This is an in-setting written work. It is written from a particular perspective and may or may not be factually accurate.
On the Culture and Ways of the Diai
Excerpt from the studies of a Korymban itinerant scholar, relating his experiences travelling the southern Kilche Sea. This excerpt recounts his time amongst the Diai, a people who live along the coast of Kintaka between the Aao River and Diata, a city which bears their name.To the Diai, everything can be categorized, counted, and quantified. This includes the obvious, of course - there are only so many types of fish in the sea, each distinct and distinguishable, and so too with trees, birds, grains of rice, and all other items physical in nature - yet the Diai extend this notion in ways that required some effort for me to grasp. They say there are two kinds of truth, seven varieties of knowledge, forty eight structures of light, and two hundred and eleven faces of hope, each of which is known to them. They recognize all of these intuitively, for they never teach such things to their children in such explicit terms as I use here, but know them all regardless, granting each a unique name.
Any emotion and its nuances, any phenomenon and its complexities, they can point to the number of each and every, and how one number connects to those which surround it. Upon the regretful death of my parrot, whose health I could not restore after the battering she suffered when we were caught by storms at sea south of the Blacksand Archipelago, the Diai family in whose house I stayed informed me the grief I felt was of three hundred and third variety - the counts of negative sensations are particularly high in number - and provided to me a detailed description, which I was forced to admit was precisely accurate.
Diai healers and historians - the two roles are intertwined in their society - tell of how their ancestral spirits determined the numbers inherent to everything, which they treat not as descriptors of what is known but rather as constraints of what exists. To illustrate, they know the kinds of wild cats to be thirty in number, and there can be no more than thirty, no matter what evidence might be presented in an attempt to convince them otherwise. Of this I certainly tried, offering sketches and tales of the long-haired moon cats of the southern Zakros Range, and the naked prowlers of the dunes of the Sangora, neither of which any Diai I conversed with had ever encountered. And yet they all, without fail or hesitation, could say the former was the nineteenth sort of feline, and the latter the eighth.
I do not believe the Diai's system of categorization to be merely descriptive, or prescriptive. Rather, I am convinced that the recounts of their healer-historians are correct in at least some manner, and that as a people they truly do possess an innate numerology that grants them a fundamental understanding of the numbers intrinsic to the world. In what matter this has been achieved, or granted, I cannot say, for the Diai themselves could not tell me, other than to matter-of-factly proclaim this was a question of the twenty third form.