History
The origins of the Vaskharr are largely the origin of the riftclaws themselves. It wasn't until the formation of the Red-Sands clan that non-riftclaw people began to join them, and the Vaskharr culture truly coalesced.
The ancestral riftclaws were a bipedal, dinosaur-like species, sapient and highly social who occupied a similar niche to humans on Earth on their original homeworld. They had a thriving society, operating at a level of technology common to the early 1930s on our Earth.
There are no surviving records from the original homeworld, nor is the cause of its destruction known. But it Fell into the void, all its inhabitants still within.
The original world decayed, as all worlds that Fall do. The ravenous wildlife of the void burrowed into it to feast, and as it broke down, the ancestral riftclaws struggled to adapt. A very significant percentage of the population perished, but several groups managed to band together and fend off the voidbeasts long enough to establish a hodgepodge collective. As their world dissolved into sludge, they moved off in search of food and safety as a single group divided into smaller groups and spread out to to avoid any one threatening voidbeast taking out the whole group.
Like the rest of the fallen creatures confined to the void, the ancestral riftclaws were forced to seek out other fallen worlds in search of resources to keep themselves alive. Constantly exposed to the chaotic energies for the void, they began to change form-- gradually taking on their modern appearance and coming to be considered voidbeasts themselves.
Despite everything, the survivors, and their descendants, stayed in as close-knit a group as possible. Relying on each other kept more of them alive than trying to survive alone, so that's what they did. For several generations the group persevered, travelling endless miles through the wreckage of reality on knuckles and feet.
Over time, breaking through the walls of decaying worlds sharpened the riftclaws' namesake claws to the point where they could tear through the fabric of reality itself. One day, by accident, someone managed to slice their way out of the void into a new, healthy world, and was nearly blinded by the sunlight on the other side.
This first escapee figured out how to travel in and out of living worlds after some experimentation, and travelled back to the others to teach them, too. A smaller group broke off from the main branch about this time and returned to the original world-- only to met ferocious resistance from the locals. They fled back into the void, taking with them other riftclaws who didn't want to risk the same result.
They were only a small number, however. The rest of the population dug their way out into the light, into a different world entirely, where they found themselves in a warm, red desert on the edge of a small, dusty town. And unlike their compatriots, the people they found there were surprised, but not aggressive.
This was the founding of the Red-Sands clan. The riftclaws joined the humans and terrani who lived in the town, lending their strength and unusual abilities to them in return for a safe place to rest. They soon became not just guests, but beloved members of the community, and over time the community developed into a proto-form of the modern clan structure. The term Vaskharr came into use at this point, as non-riftclaws who joined riftclaw families became more and more common.
Smaller groups of families broke away on occasion, taking up the wandering patterns that would later become typical of most of the modern clans. The clan grew substantially in size, and settled a great percentage of the abandoned deserts and monsoon plains of Australia, and later warmer parts of Asia and the Middle East. Others moved into the great underground cities of Terra and began to participate in Terran society. Riftclaw Vaskharr became very well-respected for their knowledge of interdimensional travel and the void, and their expertise was repeatedly sought out by the dimensional research and recovery group, the Rationale.
As their numbers grew, the Vaskharr began exploring alternative universes in search of new worlds to settle on. Terra was welcoming, but low on resources, and their expanding society would probably eventually overwhelm what infrastructure the humans and terrani had cobbled together.
The genetic consequences of the population bottleneck began to show among newborn riftclaws, and the development of the Terran "DNA scrambling" technology was created in part to try and alleviate the issue. Many Vaskharr participated in early trials to help raise healthy babies with more genetic diversity, and several generations of riftclaws were born with genetic edits that gave them wildly different traits to their parents.
More study on riftclaw fertility soon uncovered the ability of riftclaws to hybridise with other species, first in lab conditions but later with living riftclaws. Vaskharr scholars began to discuss outcrossing strategies to start strengthening the gene pool, and some of the newly forming clans in other universes put plans into place. The two largest of the new settlements were sent intentionally to befriend and integrate with the locals of the new worlds; the first, which came to be known as Treasure-Scales, settled in a world alongside a race of dragons and their part draconic offspring, while the second, which later became the Ashen-Walkers, took on more human guises and joined friendly humans in another world entirely.
Both of the new clans integrated well into their new societies, with the Treasure-Scales quickly becoming considered a new kind of dragonborn in Veross, while the Ashen-Walkers almost seamlessly integrated with the people of Solai.
Both clans increased steadily in population, and eventually formed splinter groups of their own; with the development of magitech in Veross, the Riftfarers formed, sailing in magitech ships into new frames, while Broken-Sticks and the Moon-Fangs both split from the Ashen-Walkers, with Broken-Sticks taking on a nomadic route through multiple worlds, and the Moon-Fangs settling into the society on Feyritch, an alternate Earth in a more supernaturally-oriented frame.
Red-Sands splintered again, more intentionally this time, to form the last of the Nine Clans. The first splinter travelled to a frame populated by humans and their sapient monster companions, and over time integrated into the world as the Taliminal "species". The second was sent to a frame adjacent to Terra's, populated by Artuni-- anthropomorphic animal people similar to the terrani, but with wildly different genetic profiles-- which soon became known as Painted-Rocks.