Birth by Fire: How I Built the Quem and Their Calendar

When I first started shaping the world of Trexlin, I didn’t plan to develop an entire species down to their reproductive mechanics, timekeeping, bone structure, and national ideology. But that’s what happened - multiple times. But let's start with the Quem—a race of clawed, bold warriors. This post is a look behind the scenes: how the Quem came to be, and how a simple sketch of a brutal culture spiraled into one of the most detailed elements in the Awakening the Seablade mythos.

The Spark: Gods and Failed Giants

It started with a divine misfire.

In the mythology of Trexlin, the god Aguren once tried to create his own race of giants, the Quash. Built with help from the goddess Brinta, they were physically powerful but mentally dull, and the gods abandoned them. This left Aguren with a chip on his shoulder. Enter Tegra who proposed a second attempt: combine the best aspects of previous races—Zanne height, Alfay agility and strength, Threv claws and infrared sight—into a new species born for survival and dominance.

That creation was the Quem. Their origin wasn’t meant to be noble or refined. It was strategic. The gods weren’t looking for harmony—they were looking for supremacy.

Anatomy of a Predator

Once the origin was locked in, the biology followed. The Quem had to be believable, distinct, and—most importantly—functional in the world I’d built.

So I built them like apex predators: massive shoulders, long arms, short legs built for burst motion, and a skull dense enough to endure club blows. Their eyes include a transparent second eyelid—like a hawk’s—that filters for longwave heat, allowing them to see in the dark through body heat. Each hand has only three fingers and a thumb, all ending in retractable claws. This gave rise to their base-8 mathematics, which influences everything from their calendar to their army structure.

Even the reproductive model is ruthless. Quem gestation lasts just 150 days and produces litters of 2–5. But high infant mortality is built into their culture—children are handed off at sunset of the birth day and raised by their House. Parents are dismissed, and infants who fall behind in weekly reflex and weight rankings often perish. Survival isn’t assumed. It’s earned.

They reach maturity at 13 and rarely live past 56. It’s a short, brutal lifecycle that I designed to reflect the race’s cultural identity—efficient, sacrificial, and completely devoid of sentimentality.

Time Is Their Blood

The Quem don’t track lineage. They track time. And time, for them, is sacred. It determines identity, hierarchy, and spiritual alignment. So I created the Quem Calendar, a complex eight-fold cycle that governs every part of their lives.

Each cycle is divided into nested layers of 8:

• 8 Days = 1 Week (Ehsoem)

• 8 Weeks – 1 day = 1 Moon (with variable lengths depending on which Sky it falls under)

• 8 Moons + 8-day festival = 1 Sky

• 8 Skies + 6-day inter-Hunt festival = 1 Hunt (~7 years)

• 8 Hunts = 1 Generation (56 years)

• 8 Generations = 1 Woutjangem (448 years)

• 8 Woutjangems = 1 Age (3,584 years)

• 8 Ages = 1 Great Cycle (28,672 years)

The calendar isn’t just a backdrop. It determines everything:

• House is set by the Moon of your birth.

• Clan by the Sky.

• Tribe by the Hunt.

• WarClan is geographic—one of two Quem nations: Poison Spear or Cracked Fist.

Kindred—your tightest social unit—is determined by your exact birth day. From the moment they can speak, a Quem child is taught to recite their identity chain: “Gobaz Kindred, Bear House, Fist Clan, Spear Tribe, Poison Spear WarClan.”

Even birth during a festival overrides these assignments. If born during the 6-day festival at the end of a Hunt, you’re removed from House assignment and considered for High Priesthood—though each deity within each WarClan can have no more than seven High Priests. Birth during a Sky’s 8-day virtue festival qualifies you for standard Priesthood.

It sounds complex—and it is—but the structure allowed me to embed destiny, spirituality, and sociopolitical organization into a single unifying concept: the calendar.

A Nation Divided

Originally, there was only one WarClan. Five Woutjangems (about 2,240 years ago), it split in two: Poison Spear, and Cracked Fist.

This split gives me an internal cultural tension to explore: both nations trace their origin to the same divine lineage and calendar system, but have developed diverging philosophies. Both still use the same Houses and calendar cycles, and both compete to be the “true heirs” of the Quem purpose.

Function Over Sentiment

Creating the Quem forced me to think like their gods. What would you value if you were designing a race not for beauty, but for survival? Every choice I made—clawed digits, claw-ring tattoos at adulthood, naming conventions tied to cosmic math—was built from that philosophy.

There’s no word for “mother” or “father” in Quemish. They don’t bury their dead—they cremate them, adding ashes to the soil that fuels next year’s ritual crops. They don’t celebrate birthdays. They celebrate the Agem after your 13th year—when you survive a three-day ordeal in the ash wilds and receive your tattooed claw-ring.

It’s not a race for faint hearts. But in many ways, it’s the most complete species I’ve ever written - as I even developed a fully functioning language and math system . Creating them was a reminder that the best fantasy worldbuilding doesn’t start with aesthetics—it starts with purpose. And once that purpose becomes clear, everything else—names, numbers, rituals, weapons—starts falling into place.

Final Thoughts

The Quem weren’t just born in fire. They were built to endure it. And writing them was like sculpting something from volcanic stone—rough, burning, ancient. If you’re building your own fantasy races, don’t be afraid to go deep. Design their calendar. Decide how many fingers they have—and how that changes how they count. Ask what happens to their children if they’re born weak.

Because when you get those details right, your world doesn’t just feel alive. It feels inevitable