Terrane

The Terrane are short, stout and built for stone, and they live under the mountains of Erôth rather than on them. The name is said terrain, and it is their name: the word most of the continent reaches for instead is dwarf, which is an insult, and almost nobody who uses it knows that it is one.

Most of Erôth does not believe they are there at all. They are a story told to children about stone-skinned ghosts under the mountains who whisper to the darkness, and the general opinion is that whatever they were, they died out long ago in their own disasters. Anyone who insists otherwise gets called pitic for it, which is a word for a person who believes in the Terrane, and it is not said as a compliment.

The Lidový

They called themselves Lidový, which is to say the people, and they had the better claim to it than most: they were the first mortals on Erôth to think, and they held the surface of it alone for ages. They believed themselves shaped out of the stone and behaved accordingly, stubborn and deliberate and certain that anything the earth produced was theirs by right. They carved their cities into the cliffs. Their halls were caverns the size of cathedrals, and they hung nothing on the walls: their stonework is cut in razor lines and recessed shapes that mean nothing under general light, and tell a whole history in shadow when you bring one torch into the room and no more.

Nothing checked them for a very long while, and when they finally ran out of mountains to claim they turned on each other. What began as arguments over a mine or a water channel became the Sundering, and the Sundering emptied the great cities out. Everything they had built on the surface was lost in it. Only what was cut into the mountains survived.

Then, at the bottom of that decline, somebody unearthed magic, in an age with no understanding of it whatsoever. The accounts of what exactly was dug up contradict each other, which is unusual in a people who carve their history into rock. What is agreed is what followed: mountain ranges going down like wet clay, valleys drowning, fires that crossed bare stone without burning out. They call it the Great Ruin, and most of them did not survive it. The name Terrane, meaning of the earth, was what the other races began calling the survivors afterwards, and it stuck to them well enough that they took it themselves.

The Deep

The survivors went down into the mines they had treated as ore-vaults, meaning to wait out the surface. Generations later they are still there.

The Deep taught them to hide the way the Sundering had taught them to fight. What lives down there hunts by vibration and is untroubled by darkness, so silence stopped being a preference and became a way of living: speech got shorter, then rare, and most of what passes between them now passes in gesture. At those depths they found a pale, tendril-like fungus whose spores carry plain feeling from one person to another, not thought but something like the temperature of a room full of people, and they built their society around it and grow it in gardens through their halls. Cut off from it, by exile or by travel, a Terrane can lose their sense of who they are alarmingly fast. Their skin paled in the dark and their eyes reshaped to catch what little light there is, and their stonework grew smaller and finer with them.

They could go back up. Nothing physical prevents it. But the open sky reads as wrong, and leaving the Deep is one of the hardest things a Terrane can do to themselves. Most of what they keep of the surface is kept as a warning: their ancestors built wonders, and their ancestors destroyed everything they built. It is why they treat magic as other peoples do not, not as a tool but as a raw destructive force with a record.

Jerta, and the Dead

A woman of the Catan clan named Jerta was a Terrane before she was a goddess, and she is the first mortal anyone can name who became one. She had learned to work the magics of the Plane of Earth that her people’s digging had opened, and she used them to remake the Terrane sturdier, slower to sicken and slower to age, and she succeeded so completely that she quadrupled their lives. Her own people do not call her Mother. To a clan elder she is Daughter and to everyone else Sister, because they have never accepted that she left.

The small number of Terrane who still practice magic call themselves the Children of Jerta and serve as something like a priesthood, and they exist to remind everyone what happens when Terrane ambition outruns Terrane caution: there are enclaves that blame Jerta for the first catastrophe, and whether she was a martyr or a fool depends entirely on which one you ask. Those priests, with a few well-prepared merchants, are about the only Terrane who deal with anybody outside their own clan.

Their dead go to the Mrakovi, which is what they call the reapers of Marg: figures of black stone and dust that move through the caves in silence, depicted by Terrane artisans as masons chiseling the body away to let the soul out. They are honored rather than feared, and a Terrane tomb is carved to receive them as a guest.

Elsewhere

They speak Jazyk, and their runic alphabet was once the most widespread in all of Erôth. It is not now, and why it fell out of use was never written down. Terran is not their language: that is a Primordial tongue of earth-based creatures and belongs to another family entirely, and the two get confused constantly. Neither are they the Stoneborn, who are altered humans and a separate matter.

Of all the peoples of Erôth they are the rarest to be met abroad. The one place on the surface where you are likeliest to cross one is Deadport, down where the rivers meet Kraken Bay, and most of the people who live in Deadport do not know it. That city is where the Terrane trade, and the manner of the dealing there has done a good deal to fix the low opinion most of them hold of the world above.