The WildKin
The Alverians finished their Lesser Four and found they still had work that wanted doing. Cleaning. Scavenging. Spying. Dying at sea so that something else would die with them. So they went back to the vats. "During and after the creation of their Core Four species, the Alverians had lesser tasks, ones that required more slaves." They dissected the habits of the animals of Nu and spliced them into the codes they already owned.
One passage of the makers' own writing governs everything that follows. "These species contain the same capabilities of their greater parts, yet have been flung down their evolutionary scale. Believing that all things should fight for their place beneath Hyton's sun, the Alverians built within them genetic freedoms so that they too may become as superior as the races previous to them." The cruelty was deliberate and so was the loophole. A WildKin is a slave people with a ladder built into its blood.
The makers sorted them into six classes, each with a name in the Ancient Alverian tongue and a single line of judgement. The Invertebrates are A'QSNAI VONIESE, "The Spineless Inferior Ones": "Sky bound spineless, far too close to the concept of what an Alverian was, so they were made weak." The Fish are A'QSIEM ISHFI, "The Cold Fins": "Lesser, whether food or hunter, they would serve to defend Alverian interests on land and sea." The Amphibians are A'QFOUEI EMBAI, "The Slimed Ones": "The greatest and most disobedient of the Alverian experiments. Wisdom without control." The Reptiles are A'QRIE TILESE, "The Cold Scales": "The adaptive backbone, scaled in body and able to defend against most any weapon." The Birds are A'QBIESH DOSIK, "The Clipped Wings." The Mammals are A'QMOAR ALTA, "The Great Devourers": "Soil bound for global domination. Through colonizing, they would consume the world."
Every WildKin carries a strain of one of the Lesser Four, and through it a strain of Alverian. Where a second or a third animal made the humanoid truer to its beast, the makers wove that in as well.
Several of these peoples carry the line "their genetic code was locked." The lock holds. Where a locked people has kin, those kin are castes or regional morphs of the one locked genome, born of the same blood and told apart by comb, by water, by climate or by feed, never by a second splice. The counter-species the Alverians built to hunt or to mimic a locked people are separate makings, and each is filed under the people it was aimed at.
Invertebrates A'QSNAI VONIESE, “The Spineless Inferior Ones”
"Sky bound spineless, far too close to the concept of what an Alverian was, so they were made weak."
The makers looked at the insects and the shelled things and saw their own shape looking back: small, clever, jointed, quick. That resemblance frightened them, and they answered it by building weakness in. Five peoples came out of the class, and the Thylem were filed with them afterwards. Four of the five clean, farm, salvage or read for somebody else to this day, and the fifth is five inches tall and knows what everyone is worth.
The class shares one structural decision and suffers from it in five different ways. None of these peoples has a bone. Each carries its frame on the outside or carries none at all, and every one of them therefore has a season, a posture or an hour in which it can be killed by a child. The Alverians built that window on purpose and wrote no apology for it. What the five did with the window is the whole history of the class: one made a law of it, one made a religion of it, one hid it forty floors down, one hovers above it, and one has spent four thousand years persuading the world that it is worth more alive.
Fish A'QSIEM ISHFI, “The Cold Fins”
"Lesser, whether food or hunter, they would serve to defend Alverian interests on land and sea."
Food or hunter, and the makers built both from the same water. The three peoples of this class hold the extremes of the whole tier between them: a torturer that does not die of age, a mine that walks, and a people bred to be lifted out of a tank and eaten. All three were given legs for somebody else's convenience.
Legs are the class's signature and its wound. Nothing in this class walks well. The Eesha were given hips five hundred years ago and are still learning to use them; the Hof can stand and cannot carry itself; the Aiekah were given arms and legs solely so that a hand could take hold of them. A body built in water and made to come out of it keeps the water's assumptions, and every one of these peoples is more capable, more comfortable and more dangerous below the surface than above it. Every empire that has employed them has employed them on land.
Amphibians A'QFOUEI EMBAI, “The Slimed Ones”
"The greatest and most disobedient of the Alverian experiments. Wisdom without control."
The makers wrote that judgement after the fact, and it is a confession. The first thing they ever built was an amphibian, and it got away from them. Everything else in the class was built to chase it, to hold the ground it hid in, or to stand between the peoples it hid among. The Slimed are the only class in the tier that contains its own hunters, its own quarry and its own arbiters.
They share one thing in the body and it decides all four of their histories. An amphibian of Nu is made twice: once in the water as a larva and once on the land as itself, and the water it is made in determines what it becomes. The makers seized on that. Where other classes were divided by a second splice at the vat, the Slimed are divided by where the clutch was laid, which means the Alverians could produce a soldier, a spy, a fortress or an oracle from one locked genome and a choice of pond. It also means that these peoples can still do it. A Torgai barony breeds its own garrison by managing water. A BogTown breeds its own scholars by carrying eggs to the right burrow. The Sael'mund, who stand under no lock, breed their whole profession the same way out of habit. Every government in this class is, underneath the titles, a water authority.
Reptiles A'QRIE TILESE, “The Cold Scales”
The class is summed in one line, and the line is the whole thesis: "The adaptive backbone, scaled in body and able to defend against most any weapon." The longer telling adds only a little. "The backbone of the army with their versatility and adaptive natures, allowing them to invade countless climates. Scaled in body, they stood against many weapons."
Three peoples carried the class out of the vats. The Alverians bred the Iziaka as ground infantry, one stock forked into twenty strains so that some strain of them could fight on any ground on the planet, and the purpose line is blunt about the accounting: "expendable in every way." They bred the Torkan as marine support, to "charge the land from the water and troll the great rivers and lakes for run away slaves." They bred the Tusiva as "large basilisk forces in the Alverian Military," colossal serpents that broke enemy senses and remembered everything they ate.
Two more peoples stand in the class with them. The Sarpaen are limbless coiling serpent-folk, wound around the columns of the Alverian halls to listen. The Sserrin are sea-serpent-folk, set to patrol the open water and hold the shipping lanes.
What the five have in common under the skin is an economy of heat and a habit of replacement. None of them sweats. All of them run warm by borrowing from the sun, the water or their own worked muscle, and all of them hold still far better than they hurry. All of them shed: skin in the Iziaka, skin and organs in the Tusiva, teeth in the Torkan, a single unbroken sheet in the Sarpaen, a fouled hide in the Sserrin. A body that discards its outer self on a schedule breeds a mind that treats the past as something to be stepped out of and kept in a box, and every Cold Scale people on Nu keeps its dead skin somewhere: in a book, in a tree, on a post, on a shelf, in the deep. The settled kingdoms find this ghoulish. The Cold Scales find a people who bury the whole body at once wasteful and a little frightened.
The class law is the Iziakan one, and every scaled people on Nu has felt its edge. Rank among the Cold Scales rests on scale hardness and on nothing else; birth buys nothing, wealth buys nothing, and a full armoury buys nothing. "The stronger the scale, the higher the standing." It is a caste that can be read across a crowded room at a glance, and it does not forgive.
Birds A'QBIESH DOSIK, “The Clipped Wings”
The Alverians came out of the sky, and when they put wings on their slaves they were building copies of themselves and knew it. The doctrine is set down twice and says one thing both times. "Nearly all the great, lesser children of sky were deemed pure and perfect by the Alverian's, as a near extension of themselves." And shorter: "The sky children were deemed pure & perfect by the Alverian; an extension of themselves."
That favour shows in the roster. The Eaven and the Librar were judged finished on the day they were made and their codes were locked, and they were given the two tasks the Alverians trusted to no one else, watching and remembering. The Vultari and the Pikon were given appetites instead. One clears the dead. The other owns the living.
The class name is the makers' joke. Every Clipped Wing flies. What was clipped was the part that could refuse. The locks hold as they were written, and the further forms of the Eaven and the Librar are morphs and castes thrown by a single locked genome, never new splices.
Mammals A'QMOAR ALTA, “The Great Devourers”
The last class and the largest, and the one the Alverians pointed at the ground. "Creatures set on soil bound territories, and the advancement of their species, the great intelligent mammals were bred for global domination. By their colonising nature, the world would be consumed by their unquenchable hunger of consumption." Shorter, and blunter: "Soil bound for global domination. Through colonizing, they would consume the world."
Everything here was made to take ground and hold it. The Lathonian hold prisons, the Boalden hold borders, the Gidan hold passes, the Baruush hold crossings, the Fathari hold up whatever an empire wants raised, and the Xacrie hold the dark. The empire that came after Alveria was built out of this class, and every noble house in the record with a beast on its banner is a mammal house.