Beneath the Surface

The Forgotten History of the Terrane

The Terrane: Children of Erôth

The Lidový (“the people,” in their own language) were among the few beings who could genuinely claim to be native to Erôth. They believed they were shaped from the stone itself, and behaved accordingly: stubborn, deliberate, and convinced they were the rightful heirs of anything the earth produced. Long before humans showed up, long before alchemy twisted the world into something new, the Lidový carved out cities in the cliffs and mountains like they were making statements.

Their architecture in that era was… enormous. Overwhelming. They didn’t build halls; they carved caverns the size of cathedrals. They liked imposing spaces, but they weren’t meant to feel cold. They were built to impress, not intimidate. The Terrane used space the way humans use color. A corridor that stretches so far it seems to bend? That meant something. A chamber where a single pillar holds up half a mountain? Also a message.

They didn’t decorate their homes with paintings. They didn’t believe in “art on the wall.” Instead, Terrane stonework holds meaning in its shadows. Every surface is cut with razor-sharp lines and recessed images that look random until you place a single point of light (just one torch or lamp) and the shadows tell the story. Whole histories play out across the walls like crude animations.

The Right Light:

Too many light sources or the diffused lighting of magical cantrips like dancing lights and light often creates a hazy that washes everything out. Terrane scholars say the effect is much like finding grease smeared across their ancestral records.

Only after the disaster they call “The Great Ruin,” when the survivors fled below the earth, did the other races begin calling them Terrane. The name stuck, and so did the story of their fall.

The Golden Age

An Uncontested Era of Growth

Also known as the Gilded Age

For a very long time, the Lidový had no real competition. The Hafuwë stayed deep in their rainforests, and the early tribes that would eventually become the Mól were scattered and small. With no enemies at their borders and no one pushing back on their expansion, the Terrane spread across the mountains of Erôth at their own pace. They built roads over peaks, fortified passes, and carved sprawling networks of cities out of stone.

The land rewarded them. Ore, precious gems, rare minerals: anything you could pull from the ground, they found in abundance. Metalworking and stonecraft became not just trades but national identities. Terrane engineering set the bar for the entire continent.

But eventually a problem crept in. Not a dramatic one, just the slow, inevitable one. They ran out of places to expand. Every mountain pass had been mapped. Every vein worth mining had been claimed. They had reached the edges of the world they cared about, and instead of looking outward, they turned inward.

Terrane kingdoms that once cooperated began to eye each other’s resources. Families compared what they had with what their neighbors had, and the old rivalries that used to be friendly suddenly weren’t. The Gilded Age ended not with a single disaster, but with a long, collective realization: they had no more world left to conquer but their own.

The Sundering

An Era of Conquest

What started as the usual border squabbles eventually spiraled into something much uglier. With no desire to traverse the seas and no unclaimed edges to expand into, the Terrane kingdoms saw each other as resources waiting to be taken.

Old rivalries sharpened fast. Clans that once hosted each other for week-long feasts now traded accusations and sabotage. Families within a clan would even squable. A disagreement over a mine here, a disputed water channel there. Nothing dramatic at first. But Terrane pride is a force to behold. However, like tungsten.. it doesn’t bend; it cracks.

Once the fighting began, it didn’t stop. Kingdoms launched siege engines at cities that had stood together for centuries. Entire bloodlines destroyed each other over who had the “better claim” to a dwindling ore vein. Some strongholds survived for a generation or two, but most of the civilization simply burned from the inside out.

And because the Terrane built on such a massive scale, the aftermath always felt worse. Imagine a hall meant for ten thousand voices now echoing with fire and war-cries. Imagine statues carved to celebrate unity used as cover in street battles. The architecture that once made the Terrane feel proud and grounded now made their fall feel colossal. The only structures known to have survived this era were the ones carved into the mountains. All built on the surface were lost in the wars.

By the end of the Sundering, the great cities were a map of empty shells and fractured kingdoms. Their unity, which was always their greatest boast, became the thing they tore apart.

It was in this moment of depravity, during one of their deepest declines, that a truly discover was made. This changed everything… and eventually, it broke them.

The Great Ruin

An Era of Cataclysm

The Terrane rose, thrived, and nearly destroyed themselves long before mortals had any real understanding of magic. Even the Hafuwë, who have always been closer to the strange workings of the world, weren’t “casting spells” in any way that’d be recognize in the modern era. Magic wasn’t even a rumor. It was more a pressure in the air, a thing you felt rather, and on the rare occation, something that channeled itself through an unexpecting host. This is why now, during this era, was the worst possible moment for someone to actually unearth it.

Even now, no one agrees on the details. Terrane myths contradict each other, which is unusual for a people who usually carve their history in literal stone. Some say a team of scholars dug too deep and uncovered a buried relic tied to the raw forces of creation. Others insist it was experimentation, someone trying to pull energy out of the earth without any idea what they were doing. Whatever happened, it went wrong. Catastrophically wrong.

The land itself turned on them. Whole mountain ranges collapsed like wet clay. Valleys drowned when lakes surged over their banks in ways that defied gravity. Wildfires swept across stone and didn’t burn out. Storms formed without warning, roaring through cities with the force of hurricanes.

Some Terrane poems describe rivers boiling in their beds and molten stone bursting from the earth like veins tearing open. Others blame the gods, or the Terrane themselves, for provoking a punishment they couldn’t escape.

But no matter which version you believe, the conclusion is always the same: their golden age ended in a single era of unrelenting disaster.

Some survived. Most didn’t. And the survivors had to face a truth no Terrane ever expected: the surface world no longer belonged to them.

Descent into the Deep

Survival Over Legacy

After the Great Ruin, the survivors had to make a choice: abandon everything they’d ever built… or die beside it. Most chose survival. And for the Terrane, survival meant going down: deep into the mines they once treated as little more than vaults for ore.

Those early refugees didn’t plan to stay forever. The Deep was supposed to be a temporary shelter until the surface stopped trying to kill them. But the months turned to years, and the years turned to generations. Eventually, “temporary” became the only life they knew.

The old cities of the mountains were still there, technically, but empty in all the ways that mattered. The grand chambers had been meant to feel powerful, awe-inspiring, alive with the movement of tens of thousands. Now, with only a handful of Terrane left in each enclave, those same spaces echoed in a way that made even a proud people feel… small. What was meant to be imposing now felt cold.

Down in the Deep, their cities shrank in scale, but not in craftsmanship. The Terrane adapted. Their skin paled. Their eyes reshaped to catch even the faintest glint of light. Their stonework changed too: less grand, more intricate, shaped to the textures and pressure of the underground.

Eventually, their old name faded. The few who still remembered the surface called themselves Terrane now, “of the earth,” though the meaning had shifted. Once it referred to pride. Now it meant survival.

The Sound of Silence

The Quiet Life

If the Sundering taught the Terrane how to fight, the Deep taught them how to hide. The mines of their ancestors had only skimmed the surface of what truly lived below. The Deep held creatures that weren’t bothered by darkness and were hypersensitive to sound, things that hunted by slight vibrations, even those of a heartbeat.

Silence became more than a preference. It became a culture. Spoken words grew shorter, then rarer. Entire conversations moved to hand signals, subtle gestures, and shared understandings.

Over time, the Terrane discovered a fungus that grew naturally at those depths, a pale, tendril-like thing that released spores capable of sharing basic emotions and intentions. It wasn’t telepathy; it was more like having the background noise of a community always present, giving everyone a shared emotional “temperature.” Comforting when it was warm. Terrifying when it was fractured.

They built society around it. The fungus was cultivated in living “gardens” woven through their homes and gathering spaces. Being disconnected from it, whether because of exile or travel, could destroy a Terrane’s sense of self frighteningly fast.

And while the Deep was dangerous, it also gave them something the surface never did: a constant, physical reassurance. The pressure of stone above and below. The surety of walls that didn’t move. It sounds claustrophobic to most people, but to a Terrane, it’s grounding. Like the world is holding them in place rather than trying to shake them apart.

This is why leaving the Deep is still one of the most traumatic acts a Terrane can attempt. It’s not just the open sky. It’s the silence of being alone in a way their ancestors never had to imagine.

Legacy of the Surface

Echoes of the Lost

Even after millennia underground, the Terrane haven’t let go of the surface. They can’t. Their stories still cling to it. The age when their cities climbed the mountains instead of hiding beneath them, when their shadow-carved walls told history under open torchlight instead of fungus lamps.

Every enclave keeps some record of that time. Some carve the old legends on the walls of community halls. Others maintain oral histories passed from elder to apprentice. These stories are equal parts pride and warning. Pride, because their ancestors built wonders. Warning, because those same ancestors managed to destroy everything they built.

The surface is a wound that never fully healed. It’s a reminder of the mistakes that ended the Lidový and gave birth to the Terrane. That’s why most Terrane treat magic with a level of fear other races don’t fully understand. In their view, magic isn’t a tool, but a raw destructive force.

A small group still practices it, carefully and quietly. They call themselves the Children of Jerta, after the half-mythical scholar some Terrane blame for the first great catastrophe. Whether she was a martyr, a fool, or neither depends on which enclave you ask. Either way, her followers act as a kind of priesthood, reminding their people what happens when Terrane ambition outpaces Terrane caution.

The ‘priests’ of these enclaves, and a handful of well prepared merchants, are generally the only Terrane that interact with members of other clans… or any other creatures in the deep.

The rest of the world barely remembers them. On the surface, the Terrane are a rumor used to frighten children: stone-skinned ghosts who live under mountains, whispering to the darkness. In most places, people assume they died out long ago, swallowed by their own disasters.

Ask a Terrane, though, and the truth is more complicated. They could return to the surface. Physically, there’s nothing stopping them. But mentally? Culturally? That’s another matter. The open air feels wrong. The sky feels unsafe. The world above carries too many reminders of who they used to be and what it cost them.

Some young Terrane dream of seeing the surface anyway, imagining sunlight not as a threat but as a freedom. But most know better. The surface punished their people once, and the memory of that lesson is carved deeper than any shadow-story on any wall.

For now, at least, the Terrane remain where they feel the earth’s weight most clearly: deep below, held by stone, surrounded by quiet, and forever aware of the world they lost.