The Strangeborn:

The word Strangeborn is not a name so much as a reaction. It is what the commonfolk call anything that they have trouble to understand; What they believe from reputation or segregation walks too close to the wrong side of a mirror. Devils, Red Dwarfish, Chitinians, Automaton, Moon-Kin, and Shadow Elfese, they share no ancestry, no unison of kingdom or creed, only an unease from everyone else around them that follow the Strangeborn like smoke does fire. Some were built, others cursed, and others still born seemingly out of thin air. What binds them is not blood, but the echo of xsomething unnatural, oaths, industry, and consequence twined so tightly that the world itself refuses to forget them. Everwealth calls them wicked because they make comfort impossible; Wickedness is an easier story than strangeness. Yet the truth is colder. They are pragmatists molded by rejection, creatures who learned to survive in the shape the world feared most. Take the Devils, after The Fall, the war they waged against us causing the undaunting horrors of The Great Schism, fear of them calcified into custom justified with hatred. Inns still hang charms over their lintels, courts still use the word devil to mean unwelcome. Yet those same cities hire them and other Strangeborn whenever the work is dangerous, delicate, or profane; Salvage in cursed forges, oaths no living tongue dares to swear, hunts where failure would cost a soul.   They are the ones called when magick becomes too honest for polite society. They walk the line between contract and curse, their reputations a mixture of necessity and discomfort. In Everwealth, fairness can be more frightening than fire, and the Strangeborn are the fairest creatures alive. Their customs are sharp as chisels, promises bind like iron, hospitality is both shield and test, every gesture calculated with ritual precision. Beauty, to them, is not softness but endurance, art that burns and does not melt. Their neighborhoods smolder at dusk with quiet color, iron lamplight and mirrored doors, songs that ring like hammers on brass. During their festivals the air itself trembles, choruses tuned to inhuman harmonics, dances built from geometry and grief, markets where the cost of a secret is a truth of equal weight. They are craftsmen, philosophers, mercenaries, and witnesses, but never safe. The Strangeborn do not court comfort, only survival. They are what remains of the world’s mistakes made useful. Their flames are steady, their pacts unbroken, their eyes unblinking when others flinch. You may call them monsters if it helps you sleep; They’ll take the insult, carve it into steel, and sell it back to you as protection against the next one that comes. For all their, strangeness, the Strangeborn are the quiet truth of Everwealth, everything it fears, and everything it cannot live without.