Known also as Human, Menek, Mattaya, or—among those with grander notions of themselves—Manusha. In verse and lament, they are sometimes called the King of the Sundered Throne: a crown once worn, now broken past all claim.
Round of ear and plain of feature, the Hominis lack any of the inborn marks that set the fantastic races apart: no horns, no tails, no innate communion with the Aether. What they lack in gift, however, they make up for in sheer, restless multiplicity. No other people of Mundus is so divided against itself, nor so persistently difficult to kill off.
History
The deep past of the Hominis is, by their own admission, a mystery even to themselves. The age of the Precursors is lost to time, and no Hominis scholar can say with confidence where their kind first arose, or whether the oldest tales—of arrival from some far, forgotten shore—hold any truth at all. What is remembered begins with the Asur Empire, a civilization of staggering ambition that rose under an undying God-Emperor and, for a time, was welcomed by the Goddess Herself. The welcome did not last. The Asur expanded without mercy, enslaving the Ilva and shaping new peoples—the Berkit and Jotun among them—out of living cruelty. Their punishment, when it came, was absolute: cities extinguished in a single night, the God-Emperor vanished, and the Goddess’s long Silence begun.
The survivors of that purge became the ancestors of the Hominis known today—though they were not, as it turned out, the last to arrive. Waves of newcomers followed across the long centuries after, cross-dimensional arrivers who founded the militant Imperium Romanum, embraced Mundus’s magic, and interbred freely with its native peoples, only to rot from within under the corrupting Council of Voivode. It took a pan-racial uprising under the Hominis prophetess Saint Maria Odessa—the Dawnbringers—to bring Romanum down and usher in the present age, from whose ashes rose Palamecia and the Ecclesian Church that still shapes so much of Hominis spiritual life.
The centuries since have not softened the pattern. Empires rise on Hominis ambition and fall on Hominis hubris, again and again, and the people who call themselves Hominis today are as likely to see this as a curse upon their blood as a testament to their will to endure.
Clans
The Hominis recognize no clans in any formal sense—no ancestral divide that splits the race into discrete, named branches. What passes for it is simply the accident of geography and history: Hominis of Asur descent run brown of skin, the Far Asur darker still, the Baramisian fair, the Yserian cast in tones of gold, each shaped by the land their forebears settled rather than any shared bloodline. Closer to a true distinct lineage are those who claim direct descent from the Asur themselves—a heritage worn as a badge of pride by some and a mark of inherited guilt by others, but a lineage all the same. Beyond this, “Hominis” describes less a people than an accumulation of peoples: the old stock shaped by Mundus across millennia, and the newer arrivers who have crossed over from distant, half-remembered shores and been absorbed into the whole.
Identity
No people of Mundus holds so wide a spread of belief and temperament under one name. At one extreme stand the archivists and record-keepers, who, knowing full well how short a single life runs, compensate by writing everything down: lineages, contracts, histories, grievances. It is often said, not always kindly, that no nation keeps better books than a Hominis one. At the other extreme stand the fatalists, who look upon a world they find fundamentally unjust and conclude that it deserves, in the end, to burn. Between these poles sits most everyone else: individualists chasing private ambition, communities that endure together against terrible odds, supremacists who dream of reclaiming an Asur birthright, and atoners who would rather forget they ever had one.
What unites them, more than any of this, is a consciousness of being looked down upon. In nearly every land not their own, the Hominis are reminded—by slur, by law, by simple condescension—that they are considered lesser, or tainted by the sins of their Asur forebears. The poets have a name for it: the King of the Sundered Throne, a people who once ruled all of Mundus and now hold nothing but the memory of the crown—a title spoken sometimes in pity, sometimes in mockery, and just as often by Hominis themselves, who are not above a little self-mockery of their own. And yet they endure past the insult. In state after state ruled by other peoples, the Hominis have a habit of clawing their way to second place: not the throne, but never quite the bottom either. Palamecia stands as a cosmopolitan state where Hominis share power rather than hold it alone; Orianth and the Middle Kingdoms see Hominis outnumber every other people without ruling any of them; in Aurelia’s Hanthawaddy the pattern repeats again. Only in scattered pockets—militant Volzantyne, the island kingdom of Yamatai—do Hominis sit the throne outright. And in Australis, where Hominis numbers were once greatest of all under Asur dominion, their numbers today are a shadow of what they were, a demographic wound that has never fully closed.
Tongue
The Hominis share no single tongue, and seem never to have tried very hard to invent one. Each state speaks as its history and neighbors dictate—scholarly High Etrissian in lands that lean on old learning, Amaran where Amara’s influence runs deep, and any number of regional dialects besides. A Hominis who speaks several of these fluently is not merely useful but admired; among traders, diplomats, and the well-traveled, multilingualism carries real social weight, a visible sign of a life spent beyond one’s own province. It is, perhaps, a fitting mirror of the race itself: no center, no single voice, only a great many people making do.