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Kiith LiirHra is a young family. Their parent Kiith, the Hraal, rose on Kharak during the Time of Reason, and gained great power as one of the driving forces in Kharak's industrial revolution. Emerging from under the wing of Kiith Naabal when the Great Daiamid was established, the Hraal were most notable for their application and improvement on the Naabal's basic steam engine. Hraal owned several steam-powered factories by the year 830, and hand in hand with its sister Kiithid, who collectively became known as the "Naabal Kiithlings," the Hraal eventually built the rail lines which linked the northern hemisphere with the rapidly growing Southern Federation.
Kiith LiirHra broke off from the main body of the Hraal in the year 1012, when the prospect of space exploration was under serious discussion at Tiir. Many of the smaller kiithid of the Hraal had expressed an interest in aerospace technologies to their kiith'sa, but at the time the Hraal'sa saw no reason to risk their assets on a venture in which they could see no possibility for short-term profit. Arban Hraal, then the Sa of a small manufacturing kiith, disagreed violently with the conservatism of his kiith'sa. Driven by a vision of the future, he began a campaign to recruit several other minor kiithid of the Hraal, selecting those who could share his vision and whose manufacturing and research facilities would be most useful to his cause. Collectively, this group of young Hraal upstarts petitioned the mighty financiers of Kiith Manaan for a massive loan-enough money to buy their freedom from Hraal, and pay for all the human and manufacturing assets they'd be taking with them.
Siima Manaan'sa, amused by the defiant bravado of Arban Hraal and his compatriots, made a thorough appraisal of their holdings and offered them a low-interest loan of some 500 million Kharakid credits--an outrageous sum at the time. Kiith Hraal, however, was not amused by their children attempting to leave the nest without permission, and would not accept the proposed settlement quietly. They branded Arban Hraal a thief and banished him from their kiith, forbidding him to take any family members or assets with him. His holdings were seized, including the account in which his Manaani credits were deposited, and he was denied access to anything he had once called his, including his wife and children. When he tried to storm into the Hraal compound where his people were being held, ostensibly awaiting "interview" by their kiith'sa, a trio of hooded Hraal security men subdued him. He was taken out into the middle of the Painted Desert in a hovercar, bound and blindfolded, and staked to a dune nearly 200 kliks from the nearest town.
Arban Hraal was not defeated by these extreme measures; he was only just beginning his rebellion. When the Hraal security men returned the next evening, to see if a day in the sun without water or shelter had taught him a lesson, they couldn't find him. They searched the surrounding area by ornithopter, but found no trace of him but a length of knotted rope. Eventually they assumed that he had been left accidentally near the feeding ground of a dune strangler...but at any rate, they were fairly certain that he would never be heard from again.
The truth, of course, was that Arban Hraal had snapped his bonds in the night and escaped. While his kiith'sa searched for him by day, he was sleeping under the sand; by night he was slowly making his way to the nearby city of Frein, navigating by the stars. Once he stumbled into the town, ragged and filthy and only half-alive, he managed to make contact with a sympathetic kiith brother, Kona Hraal. Kona was able to hide him in the Hraal railyard where he worked, and kept him there until Arban was somewhat recovered from his severe dehydration and sandflea poisoning. Penniless and hungry, but unwilling to risk the life of the man who had helped him, Arban Hraal quickly vanished again, crawling aboard a north-bound freight train. Over the next week he made his way from Frein, very near the Southern pole, all the way to the Daiamid at Tiir.
Ragged from his crossing of the Great Banded Desert in a freight car, Arban Hraal staggered into the Assembly an unkempt, blazing-eyed wildman. No one was more surprised than the Hraal'sa when he rushed into the midst of the assembled kiith'sid of Kharak and demanded his right to be heard. He insisted that he was Arban LiirHra'sa, the leader of a hidden kiith nearly 20,000 strong, and that the Hraal were keeping his people prisoner. In the resulting furor, Sobanii guardsmen stepped forward to drag Arban away and the Hraal'sa stood up, demanding an explanation: why was this lunatic allowed to intrude upon the halls of the Daiamid? Arban's future looked very dark indeed until Siima Manaan'sa rose from her chair, silencing all when she stepped down to the floor to give the ragged man her hand.
"Welcome, LiirHra'sa," she said. "We wondered what had happened to you."
The rest, as they say, is history. The Daiamid voted to allow the LiirHra their independence by a significant majority. The Hraal were punished for their mistreatment of their kiith children by being forced to part with the LiirHra at a much lower price than the sum of the Manaani appraisal, and the Hraal'sa of the time quickly found himself deposed by his sister. The upstart kiithling LiirHra went on to be a forerunner in Kharak's conquest of space, and they were key contributors to all aspects of manufacture and research of the Mothership. Among the Sleepers, LiirHra had a presence of nearly 50,000 souls, and since the return to Hiigara they have made put many of the technological advances we made during the Exodus to good use.
A minor footnote completes the ironic circle of Kiith LiirHra's history. Ten years after landfall on Hiigara, the last surviving members of Kiith Hraal, tired of struggling for a voice of their own in the new Daiamid, at last agreed to become vassals of the LiirHra, merging with the younger family for mutual profit and protection. LiirHra gave the former Hraal a kiithing gift of two factory ships when the two families joined, the Gren-Shto and the Steelweaver, and the former Hraal have proved to be as loyal and productive as any kiithid living under the LiirHra flag.
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