- Peoples of Talan
- The continent holds many peoples, distributed across the thirteen domains by ancient pattern of culture, climate, and kinship. The Dragons of Sumendar are an alien race whose mothership crash-landed in the Gods' Era; all other peoples are native.
- A feeling, not a uniform
- An ancestry is a temperament: the feel of a people, met anywhere on Talan. How that temperament lives is the business of each land; the same people keeps different customs in every region that holds it, and a region's culture is kept by everyone who lives there.
- Heritages
- Lineages that carry something other than ordinary ancestry: divine blood (god in the veins), elemental sparks from the Prelife layer, Life-Layer planar lines (Wood & Metal, from the Feyworld and Shadowplane), mortal-ancestry mixes, and a small handful of other unique lines.
- Lifespan
- No mortal of Talan is known to have lived past two and a half centuries. This shapes politics, warfare, and theology across the continent: dynasties move quickly, scholars work in lineages, and no one mortal sees a century of history through their own eyes alone. Gods and the undead step outside this limit.
The Peoples of Talan
Every people of the continent, in one roster, each led by the feeling a traveller meets before any flag or custom. Where a people keeps a heartland, the entry names it; where one region holds the people's fullest expression, the entry names that too. The customs themselves belong to the places, and the places are written on their own pages.
AnadiChaos · Nashavel · the Basogur Jungle
The ones who re-weave.
Eight-eyed spiderfolk for whom making is devotion: an Anadi's order is not a wall against the churn but a daily practice inside it. The web tears, a storm, a beast, a neighbour's notion, and the Anadi is unbothered, because the web was never the point; the weaving is. Creation re-done every morning, serene about destruction in a way that unnerves tidier peoples: they rebuild the way other folk wake up. Their web-holds cluster thickest in the Basogur's deep interior, and their silken web-walks re-string Nahaskel as fast as the city remakes itself.
Androidrare across Talan
The last of an old craft, and they know it.
Synthetic people created by the Elden, the only living link to Elden craftsmanship, and no forge will ever make another: every Android alive knows the count goes only down. It makes them deliberate in a way no other people is; an Android maintains herself the way an archivist maintains the last manuscript of a dead language, because she is one. Some husband centuries, some spend themselves on the conviction that a last thing unused is already lost. What no Android does is forget the number.
AthamaruWater · Floteyn · the spray-zone islets & Hafra coast
At ease above the abyss.
Fish-folk whose pods range the spray-zone islets and the saltwater shorelines of Hafra. An Athamaru is born suspended over a darkness that goes down past all light, and is fine: dread gets no purchase on them, panic is a land-emotion, and when the ship founders, the Athamaru is the one whose voice does not change. She meets disaster the way the sea meets a thrown stone, closing back over, whole.
Automatonuncommon · common in Eldara (Fire)
The almost, owned.
An Automaton was made as an attempt at something else, the Golden Empire's would-be Androids, and has stopped apologizing for it: the empire is dust, the aim was never reached, and the Automaton is still here, each one deciding what they are for, since the one who decided first is gone. They are most at home in Eldara, the city that sells its almosts for fortunes: the people who are someone's near-miss, living among folk who know a near-miss can be worth more than the aim.
Awakened Animalrare everywhere
The ones who remember waking.
Every Awakened Animal was present at their own beginning: there was a wordless life, and then there was a morning the world had names in it, and no other people on Talan remembers becoming a someone. It never entirely wears off; everything other folk absorbed before memory, names, money, doors, promises, lying, an Awakened Animal learned on purpose, one astonishment at a time, and they are the one people for whom no convention is invisible. Lifted into sapience by druidcraft, by the flame-touched lands of Sumendar, or by Feyworld leakage at the edges of Nashavel; the Adventurers' Guild treats any who join a party as full members. Each one is its own story; the waking is the one page they share.
AzarketiTime · Lioaru · the southern coast
The ones who answer it now.
Water-adapted descendants of the civilisation mortal myth calls the Old Race. Every Azarketi is born carrying a story bigger than their own life, and what an Azarketi is, is the answer given today: most wear the inherited Elden blood claim as daily pride, a long-distorted memory; in Valreka, Tani's whale-borne city, a community answers with water instead, serving as the water-bearers a desert city cannot live without. The inheritance is fixed; the response is a present-tense act, renewed every morning.
Curiosity that keeps.
Not just the urge to know: the urge to know properly, completed, ordered, cared for, put where it belongs. A Catfolk anywhere is the one who finishes the question, checks the second source, labels the jar, and quietly resents an answer left half-done; knowledge, to a Catfolk, is something you become worthy of. Enki himself is depicted as a black-haired catfolk, and they carry his Wisdom face: the keeping eye, for whom every closed door is a kept promise rather than a refusal.
CentaurHunt · Ehizahar · the open grasslands of Villtur
No one can carry them.
A Centaur's body is always her own to move and never another's to lift, and that same body bolts, a prey-creature's nerve under a thinking mind. So the watch belongs to the herd and the running to you: a hundred eyes turn the herd before the danger lands, and then each runs on her own legs. She is never alone and never truly carried, and the two are one fact; should her legs break there is no bearing her out, and they are the one people on Talan who cannot be rescued. The herder-coursers of the open grass, prey in the domain of the chase, kept alive by the one thing the lone hunter never has.
The ones who know what is underneath.
A Conrasu is chaos given a body: they have been formlessness, and the chosen shape, kept deliberately, is sanity practiced as a daily act. Their carefulness is the discipline of someone who knows exactly what is at the bottom, because they came from it; the thread of caution in any room is the voice of the only people who do not have to imagine what unravelling means.
The old blood.
Indigenous wyrmkin whose line remembers an age before the bread, before the kingdoms, before the Dragons fell from another sky, and the remembering is in the blood rather than in any book: a Dragonet is born already belonging to something older than every map of Talan. It makes them unhurried and very hard to impress; a thousand-year ruin called ancient strikes them as a charming use of the word. Their tradition holds Zaharsuge as progenitor, and many reject the authority claim of Dragon's Reach on theological grounds. In Sarrum's domain they are the miners and metal-wrights whose lineages root where stone gives way to metal, the old memory the colour under the craft.
The long ember.
An alien race; their mothership crash-landed on Talan deep in the Gods' Era. Dragon doctrine holds that the gods of that era used them and, in the using, stripped them of their immortality; modern Dragons are mortal, remember being otherwise only as record, and every Dragon holds an opinion on what purity would mean and whether to seek it. The argument between purists and pragmatists is the shape of their civilisation.
Methodical.
A Dwarf believes any problem yields to the right procedure: measure, sequence, test, correct, the schematic before the hammer and the checklist after it. A dwarven masterpiece is never a stroke of genius; it is ten thousand corrected errors, and the Dwarf is prouder of that than genius could ever make them. Two cultures share the temperament: the
New Age Dwarves of the
Order of Steam, and the
Sentinel Dwarves of the upper Darklands, the most reliable mortal early-warning system against what climbs up from below. A third stands far from both: Fenurra's
Draconis tribe, Mantle-holders of the
Scar of Aeris and sole forgers of Blackglass, the method-temper under Dragonblood scale.
The long view.
Patience as temperament: an Elf weighs a choice against decades, gives trust the way a bank gives credit, and is still watching a plan unfold when the mortals who started it beside her are grandparents. One of the two ruling bloodlines of the
Thousand Kingdom, and the side of any Zuzental polity that remembers why the rule was made.
Fenurran tribesHunt · Fenurra · the Scar of Aeris
Four peoples, one blood.
The four tribes of
Fenurra are united by the
Dragonblood heritage rather than by any single ancestry: the
Draconis are Dwarves, the
Vexiren are Goloma, the
Brakkaun are Orcs, the
Seravain are Hobgoblins, and the old wyrm-blood runs through all four, thicker than anywhere else on Talan. Four peoples who would be strangers anywhere else read each other as kin, because under four temperaments runs one undertone: the stillness every Fenurran goes to under threat.
FetchlingDarkness · Myrkono · Ilun Tasun
The self is made, not given.
Who you were is information; who you are is a decision, and a Fetchling extends that conviction to everyone they meet. The unasked question is its courtesy: a Fetchling may know you ten years before asking where you came from, and then only because you began it. The discretion runs both ways, and the one who tells you their old name is telling you they trust you with their life.
A people of one.
No two Fleshwarps are alike, which means every Fleshwarp is the sole member of their own kind: no template to resemble, no "typical" to fail at, and the loneliness and the freedom of that are the same fact. Each one builds the whole answer to
what am I? alone, and the steadiest of them carry a composure that surprises strangers. Born of the cursed ground of the
Blackened Lands, or fabricated far away in the
Red Empire's Menagerie; same end-product, completely different origin, and most Talanese cannot tell them apart on sight.
The ones who hold what was.
Memory as temperament: unhurried, archival, every Ghoran a living keeper of what it has witnessed, for whom the past is not gone, merely earlier. Plant-rooted and long-lived, the Guardians of Time: each elder a living archive of centuries the rest of the world holds only in fragments. They are the majority and the heart of Valreka, the whale-borne city whose whole work is to remember.
The ones who spin it.
Spontaneity as temperament: the idea arrives and the hands are already moving, let us try it differently this week is the resting state, and boredom is the only suffering a Gnome takes seriously. They do not endure the churn of the Chaos domain; they generate it. Feyworld-native, long since migrated into the Material Plane; in Nahaskel, a city that remakes itself overnight, the Gnomes are the engine.
Appetite.
The first question a Goblin asks of anything in the world is whether it can be consumed, and the second is whether heat, distillation, or the right combination could make it so. Brews, ferments, tinctures, poisons, intoxicants, acids, the volatile charge a Kobold will happily build a shell around: everything consumable is theirs, and nothing is ever ruined, only changed into an ingredient the next batch has not met yet. The world, to a Goblin, is a meal half-cooked, and fire is how you finish cooking it.
The hidden many.
A Goloma is never seen and never alone, a flock of many eyes in the tall grass and the dark, and where one is, others are, because prey does not stand by itself. They move together by instinct, not oath, many minds reading the same wind, a togetherness that needs no weaving and never melts into one will; you are surrounded before you know it, and what rises from the grass is fifteen souls who were there the whole time. The cost mirrors the gift: a people happiest unseen are a half-beat slow to put themselves forward, shy of the spotlight and a stranger's direct look, though they warn you of the snake in the path all the same, just a breath later than a louder person would. Fenurra's Vexiren tribe is a Goloma people, the hidden-many turned to ambush-craft.
The road in the blood.
Wanderlust as temperament: the call of the next market, the horizon as a standing invitation. It holds even for the ones who never leave; a Halfling who stays has chosen the one place where the world keeps arriving, and a Halfling who settles comes home full. Atarialda is the feeling at its fullest, the road carried out and brought home to the hearth; the rail-Halflings of the HRA run the same feeling down the lines without ever sitting down.
HobgoblinLaw · Zuzental · the Order of Law
The given word.
For a Hobgoblin the sworn word is load-bearing: slow to promise, immovable once sworn, still keeping what was agreed long after everyone else has moved on. The constancy casts its own shadow, the grip that does not know when to let go, and Hobgoblin elders name it before any outsider can. The oath-minded gather thickest in the Order of Law, where the Hobgoblin is the dominant ancestry of the institution itself. Fenurra's Seravain are a hobgoblin people whose bond-pairing carries the given word into marriage and war.
The short fire.
Life is now, so the move is now: risk-takers and cycle-burners, the ones who force the question, take the loss, and start over twice in a working life. The other ruling bloodline of the
Thousand Kingdom, and the side of any Zuzental polity that notices the rule has stopped working.
The ones who stand in it.
Giant-blooded folk of the arctic north, the largest stable Jotunborn population on Talan. The storm arrives and they remain: stoic, slow, weather met as a fact to be respected and outlasted, anger as rare and as total as a winter front. Many read weather and ice-routes for the saltkeel crews of the northern Hafra arc.
The ones who watch it.
The observer's stillness inside the moving air: quiet, precise, inward where others are loud. What a Kashrishi believes is their own; what a Kashrishi has measured is everyone's. The
Air Monastery and its Wyndwalken cartographer-order are the public-civic crown of the inclination.
The ones who keep their own.
The first fact about any Kholo is who is hers: family by blood or family by decision, and toward that circle a Kholo is never off duty. Matriarchal by disposition, they reckon a life by what it kept safe through the lean seasons; ask a Kholo who she is, and she will answer with who she keeps. In Brauogi they are the herder-clans of the breadbasket, the meat, milk, and leather to the Minotaurs' grain and stone.
The chosen reveal.
Known as the Divine Envoys; Fisaya herself is depicted as a kitsune, and the affinity goes back as far as the chronicle record reaches. Presence as craft: charm, performance, and discretion in one skin; what a kitsune shows you is exactly what she means to show you, and what she keeps is hers. Whether that becomes the Heartcourt's theatre, a quiet harbour bar, a market-stall, a veiled book of odds, or the waking-record of a dream-touched coast is the place's business; the populations diverged so long ago that one tradition reading another sometimes recognises only the foxfire.
The leap.
Where the Dwarf proceeds, the Kobold arrives. Intuition over process, fascination over fear: the prototype goes straight to the fire because the explosion teaches faster than the drawing ever could, and a Kobold reads wreckage the way a Dwarf reads a schematic. The genius is real and so are the casualties, and no Kobold has ever agreed that the second point diminishes the first. Komo himself is depicted as a kobold, and they have never once been humble about it. No relation to the Dragons, whatever the silhouette suggests.
LeshyLight · Egulon · fullest in Lua Lasai
The ones who stay.
Plant-spirits and a full people, born and raising children and holding lineages like any other folk. Rootedness is the temperament: to stay, to tend, to remember. In the longest-cultivated land on the continent the Leshy are the part that remembers, who planted this windbreak, what stood in this field before the vines, what the soil took badly the last time someone tried it; their lineages keep to the same grove and vine-stock across generations of the wine country's sun.
LizardfolkHunt · Ehizahar · the Lands of Villtur
The ones who never stop coming.
Patience as temperament: slow to start and impossible to shake. A Lizardfolk decision takes its time arriving, and once made it is inevitable; the people of the long stalk, deliberate at the kill, unhurried in a way that frightens prey more than speed would.
MerfolkWater · Floteyn & the Hafra coasts
They move as water moves.
A Merfolk does not force: she meets an obstacle the way a current does, around it, over it, through the crack in it, unhurried and unstoppable, and arrives where she meant to arrive with no sign of having fought for it. The sea is hers because she is the sea's, and the dignity surface-dwellers find magnificent or insufferable is simply the certainty of water: nothing has ever finally stopped it, and nothing has ever finally stopped her.
The ones who outlast.
Nothing about a Minotaur moves quickly: anger arrives slowly and forgiveness slower, trust is laid course by course, and a task once shouldered is carried to the end, because setting it down half-done never occurs to them. A Minotaur's grudge and a Minotaur's friendship are made the same way, slowly, and to last. Sarrum himself is depicted as a Minotaur, and his cousins wear the resemblance without ceremony: the grain-farmers, stonecutters, and wall-builders of the breadbasket.
NagajiTime · Lioaru · Hareaveldi
The ones who become what's next.
Serpent-folk: shed, and whole again. A self, to a Nagaji, is a finished thing you can lay down, and a Nagaji is always already growing the next one; the smith of thirty years sheds the trade and is wholly a riverman now, and the mourner emerges from grief clean in a way other folk find uncanny, answering that the sorrow is in the skin she left. No people on Talan carries less of its own past on its back, and Tani's death-and-return is something they recognise rather than merely revere, for her mystery is written in their own bodies.
OrcHunt · Ehizahar · the Lands of Villtur
The ones who close.
Predation as temperament: the world met head-on, now, holding back the one unbearable thing. Loudest, first in, most consistently in feud with their counterparts; Hinka is depicted as a red-headed orc, and the affinity runs deep. The hunt ends with them. Fenurra's Brakkaun are an orcish tribe apart from the Villtur sprawl, the close carried into drum-and-charge warfare.
Poppetrare everywhere
Made on purpose, and knows whose.
A Poppet is the only kind of person who was wanted before they existed: someone's hands made them, for something, and the Poppet knows exactly what and whose. That certainty is a warmth no born people has and a wound waiting to happen, because makers die and purposes end, and a Poppet who outlives theirs carries the question the rest of their days. Earnest, loyal to littleness, unembarrassed by having been a toy: the smallest people on Talan, and the only ones who have never once doubted they were meant.
Every question has an answer.
The Ratfolk conviction is that nothing is truly closed: every wall has a seam, every system has a gap, every stuck problem a route nobody has tried yet. They assume the way exists and start looking, try it, fail cheap, try it differently, unsentimental about how a thing is "supposed" to be done; the same temperament threads a tunnel, cracks a cipher, a market, a recipe, a negotiation everyone else has given up on. Originally of the Darklands and at home underground as few peoples are, they carry Enki's Discovery face in his own domain, and they thrive in every city on Talan as its quickest and most resourceful folk.
The ones the hidden calls.
The Shisk hunger is specific: not knowledge in general but the withheld, the locked drawer, the unmarked path, the subject the village will not discuss. Show a Shisk an open library and a sealed cellar and you have already lost them to the cellar; it is neither defiance nor greed, the hidden simply itches. Shisk-curiosity is a standing warning given to junior novices, and the calling runs both ways: a Shisk who follows the pull far enough tends to end a keeper of the very kind of secret that drew them. The people of Enki's Mystery, becoming mysteries.
ShoonyLight · Egulon · fullest in Argia Esfera
The heart given once.
All dog-coded peoples fall under the Shoony name. Loyalty and constancy as one temperament: a Shoony who has chosen you has chosen for good, and the choosing does not wear out. Many as the breeds, a dozen dog-kinds under one name, and underneath every coat the same fact: a Shoony is the one still there, at the door, at the altar, at the sickbed, when everyone else has gone home. In Argia Esfera they tend a great flame that has not gone dark in living memory.
The ones who already paid.
A Skeleton has settled the one debt everyone else is still dreading, and fear has lost its biggest lever on them forever; what remains is the question the living never face plainly, why get up?, and every aware Skeleton is one who had an answer. Patient as only the deathless can be, with a strange lightness the living find unsettling in the bones of the dead: the worst has happened, and here they still are. Common in the Blackened Lands and nearly unknown elsewhere; émigrés carry the politics of that origin with them, many kingdoms refuse them entry, and the Adventurers' Guild does not. Spiritually tied to Betibizi, the Minor God of Undeath.
SpriteLight · Egulon · fullest in Harro Distiratsue
The ones who shine.
Two populations, one people. The Material-born Sprites of Egulon are settled and generational, a world away from their flighty Feyworld cousins: they feel outward, delight, grief, mischief, and pride running straight to the surface and coming out as light, glamour worn openly and well. A Sprite who is happy is a room that knows it, and where a Sprite lives there is more light than the sun strictly provides. Their fey-and-chaos lineage still sits uneasily against Iro's zealous worship, a question Egulon has never settled. The Feyworld stock remains across the veil, and the few who cross stay rare and go where they go.
The ones who ride it.
Winged sky-people with weather in the blood: restless in still air, most alive when the sky is moving, reading a front the way other folk read a face. Flight is the disposition, whatever the trade, and their storm-attunement makes them the deepest keepers of storm-lore on Talan; the Stormriders and the Thunderhost moot are Fellibylur's institutions grown around the gift.
Not their shell, and never alone.
Insectoid sapients, never their shell and never alone: a Surki is what they choose, never what they wear, and what Surki choose, almost always, is each other. They think in
we, work braided, grief shared out until each carries a bearable piece, and the
we is woven, never granted: a stranger is fed the day they arrive and called
we years later, and once woven in, never dropped. In the shadow-forest of
Itzasoa they are the Woven, who grow the dark-yew
ilunagin hard as metal and braid the
we the same slow way. They are the fiercest enemies of the corrupted swarm they are mistaken for, because they know the difference between a multitude and a hive: the swarm is one will wearing ten thousand bodies, and the Surki are ten thousand wills choosing the same thing.
The ones who answer it.
Voice as temperament: expressive, social, quick to song where another people keeps silence. The wind speaks, and a Tengu speaks back; the answer comes as reflex before it comes as choice. Two pulls share the one bird, the one that draws them out into the world and the one that calls them home, and a Tengu is shaped first by the leaving and then again by the return.
TripkeeWater · Floteyn · the Floating Isles
Home is made, not found.
A Tripkee builds wherever she stands, and if the island drifts, the home drifts with it, which troubles her not at all. Give a Tripkee three planks and a tide and there is a porch by evening; give her a season and there is a village. The most settled people of the least settled domain, at peace on moving ground because they build, never despite it.
VanaraChaos · Nashavel · the Basogur Jungle
The ones who ride it.
Change is the element the Vanara are native to: neither seeking the current nor resisting it, sure-footed on ground that will not hold still. Where others need the world fixed or need it changing, a Vanara needs only to know which way it is moving today. Jungle-dwellers of the Basogur, which straddles Nashavel and Ehizahar, navigating the politics of the two domains around it rather than belonging to either.
The shaping hand.
Community is a thing you make, and making is how you belong: what a Vishkanya touches takes a form that holds, a household, a ledger, a fair argument, a thing of beauty meant to outlast its maker, and she stays to keep what she shaped. Jianna herself is depicted as a vishkanya. In Itsasalda the feeling stands at its fullest as the steady watch of the Vordsbench; in Merkavar it is the fine-artisan guilds; in Azkataria, the form-masters of the Open Floor.
Who Lives Where
Each god's domain has one or more peoples for whom that land is cultural and demographic heartland; where one sub-region holds a people's fullest expression, it is named in parentheses. Others live across the continent in smaller numbers, finding company where the climate and the gods allow.
Seldom seen across Talan
Poppet · Fleshwarp (common in the
Blackened Lands) · Skeleton (common in the Blackened Lands) · Android · Awakened Animal · Feyworld-stock Sprites (their Material-born cousins keep a true heartland in Egulon). Azarketi keep a true heartland in Lioaru, so they sit with the domain-dominants above rather than here.
Heritages
Some mortals are born carrying something more than their parents' blood, and the lines sort by where the otherness comes from: the substance of a primordial's stratum, the essence of one of the sibling planes, divine parentage, a mortal mix, or one of the old powers' lines. Each is visible, often striking, and met with its own reception: some are blessed, some are feared, most are simply known and lived around. A heritage sits on a person who already carries a people's feeling, so each entry below describes the carry: what the blood or spark does to whatever temperament was already there. The carry holds on any ancestry; the ancestry keeps deciding who the person is.
Sparks of the Substrate · Layer 1 in the Body
Seven lines carry the substance of a primordial's stratum: the spark is substrate, never divine blood. The four bound elemental gods keep a doctrinal kinship with the corresponding spark, and spark-carrying communities gather around those domains by cultural gravity, never by birth. The four classical sparks differ the way the elements differ: fire spends, water levels, earth bears, air alights; wood grows and metal is set; the Suli carries more than one.
IfritSuzar's spark · primordial flame
The burn.
The body keeps fire's rules: an Ifrit runs warm to the hand, the air over her skin shimmers on a cold morning, and the soup never goes cold at her table. Fire warms the cold and consumes what stops moving, and an Ifrit's attention works the same way, kindling what it lands on, eating through whatever sits still too long. The reception is everywhere double: welcome at the hearth, watched in the hayloft. The shadow is consumption, a fire fed everything it asks for; ask the one who left why she did, and she will say she got tired of being fuel.
UndineUrzar's spark · primordial water
The level.
Whatever the day throws at an Undine thins, spreads, and settles, the way ink thins in a harbour: insults shed, yesterday's weather slides off, the temper finds its level by morning. Folk trust that levelness the way sailors trust deep water: it will hold your weight, and it makes no promises. The shadow is the flood, perhaps once in a decade: the water does not argue, it takes everything loose, and afterwards it is calm and the furniture is gone. Watch one take terrible news: the surface moves, the depth holds.
OreadLurzahar's spark · primordial earth
The bearing.
Weight is real to an Oread, and bearing it is the native act: they feel loads the way other folk feel temperature, the sag in a roof-beam, the strain in a friendship, the panic gathering in a crowd, and where an Oread stands, things settle onto her and hold. People lean without meaning to; the child is asleep against her shoulder inside three minutes. The shadow is the swallow: a grief taken so deep it becomes geology, load-bearing and past anyone's reach, her own included. When the storm comes, the street shelters in the Oread's house, and nobody remembers deciding that.
SylphHaizar's spark · primordial air
Lightly held.
Gravity holds a Sylph loosely: light on the floorboards, the voice arriving on the draft before the face arrives at the door, and the lightness goes all the way in. A Sylph holds everything lightly, the grip, the grudge, the plan, and what she loves she loves without putting weight on it, which the loved receive as the purest freedom or the deepest insult, depending on what they wanted held. The shadow is the fickle: a Sylph who never once presses down leaves a life with nothing standing in it. Hand a crying baby around the room; it quiets with the Sylph, because nothing in her hands has weight.
ArdandeZurzar's spark · Feyworld wood
Grows around what happens.
Wood lives by growing around what happens, and so does an Ardande: injury, love, a bad year, each is grown over, kept, and built on, ring around ring, knots where the wrongs were and the wood hardest exactly there. Forgiveness in an Ardande is growth: the friendship continues with a knot in it, changed and stronger at the joint. The shadow is the dead branch: an Ardande who stops growing dries, and the one who bent through forty winters snaps in an afternoon. Plane her down to any year, and that year is still in the grain.
Set by being worked.
Metal takes the shape it is worked into, and so does a Talos: the hungry year, the good master, the long war each leave a permanent set in the self, and the set holds. What a Talos learns is learned for life, and knowing it, she chooses her forges with care, the trades, the teachers, the loves she will let work her, because for her there is no passing phase. The shadow is the bad set: bitterness in a Talos outlasts its cause by decades, true as a blade and just as indifferent to what it cuts. Ask her for the thing she learned at nine, and the motion arrives without rust.
Sulithe blend · more than one stratum
The strata take turns.
A Suli wakes to find which element has the morning, the warm hand or the cool one, an inner weather with real seasons and no calendar. The blend is range no single-spark carrier has; the price is that no rule of thumb works on her, her own included, and the discipline every Suli builds is the morning's first honest question: who is up today? The shadow is the argument, strata that stop taking turns, a soul like a strait where two tides meet. The proof is small: her tea goes cold while her bathwater steams, in the same hour.
Essence of the Sibling Planes · Layer 2 in the Blood
The two planes flanking the Material each express in mortals twice: once as substance (Ardande and Talos, above) and once as essence, the plane's own nature crossed into a bloodline. The essence pair are counterparts: the Aphorite carries a sense, the Ganzi a field.
Aphoritethe Shadowplane's essence · the plane of Order
The line in the blood.
An Aphorite is born with a sense the way other folk are born with hearing, and what it hears is order: a true statement and a crooked one feel different in the room, a promise being kept has a weight, and a promise breaking has a sound that only the Aphorite caught. The blood decides what they notice; what they do about it belongs to the person and their people, so a Goblin Aphorite distils with uncanny exactness while a Gnome Aphorite spins her chaos in perfect metre. The trait shows as ruled-straight markings or a faint metallic veining. The shadow: some carriers cannot stop hearing the crookedness, and set out to straighten the world by hand. At the swearing of a false oath, the Aphorite is the one who looked up.
Ganzithe Feyworld's essence · the plane of Chaos
The improbable leans in.
Around a Ganzi the stuck thing comes loose, the long odds land, the day swerves, and the blood does the swerving whether or not anyone asked. A Ganzi grows up knowing the plan and the day are two different things, and the day wins; the Dwarf Ganzi carries three spares of everything, the Halfling Ganzi lets the road choose the fork. The trait declines to settle even on the skin: an opal sheen one season, a patch of scale or feather the next. The card-houses split on them, half comping their drinks, half barring the door. The shadow is the unravelling: a carrier who tires of broken plans can stop making them, and a life that has stopped planning is the door the unravelling uses.
Divine Parentage · Layer 3 in the Veins
Nephilimany god or devil · the bound thirteen included
The parent's nature, as a light pull.
The one heritage that is a god in the veins, and the only way a god gets there: parentage. A god's touch never rides a bloodline on Talan; Jianna's blessing lands as trade fortune and the favoured merchant's child inherits nothing, Enki's as aptitude, Cronus's worshippers are made by choice. What crosses into blood crosses the old way, and what a Nephilim carries is the parent's nature as a light pull, a lean in the blood: an Iro-line carrier finds hope coming easier than the evidence warrants; a Shuun-line carrier is steadied by still water and moved to tears by the tide; a Hinka-line carrier reads a room's exits before its faces. The pull is a lean the carrier can stand against without effort; the people they were born to decide everything else, which is nearly everything. The shadow is feeding: a pull indulged daily thickens, until the lean has become the direction.
How the marks fall
Celestial marks can manifest in Nephilim descended from any god, most commonly Iro, who is himself depicted as a Nephilim; the celestial-marked find Egulon's doors open accordingly.
Fiendish marks manifest in Nephilim descended from any
Vice Demon or Virtue Devil. Two Nephilim from different parent lines may share nothing beyond the divine touch itself: one glows faintly, another smells of brimstone, another casts a shadow with three more limbs than the body has. Reading the parent line takes a practised eye, a service Enki's scholars sometimes sell; plenty of carriers live and die with the line unread.
Mortal Mixes
Children of two peoples whose lines mix; their place in the world is shaped by the politics of the parent peoples and how those politics frame the child of both.
Aiuvarinelven · any other people
The second clock.
One parent line is elven, and the elven gift is the long view; the Aiuvarin carries it as a second clock. Whatever tempo her other people keep, the slow clock ticks under it: she argues for the quick fix all morning, spends the afternoon drafting the twenty-year version, and means both. The half-and-half identity is its own social position, and the carrier learns early which rooms want which clock shown. The shadow is the long escape: living in the twenty-year version, patient with everything, including the things patience quietly kills. At the housewarming, the Aiuvarin plants the oak, and she plants it for herself.
Dromaarorcish · any other people
The close.
One parent line is orcish, and what crosses is the close: a finishing instinct. Open things pull at her, the unsettled argument, the unbanked fire, the door ajar; her body votes for action a beat before the rest of her is consulted, and waiting spends her like a held breath. The shadow is the foreclosure: things ended because unfinished was unbearable, the argument closed with a blow, the question closed that needed a year ajar. Ask a Dromaar to wait out an insult: she can, and you can watch what it costs her sitting in her shoulders.
Beastkinthe Awakened line
One beast, the ancestor's.
Somewhere up every Beastkin's family tree stands an Awakened Animal: an ancestor who began as a beast, woke into a someone, married into a mortal line, and left the waking in the blood. The beast in the blood is particular, the ancestor's own, hawk or boar or hare, and it shows in the features and in something faster than thought: the weather smelt a day out, the wrongness in a room felt before the door opens, the body already turning when something runs. Ehizahar's tribes read the trait as Hinka's blessing or her burden; the tribes are wrong about the source and right about everything else. The shadow is the reins: a chase joined too completely, the beast deciding before the person is consulted. Asked how she knew, the Beastkin has no answer; the knowing arrived without words.
The Old Powers' Lines
A bound god's touch lands as blessing and leaves the bloodline unmarked; the lines below belong to older powers outside the Compact's bound form, and to lineages with no god in them at all.
DuskwalkerEpairima's line · made, not born
The cycle's children.
A Duskwalker arrives as a mortal child of some people, manifesting where death runs close to the surface, and the crossing is in them from the first breath, finished. Endings come gently where they are: the restless dead settle, grief quiets in their company, and undeath has never once taken a Duskwalker, for their soul is promised home. Talan's two great sources are the
Blackened Lands, the wound, and the
Soul Tree off the coast of
Tvisol, the Kingdom of the Two Suns, the door (the one place on Talan where a Duskwalker birth is entirely ordinary); the
Voroir Daua read Duskwalkers as the cycle's own children, and extend them a courtesy the order extends almost nowhere else. The shadow is the remove: a carrier too settled about endings can let go what should have been fought for. When the breath goes long, it is the Duskwalker's hand the dying reach for, strangers included.
The becoming, unbidden.
A Changeling lives with a standing invitation to be someone else, felt as a low tide under the life they have, and once or twice in a life the tide rises, and the carrier wakes certain that the name in their mouth is finished. The blood offers; the person disposes, in their own people's tempo. The trait shows in the eyes, mismatched, one Unaru's and one Veyru's, and folk-belief reads the pair endlessly: which eye is looking decides whether the next face will be a delight or a woe. Myrria receives them warmly, and a finished name has a rite waiting there; most of Talan keeps a warier eye on a friend who might be someone new by spring. The shadow is the one the folk give to Veyru: the invitation accepted too many times, until none of the names was anyone.
Dhampirhalf-Vampire
Alive, at an angle.
Vampires are an independent lineage on Talan, and Dhampir descend from them directly: mistrusted across most of the continent, easier received in Myrkono, where Araphel's new faces doctrine extends a cultural courtesy. The carry is the threshold: alive the way dusk is daylight, truly, and at an angle; the heart beats slow, the night reads as plainly as noon, and the pulse of a sleeping house is audible from the stair, the parent line's thirst arriving as an echo, a tide felt and never owed obedience. She is within the cycle, ageing, dying, and she insists on it: among no other people is the first grey hair a private festival, evidence at last against the accusation in every stranger's look. The shadow is the echo indulged: nights spent listening to pulses, the tide obeyed in small ways that grow.
The undertone.
Wyrm-blood of Talan's indigenous serpent-stock, the same old line the Dragonets descend from, surfacing as scale at the temple, a slit catch in the eye, heat in the breath; no kinship with the alien Dragons, whatever the name suggests. Beneath the features sits a stillness older than the person carrying it: under threat a Dragonblood goes quiet where her people go loud, the voice drops into an undertone the bones hear before the ears do, and the room's hair stands up, because the old line never learned to bluster. The blood entered mortal lines in the deep ages, wherever the old Wyrmkin country ran near the surface and mortal peoples lived beside it; it is strongest in
Fenurra, where the four tribes are united by the blood across their differing ancestries. The shadow is the cold: the stillness can swallow the warm answer, and kin reaching for comfort sometimes find scale where they wanted skin.
Hungerseedhalf-Oni · Sortalde
The second helping of want.
Oni are bound spirits of Sortalde, hungers tied to one place forever, and the child of that line is born with an appetite one size larger than any meal: the feast ends and the want is still at the table, praise, gold, victory, love, each arriving with its echo, more, in a voice older than her own. The want is the spirit's; the answer is the carrier's, and most Hungerseeds become connoisseurs of enough, generous at table beyond all custom because they know hungry from the inside, all the time. Almost all Hungerseeds are Sortalde-born; a Talan-side carrier typically descends from an émigré a generation or two back. The shadow is the bargain: feeding the want whatever quiets it longest, and the list grows stranger by the year.
Reflectiona touch of the Wellspring
The quiet.
No parent lineage: Reflections are made, sometimes intentionally, often not, among the very few beings on Talan born of chance contact with the Wellspring rather than the touch of any deity. The carry, from the inside, is the quiet: where other carriers describe a pull, a tide, an undertone, a Reflection reports still water, a deep unweathered hum at the bottom of herself. She is the one client Enki's lineage-readers refund: the divination slides off, the family trees dead-end, and the scholars rule out everything until what remains is Reflection, which is how most learn the word for what they are. The shadow is the undertow: leaning over her own quiet too long, asking what am I of water that holds the question and gives back her face.
Sortalde · The Six Petals
Six ancestries native to Sortalde (Tao Hua Yuan internally), the petal-archipelago continent east across the Cloud Sea.
On Talan, all six are rare. The crossing is hard, and most arrivals come through the standing Sortalde embassies on the Emerald Isles' Bridgelands, the cloudship landing point for Sortalde traffic. A Sortalde-ancestry character on Talan is a story, not a demographic.
| People | Sortalde homeland | Seen on Talan |
|---|
| Yaoguai | Wandao (Myriad Island), outer petal | Most-likely-seen; closest petal to Talan. Yaoguai merchants occasionally settle in Lautara. |
| Tanuki | Xidao (Theatre Island), outer petal | Itinerant performer-merchants; the largest standing population on Talan is around the embassies. |
| Sarangay | Niudao (Ox Island), outer petal | Usually attached to embassy security details. Their oaths survive reincarnation cycles. |
| Wayang | Yingdao (Shadow Island), inner petal | Vanishingly rare; those who cross are typically working, embedded spies or freelance information brokers. |
| Yaksha | Lingdao (Spirit Island), inner petal | Functionally never. Bound to specific places; a Talan-side Yaksha is doctrinally an exile whose bond was broken. |
| Samsaran | Lundao (Wheel Island), inner petal | Vanishingly rare. A Talan-side Samsaran is almost always a retired chancellor or a heretic. |
Read the full continent
Sortalde has its own continent page covering the seven petals, the Concord of Courts, the (still-unnamed) dynasty-spirit pantheon, and the cloudship-only trade route to the Emerald Isles. The entries above are the at-a-glance; the continent page is where the ancestries breathe.
Sortalde · Tao Hua Yuan →
Continue Reading
- The 13 Bound Gods → · The deities whose domains shaped where each people settled and how they worship.
- Non-Bound Gods & Beings → · The Layer-3 gods, primordials, Vice Demons, and Virtue Devils whose bloodlines feed the heritage lines above.
- Magic & Faith → · The Wellspring, the planar layers, and the cosmological frame that underpins divine blood and elemental sparks.
- Cosmology → · The world's structure: Tyrnarra, the planes, and the Wellspring from which all ancestry ultimately flows.
- Lost Kingdom · the Blackened Lands → · The Fleshwarp and Skeleton homeland; the wound in Lioaru's south that pulls the dead back into motion.
- Emarrea → · The Kitsune kingdom in Lautara's forested western highlands; home of the Heartcourt.
- Order of Steam → · The New Age Dwarf polity of Sumendar, including House Eisenhart.
- Sortalde → · The petal-archipelago continent and its six ancestries, Oni, and the unnamed Layer-3 pantheon.
- Emerald Isles → · The Sortalde embassy landing point on the Talan side of the Cloud Sea crossing.
- Itsasalda → · Lautara's harbour-region, where the Vishkanya keep the steady watch of the Vordsbench.
- Atarialda → · The hearth-Halfling sub-region of Lautara; home of Eyvind the far-travelled Jotunborn.
- Azkataria → · The philosopher-market of the Open Floor, its Vishkanya form-masters, and the Foxbook kitsune.
- Adventurers Guild → · Assesses the individual, not the lineage; the one institution on Talan open to every ancestry equally.
- Red Empire → · The Menagerie-made Fleshwarps and the Iron Tide's threat to Talan's eastern coast.
- The Binding → · The Vermin Queen versus the Surki; the Nine Generals and the War of Seals.