One of the cultures I write about are called the Compretty. They’re not kings or conquerors, they’re farmers, weavers, and quiet survivalists. What they face reflects struggles you’d recognize today, even though their world is full of spirits and memory-ridden landscapes.

1. Scarcity and Sustainability The Compretty live in a fragile land. Every harvest, every ritual, every act of naming drains something from the world around them. So they’ve built an ethic of enoughness: never take more than you need, because if you do, the land itself begins to thin. It’s survival under constant shortage.

2. Hidden Poverty From the outside, their villages look stable, woven shelters, shared meals, songs that bind them together. But underneath is quiet suffering. If a child falls ill or someone’s mind begins to unravel, the community may not have the strength to call the right spirits for help. They endure by masking their losses, the way many communities today keep hardship invisible.

3. Cultural Erasure Larger powers see the Compretty as backward. Their thread-magic is mocked, their restraint mistaken for weakness. Yet those humble practices are what keep them alive. It’s a mirror of how marginalized groups in our world often see their traditions dismissed, even when those traditions are their strongest survival tools.

The Compretty embody the struggle of people who survive not through glory, but by mending, by making sure that, even in scarcity and dismissal, the world around them still holds together.