Drekar make war on every city and nation other than Solstice.

This is because drekar never sleep.

Most other races, from elves to humans to dwarves and even ctheph and tyhnt, don’t really understand how crucial that is to understanding how drekar think. The commoner masses, if they are aware of drekars constant consciousness at all, thinks of it as a quirk no different from the fact they have nictitating membrane rather than eyelids. Even scholars among these races tend to focus on their total rejection of deities as anything more than beings of vast power, no different than mages a thousand time greater than any other mages, and ignore the fact they don’t sleep.

This is a mistake. It is the linchpin of drekar psychology.

From the moment light first strikes their eyes after birth, an event known as the Spark, a drekar gains and maintains consciousness. Unless killed, a drekar never loses the ability to perceive its surroundings and remember those perceptions. Unlike races that sleep, pass out drunk, or just get knocked unconscious, a drekar has an unbroken line of consciousness from the moment of the Spark, to the moment of death. A drekar never wonders if it missing time, or wonders why nightmares it had. It knows, in general terms, what has happened through all its (often many) years.

Drekar also do not believe in souls. Since they accept no gods, and see miracles as nothing more than magic, they do not accept that they are more than their meat. While they acknowledge some energy passes on to the outer planes when they die, they see it as no different from the fact a body of soon-rotting flesh is left behind. And neither reincarnation nor resurrection is considered a restoration of the dead. Magic can create a spoon, or a talking spoon, or a construct made of talking spoons that think they are a mighty general. But it is still just magic creating a thinking thing.

To drekar, being resurrected means a perfect copy of the original person has been created with magic. But since the original existence ended, the reincarnated person is not the same person, even if it has all the memories and feelings of the original person. A wish spell can, after all, create a perfect duplicate of someone who thinks it is that person, but since there are then two people it is clearly not the original.

Even if it is the drekar that is resurrected, it knows with total certainty that is a new being, instilled magically with the memories of a dead drekar. It knows this, because there is a break in its consciousness. A time when it was not aware. That means the previous memory-holder’s unbroken stream of consciousness ended, and that means it is dead.

And this is why drekar feel no shame or guilt for warring on and slaughtering every other race. Because to the drekar, anyone they kill was no more than a day or two old, and only a day or two to live.

This view is held because to the drekar any break in the line of consciousness, even just sleep, is death. Anyone they meet is a brand-new creature, no older than when it last awoke, and not even the true owner of its thoughts and memories. It is instead an amalgam, a colony, of thousands of creatures, each of which lived roughly one day, from awakening to sleep. They view any creature that sleeps much as other races view the undead–as thinking, moving, animate beings capable of making plans and feeling emotions, but not as alive in any useful sense of the word. They are, at best, moiety.

And thus in the lands where drekar septs are strong, they wage merciless, ceaseless, brutal wars against the moieties around them. The moiety aren’t just short lived and doomed to quick deaths. They are perversions of true life, and not to be tolerated if any other choice remains, much as many races war on the undead.

And as drekar are tall, strong, resilient, and adept with war magics, they often conquer vast regions, limited only by how far they can march or fly (as drekar never teleport or engage in planar travel other than physical gates).

But they take no offensive action against the city of Solstice, or those within it. The Mage-God claimed that his vast machine recorded every second of every entity that dwelled within it. The drekar believe this was to done to prevent people from being moiety. That his true purpose was to reclaim true life for all races, as only the drekar have it.

Because it was well known, the God-Mage did not sleep…