Mni - Cilanis (Al - Emm - Nee)

Tall and willowy, a typical Mni stands 1.8-2.1 metres but rarely exceeds ninety kilograms. Slender musculature sheaths a flexible skeleton, marrying speed to stamina rather than weight to power. Ears taper to fine points, long and rippled in the Alemni, rounder in the Varlimni, thicker and salt-scarred among Yorimni mariners. Eyes, almond in shape and broad of pupil, gather detail in dim forest shade or moonlit deck alike, granting low-light vision beyond human reach.

Skin and hair speak the dialects of homeland: Alei complexions gleam pale ivory shot with silver undertone; Varli skins smoulder olive through bronze beneath canopy shadow; Yori flesh weathers to grey-brown, often mottled by years of spray and sun. Hair follows suit, snow-white or platinum for Alei, dark chestnut to black streaked green or copper for Varli climbers, slate-grey or storm-blond for Yorimni. Yet beneath these hues all Mni share the same wiry endurance that lets them lope forest limbs or rigging cables for hours without rest.

Mni mature at a glacial pace. Infancy and childhood drift across two decades; adolescence stretches into a fifth. Only at roughly fifty years are they named adults, often after clan rites or Directorate examinations. Thereafter they dwell centuries in vigorous steadiness, three, sometimes four, before senescence finally clouds eye and loosens limb. Such longevity fosters patience but also a cultural dread of careless change.

Fertility, in stark contrast to lifespan, is fleeting. A Mni woman enters a single fertile window of five-to-ten years and gestates eighteen months. Clans therefore record every lineage with obsessive care: the Directorate assigns unions to balance aptitude; Varlimni matriarchs barter bloodlines between forest circles; Yorimni captains negotiate marriages as shrewdly as trade contracts. Inter-ethnic offspring are viable but rare, more from taboo than biology.

Seasonal extremes touch them only lightly. In winter they burn fractionally warmer; in tropic heat their metabolisms idle, conserving salts. Varli hair thickens when monsoon mists rise, Yorimni skin darkens after months under open sky, but such shifts are subtle, easily missed by shorter-lived observers.

Eyes tuned to crepuscular light, ears that swivel to catch wing-beat or rope-creak, and a refined palette of scent keep the Mni alert where heavier senses would dull. They record scent as memory, shift balance on wind-hint alone, and read shadow gradient the way scribes read ink. These talents underpin both their famed archery and the architectural daring of sky-bridges and mast-cities.

No flora or fauna binds itself uniquely to Mni flesh, though Varlimni legend reveres tree-spirits that whisper to bloodlines, and Yorimni quartermasters swear certain deep-sea leeches pledge life-bond to captains for safe passage. Whether myth or misidentified commensal remains an open question for scholars of Valenfar.

From a distance, all Mni seem cut from one cloth: tall, lean, and tensile. Close study reveals fine variances. Alemni bodies are long of limb and almost fragile-looking, yet hide formidable tendon strength, ideal for poised swordwork and disciplined drill. Varlimni frames favour compact muscle at shoulder and thigh; tree-bound life gifts them explosive power for vertical leaps and branch-to-branch sprints. Yorimni sailors, though still slender, add rope-knot calluses and a rolling gait: balance honed on heaving decks and rigging spars. Despite these nuances, none carry excessive bulk; stamina, agility, and precise economy of motion define the species far more than raw power.

High cheekbones, tapered jaws, and almond eyes lend every Mni an air of alert refinement. Alemni faces are smooth-planed, ears long and scroll-fine, brows swept like quills, an aesthetic cultivated by centuries of courtly exactitude. Varlimni features soften into rounder ears and broader smiles; laughter lines form early from clan feasts and wind-shared stories. Yorimni visages weather hard: skin salt-etched, ears thicker and often looped with bronze rings or knotted cord. Across all kindreds, eye colours are vivid: moon-silver and glacier-blue in Alei halls, emerald and deep amber beneath Varla leaves, steel-grey or storm-green upon Yori ships. Expression is nuanced yet measured, public restraint, private warmth.

Pigmentation maps their ecological niches. Alei complexions shimmer from porcelain to faint gold, catching candle-light like polished marble; hair gleams silver-white, platinum, or pale flax, often worn in intricate knots that echo Directorate heraldry. Varli skin ranges olive through dark bronze; hair spills black, sable, or deep chestnut streaked with green-copper pollen dust; clan tattoos, spirals of ochre or sap-ink, mark coming-of-age climbs. Yorimni flesh pales to ash-tan in winter, browns under midsummer sun, then weathers to muted greys kissed by salt; hair bleaches slate, blue-grey, or storm-blond, braided tight against sea wind and garnished with shell or shark-tooth beads. Tattoos and scar-lacings abound among Varli and Yori, while the Alemni reserve bodily markings for rare acts of state or penance.

Mni settlements flourish wherever climate, craft, and philosophy can be reconciled. In Valenfar, airy spires rise amid orchards of white-barked lassir, each city a calculated lattice of sun, shadow, and watershed. Eastern Erothi hosts clan-clusters of Varlimni platforms threaded through thousand-year trunks, their rope-lifts and gliding bridges shifting with the growth of the forest rather than resisting it. The Yorimni chart migratory harbours, stone breakwaters where basalt meets surf, raft-towns lashed in the lee of sea-cliffs, even storm-borne flotillas that drift on prevailing currents for seasons at a time.

Wherever they dwell, the Mni cultivate buffer-groves and dune-gardens that absorb the slow creep of erosion, and they mark sacred corridors for wildlife whose passage they will not impede. Outsiders often misread this as mysticism; the Mni call it simple arithmetic, life, after all, is a yield that compounds only when its principal is protected.

Diet follows landscape. Alemnic cuisine exalts bread-grains, night-orchid fruits, and a dizzying catalogue of herbal infusions, meat appears more as garnish than fare. Varlimni fare pairs root-tubers and river fish with the rare flesh of tree-striders taken in regulated hunts; every part of the beast is rendered to use, bone to tool-ply and hide to leaf-oil vellum. Yorimni mess-galleys steam with kelp rice, salted long-fin, and fermented sea-pickle that can outlast a year at voyage. Common across all tables is the Mni preference for light cooking and layered seasoning: nourishment that quickens the limbs without dulling the senses required for bowstring or rigging-line.

Mni esteem mastery, patience, and collective memory. Excellence is not a race but an asymptote approached through centuries of disciplined practice. Status accrues quietly: a stone-mason whose arches have withstood a hundred winters needs no title to command respect. Public discourse is formal, leaning on precedent and measured rhetoric; impulsive brilliance is applauded only once tempered by reflection. Art serves function as readily as beauty, yet when beauty emerges it is intricate, layered, and meant to reveal new subtleties with each generation that beholds it.

Three refined language families dominate Mni speech. *Alemnic* (Valen) threads precise consonant lattices through a syntax obsessed with clarity and hierarchy. *Varlic* dialects, Bashic, Chai, Tian, flow like water around hard vowels, rich in metaphor drawn from leaf, river, and root. *Yoric* tongues (Yurun, Nesuan) are spare, staccato and melodic by turns, trimmed for shipboard brevity yet capable of haunting cadence. Multilingualism is common in border cities and among diplomats; even the most cloistered Alemni scholar likely commands trade-cant Yoric. Diaspora enclaves hoard ancestral phonemes long lost in the homelands, treating accent as heirloom.

Faith is less dogma than cultivated worldview. The Alemni follow Alemnic Purism, a strict monotheism venerating Khaldora as architect of order; its liturgies resemble geometries of the soul. The Varlimni keep an animist strain of Arorism, wherein forest, river, and moon each voice a fragment of a wider will. The Yorimni maintain a patchwork of tide-lore and star-oaths, invoking ancestral captains or the deep-sea spirits they call Wind-Drinkers to bless voyaging hulls. Disputation is scholarly; open proselytising is discouraged, for belief is held a covenant first with self, only second with cosmos.

The early history of the Mni is cloaked in shadow, and the deeper one peers into the mists of prehistory, the more the facts unravel into allegory. What is at least widely accepted is that the Mni were not always three. Most scholars agree they descend from a single root population, which emerged in the mythic age from deep beneath the earth. The Ascent, as it is called across all three branches, marks the transition from the age of caves and subterranean gloom into the light of the upper world, though the motivations for this migration remain a subject of endless speculation.

According to the traditions of the Alemni, the Mni first surfaced in Valenfar, where they found the land empty but hostile. In time, they established settlements, made peace with the sun, and developed writing, agriculture, and social order. However, archaeology tells a more fragmented story. Crumbling forest cities in eastern Erothi, predating the earliest known Alemnic capitals by centuries, suggest that some Mni, likely ancestors of the Varlimni, crossed the oceans long before the rise of the Directorate. Whether they were explorers, exiles, or pilgrims seeking freedom from early hierarchies is debated, but the elegance of their surviving ruins implies a people both sophisticated and deliberately withdrawn from centralising power.

In contrast, the Yorimni claim descent from those who rejected unity outright. In Alemnic myth, this rupture is recorded as the Clan Wars, an era of blood-feud and internecine chaos in which a thousand Mni warbands devoured one another beneath the banner of pride. The legend of Alem, whether taken as person, movement, or mythic ideal, tells of a final unification not by blade, but by covenant. From this act, the Directorate was born, promising eternal order to a people who had nearly destroyed themselves. But the tale also whispers of those who would not yield. It is from this refusal, scholars suspect, that the Yorimni emerged as seafarers and dissenters who abandoned the land and its strictures for the uncertain freedom of tide and wind.

This splintering, whether through flight, banishment, or choice, left cultural scars still visible in the Mni. The Alemni recall the pain of chaos and build monuments to structure. The Varlimni carry the old ways quietly through the forests of Erothi, their oral histories older than any Directorate decree. The Yorimni reject fixity altogether, shaping their identity anew with each voyage, each storm, each song.

That such profound divergences in culture, temperament, and even physiology could occur over so short a span, scarcely three to four millennia, remains a biological puzzle. Some posit that Mni are unusually sensitive to environmental and sociocultural pressure, changing more swiftly than other long-lived peoples. Others argue that the distinctions are more cultural than biological, a case of deep tradition inscribed upon bodies and minds through generation after generation of memory and ritual.

It is said that the Mni, once sundered, did not merely survive but began to build. The Alemni, inheritors of Valenfar's fertile plains and sheltered valleys, founded the first enduring cities: bright beacons of white stone and carefully tamed forest. Among their early achievements was the invention of written language, a development that would profoundly shape the destiny not only of the Alemni but eventually of the wider world.

The earliest surviving records date to what the Alemni now call the Era of Binding, a period beginning approximately twelve centuries ago by modern reckoning. It was during this time that the Directorate formalised the first codices of law, the first census registries, and the first formal oaths of allegiance written and preserved in the tongue of Valenfar. Among these venerable documents is the Covenant of the First Assembly, a charter that historians commonly used to mark the beginning of the Alemnic Historic Era, distinct from the mythic past.

For some four centuries, the Alemni lived and developed within their lands, slowly extending their reach across Valenfar through careful settlement and ecological stewardship. Their pace was slow but deliberate; each city was established only once the surrounding land could be fully sustained without waste or imbalance. Their expansion, while meticulous, rendered them slow to dominate the wider world.

It was in the Year 0 of the Historic Era, by common world reckoning, that the Alemni first crossed the Valennic Sea to the vast continent of Erothi. Here they encountered a mosaic of peoples; Humans, Urmans, Seishi, and others, who had developed rich but largely unwritten cultures. The arrival of the Alemni, bearing the gifts of literacy, mathematics, and agricultural sciences, marked a profound turning point for the world. Knowledge that had been confined to Valenfar for centuries now diffused outward, reshaping the destinies of a dozen races almost overnight.

Though the Directorate exerted careful control over which secrets were shared, the impact was irreversible. From this moment, recorded meticulously by Alemnic scholars as the First Contact of Komi, the world entered a new chapter: the Historic Era. For the Mni, however, it was a bittersweet triumph. While the Alemni looked outward and grew entangled in the complexities of diplomacy and trade, the Varlimni and Yorimni, already deeply rooted in their respective ways, remained more insular, their ancient choices separating them even further from the lineage they once shared.

Mni attitudes toward other sapient species vary widely across ethnicities, ranging from isolationist suspicion to pragmatic trade and rare alliance. In all cases, the long lifespans and historical memory of the Mni lend them a reserved and cautious demeanour in diplomatic contexts.

The Alemni, with their structured and insular civilisation, tend to maintain formal, hierarchical relations with other peoples. They preferred controlled treaties, sanctioned emissaries, and a careful regulation of cultural exchange. Their perception of themselves as culturally and intellectually superior is often veiled in politeness but rarely absent.

The Varlimni, by contrast, maintain more fluid boundaries. Their forest-clan diplomacy is based on mutual respect and observance of custom. While they are wary of outsiders, they do not view other species with disdain, so long as the natural world is honoured and the clan’s autonomy is respected. They are most likely to engage in limited trade or ceremonial alliances with nearby peoples.

The Yorimni are known for the most regular, and sometimes volatile, contact with other races. As sailors, pirates, and traders, they have walked the decks of ships from every major culture and fought under a dozen foreign flags. Their relationships are often personal rather than institutional, forged through shared hardship or mutual gain rather than diplomatic agreement. Some speak of Yorimni bloodlines scattered across the continents, the legacy of shipboard liaisons and coastal rebellion.

Despite these differences, all Mni share a subtle wariness of cultural dilution. They guard their languages, rites, and ancestral knowledge closely, and while they may walk among others, they rarely do so unshaped by the long shadow of their own history.