After their rout from the heartlands, the jackals were not butchered, but they were expelled with totality. Small holdouts were crushed or run off; Bantos tolerated no enclaves, no survivors to sow the seeds of return. The few who made it south found no sanctuary. Pushed across the crossing to the isle of Nykava, they were met not with welcome but massacre—Nykava’s rulers made sport and example of them, cutting down any who thought to dig in, driving the remainder further still.

Those who survived that passage staggered on, only to be pushed to the edges of the Yorozhian desert—a region already infamous as a screaming hell of sand, starvation, and predation. There, the jackals stagnated, their numbers withering to madness, disease, and despair. They found themselves unwelcome in every neighboring realm, haunted by their own extinction and ruled by petty tribal lords—each one a pale shadow of the weakest old Jantaran slavers.

Bantos made a ritual of hanging any jackal caught crossing back—never a mistake, never a wrongful execution. The line between jackal and “black dog of civilization” was never blurred. Bantos’ scouts and marshals took pride in it, and the certainty of the policy sent a message to all who might doubt the resolve of the new order.

The fate of the Yorozh jackals was fitting in the eyes of those who had suffered under them. In Kartonga and the Varduun wastes, the jackal outcasts became sport and prey—a living warning. Kartonga’s cruelest found joy in hunting them for bounty or amusement. Varduun’s arenas turned their suffering into entertainment, pitting the starved jackals against monsters for the pleasure of their most sadistic enemies. Those not slain outright found only madness in the lotus haze, their bodies consumed by the same vultureworms and hyena-born curses their ancestors had once spread. In the end, it hardly mattered if the jackals fell to monsters, disease, or to one another. The world no longer cared.

The average jackal knew the truth: extinction was not a possibility, it was a sentence already half-executed. They existed only as a memory of what they had lost, and as prey for the very races and beasts they once despised.

The jackals themselves speak of the past in low tones. They once possessed a realm twice the size of what now lies beneath their feet, its southern half fertile and rich with pasture. But they built nothing that endured. Their towns were camps, their strongholds carved from rock and sand, their wealth stored in caravans that never stopped moving. When the war came, there were no walls to hold, no fields to feed them, no foundries to arm their sons.

The dogs came with iron, timber, and a will to settle. The jackals had only teeth and pride. Their defeat was absolute. The southern half of their world—the heart of their domain—became the Doglands, the single greatest territorial loss of any people in Zhuru’s postwar age. It was not simply a shift of borders; it was a replacement of civilizations. Every city that stands there now was raised by dogfolk, brick upon brick, on jackal graves.

The canals that run from the highlands bear Doglord names. The shrines, the market towers, even the roads—none are of jackal make. If the jackals were to reclaim what was theirs, they would inherit only the monuments of their conquerors. To restore their own culture, they would have to destroy everything the dogs have built.

This is the curse of the Jackalands: a land they cannot reclaim without erasing the only structures that could sustain them. They lack the numbers, the beasts of burden, the ironworks, and the sheer labor power to rebuild what war and time erased. A full generation has grown since their last serious campaign. Those born now know no homeland beyond the sand. They dwell in ruins that predate them, carving out a thin existence along the northern marches where the soil begins to fail and the wind carries the dust of Kartonga.