Nu'umano
The Nu'umano are the core strain and the unmarked case. Everything said about "the Nu'uman" without qualification describes them: the paler olive-pink-white skin out of the milder climates, no specialised climate adaptation, no dominant magical discipline. They are what came off the bench before an Alverian pointed the acclimatising rays anywhere in particular.
They filled the prison complexes, walked out of them first when the stars went dark, and built the feudal order that runs the surface of the world. Their lung, fat, eye and skin are the makers' baseline, which is why they alone can live tolerably in every strain's cradle and excellently in none, and why the surface empire is theirs; an administration needs a people that can be posted anywhere.
Body
Paler olive-pink-white skin out of the milder climates, five to seven feet, no specialised climate adaptation and no dominant magical discipline. Lung, fat, eye and skin are the makers' baseline, which is the whole distinction of the strain: nothing in a Nu'umano body is tuned to a sky, so nothing in it fails in an unfamiliar one. They live sixty to one hundred and thirty years, and rarely three hundred, and they carry the species' thin four-layered skin, its shallow vessels, its whole-body sweat and its slow clotting without any of the seven adjustments the rays made elsewhere.
Country
Their cradle is the temperate lowland: river valleys where the mist lies in the bottoms until the sun is high, wet springs, mild winters, hedged fields and low wooded hills, the country a homestead is easiest to die in. It is also the country the surface order was invented in, and the hedge, the three-part field and the market town travelled out of it with the strain that could be posted anywhere.
Society
They are the administrative strain, and the six estates, the Imperial Diet and the houses are theirs before they are anybody's. The others hold the cradles; the Misted Folk hold the offices. Everything the record says about the Nu'uman as a people, the breeding, the forgetting, the short reigns, the surplus sons and the Curse of Chivalry that binds their kings, is said first about them.
Tongue
The Misted Folk give a short given name and a house or trade name, and because this is also the naming rule of the crowns, a Nu'umano who rises has no register to drop. The house name is the oath: to forswear it is to lose the name, and a Nu'uman without a house is a body waiting for a hide-buyer.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which country holds the temperate lowland cradle
- Whether the base strain was left unaltered by design or simply never pointed anywhere
- Which of the recorded strain-register names belong to this register
- How much of the surface nobility is Misted Folk and how much is mixed