver returns, the weretigers wake—often miles from where they started, sometimes covered in blood they pray isn't human. They've learned to live with this curse, but they've never learned to cure it. Some say it came from a Zelidian blood-ritual gone wrong, others that it's punishment from a tiger-god for some ancient transgression. The weretigers themselves don't speak of origins. They simply endure.
The Qipi
The Qipi are gnomes, but barely. Standing less than a foot tall, they're the smallest of the gnomish peoples, with gray skin that blends into limestone and enormous dark eyes adapted to underground life. They live in the sinkholes that pock Tyberoskos, carving tiny cities into the vertical walls: miniature towers, thread-thin bridges, gardens of phosphorescent fungi.
From above, a Qipi sinkhole looks like nothing, a dark hole in the forest floor, maybe thirty feet across. Climb down (if you can fit in the handholds carved for Qipi fingers), and you'll find a civilization. The largest sinkholes house thousands, their walls honeycombed with dwellings, their floors converted to underground lakes stocked with blind fish.
The Qipi have an arrangement with the weretigers. When the new moon approaches, the gnomes retreat underground and seal their sinkholes with stone caps: too heavy for a transformed weretiger to move, too snugly fit to offer purchase for claws. They wait in darkness until the danger passes. In exchange, during the safe twenty-two days, weretiger hunters protect Qipi trading expeditions to the surface and escort their merchants to markets in Maun and Wisgarrd.
It's not friendship. The weretigers are terrified of what they might do to the tiny gnomes during transformation; the Qipi are pragmatic enough to know they need protection. But generations of mutual dependence have built something like trust. When a Qipi elder speaks of "our great friends above," there's genuine warmth beneath the irony.