A species is a broad kind of people sharing an inherited nature, whether biological, metaphysical, or constructed. Elves are a species; so are Humans; so are the Wrought, whose nature passes through design and repair rather than birth. In ordinary speech the word is people: the Dwarves are an old people, and the cradle-web is home to many peoples. "Species" is the healer’s and the scholar’s word. The word "race" is not used of any of them, by anyone careful.

No species was made by the Primes. Each arose in one of a few ways. Most came by natural evolution on Caeldon itself: Humans, Reedfolk, Orcs, Halflings, Gnomes, the Thaluren, and the Kavari among them. The two oldest peoples came by planar adaptation, descending from ancestors shaped by another plane’s pull on the Material Plane and slowly tamed into fully material life: the Elves from Verdant-marked stock, the Dwarves from stock crushed into shape under the Iron Backbone. The Wrought were made, or rather their predecessors were, as mindless working frames, and became a people only when those frames woke into self-awareness. A few groups that live among the others, such as the Salvage Peoples of the ruin-belts, are less one clean species than a people-complex, drawn together by descent and by long lives lived in the same broken places.

Whatever its path, as a lineage formed it took on its own settled balance of Prime energy, and that balance is its lifeforce. Every people has its own signature, shared in broad shape by all its members and varied in strength and steadiness from one individual to the next. Lifeforce is not a soul or a moral essence. It is the animating charge of a living body, the thing that lets it grow, endure, and mend, and its species-shaped form is why some peoples lean towards particular kinds of magic. It also governs healing between peoples. Healing within one species is the surest and the least wasteful; between related peoples it works with noticeable loss; between very different ones it is possible but costly, and healers who serve mixed towns learn the difference early, sometimes at a bedside where the patient did not live to teach them. Broths, tonics, and herbs work because a plant or animal carries a living charge of its own, and different herbs act differently on different peoples for exactly that reason. The workings of lifeforce belong to the chapter on how magic works; for a writer of peoples, the point is that a body’s kind is written into how it heals.

A branch is a durable inherited difference within a species. It may be biological, ecological, magical, or constructed, but it is always inherited, never only learned or chosen. The Wood Elves, the High Elves, the Thorn Elves, and the Dark Elves are branches; so are the Ironspine and Stonewake Dwarves. In everyday speech people say kindred, or stock, or use their own people’s word, and almost nobody says "subspecies" outside a scholar’s notes.

Humans are the striking exception. They form regional peoples, the Confluence, Headwater, Serathic, and frontier or Mixed-March populations, shaped by settlement, roads, the river, and trade, not by descent. A Serathic Human is Serathic by where she lives and whose oaths she keeps, not by blood, and a Headwater family that settles in the river towns and swears to the river houses becomes Serathic in a generation or two.

A lineage is a line of descent at any scale, from a single family or clan to the deep-time First Material Lineages from which the oldest peoples descend. Among the Wrought it also means a design lineage: the line of frames a design came down through, Forgeframe or Fieldframe or Warframe. A lineage is never another word for a branch. A family can be ancient and still be one family; a branch is a whole population changed.

A lifeway is a recurring way of living. It can shape identity as strongly as any inheritance, but it is not inherited, and it can cross branches and even species. The Highhold and Gatehold Dwarves are real and recognizable, with their own habits of weather, haulage, and trade, but they are lifeways of exposed holds, not separate kinds of Dwarf; a Gatehold family’s grandchildren raised deep in the mountain would be ordinary hold Dwarves. Goblins of the ruin-warrens and Goblins of the road margins differ in nearly everything they do and remain one people.

Culture is a shared way of life seen from the inside: language, custom, values, ritual, art, food, oaths, the practice of magic, memory, and the shape of the world in a people’s eyes. A society is narrower, a concrete gathering of people at one time and place: this town in this generation, this camp this winter.

A civilization is a durable order with its own customs, powers, and memory, lasting beyond any single settlement or ruler. It need not hold land. A hold-world under a mountain is a civilization; so is a league of river towns, and so is a web of houses that owns no ground at all but keeps its oaths, its tallies, and its grip on the roads it holds. A civilization that sits inside another is a civilization within it, as the Stonewake Compact is within the hold-world of the Ironspine. Every one of them is held together by custom, oath, kinship, and the strength of its great families, and none by written rules; where something is written down, it records what the strong have already decided. The names civilizations give themselves (Compact, League, Concord, House, Holds, Circles, Courts, Pacts, Commons, Covenant, Keepers, Marches, Orders, Kindreds) are proper names, as loose as any old title. A Compact need not be a treaty and a League need not have members who signed anything; each name describes its people only roughly, and what each one actually is must be learned from the people who keep it.

The same words apply to every people, but they do not fit every people the same way, and the unevenness is the point. Among Elves, branch and civilization line up more closely than anywhere else: each of the four branches has a civilization that keeps, hardens, or turns its inheritance, and still an Elven branch is inherited peoplehood while its civilization is custom, memory, the right to rule, and the houses that hold power. Dwarves differ more by hold, depth, and neighbours than by birth, so their civilizations matter more than their branches. Humans are divided far more by custom, fosterage, and the age at which they count someone grown than by any reckoning of descent. Goblins, Kobolds, Trolls, and Ogres live in many local lifeways and compacts without great states. The Wrought are sorted by design lineage and by who will accept them, not by ancestry.

Lifespan shapes the pattern too. Long-lived peoples tend to have few branches, slow divergence, and long unbroken memory: Elven and Dwarven histories reach farthest back and hold only a handful of living branches. Short-lived, mobile, or hard-pressed peoples throw off many local forms, lifeways, and vanished or absorbed populations. A constructed people diversifies through design, repair, and the slow history of its acceptance instead of through birth. The living divisions of each people show it:

Every people also carries layers of what it used to be. Branches and civilizations emerge, merge, fragment, vanish, transform, or survive only as ruins, taboos, absorbed peoples, old distinctions of rank, and old names: the haunted hold no one dares to take, the grove whose song no living Elf can finish, the road cairns of a kindred that is gone. They do not all develop in parallel: a people may have an ancient bodily baseline, a later first civilization, still later secondary branches, and lifeways that are mostly a matter of region and custom. The peoples of any one era are the living top layer of that history, not the whole of it. Under the Wood Elves lie proto-Elven lineages that survive only in ritual memory and in overgrown root-halls nobody living built; under the Dwarven holds lie lithic ancestor lines and lost pressure holds; behind every Human region lie older peoples of the basins and the roads whose names nobody kept, and whose barrows the plough still finds.

Bodies and homelands are only half of what separates one people from another. The other half is what a people defends first, what it sacrifices first, and what it mistakes for wisdom when the raiders are at the gate. Every people of Caeldon has such a heart: something it will die for, something it runs from, something it sings about at the fire. It does not make every member think alike. It describes the default leanings a people lives under, which individuals, branches, and civilizations can sharpen, soften, or turn in another direction, and which history, sacred force, and geography can bend. A Dwarf hold sealing a flooded gallery with its own people behind the door, an Orc escort turning back into a storm for one straggler, a Halfling fold barring its gate in a locust year: each is a people’s leaning made into a deed.

A few rules hold for all of them. Every people is a real people with self-interest, love, fear, cooperation, conflict, and variety inside it, never an allegory. No people is morally pure: there is no wholly benevolent people on Caeldon, and none whose nature is evil. Peoples differ by weighting, not by one exaggerated trait. And each people’s great strength and its characteristic failing grow from the same root: the courage that holds the pass is the stubbornness that will not open it.

The differences are easiest to see along a few lines: adaptation against endurance, expansion against boundedness, duty against preference, keeping against changing, the order of the whole against the freedom of the hearth, and the short horizon against the long. The peoples whose leanings are best known sit along them like this:

Mixed lines have leanings of their own. People of Human and Elven descent often move between unlike rhythms of life and belonging more easily than either parent people expects, and are held back chiefly by being treated as go-betweens, compromises, or proofs of contact before they are treated as persons. People of Human and Orc descent often endure hard roads and heavy expectations better than anyone predicts, and are reduced, as often, to hardness, suspicion, or usefulness. The paired sentence is the whole method, and a writer can use it for any people: this people is strong at this because it puts that first, and vulnerable to this other thing because the same priority hardens or overreaches.

Every people of Caeldon has its own words for the self, and many of them are old words for a soul: spirit, breath, shade, the thing that leaves. They survive in prayers, in curses, in the names of places. The world itself knows nothing of the kind. There is no detachable, immortal soul-object in any being on Caeldon. What people call the self is a continuity: a living, changing pattern that acts in the world, leaves traces in it, and may be kept in the deep memory of the cosmos. A few of the highest scholars call the doctrine Resonant Continuity, and almost nobody else has heard of it. It is the ground under every argument in this book about who someone is, though those who argue rarely know it.

Every people in this book is described first by what it eats, mends, celebrates, teaches, inherits, bargains over, mourns, builds, protects, and repeats, and only then by its wars and monsters. That is not a rule of tidiness. It is how the peoples themselves live: crisis breaks into an ordinary life; it does not replace it. Then comes the bad year: the wolves at the fold, the raid on the road, the flood that brings the drowned back. A writer who knows how a Dwarven family tends a child through its long years in the stone cradle, behind the most doors, where an enemy would reach last, or what a Human village keeps in its granary against the bad year, knows what a war would actually threaten, and what a people would give up last.

The chapters that follow describe each people as a kind: its body, its life, its fears and its treasures, and the customs that run deep enough to survive from one era to the next. How each lives in a given era, who rules it, where it lives, and what it is fighting over that year, is told in that era’s book, and changes from one era to the next.