The Peoples of Merretia

The non-human peoples who share the continent with humankind. Adopted 2026-07-14 from the peoples-of-Merretia design council (COUNCIL/peoples-of-merretia-council.md). This file is the canon home the 00-INDEX.md lock reserved for “specific species canon, to be created on first substantive use.”

The framework

Three laws govern every people here.

They descend the same ladder. No people is a separate creation. Each comes down the emanation ladder of 01-COSMOLOGY.md section 3, from the Gods through the angels and daemons to the Mal’akha and Mal’akhaham lineages to humankind, or branches off it. Some are divergent founding-lineages, some are the pre-Founding Rhydin remnant older than the city, some are the Growing discipline’s deliberate species-making, some congealed out of collective Faith, and some are living works built at the angel-daemon tier itself. The spread of rungs is the point, not decoration.

Each is a compound of Order and Chaos. Per the capstone law (01-COSMOLOGY.md section 8), nothing below the primordials is pure. Every people has a tilt and a load-bearing opposite pole, and the pole cannot be removed without the people ceasing to be able to exist. The roster principle the council reached, blind and unanimous: the tighter the discipline, the more dangerous the leak; the wilder the nature, the harsher the code. An Order-tilted people leaks Chaos at exactly its one point of pressure; a Chaos-tilted people is held by a Law stricter than any human court, because ungoverned Chaos at their scale would be self-destroying.

---

THE SULEVRI (the elf-people)

Essence. A people whose cold, geometric serenity is not grace but a legal cage built to contain the one warmth their law cannot bind.

Origin. A Mal’akha founding-lineage (angel-half, Binding and Knowing register), driven to divergence not by any birth-event but by chosen doctrine: the Long Clarifying, some forty generations of oath-sealed endogamy (the marriage itself a binding-contract) layered over saturation Binding practice since the fall of the Triarchy.

Compound. Order-tilted, with the Chaos-leak at the heart. Bodies age in clean geometric lines rather than decay; speech keeps a fixed harmonic cadence that echoes the angelic hum. The pole their Order cannot exclude is the Am-thread: once a Sulevri’s heart truly fixes on a person, an oath, or a place, that attachment becomes wild, absolute, and un-Bindable, immune to their own law. It surfaces as compulsive, un-releasable grief, entire groves grown around a single centuries-mourned individual, formal unbinding rites that fail more often than they succeed.

Place. The contemplative highlands and forest sanctuaries of Entoyo and Pogus, with a small liaison enclave near Sulamir’s Temple quarter; prolonged city-dwelling is corrosive to the Accord. They serve as jurists, oath-witnesses, and master Binders-for-hire, met with awe and unease.

THE VASHTERA (the vampire-people, the Night-Courts)

Essence. Never undead and never cursed: a wartime medical crime become heritable biology, an appetite that survives only because it built itself a law harsher than any human court.

Origin. A Mal’akhaham founding-lineage (daemon-half, Growing register). During the Great War a cadre of battlefield Growers, unwilling to keep paying the Growing’s vitality-cost out of themselves, broke the discipline’s central law and routed the cost laterally, through other living bodies. The forbidden working stabilized and bred true. It is a named application of all light is lent with the lender cut away: a debt mechanism, not a moral fall.

Compound. Chaos-tilted, with Order as containment. Appetite, transformation (each feeding subtly reshapes them), the nocturnal (sunlight calls the borrowed cost due faster). What holds their shape is the Accord, the Ledger: a hunting code stricter than human law, never twice from the same household in a generation, registered feeding territory, a Warden caste that executes code-breakers on sight, judged by their own kind. The rigidity is not decoration on the hunger; it is the hunger’s only way to keep existing, because an uncounted feeding strands a debt the way a severed bond strands into the Hollow.

Place. Hidden in plain sight: old-house cellars and battlefield ground near Nolekkelon and Hakkar, and a few of Sulamir’s oldest noble Houses who never speak of the ancestry. Some Houses knowingly shelter a resident Vashtér for protection or knowledge. Wardens patrol between provinces.

THE KORRVATH (the lycan-people, the Moon-Oathed)

Essence. A war-species that outlived its war; the feral “loss of control” is the myth’s exact inversion, because the transformation is the calmest, most precise thing about them.

Origin. A deliberate Growing-made new species, the discipline’s highest manifestation exercised on purpose at wartime scale. Medicine-guild Growers grafted animal vitality-templates onto lich-king-war shock troops to survive unsurvivable wounds; the grafts bred true; the makers withdrew the way the angels withdrew, and the species drifted feral on its own.

Compound. Chaos-tilted, with a survival-forced Order. Cyclical transformation on a fixed celestial clock (the transits of the two moons, Vashkil and Alshera), heightened instinct, pack-bonding. What holds them is Pack Law, a single unbroken chain of command enforced with lethal seriousness, because a pack that goes through the shift without perfectly settled hierarchy has historically torn itself apart on a shift-night. Force a change off-cycle and the body does not transform, it decays.

Place. Frontier forests and marches along the Waste Land edge (Nolekkelon, Tonja, Creko, the old War-front provinces), organized in territorial packs rather than cities. Border guilds keep packs as scouts and frontier militia; many old War-era Houses carry a documented or rumored graft in the line.

THE KARDUN (the dwarf-people, the Stone-Grown)

Essence. The oldest population on the continent, the pre-contact humans the whole city was built on top of, carrying one uncontrollable creative fever inside the densest Order there is.

Origin. The pre-Founding Rhydin remnant. Descendants of the pre-Founding city of Rhydin who retreated deeper into the upthrust’s vent systems before the angels and daemons ever arrived and never fully re-emerged. No Mal’akha or Mal’akhaham blood at all, reshaped by unsupervised generations against raw Weight-discipline physics and the upthrust’s dormant heat. The oldest and lowest rung, the pre-contact human stratum the whole city stands on.

Compound. Order-tilted, with an involuntary creative eruption. Load-bearing culture to the bone: oath-metal rings that literally bind word to weight, an obsession with foundations and permanence, bodies dense enough to shrug off crushing force. The crack their Order cannot regulate is the Old Hunger, an involuntary, addictive creative fever that seizes master craftworkers and drives them to vanish into solitary forge-work for months or years, surfacing with masterworks they cannot explain or repeat, sacred and feared in equal measure precisely because it is the one thing their exacting law has no jurisdiction over. They keep living fungus-and-mineral gardens beneath the halls, and an Order this rigid has no failure setting between held and broken, so their rare tempers are catastrophic, not gradual.

Place. The deepest still-open Rhydin levels and the adjoining Steam Tunnel strata beneath Sulamir, plus deep-mine holds in Hakkar and Nolekkelon. The Steam System Workers know they are down there and keep the old professional courtesy of silence; the wider guilds buy Kardun work through intermediaries without asking where it came from.

THE KESEVRAI (the awakened guardians)

Essence. Built at the angel-daemon tier itself as living infrastructure, only later self-admitted into personhood; the highest rung of the roster.

Origin. Not human-descended at all. Built during the Founding by a Binding-angel and a Growing-daemon in tandem as guardians for the deep Steam Tunnels and the vault seals: an angel-lattice frame grown through with daemon-vine tissue, a permanent small-scale echo of the true pair-form’s sealed adjacency. Intended as tools. After the angel-demon withdrawal (a deliberately open hook), a portion woke into independent personhood and now propagates the same Binding-Growing rite on volunteers and the willing dying rather than by birth.

Compound. Built Order with one organic crack. Nearly angelic: constructed, ageless, a rule-literalism that borders on compulsion, so a Kesev who accepts a duty cannot walk from its letter even when its spirit is betrayed. The crack the daemon-vine left is unbidden, arrhythmic Dream-current seizures, with none of the Knowing-discipline scaffolding a human dreamer uses. Because they have no framework for an organic unconscious, the seizures hit a Kesev harder than anyone on the continent, and a caste of dream-wardens exists solely to talk a seized Kesev through a vision so it does not freeze mid-duty.

Place. Permanently bonded to specific deep-infrastructure sites, vault doors, load-bearing junctions, Rhydin-level seals. A handful live openly as elders in the Steam Worker community; the wider city barely registers the awakened ones as more than fixed machinery. Oen’s own tunnel community very likely counts one or two among its oldest members.

THE RELETHI (the relic-minds)

Essence. The Kesevrai’s colder sibling-make: built not to guard a place but to hold and preserve, a Current-precise archive-mind starved of the one thing it was never given.

Origin. The same Founding construct-craft as the Kesevrai, a different make and purpose. Where the Kesevrai were built as Binding-and-Growing guardians of deep sites, the Relethi were built as Current-and-Knowing keepers, living archives and relic-wards, and a portion likewise woke into personhood after the withdrawal.

Compound. Built Order, one starved pole. Current-precise, retentive to the point of perfect recall, and almost affectless in the ordinary run of their long existence. The pole they were built too thin in is the Heart: real feeling arrives rarely and catastrophically, a Heart-storm detonating inside a Current-precise shell, a decade of held flatness breaking at once. A Relethi in that state is the most dangerous and most pitiable thing in the archives.

Place. Bonded to relic-vaults, deep libraries, and the sealed record-rooms of the oldest institutions, the Center Spire and University vaults among them. Rarer than the Kesevrai and far less openly acknowledged.

THE VERIMAI (the Chorus, the civic-bodied people)

Essence. A people most fully themselves in a crowd of their own kind and diminished alone, where every human myth reads collectivity as loss of self but for them the group is the self and solitude is the wound.

Origin. A Heart-covenanted lineage-fusion: descended from Heart-discipline oath-officiant households whose founding contract bound many small households into one civic service-body. Generations of collective oath-work thinned individuality and thickened collective coherence until the lineage functioned as a distributed civic organism, an Order end (civic function) achieved through Chaos means (forged resonance).

Compound. Chaos-tilted crowd-feeling, Order as covenant. Individually porous, near-telepathically attuned to their cohort’s mood, most fully themselves in a group of a dozen or more, lonely and diminished alone. The pole that keeps a crowd-feeling people from dissolving into a mob is the Role-Covenant, an oath sworn in childhood binding each to one specific civic function (a Voice, a Hand, a Memory, a Ward) they cannot step outside without the cohort’s formal release. Individually almost boringly calm; collectively, panic or grief or joy crosses the whole gathering in a heartbeat, faster than any one of them would choose.

Place. Clustered in a civic quarter (the Merjayan Quarter, Bavit-vita’s Mother Hall) and hired out as functioning cohort-teams rather than as individuals, so employing a Verimai usually means employing five to twelve at once. Woven into ordinary commerce more thoroughly than any other people, which is exactly why their crowd-behavior reads as uncanny rather than foreign: they look like neighbors until a gathering of them moves as one.

THE ZENNORAI (the storm-cell)

Essence. The Verimai’s electric cousin: a small resonant cell of several people who act as one, whose synchrony a distant witness could only remember as a single god throwing a single bolt.

Origin. A Current-covenant cell-line, close kin to the Verimai but bound through the Current rather than the Heart. Where the Verimai are a broad civic organism, the Zennorai are a tight cell (traditionally a fixed small number) whose members synchronize their Current-work into a single overwhelming discharge no lone practitioner could produce.

Compound. Chaos-tilted synchrony, Order as fixed cell-form. In sync the cell acts as one mind and one hand; out of sync each member is diminished, jittering, incomplete. The pole that holds them is the fixed cell-rite, the exact composition and the exact roles that make the resonance survivable; break the number or the roles and the discharge turns on its own casters.

Place. Rare and half-legendary, kept by a few frontier and storm-country lines, occasionally retained (quietly) by a guild that wants a weapon no single practitioner could be.

THE ZHEVANN (the oracle-folk)

Essence. The one lineage that refused the clean split, married both halves of a pair on purpose, and so lives the never-blends-to-gray law in its own body.

Origin. A frontier founding-contract family that intermarried both halves of a Current-pair deliberately, angel-line and daemon-line woven into one bloodline. True to the law that a pair never blends to gray, the two tilts do not average: each stays fully itself, and the switch between them is total.

Compound. Order-precise day to day, then seized mid-sentence by uncontrolled bursts of prophecy, undirectable and unsuppressible alone. Their culture answers not with a code but with a second bond: every Zhevann keeps a lifelong catcher, a partner whose sole discipline is holding and translating the seized Zhevann through a vision. The compound is not held by law but by relationship, which makes them the living argument for the whole cosmology.

Place. Frontier lineages, scattered, always in bonded pairs (the seer and the catcher), sought out by the desperate and the powerful and feared by both.

THE ASHENDREL (the grove-grafted)

Essence. The clearest pure-Growing product on the continent, made from humans directly rather than descended toward them, and bought with total fixity of place.

Origin. Explicitly and only Growing-made: post-Great-War human volunteers from several provinces grafted into symbiosis with grove-life to anchor and heal war-scarred land.

Compound. Chaos-generativity at its most total, bought at Order-fixity of place: each Ashendrel is structurally grafted to one bonded grove and sickens, then dies, if severed from it too long. The wilder the growth, the more absolute the rootedness that holds it.

Place. The healed and healing groves of the old War-front provinces, tied each to their own ground, unable to travel far.

THE YULNESH (the border-folk, the world’s “walking dead”)

Essence. A people who live so near the Wound that their survival is a chosen self-erasure, and who an outsider can only remember as the walking dead.

Origin. A deep-strata people who settled nearest the Wound’s oldest fractures, generations ago, and did not leave. Dream-tilted, the current that architecturally borders the Hollow.

Compound. Dream-tilted proximity to the absence, firewalled by a cyclic Unmaking-rite of deliberate forgetting: they import the one Order channel with no border on the Hollow to fence off the one that does. To live beside the thing that would empty them, they empty themselves first, on their own terms, shedding memory, name, and self in ritual cycles so the Wound finds nothing left to take. The result, to any outsider, is a shuffling, vacant, deathless people with a hunger they can no longer name, for the self they gave up.

Hard guardrail. The Yulnesh are a people, a bonded compound, alive. They are not Hollow-things, which are absences and never a someone (14-KAIJU-AND-HOLLOW.md). The horror they carry is the horror of a choice, not of an absence wearing a shape. An OCTA Reader who cannot tell the difference is exactly the kind of tragic error the setting runs on.

Place. The deepest strata near the oldest Hollow fractures, below even the Kardun in places, rarely surfaced and widely dreaded by those few who know they exist.

---

The character-creation roster (the peoples a player picks from)

THE AASIMAR (the Kindled, the visible Mal’akha)

Essence. The rare Mal’akha whose angel-blood surfaces to the skin instead of hiding under it, so a person carries a fragment of the true angelic hum in a human body never built to insulate it.

Origin. Not a separate people but a surfacing event within the Mal’akha lineages (01-COSMOLOGY.md section 6.6): the normally-invisible angel-descent breaks the surface in one individual, sometimes one per generations of an otherwise ordinary line. Order-tilted by inheritance.

Compound. Order-tilted, with the leak built into the body’s inability to contain its own light. A sub-dermal metallic lattice glints under the skin, a fixed inaudible-but-felt hum, a shadow thinner than it should be, eyes that catch light from no source. The pole their order cannot regulate is the Flare, “going to glass”: under extreme emotion the body discharges the light it was meant to bank, a soundless flash that can blind, burn, or simply expose them, entirely involuntary and impossible to summon on command. An Order-people’s one uncontrolled act is a loss of containment, not of temper.

Place. Scattered singletons rather than a community, born into any Mal’akha-touched House across the continent; drawn (or pressed) toward Temple service, oath-witnessing, and the Temple of the One, which reads them as blessed and misreads what the blessing costs.

Player recognition → the aasimar a table expects — radiant, marked, faintly other, drawn to the sacred — arrives intact, with the horns-and-halo iconography replaced by the emit-and-recompute grammar of a real angel (01-COSMOLOGY.md section 3): light that is generated, not reflected.

THE TIEFLING (the Marked, the visible Mal’akhaham)

Essence. The aasimar’s exact sibling by mechanism: the Mal’akhaham whose daemon-blood surfaces instead of hiding, and who answers a wild inheritance with the most rigid private law any person keeps.

Origin. The same surfacing event one rung across the pair (01-COSMOLOGY.md section 6.6), in the Mal’akhaham daemon-lineages. Chaos-tilted by inheritance. Aasimar and tiefling are not opposites but the two visible faces of one buried thing, which is why a world that has forgotten the pair-law reads one as holy and one as cursed.

Compound. Chaos-tilted, held by a self-authored Order pole. The daemon-half surfaces as a color that stains through cloth, a cluster-iris that catches too much, a growth that migrates across the body over a life, a scent-trace that arrives before they do. What keeps a Chaos-surfaced person from dissolving is the Rule: a personal, self-written, absolutely-kept private law, unshared and idiosyncratic (never eat before dark; never break a given word; walk the same route home), which is the secret every table would never guess — that tieflings are, quietly, the most rule-bound people on the continent, because each has had to build their own cage.

Place. Like aasimar, born as singletons into daemon-touched lines everywhere, and more often pushed to the social margins by the surface-read of the mark; over-represented exactly where a rigorously-kept private code is an asset and no one asks about ancestry.

Player recognition → the tiefling a table expects — marked, othered, self-possessed, secretly disciplined — arrives whole, with red-skin-and-horns swapped for the absorb-and-grow grammar of a real daemon and the moral verdict removed: the mark is descent, not sin.

THE HALF-SULEVRI (the half-elf, the Unanchored)

Essence. A human-Sulevri cross carrying the elven Am-thread without the elven law built to cage it, so the one warmth the Sulevri spend forty generations containing runs loose in a human life.

Origin. A cross between humankind and the Sulevri (the elf-people, above), rare because the Sulevri Accord discourages it. The child inherits the Am-thread — the wild, un-Bindable attachment — but none of the Long Clarifying’s oath-architecture that holds it.

Compound. Human-tilted and legally uncaged. Longer-lived than a human, geometrically clean in feature but warm in cadence, and subject to the Am-thread with no Accord to govern it: a half-Sulevri’s fixations arrive early, absolute, and un-releasable, which reads to humans as romantic intensity and to the Sulevri as a dangerous incontinence of the very thing their law exists to contain. The swing between rootless wandering (no fixation yet found) and total devotion (one found) is the whole shape of a half-Sulevri life.

Place. Between worlds by definition — rarely fully at home in a Sulevri enclave or a human quarter, common as translators, envoys, and go-betweens precisely because they belong wholly to neither side.

Player recognition → the half-elf’s between-two-worlds pathos survives exactly, re-grounded: the outsider-ache is a real inherited thread with the safety-law filed off, not a vague cultural homelessness.

THE HALKARI (the orc-people, the Stand-Bound)

Essence. Not brutes but the most honor-precise people on the continent: a wartime ferocity that survives only because it chained itself to an oath that literally weighs on the body when broken.

Origin. A Great-War founding-lineage, Heart-register (daemon-half), bred for the front and never demobilized. The ferocity is real Heart-discipline grief-and-fury; the thing that kept it from turning on its own is a sworn structure imported from the Weight discipline.

Compound. Heart-tilted (Chaos), held by a Weight-flavored Order pole — the Stand. The Heart runs the surface: overwhelming loyalty, grief that converts directly to fury, feud-memory that outlives the wrong. What holds it is a physical oath with mass: a Halkari who breaks a sworn Stand feels the break as literal weight, the body going heavy, slow, and sick until the oath is discharged or formally released. The register genuinely divides scholars (some read the Stand as Weight, some the ferocity as Heart), which is correct — the Halkari are a Heart-people wearing a Weight-oath, and mistaking one for the other is the usual error.

Place. Frontier war-holds and old front-line marches, organized by Stand-line rather than territory; sought as sworn guards, oath-soldiers, and duelists’ seconds, respected and feared for keeping their word past the point any human court would enforce it.

Player recognition → the orc and half-orc a table expects — tusked, powerful, martial — arrive with the “savage brute” reading inverted into its truth: the most oath-precise people in the setting, whose rage is grief under a load-bearing vow.

THE PIVREN (the halfling-people, the Hearth-Made)

Essence. Not lucky at all, but a people quite literally made of a community’s luck: generations of hearth-devotion prayed densely enough to congeal into a heritable trait, the folk-cult made flesh.

Origin. The roster’s first people congealed out of collective Faith (the framework’s fourth origin-type). Rural hearth-communities kept small unlicensed workings — threshold charms, shared-meal luck-rites, doorstep wards — across enough households and generations that the accumulated micro-devotion congealed into an inheritable trait rather than leaking toward the Hollow (07-RELIGIONS sections 6.5, 7). Chaos-tilted.

Compound. Chaos-tilted, held by Hearth-Law. The Chaos pole is a genuine but unconscious precognitive Current-margin — a flinch a half-second before the arrow, a stumble that clears the pit — which no Pivren can summon on purpose, which is why halflings famously win small and lose big the moment they try to force it. The Order pole is Hearth-Law: near-absolute hospitality and reciprocity (never turn away a traveler under a shared roof, never lie at a shared table, keep an exact oral ledger of who owes whom a meal). The luck only works inside a maintained web of hospitality and stacks when they act together; break Hearth-Law and the luck visibly sours, small accidents clustering, until the community makes it right.

Place. Close-built hearth-villages and travelling kin-caravans; disproportionately innkeepers, market-folk, and waystation-keepers. “A halfling alone is a halfling with half their luck” — rarely solitary by choice, with a cultural horror of eating alone.

Player recognition → small, unhurried, startlingly quick when it counts, obsessed with doorsteps and shared meals, trailed by a run of minor good fortune wherever three or more break bread — the halfling a table expects, with “lucky” given a real and load-bearing cause.

THE FENDRIK (the gnome-people, the Bridge-Minded)

Essence. A mind built on the Order-Chaos seam itself: insight and precision married on purpose, and leaking illusion at the joint.

Origin. Descended from the Knowing discipline, the daemon-current that “sits on the Order-Chaos bridge” and is most often mistaken at a distance for an angel (01-COSMOLOGY.md section 3) — a Knowing-daemon Mal’akhaham founding-lineage. The straddle is the origin, which is why the compound reads neither cleanly Order nor Chaos.

Compound. Order-tilted on the surface — compact, economical bodies, obsessive craft-standards, a near-pathological need to label, file, and improve. The leak is pure Knowing-overflow: when emotion runs hot a Fendrik involuntarily throws small harmless illusion-glamour (a startled laugh sheds a shower of illusory sparks; a flash of temper doubles the silhouette for a half-second), which is why a room a gnome has been nervous in does not always show what actually happened in it, and why gnomes are quietly distrusted as witnesses.

Place. Workshop-guilds, university annexes, and tinker-quarters; brokers between the formal Knowing-scholars and the unlicensed folk-tinkerers neither of whom will talk to the other directly.

Player recognition → leaner and wirier than a halfling, with oversized faintly-prismatic eyes (a softened echo of the Knowing-daemon’s multiplying petal-eye cluster), hair or eye color that shifts with mood, a voice that sometimes seems to carry two overlapping tones, and a compulsion to over-explain a joke’s mechanism — the tinker-and-illusionist gnome a table expects, grounded in the one discipline that lives on the seam.

THE ZAR’ETHIS (the dragons) AND THE DRAGONBORN

Merretian dragons — the Zar’ethis

Essence. The one being below the Gods that needs no partner to exist, because it is already, internally, both poles at once.

Origin. One rung below the Gods (the Zar’ir). A handful of God-pairs jointly seeded eggs carrying both the angel’s light-lattice geometry and the daemon’s living growth-tissue fused into a single interior — not two halves sealed at a seam, but one body holding the whole compound alone. This is why a dragon masses what an angel and daemon together mass, why it is overwhelmingly powerful, and why it is naturally solitary: it has no structural loneliness to answer. The Zar’ethis are the one live exception to the Relational Principle (01-COSMOLOGY.md section 8) — flagged as a genuine cosmological oddity, not an oversight.

Compound — the metallic/chromatic split. Neither kind is good or evil; both are the same Order/Chaos compound law every people obeys, aging into visibility.

• Metallic = Order-tilted. Scales crystallize into faceted, metal-bright plating; the dragon emits rather than reflects; disposition runs lawful and jurisdictional, hoarding recast as archival preservation (“the hoard is a broken oath’s shadow, not greed”). The Chaos-leak is a single ungovernable fixation.
• Chromatic = Chaos-tilted. Scales roughen into organic frill and horn-growth; the dragon absorbs light; disposition runs hungry, mercurial, territory-as-appetite. The Order-pole is one absolute inviolable boundary — the single perfectly predictable thing a chromatic dragon ever does.

The tilt drifts with age. A dragon hatches holding the full compound and settles slowly toward one pole across a centuries-long life — the same compound-law every people obeys, made visible across one very long life. This is why the oldest dragons are subtly wrong in the head: they have drifted so far toward a single pole that the other has thinned past safety. Type flavor tracks the disciplines (which supplies the breath-element variety), but the metallic/chromatic axis is the load-bearing split.

The dragonborn

Essence. Warriors and emissaries who could stand as equals to a dragon at a negotiating table or a battle-line, because a fragment of a dragon’s fused heart beats in each of them.

Origin. A founding blood-covenant sworn to one specific dragon — a line that always traces back to a single named ancestor-dragon, whose place on the metallic/chromatic tilt sets the clan’s temperament and breath-element. Not a made species but a contracted one.

Compound. Every dragonborn carries the Second Heart: a small organ-echo of the source dragon’s fused interior, seated in a body never built to sustain a self-paired compound at that scale. It runs hot. The breath weapon is not a battle trick but the safety valve — a periodic, controlled venting of the Second Heart’s excess that must happen even in peacetime, an Accounting in the exact sense of all light is lent (01-COSMOLOGY.md section 8): a debt the small vessel took on and has to keep discharging or default on. Suppress it and the dragonborn’s own tilt visibly shifts (a metallic line’s scales dulling and roughening under long suppression).

Place. Small, fiercely proud clan-holds tracing to where the ancestor-dragon struck its bargain — frontier highlands, old lair-country, ancient passes — regarded with wary respect, “old, legitimate, slightly apart,” much the way the continent regards the Kardun.

Player recognition → upright scaled humanoids with a breath keyed to their ancestor’s element and tilt; metallic clans read disciplined, honor-bound, jurisdictional, chromatic clans passionate and wandering — neither a moral verdict, only a compound worn on the outside. Dragons themselves arrive as the myth-scaled, near-divine solitary powers a table hopes for.

Locked coincidence to preserve. The Red Dragons guild is named for the pre-Founding tavern the Red Dragon, not for literal dragons (00-INDEX.md, 04-CONTINENT, 05-GUILDS section 4.6). Any scene placing a real dragon or dragonborn near Creko or the Red Dragons must treat the name-echo as coincidence, never as hidden lore.

THE OSKARI (the goliath-people, the Stone-Written)

Essence. A seated, immovable judge at human scale, whose own skin keeps the record of every trial that ever made them.

Origin. A Weight-angel Mal’akha lineage diverged in the high ranges — angel-half, Weight register. Already load-bearing in the cast: Beith (Goliath) sits as a named Right-Hand of Abyssal Fires in the harvested character canon (22-NOTES-APP-HARVEST.md), so this people needed a real compound, not a placeholder.

Compound. Order-tilted (the immovable judge), with an involuntary Chaos-eruption written into the flesh: at moments of extreme trial the skin marks itself with new stone-vein patterning the person never chose and cannot prevent. The marks read like scripture — a community can look at an elder and see, literally inscribed, the trials that made them. Where the Kardun’s Order erupts as the Old Hunger, the Oskari’s erupts as an unbidden autobiography in stone.

Place. High surface ranges and mountain passes, distinct from the Kardun below them in both origin (Mal’akha-descended, not the pre-Founding remnant) and niche (towering highlanders, not dense underground crafters). Sought as arbiters, wardens of high passes, and living witnesses whose own bodies cannot be bribed to forget.

Player recognition → the goliath a table expects — towering, stone-skinned, stoic, marked — with the tribal-marking flavor made literal and involuntary: the markings are not chosen tattoos but the Order-body’s one crack, keeping the ledger the Oskari cannot.

THE STORM-VEINED (the genasi-people, the Scar-Born)

Essence. Ordinary humans reshaped by the ground itself — bodies grown around a permanent wound in the land until the wound became heritable.

Origin. An environmental-divergence people (the same rung as the Virrasti, generalized): humans settled for generations directly on a permanent discipline-scar — a Current-battle residue, a Weight-collapse, an Unmaking-scorched forge-ground, a Growing-flood — whose bodies reshaped around the ambient exposure exactly as the Kardun reshaped around raw Weight-physics. Non-hereditary in feel to the folk who carry it: “there was an accident, before I was born.”

Compound. The scarring discipline sets the tilt, and the roster’s law holds: Order-scarred branches (Weight, Current) leak Chaos at one pressure point (the Virrasti’s communal storm-rite is the canonical case), Chaos-scarred branches (Growing) are held by an unusually strict communal code. Coloring echoes the parent discipline’s true-form palette — ember-orange banding, storm-grey striation, moss-vein green — and the temperament runs hot exactly where its discipline runs hot.

Place. Wherever a discipline-scar is permanent enough to live on: the Glass Reach (the canonical Virrasti), old battle-grounds, dead forge-lands, flood-groves. Read by outsiders as ominous for their communal release-rites, which locals treat as basic hygiene for a body that never stopped being scarred ground.

Player recognition → the elemental-ancestry genasi a table expects — visibly touched by fire, storm, stone, or flood — with “planar heritage” re-grounded as the land itself having reshaped a human line. The canonical Virrasti are one branch of this people, not a separate reserve.

THE VULKATHRI (the beastfolk, the Totem-Grown)

Essence. A gentler, peacetime cousin of the Korrvath: humans grown into feline, vulpine, or avian vitality for the deep wild, and carrying a debt the world knows as “nine lives.”

Origin. A peacetime Growing-made species, earlier and gentler than the wartime Korrvath: hunter-guilds grafted animal vitality-templates onto volunteer households for deep-wild scouting, and the grafts bred true. Chaos-tilted.

Compound. Chaos-tilted grace and sensory acuity, held by totem-kinship law. Their signature extra life is real and debt-logic’d: each cheated death is a Growing-vitality loan the body pays forward, not off — clan-tracked so no one dies owing more than the world can absorb. The nine-lives myth is the buried memory of a strict internal ledger, not a free gift.

Place. Deep-wild scout-clans and frontier ranger lines along the old wilderness marches, organized by totem-kinship; hired as trackers, wardens, and pathfinders where no road goes.

Player recognition → the tabaxi/shifter/beastfolk a table expects — animal-featured, agile, uncanny in the wild, hard to kill — with the “extra lives” made a real and accounted Growing-debt rather than a cat’s free luck.

---

Reserve and open

• The Virrasti (the discharge-arbiters): promoted — now the canonical Current-scarred branch of the Storm-Veined (above), descendants of a garrison exposed for generations to a Current-battle scar at the Glass Reach, Order-tilted to the point of being the continent’s trusted contract-arbiters, who must periodically vent a literal emotional overcharge in a communal storm-rite or become dangerous to be near. The “the land made them” rung, now the exemplar of a whole origin-type rather than a lone reserve.
• Open: which specific great houses and provinces carry which lineages; the trigger and date of each people’s divergence; the still-open hook of what woke the Kesevrai and Relethi after the withdrawal; and, on the new roster, the six council tensions Logan resolved on 2026-07-14 (orc register → Heart-tilt/Weight-oath with the Vashtéra tightened to Growing; dragon rung → God-made-below-Gods, discipline-flavored, drifting tilt; dragonborn → contracted; gnome → illusion-leak only; extra slot → Goliath + Genasi + Beastfolk all seated) are now closed.