#isaldi

A long time ago, in the times beyond the peoples' memory, the gods have created the world. They tied the Sun and the Moon to its axis, a giant tree. The Sun was pulled by two dogs made of pure fire, and the Moon was their bait - it was pulled by a silver reindeer, sculpted from starlight. The Father of the World, pleased with this arrangement has left it be and went on to do different things.

Ages have passed, kingdoms and peoples have risen and fallen, and the Sun and the Moon were spinning. The gods waged wars, killed monsters and feasted, and the Sun and Moon tirelessly ran along its trails. One time, when the gods were feasting, a drop of their mead have fallen off their table and made a golden pool. A man named Annes have found the pool and drank from it, and has seen the life in things surrounding him. He understood the world the way no one else had before, and he's seen the chains binding the Sun and the Moon. Thus, Annes has become the first shaman. He called out in his bewilderment and so loud was his shout, that the reindeer that pulled the Moon reared up and the chain that held him broke. The dogs started to thrash and they freed themselves as well. The Sun started circling the sky chasing its own fiery tail and it ran like this for seventy two nights. In vain have Annes begged the gods to fix what he's unwittingly broken - the father of the gods was old and tired. He didn't have the strenght to catch the mischievous dogs anymore and his sons were busy with infighting and struggle for power.

In these times there lived a great warrior, named Hannem. The young gods, who didn't want to bother with the problems of the world, turned to him with a mission: he was to bind the Sun and find the Moon. Hannem was strong and quick-witted. He managed to fulfill his task. With deception and force he bound the reindeer and the dogs back to the great tree, and the Sun and the Moon returned to their places. The gods were pleased, the world was saved, and Hannem went back to his fighting in the mortal world. He lived long, he had many women, who had many children with him, and later he died and his lands were taken by the other heroes, hungry for power and glory. But they say mortals shouldn't touch godly matters, and there has to be some truth in it. Hannem in his struggle with the starlight reindeer have touched the Moon, and in his struggle with the fiery dogs he's touched the Sun. He's fulfilled a divine quest, and so, unbeknownst to him, he had become more god than human. His descendants were stronger than humans, but they were wild and cruel like animals, and their skin turned on them so that they resembled wolves and wild cats. There was nothing of the gods in them, but in their veins there remained a droplet of the blood of the world - the blood of the stars from the starlight reindeer and the blood of fire from the sun dogs. They were tireless and restless like sunfire and their strenght waxed and waned like moonlight. They couldn't live among people - they got into fights and raided their neighbors, and they knew war like nothing else, so everyone feared them.

Finally, the local dukes have lost their patience, and having invited sons and daughters of Hannem to a feast under a pretense of peace offering, they got them drunk and slaughtered them. No one has survived out of the generation of the demigods, but one of them managed to curse the murderers with his last breath, for breaking the sacred rule of hospitality. "May this blood never wash out off the face of this earth!" he shouted. "May your children always wear its brand!"

There's always weight in the words spoken in anger, and those were also sealed with a half-divine bloodshed. The dukes got scared of the curse. They razed the hall to the ground and burned the bodies of the slain. The settlement was abandoned, soon its ruins became overgrown. The ashes scattered on the wind. Peace came to the land.

In general, humans and elves are more biologically similar to each other than to any of the shorter people, and vice versa - dwarves and halflings are related closer to each other than to any of the taller people. The only known interspecies unions that produce offspring are humans + elves (the outcome is a half-elf) and dwarves + halflings (the outcome is a gnome).

Half-elves are very diverse - they inherit traits from both parents in a way that cannot be foreseen, the only constant is that their ears are almost always pointy, but shorter than elven. Lifespan, eye color, iris shape, bodytype, resistances to toxins, allergies and intolerances, even body hair patterns vary wildly from one half-elf to another. Oster, for example, passes for a human more easily than Igna, but sees better than her in low-light conditions (he also happens to be near-sighted, but that's an unrelated issue).