The Dead Moon Tribe are the humans who ruled Kyagos before the Sylthik came, and who never once conceded that the rule had passed. When the Sylthik city-states pushed them off the open land, the tribe did not break. It withdrew into Moonwood, the great northern forest, and turned a lost war into a long one. For generations now they have fought from the trees: ambush, retreat, patience. The Sylthik called them spent, and pointed at how little ground they held. The ruins of Syvlius are the tribe's answer to that.
Nyxara's people
The tribe takes its name and its strength from Nyxara, the dark moon, whose deeper rhythm the shamans claim to read and ride. Their power waxes on the nights Nyxara dominates the sky. What the tribe is known for, beyond the fighting, is healing. Wounds that should be fatal close within hours. Poisons that should kill leave a Dead Moon warrior merely ill for a day. The shamans say Nyxara takes the pain into herself so her people can keep fighting, and they speak of the debt this incurs in tones that suggest it is not free.
Whether the healing is Psy work, some reach of Kethic dark-element work, or an older craft with no clean name, the shamans will not say and outsiders cannot tell. The practical effect is plain enough. Dead Moon warriors fight without the ordinary fear of death, because they have watched their healers pull comrades back from injuries that would have ended anyone else.
Cut us. We have a moon for that. — a Dead Moon answer to a Sylthik parley, remembered in the southern garrisons
The revolution and after
For decades the tribe let the Sylthik believe the worst about its strength, and the decades of low fighting hid the truth: the Dead Moon Tribe had never been as weak as it played. It was waiting. When outsiders arrived with a plan to free the Drasnian slaves, the tribe took the opening. Warriors poured out of Moonwood, joined the uprising, and helped burn Syvlius to rubble.
They have pulled back into the forest since, in name. In fact their patrols range further south than they have in a lifetime, and their shamans have been seen in the Syvlius ruins, meeting with Drasnian leaders. Something is being negotiated. The Sylthik city-states still standing are not sure what, and the not-knowing is its own kind of pressure.
The Moonwatcher question
The cult called the Moonwatchers shares the tribe's obsession with a lunar body, and the resemblance has not gone unnoticed. Where the resemblance comes from is the disputed part. One account makes the tribe's founders lapsed Moonwatchers, faithful who soured on the cult and walked away. Another makes them survivors of a past Killing Moon period who took up the dark moon precisely because they refused to worship the thing that had killed their ancestors. The tribe will not settle it, and neither will the cult. The two regard each other with a wariness that reads as either old kinship gone cold or old grievance kept warm.