A Bestiary of Caeldon
Touched Beasts
Here stand the beasts of the world that something has changed: a wolf with frost in its coat at the edge of the Cinder Fields, a deer that stopped ageing below a spring where time stands still, a fox that slips half out of sight at a thin place, a hound bred bigger than any hound should be. They were born in Caeldon and they live in it; they are not natives of a plane or a zone and nobody’s host. Some of them breed true, and the herders and hunters who live beside them have long since stopped finding them strange.
Most Named in This Part
- Humans PeopleThe young, fast people of the cradle-web's basins and headwaters, of the balanced adaptive field, who emerged c. 300,000-c. 220,000 BR; what marks them is pace, and they form regional peoples rather…
- Elves PeopleOne of the oldest peoples of Caeldon, stabilized in the Elderweald from an inheritance marked by the Verdant Expanse that shows in presence more than in anatomy; their branches are the Wood, Thorn…
- Ill-Hatched CreatureWhat comes out of a chrysalis rite of Imago that went wrong: unfinished, half-made creatures that are not persons, and that the rite's own house must put down or keep.
- Skin-Lost CreatureShape-changers who stayed in Beast-Skin too long and forgot the way back: beasts now, no longer persons, with a person's habits, whom their villages treat warily as kin.
- The Veil PrincipleThe fluid space between places that connects every plane, a fog whose face changes towards each plane it borders and which takes its price from travellers, most often in what they remember.
- Dwarves PeopleOne of the oldest peoples of Caeldon, a dense and durable people stabilized under the Ironspine from an inheritance marked by the Iron Backbone; their branches are the Ironspine and Stonewake Dwarves.
- Kobolds PeopleA small, careful, underwork-adapted people who live wherever surface and underworld meet imperfectly, in mine-edges, drains, vents, and ruin underlevels; their civilization is the Underhouse Compacts.
- Wood Elves BranchThe first Elven branch, a grove-bound people of the Elderweald whose continuity is kept by growing within a living landscape, not by redesigning it; their civilization is the Rootcrown Concord.
- The Ageless Spring Resonant ZoneA small, softly glowing pool in a secluded valley or among ruins; those who drink and stay do not age, and a village beside one such spring is known where the old never die.
- The Cinder Fields Resonant ZoneThe most famous zone of the Crucible: its energy turned inside out, so that fire consumes heat instead of producing it; its hermit-guardians are the Frost-Burned.
- The Confluence Basins RegionThe broad lowland heartland of Humans: wide valleys, deep fields, and linked rivers gathering towards the Serath.
- The Elderweald RegionThe old-growth forest at the centre of the Elven world, home of the Wood Elves and the Rootcrown Concord; it has no roads, only paths walked open.
- Giants PeopleRare, withdrawn, and real: the living remainder of the Upland Colossal world, who keep to the storm shelves and hidden basins and keep the Mountain-Father's sleep.
- The Headwater Marches RegionThe foothill country between the Human farmland and the Dwarven mountains, the oldest shared country of Humans and Dwarves, living by the escorted exchange roads to the hold gates.
- The Stormcrown RegionThe high country above the Ironspine holds, bare ridges and storm shelves where the Upland Colossal world left its terraces, ridge roads, and weather shrines; the colossal heartland still.
- The Glassbelt Interior RegionCaeldon's first true desert, which nobody holds; a single overland route across it is the only thing joining the cradle-web and the far side.