“Go to hell!”
“You know, I have a rather interesting story about that …”
The native ancestry of the Seven Cities of Hell, devils are humanoids with red or blue skin expressed in a wide variety of hues, from bright crimson to deep purple. Each devil is born with some hellmark—horns, a tail, cloven hooves, a forked tongue, fanged incisors, or even wings.
Hell is dominated by the Seven Cities of Hell, each ruled by a different archdevil who constantly plots and schemes against the others in the hope of ascending to the Throne of Hell.
Those devils who join “the trade,” as their civil service is called, spend their days in bureaucratic service hoping or scheming for promotion. Devils looking for a quick path up the bureaucratic ladder sign up for the Exchange, whereby mortals in the mundane world who perform the right rituals can summon a devil, who bargains with the supplicant on behalf of their archdevil. Archdevils can grant temporary worldly power in exchange for a supplicant’s soul, with the summoned devil acting as the broker.
On rare occasions, the summoning goes wrong and the supplicant dies before the deal can be struck, stranding the summoned devil on Orden permanently. Some stranded devils seek to return to Hell, but most prefer life in Orden, where the phrase “stabbed in the back by a colleague” is usually a metaphor.
The majority of devils in Orden are not from, nor have ever been to, the Seven Cities. They are descendants of devils who were stranded in the mundane world decades, centuries, even millennia ago.
“I thought the dragon knights would save us, but even they couldn’t stop Ajax. Now the roads aren’t safe. People are taken from their homes without cause or warning, never to return. I don’t know what’s going to happen now, except everyone’s afraid all the time.”
“I think things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.”
The Ritual of Dracogenesis that grants the power to create a generation of dragon knights—also known as draconians or wyrmwights—is obscure and supremely difficult for even an experienced sorcerer to master. Small populations of draconians in Khemhara, Higara, and Khorshir attest to this. Descendants of original generations created millennia ago by powerful wizards, they have never been numerous.
A typical clutch yields only a single egg. After only a few generations, these draconians begin to show new adaptations like feathers or frilled ridges. The largest extant population of draconians is the remnants of the Dragon Phalanx in Vasloria. Created by Good King Omund’s wizard Vitae, the Dragon Phalanx once numbered several thousand of the king’s greatest knights, ensuring the rule of law across the land.
Knighthood was a title carried by every member of that first generation of dragon knights. Within the Dragon Phalanx were shadows, censors, tacticians, and elementalists. Members of virtually every heroic vocation could be found in one of the eight dragonflights that made up the phalanx. For over thirty years, these heroes were symbols of justice, protecting the weak from the strong, and standing between the common folk and those who sought power over others. Those who grew up in that place and time could never have imagined any other way of life.
Then Ajax came.
“Remember, we are dwarves. Our strength is the strength of the earth. The strength of the marble column that rises to the heavens. The strength of the granite foundation that reaches deep into the ground. But what is the value of strength if it is not used in service of justice?”
—Zarok the Lawgiver, Hero, Dwarves 232
Possessed of a strength that belies their size, dwarves have flesh infused with stone—a silico-organic hybrid making them physically denser than other humanoids. They enjoy a reputation in Orden as savvy engineers and technologists thanks to the lore they inherited from their elder siblings, the long-extinct steel dwarves.
Dwarves are the children of the elder god Ord, and a common phrase among dwarves is “Ord made the world”—their way of saying, “What will be, will be.” They take great pride in knowing that along with Aan, Eth, and Kul, their god created the mundane world, and many dwarves leave their homes to see the world and seek glory in Ord’s name.
See you the wood so dark and deep,
Where runs the fox and hare?
You know now why your mother weeps.
Your father’s bones lie there.
See you the river clear and sweet
So beautiful and fair?
Follow it in and you may meet
The Queen of Dark and Air
Children of the sylvan celestials and masters of the elfhaunted forests called wodes, wode elves see all forests as their domain by birthright. They know and enjoy their reputation among humans for snatching children who wander too far into the woods. Humans should fear the trees.
The wode elves’ natural ability to mask their presence, called glamor, complements their guerilla style of fighting, letting them strike quickly from cover and then meld back into the underbrush. These traits also make the relatively few wode elves who dwell in cities naturally adept at urban warfare.
“Ajax has a kind of crude style, perhaps, but no taste. I have no objection to a villain, you understand. The world is a tale, but a tale is only as good as its villain. And Ajax is so … artless. We deserve a better villain.”
Children of the solar celestials created to tend their libraries and attend to the true elves as heralds, the high elves remember a better age, before the coming of humans and war. A time when the celestials were still in the world, and all that mattered was art and beauty.
In the millennia since their creators retired to Arcadia, the high elves built a civilization for themselves, primarily living in and among the fallen celestial sky cities. With no creators left to please, the elves continue as they did before—collecting lore and knowledge, worshiping art, and turning more inward and distrusting of outsiders with each generation.
Defending the Society’s flank, the Pillar stood alone against the Bloodstone Legion. The Arrow was awestruck and afraid. She was a different person in a fight.
“COME FORTH, SONS OF ORD!” the hakaan metamorph bellowed as Ajax’s dwarven legion advanced. “AND MEET A BETTER WOMAN THAN THEE!!”
In spite of their friendly, outgoing nature, the rare presence of a hakaan in human society is considered a harbinger—an omen of dark times.
Descended from a tribe of giants in upper Vanigar, the original Haka’an tribe made a bargain with Holkatja the Vanigar trickster god. They traded some of their gigantic size and strength for the ability to see the future. But Holkatja betrayed them, and the only future they are allowed to see is the moment and nature of their own death. These visions are never of some mundane tragedy. No hakaan ever received a vision of dying from choking on a grape. The doomsight is always momentous—always dramatic.
This doomsight can happen at any moment. It does not come for all or even most hakaan, but when it comes, it is considered an act of overwhelming hubris to ignore it. Trying to escape the doomsight means a painful, tragic death, and cursing your family to live with shame.
For this reason, the only hakaan the average human meets is one trying to fulfill their doom. The human superstition—that the arrival of one or more hakaan in human lands is a sign of great forces acting in the world, auspicious times—is literally true. In dark times, many hakaan experience the doomsight and leave their communities to venture out into the mundane world, in search of their destiny.
Humans in Vanigar have their own word for this concept of a personal fate, “wyrd.” Traditional hakaan sometimes refer to the doomsight as wyrdken.
“Humans,” the dwarf said with a combination of exasperation and awe. “Their only virtue seems to be believing in impossible things.”
“Humans belong to the world in a way the other speaking peoples do not. You can sense the presence of magic—that … oily smell in the air, as I’ve heard it described. And the presence of deathless causes the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up. Or why do you think graveyards affect you so? Whatever magic is, its grip on you is light. Whatever drives the deathless, your nature rebels against it.”
“No one knows why this should be. We elves have no such senses. Nor do the elementals or the kanin … the dwarves and the orcs as you say. What is it that sets humans apart? I am an historian, not a physician. I cannot say. Perhaps some of you will one day find out and teach us all the reason.”
“This world of yours. Ships of wood and swords of steel. It’s so … primitive. Like a fairy tale.”
“Where do you come from, lady, that our world seems a fable? You have no ships and swords?”
“We have them.” Lady Urusistra cast a hand across the sky.
“You see those stars? That is my home—the timescape. Our ships are great star freighters that ply the space lanes. And among those stars, light hits as hard as steel.”
The native denizens of Axiom, the Plane of Uttermost Law, memonek dwell in a land with lakes and trees and birds and flowers. But on this alien world, the lakes are seas of mercury, the birds glitter with wings of glass stretched gossamer thin, and the flowers’ petals are iridescent metal as flexible and fragile as any earthly rose.
The minds of memonek are highly ordered. Their reason is their great pride. But when descending to the lower planes, including a manifold like Orden where law and chaos mix, a sickness comes over them—an uncontrollable sensation called … emotion.
“Even should an arrow pierce their heart, each kanin warrior has within them one last act of revenge.”
An anger that cannot be hidden. A fury that drives them in battle. Orcs are famed throughout the world as consummate warriors—a reputation that the peace-loving orcs find distasteful.
The fifth of the speaking peoples, orcs arrived on Orden after humans and elves. They made their homes in the borderlands between those two cultures, preferring the natural forests and avoiding the elf-haunted wodes. For generations, this put them directly in the path of humans who cut down the trees and built roads and farms.
Each orc has within them a fire that causes their veins to glow once blood is drawn. This anger propels them right to the edge of death. The dichotomy between their desire to be left alone and their zeal in battle is summarized in a dwarven proverb:
“Be thankful orcs do not hold grudges.”
“Wait, where’d he go? Where’d that little son of a bitch go? AAAAGGH!”
After humans, polders are the most numerous and diverse ancestry in Orden. They are not humans, but they live in and among humans, sharing their gods and culture. Almost every human culture in Orden has a polder saint or a human saint venerated by polder.
Short creatures averaging three-and-a-half feet tall, polders have obscure origins. They are a young species who, like humans, have no single patron god. Their natural ability to blend in with shadows makes them excellent spies and thieves. However, many polders consider this stereotype a base slander, pointing out that they’re also famed as chefs—though polders can be found in virtually every profession, especially in cities.
“I will suck the life from your flesh and leave you a withered corpse!”
The revenant null flexed his arms and assumed a fighting pose. He smiled.
“Little late for that.”
The dead walk among us. Some of them are happier about it than others.
Unlike the necromantic rituals that produce wights and wraiths and zombies, revenants rise from the grave through a combination of an unjust death and a burning desire for vengeance. Creatures sustained on pure will, they have no need of food or water or air—and, unlike their zombified cousins, they retain all their memories and personality from life.
These revenants are rare. Many are hunted by ignorant villagers who see only their dead flesh and assume the worst. Those who survive the pitchfork brigade either choose a solitary life, often as a wandering soul seeking out living company yet constantly in fear of it, or they migrate to a metropolis such as Blackbottom or Capital, where lost souls gather to make a home.
“I fear no living thing, but the time raiders.”
—Chief Executive Admiral Lithiri Aswandala Commander of the HOV First Get Behind Them Memonek
The original servitor species of the synliiroi—evil psions with near god-like power—the kuran’zoi liberated themselves during the First Psychic War. In the centuries since, they built their own culture and civilization as nomads of the timescape. The exonym “time raiders” was given to them by denizens of the lower worlds who, seeing the advanced technology they wield, concluded they must be from the future.
Extraordinarily rare in Orden, the time raiders thrive on the Sea of Stars, the Sea Between Worlds, where the winds of limbo roar.
In place of eyes, kuran'zoi possess crystalline ocular sensors that grant them high-spectral vision hardened against the extreme radiations encountered in the Sea of Stars, permitting them to operate freely outside their vessels with only their portable rebreathers. Time raiders also have two sets of arms, allowing them to wield melee weapons at the same time as ranged weapons. A single well-trained kuran’zoi is like a squad unto themself.
