The Hybrids

The Alverians spliced everything, and then they locked it. "Built off of the spliced genetic codes, these hybrid races have become a common, yet infertile collection of species existing upon the soil of Nu." The lock was deliberate. "Due to the complex coding within each species, spliced by the Ancient Alverian's, they wished to ensure that no species could vary too far from its core genetic coding, thus no further mutation via breed can occur after a hybrid is born; they can only breed amongst their own people."

A hybrid is a terminus. Two parent peoples meet, a third thing is born, and that third thing is the last new thing the lineage will ever make. An Imp breeds Imps. A Nakasi breeds Nakasi. Nothing from outside can enter the code again.

The kin written under each hybrid are lineages inside that rule, never new crossings. What varies down a hybrid line is which strain of each parent made the first crossing, and what two thousand or fifteen thousand years of the same trade, the same quarter and the same cold welcome have drawn out of it. The Alverian strain that every Lesser Four people carries sits in every hybrid too, and it is that strain which lets old blood surface in odd places: a sabre tooth in a gutter cat, a third eye under a smith's brow. The lock holds. The lineages are what the lock allows.

What the lock does to a body can be seen in all four of them. Two engineered codes meet in one frame and neither wins. Where both parents call for the same structure and call for it differently, the body builds a compromise no designer would have signed off: bone in one people's shape at another people's weight, skin written twice and grown once, an organ sized for a body four feet taller than the one it sits in.

The hybrids have a shared word for the place where this happens, borrowed out of the needle trade and used by all four peoples in all four tongues. They call it the seam. The seam is where a hybrid is strongest and where a hybrid fails, and no two of the four have it in the same tissue. An Imp's seam is bone, Do'urssan angles carried at a tenth of the Do'urssan mass. A Scan'uun's seam runs round the margin of every plate of scale, where reptile hide is set into Nu'uman skin. A Gorklin's seam is an absence, because the two codes disagreed about the skeleton and the bone under dispute was never laid down at all. A Nakasi's seam cancelled itself: pelt and bare skin were written one over the other and nothing grew. The old claim that a hybrid can channel the best of both parents is true and is observed. It is paid for at the seam, every day, in every body, for the whole of a life.

The world does not love them. "The Hybrid Species are looked down upon within several societies, and there have been rumors and rare cases where some believe they can reproduce with other sentient species; even though this is unproven, many aspire to believe it is true." That rumour is the load-bearing hope of four peoples and it has never once been shown true. What they have instead is competence: "Often to be a hybrid is to be weak, compared to your parent species, however at times a hybrid can channel the best of both their species, becoming far stronger than their more 'refined' species."

The Ancient Alverian class name for the whole tier is THE LESSER FREAKS. No hybrid chose it. Imps and Nakasi date to the last two thousand years, Gorklins to the collapse of the Alverian Empire, and only the Scan'uun reach back fifteen thousand years, to the era "when species began mingling amongst themselves, building communities and tearing down differences."