Humans, elves, dwarves, Wrenfolk, and orcs — each carrying a different relationship to memory, history, and what was lost.
The Five Known Races
Humans are the dominant political force in the Sundered Age, which they have achieved primarily through the quality of short memory. Where other races carry the weight of long history — elvish grudges persist across millennia; dwarven family records extend eleven generations — humans adapt. An empire that made a mistake three generations ago does not carry that mistake as institutional knowledge. It builds over it. This is both the source of human resilience and the source of human danger: they rebuild without asking what the original structure was for.
The Aldenmere Empire represents the peak of current human political development. It controls trade routes across most of Valdenmoor and maintains an active intelligence apparatus — the Quiet Ledger — that ensures unwelcome historical truths do not circulate beyond corridors that can manage them. Ilyr Vaust, Imperial Curator of Continuance, is perhaps the most sophisticated product this system has produced: a man who genuinely believes that peace requires managed ignorance, and who has spent his career building the institutional architecture to deliver it.
Elves are long-lived and linguistically gifted, which has made them the closest living bridge between the current age and the pre-Collapse world — and has also made them, in certain respects, the most vulnerable to the Unmaking’s specific form of corruption. An archive built on false translations is worse than no archive. Elvish scholarship has been, for centuries, meticulously recording a history that is subtly wrong in ways that matter, and defending those records against scholars who notice the wrongness.
The Grand Linguistic Archive at Vel Tharun is the defining institution of elvish intellectual life. It holds the largest collection of pre-Collapse texts in the known world, the vast majority of which remain untranslated or mistranslated. Thessaly Vorn’s expulsion for publishing a paper demonstrating this is the most recent and most visible instance of an institutional pattern that extends back at least four hundred years.
Dwarves record their history in cut stone. Kharanor’s archive goes back eleven generations, representing approximately four thousand years of continuous record — the longest unbroken written record of any mortal race. What it does not record is what existed before the descent, because the descent itself was a response to the Collapse: the world above had become uncertain in ways the stone below was not, and the dwarves went where they trusted.
The ruin-walking tradition — of which Breck Ironhallow is a practitioner — represents a small and largely disreputable segment of dwarven culture: those who leave the stonehalls to examine the ruins of what came before. Ruin-walkers are not well-regarded in formal dwarven society. They return with questions the stonehalls do not have answers for, and questions whose answers might destabilize records already carved.
Wrenfolk are small, careful, and perpetually underestimated, which suits most of them. The Wrenvale Isles have been self-governing since before any mortal historical record, and the Wrenfolk’s absence from imperial politics is not ignorance but preference. They produce excellent archivists, couriers, and — reluctantly, occasionally, once every few generations — the precise kind of person who finds a stone tablet in a flooded basement and cannot stop following the thread.
Their inner reserves are considerable. They do not, as a rule, show them.
Orcs are oral historians and spirit-speakers. Their shamanic tradition — the reading of the land’s emotional and spiritual residue — is the oldest continuous practice in the known world, predating even Drevari contact with the younger races. It has survived three thousand years of collective amnesia, the Collapse, and the persistent mistrust of every other race, primarily because it does not require anyone else to believe in it to function.
Orc shamans were the first to sense the Unmaking, centuries before its effects became visible. They reported what they sensed. They were not believed. They continued reporting. This is the characteristic posture of orc shamanism with respect to the rest of the world: accurate, patient, unheard, and eventually proved right at a cost that should have been paid far sooner.