THE LORE

The Birth of the Races

The seven peoples of the world did not all arrive the same way. Six emerged from the Rebirth cycle at different points in its descent — each a crystallization of the elements at a specific transition. The seventh, humankind, was not born. It was fashioned from mud by Vallen the Wright, for labor, and given just enough of his breath to be alive.

The Rebirth cycle descends through five stages: Aether into Fire, Fire into Earth, Earth into Water, Water into Air, and Air back into Aether. The peoples of the world are what that descent left behind at each stage — living residues of the cycle's passage, each one a crystallization of the transition that made them. They did not emerge all at once. The oldest races predate the Imperium by ages; the youngest arrived with it. And the youngest of all was not born at all. --- **The Vyr — the Firstborn — born at Aether→Air** The Vyr are the first and oldest. They did not emerge from the material world; they ARE the first movement of the Rebirth cycle — the moment Aether began its descent into Air, given form and will. Their bodies are half-Aether, half-Air: thin to the point of luminous, brilliant, impermanent, attuned to the Design because the Design is the Aetherial substrate their own nature is made of. They are the people of becoming — the descent itself crystallized as flesh. This is why they call themselves firstborn. It is not a boast about power or number. It is a cosmological fact: before the Vyr there was only the divine substrate, unmoving. The Vyr's birth WAS the beginning of the world's descent into matter. Everything that came after — every race, every stone, every river — is downstream of the moment the Vyr began. The price is written in their bodies: you cannot be half-Air without being impermanent. The Design shows through a Vyr too clearly, and what is wrought that fine shatters. Their longevity is bought in fragility; their brilliance bought in brittleness. A Vyr who lives long enough and looks too deeply does not die — they dissolve into the Air they came from, which is either a return to the divine or simply the end, and no Vyr has come back from it to say which. --- **The Asheni — the Secondborn — born at Fire** When Aether descended fully into Fire, the Asheni emerged: the first people of solid form, the first to take the world's heat into their blood and hold it there. They are Fire's people — ember-eyed, ash-skinned, forge-keeping, resistant to the flame that made them. They are the first race to be fully material, which the Vyr have never forgiven them for not minding. Fire is the dual element: it creates and destroys in the same act. The Asheni are this. They make and they ruin with equal dignity. Their forges and their grudges run on the same fuel. Their burial rite — the Ash-Return — enacts the Ruin cycle's Air→Aether ascent: burn the dead to ash, release the ash to the wind, and the Aetherial remnant rises free. They do not call it elemental cosmology. They call it respect. The Asheni consider themselves the eldest material race and in that sense the truest inheritors of the world. The Vyr were first, yes — but the Vyr are barely here, half-dissolved into Air, barely touching the ground. The Asheni are here, in the stone and the forge and the grudge. Being real matters more than being first. --- **The Stoneborn — the Thirdborn — born at Fire→Earth** When Fire cooled into Earth — when transformation settled into the made and fixed — the Stoneborn emerged. They are the world's memory of the first making: short, broad, dense, carrying in their bones the settled weight of Fire become stone. They do not resist magic because they are strong; they resist it because the Design finds no purchase in granite, and they are closer to granite than to air. The Stoneborn do not think about elemental cosmology. They think about the oath, the seam, the wall that will outlast the century. But their guild-oaths — the oldest ones, predating the Imperium — carry a line: *by the first cooling, which held*. They do not know what it refers to. It refers to this: the moment Fire became Earth, and the world stopped changing long enough to be built on. The Stoneborn are the bedrock race. Every civilization in the world has been built on top of what the Stoneborn cut. --- **The Korl — the Fourthborn — born at Earth→Air** The Korl are not quite Earth and not quite Air. They are the mountain's surface — the place where the great settled stone meets the constant wind, where Earth reaches its highest point and Air presses down to its lowest. They are this boundary made flesh: immense and enduring as rock, passing and uncommitted as the high-pass wind. They hold no permanent thing. The mountain endures; the Korl passage across it does not. They are Earth that learned to move. This is not the same Air as the Vyr. The Vyr's Air is half-Aether — divine, luminous, the Air of becoming. The Korl's Air is terrestrial: the wind that carries stone-dust, the cold that kills, the gale that clears the pass. There is nothing divine in it and the Korl do not want there to be. The Vyr look down from Aelvyrenn and see the Korl as crude half-made things. The Korl look up at Aelvyrenn and see people who refuse to touch the ground, which is a polite way of saying cowards. The Korl predate the Imperium. Their barrow-halls are in the rock above every pass the Imperium's road-builders later graded. The Stoneborn cut the stone beneath; the Korl held the height above. The Rampart Wars — the Imperium's long push east — broke the Korl's monopoly on the passes, which is why the wound is still raw four centuries later. --- **The Hessk — the Fifthborn — born at Earth→Water** When Earth began to erode into Water — when the fixed gave way to the flowing — the Hessk emerged from the first deep dissolution. They are the oldest of the low races and the most patient: cold-blooded because Water is cold, scaled because Water's creatures are armored against the pressure of depth, unblinking because the deep is always dark and there is nothing to flinch from. The Design barely touches them — Water is too low in the Aetherial hierarchy for the divine to press strongly in it, which is why the drowned shrines that would madden a Vyr are to a Hessk merely cold and dark and full of things worth taking. The Hessk do not count their age. Water does not count years. But they were in the Mirrenmere before it was called that, and their word for Sresh-Dar predates the city, and the drowned valley they call home is older than any imperial road. They are the oldest continuous presence on the Vale's water, and they know it with the quiet certainty of something that has never needed to prove it. --- **The Reshi — the Sixthborn — born at Water→Air** The Reshi emerged at the threshold between Water and Air — the transition where the flowing rises into the free. They are neither fully heavy nor fully light: tawny-furred and night-eyed, at home in the dark places between states, moving through a world of fixed things with the ease of something that was never meant to stay. Their night-eyes are the signature of the threshold: they see in the dark because they are of the in-between, where Water's depth and Air's openness meet and neither fully wins. The road is not their home. The road is their element. Movement is to the Reshi what stone is to the Stoneborn — not a choice but a nature. When a Reshi stops moving, something is wrong in the way a river dammed is wrong: the pressure builds behind the stillness and eventually the dam breaks. They were on the roads before the Imperium graded them. They will be on the roads after the last milestone is swallowed by grass. --- **Humankind — the Last — fashioned from mud** Humankind was not born from the cycle. It was **made**. Vallen the Wright — the god of making and unmaking, whose domain was the great transition between the Aetherial and the material — shaped humankind from mud during the High Age, for the great works of the Imperium. Mud is Water and Earth combined: the lowest elements, the dregs of the descending cycle. He animated the mud with Fire — his own animating breath, the element of his domain — and gave it Air to carry the breath. He gave it a vanishingly small sliver of Aether: enough for consciousness, enough to sense the Design dimly, enough to be something more than animal. Not enough to threaten. Humankind was made numerous because tools need to be available. It was made adaptable because the Wright needed workers for many kinds of work. It was made unremarkable because a hammer does not need to be beautiful. What Vallen did not give humans — could not give them, or chose not to — was a nature. The other races are crystallizations of an elemental transition; they cannot be anything other than what they are. A Vyr who tries to be dense and permanent fails at it. A Stoneborn who tries to be light and impermanent fails at it. Humans carry Water and Earth and Fire and Air and a whisper of Aether without belonging to any of them — which means they can be almost anything, which is either a gift or a lack, depending on who you ask. Most humans do not know their origin. It is not in any text they have access to. The Vyr know. The eldest Asheni gravesongs hint at it: *the mud-kin came with the roads*. The Stoneborn guild-oaths have a line — *by the first cooling, which held, and the last mud, which walked* — that most Stoneborn read as metaphor. The Reshi road-songs have a verse about a god who got lonely and made himself company out of river-clay, which is close enough. Humans themselves believe they came up the trade roads following opportunity. This is true. The roads they followed were built for them, by the god who made them, who is now dead.

This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →