Dragon Heart people

The Dragon Heart people are an ethnolinguistic group originating from a remote region of the Central Andes, who have in recent centuries developed a sophisticated culture throughout the region.

History
The Dragon Heart people were originally a lowland tribal group with trade contacts with the Moche and Andean Basque civilisations, began to move into the area following their collapse, forming the basis of their modern culture.

Currently (c. 1000), most of them live are a network of Izanian agricultural city-states spread throughout the North-Central Andes, with some of the major city-states hosting mountain palaces ruled by a priestly class. The largest city-state, around Lake Titicaca, is actually a federation resulting from the merging of numerous smaller polities.

Some city-states belong to leagues, each of them having an appointed peacekeeper in charge of arbitrating and resolving internal disputes. A peacekeeper is nominally in charge of the Lake Titicaca metropolis, but is as of today mostly powerless.

In between the city-states, in less arable areas, there are also remnant nomadic pastoralist groups, who are also involved in trade between states.

Further to the east, semi-nomadic Dragon Heart people live in plains far removed from the city-state network, herding Toxodon and other large pack animals. These do not follow the Izanian religion, but instead practice an ancient form of traditional animism.

Social structure
The Dragon Heart people do not have any gender distinction.

Polyamory system
People are in couples, not single relationships including multiple people. However, most people have two or more partners. Some rare people are monogamous, or are in relationships with multiple people within them (think a love triangle).

Three types of partners are distinguished : A ken is your first partner, and very likely your primary partner. A lao is a partner you have kids with. A shi is another partner you don't have kids with.

When you are single, it is the cultural norms only to seek relationships with other single people. This means that you are your ken's ken. Similarly, if you are in a relationship, the cultural norms is to only seek relationships with people already in relationships, so you won't be each others ken's at all - the opposite being strongly frowned upon by the society. Because of a large web of couples, the most common living arrangement is to just live with your ken. But society is arranged so you see your other partners very frequently.

As a spiritual and cultural custom, when reproducing with a non-ken partner, a spiritual ceremony is held which somehow decides who the child will live with. Some people just decide on their own. All kids in the first pregnancy live with this partner. Customarily, future pregnancies alternate between who gets the kid. Some couples still decide on a case by case basis.

Origins
They originally expanded in the central Andes, but due to their previous tribal nature, little is known of their origins beforehand.

The Izanic languages - the name comes from an Andean Basque conflation of Dragon Heart people with Izanians - are commonly thought to be an independent family, though various alternative theories have been proposed:


 * A Macro-Jê origin is one of the more common theories
 * A "Quechumarizan" propozal (Ruhlen 2004) suggesting links between the Izanian, Quechuan, and Aymaran languages. Others have argued that this may be due to the strong areal contacts over a long period of time.
 * Links to Arawakan languages have also been proposed based on word order (AlexJD1 2018[unreliable source]).