Among the peoples of the realm, none carry the weight of history quite like the Lysfaer. Once the undisputed masters of the known world, they ruled an empire that stretched across continents during the height of the Second Age—an age that bears their name even now. Their story is not one of sudden conquest or divine mandate, but of time itself: the slow accumulation of knowledge, wealth, and power that only centuries of life can provide. It is also a story of fall, adaptation, and the bitter arithmetic of blood.

  The Lysfaer are a long-lived people. Where humans might see four generations pass in a single lifetime, a Lysfaer experiences only one. They mature slowly—a full century before they are considered adults—but live nearly three centuries if fortune favors them. This longevity shaped everything about their culture: their politics, their scholarship, their magic, and ultimately, their dominance. A Lysfaer Draíar—a practitioner of the Laith, the unseen currents that shape reality—has lifetimes to refine their craft. A Lysfaer statesman can play political games across generations. A Lysfaer merchant accumulates wealth that compounds across centuries.

  They are not physically imposing. In height they match humans, and in strength they are no greater—some would say slightly less so, their builds leaner and less suited to sustained labor. They are a people of warm climates, preferring dry heat and open sunlight, deeply uncomfortable in cold or damp conditions. But what they lack in raw endurance, they possess in other ways. Their hearing is sharp, their night vision keen, and they carry an innate sensitivity to the Laith itself—able to sense the flow of magic in the world around them, to feel disturbances in the air and the hum of Mára as it moves through living things.

  Most notably, they are exceptionally resistant to magic. A Caeth—a working, a spell—that would fell a human requires far more Mára to affect a Lysfaer. Healing magic, offensive workings, enchantments—all demand greater skill and energy to touch them. This resistance is not a shield they raise, but something woven into their very nature. It makes them both safer from hostile magic and harder to heal, a double-edged trait that has shaped their relationship with the arcane for as long as anyone can remember.

  In the Second Age, this combination of traits made them nearly untouchable. The Lysfaer Empire was not built on military conquest alone, though their armies were formidable. It was built on institutional mastery: administrative systems refined over generations, magical traditions passed down through centuries of unbroken study, economic structures designed to compound wealth across lifetimes. Humans and Veskal lived within their borders—not as equals, but not as despised enemies either. The Lysfaer saw themselves as stewards, civilizers, the architects of order in a chaotic world. Slavery existed, though they called it indentured servitude, framing it as a kindness—keeping the shorter-lived races productive, busy, guided by wiser hands.

  To be Lysfaer in that age was to be above. To be pure. To be the measure by which all others were judged.

  And to be called Narfyr—a human word meaning "one of us"—was an insult worthy of death.

  The word itself carried a specific cruelty. It implied equality. It suggested that a Lysfaer was no different from a human, no more special, no more deserving of their long years or their place at the top of the world. In an empire built on the assumption of inherent superiority, it was a denial of everything they believed themselves to be. Worse still, it carried a hidden implication: that the Lysfaer in question might be tainted, that somewhere in their bloodline, someone had mixed with the lesser races. Such mixing did happen, of course—affairs, curiosities, indiscretions—but the children of such unions were hidden, shunned, or quietly killed. Purity was maintained not through biology alone, but through violence and social control.

  Then came Jean-Luc de Montreval.

  The first Traveler to survive his passage between worlds, Jean-Luc arrived from a place called France, fresh from the fires of revolution and carrying ideas that would shatter the old order. He was human, charismatic, and utterly convinced that no person was born to rule over another. The Lysfaer dismissed him at first—another short-lived rabble-rouser, gone in a few decades at most. They were wrong.

  The war that followed was brutal. It was not a peasant uprising or a border skirmish, but a total conflict that raged across the empire for years. Jean-Luc's forces were outnumbered and outmatched in magic, but they were fueled by something the Lysfaer had never faced: the certainty that their cause was just, that freedom was worth dying for. And die they did—humans and Veskal both, in staggering numbers. But so too did the Lysfaer. Their resistance to magic meant little against blades, fire, and the sheer weight of numbers. Their long lives meant that each death was a greater loss—centuries of accumulated knowledge and skill erased in a moment.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  When the war ended, the Lysfaer Empire was gone. In its place rose the Lahrun Imra, a human-dominated order built on the bones of the old world. The Lysfaer who survived scattered—some retreating into isolated enclaves and gated communities, clinging to what remained of their culture; others integrating into the new order as scholars, professors, high-end Draíar for hire, or reclusive aristocrats nursing old grudges in crumbling estates. They were no longer the rulers of the world. They were a minority, outnumbered and diminished, their long lives now a reminder of all they had lost.

  And the Narfyr became common.

  With the empire's fall came the collapse of its mechanisms of control. Purity enforcement required power—social, economic, violent—and the Lysfaer no longer had enough of it. Mixing, which had always happened in secret, now happened openly. Survival often meant alliances with humans or Veskal, and those alliances sometimes became intimate. Some Lysfaer sought favor with the new human powers through marriage or partnership. Others simply lived, loved, and bore children in a world that no longer cared about bloodline purity the way it once had. The war itself had killed so many pure Lysfaer that the gene pool was forever diluted.

  Within a few generations, the Narfyr—those of mixed Lysfaer heritage—outnumbered their pure-blooded kin by staggering margins. Today, for every pure Lysfaer, there are perhaps six hundred Narfyr. The word that had once been a deadly insult became a simple descriptor: anyone below seventy percent Lysfaer blood is Narfyr, regardless of how they look or what they believe.

  And they look Lysfaer, mostly. The genes are dominant in that way—pointed ears, the same general build, the same sensitivity to heat and cold. But the differences are there for those who know where to look. Narfyr are often stronger, more physically resilient, better suited to labor and endurance. They live shorter lives—a little over two centuries instead of nearly three—and their resistance to magic is notably weaker. They may carry traits from their non-Lysfaer parent: a Narfyr with Veskal heritage might have sharper senses or a faint pattern of fur along their forearms; one with human blood might be stockier, better in the cold.

  Culturally, they are not the same people. Where pure Lysfaer tend toward calculated caution, long-term planning, and a certain aristocratic aloofness, Narfyr are pragmatic, grounded, and often openly dismissive of the old ways. They work. They labor. They serve as guards, craftsmen, manual workers, estate servants—the roles that pure Lysfaer, with their long childhoods and scholarly inclinations, were never suited for. And they do not, by and large, care about purity.

  "We're the ones who actually do things," a Narfyr might say, with no small amount of pride. "They've never worked a day in their lives."

  The pure Lysfaer, for their part, see the Narfyr as both a tragedy and a necessity. Tainted, yes—seventy years of lifespan stolen, resistance to magic weakened, the slow degradation of what was once a perfect lineage. But the cruelty of the percentage is that it offers a path back. A Narfyr at sixty-five percent purity who marries a pure Lysfaer might see their children climb above the threshold. Two generations of careful breeding, and the sin is purged. The family is whole again.

  This creates a peculiar dynamic: pure Lysfaer hold the keys to redemption, and Narfyr with ambition know it. Wealth, skill, beauty, talent—these become currencies in a game of bloodline restoration. For those with no such ambition, the Narfyr identity is enough. They are their own people now, and they have been for centuries.

  Humans, for their part, view both groups with a mixture of respect, resentment, and practicality. The Lysfaer were their masters once, and that memory lingers. To meet a pure Lysfaer now is to meet someone who might have been an aristocrat in the old world, someone whose grandparents perhaps owned your grandparents. There is respect for their knowledge—Lysfaer Draíar are among the most skilled magic-users alive, and their scholars are unmatched in certain fields—but there is also bitterness, the weight of an empire that took centuries to topple.

  The Narfyr, by contrast, are simply part of the world. They are neighbors, coworkers, guards at the gate. Some humans barely distinguish between Narfyr and Lysfaer at all; others know exactly where the line is drawn and treat each accordingly.

  To enslave a Lysfaer—pure-blooded, true Lysfaer—is a statement of wealth and power. They are rare, resistant to coercion, and often come into bondage only through extraordinary circumstances: hostages taken in political games, children sold to settle catastrophic debts, prisoners of war from some long-ago conflict. To own one is to own a piece of the old world, and the price reflects that.

  Narfyr, meanwhile, are far more common in the markets, though they too command respect. Strong, long-lived, often skilled—they are valuable property, but not the once-in-a-lifetime acquisitions that pure Lysfaer represent.

  And if you want to truly enrage a Lysfaer—pure-blooded, proud, clinging to whatever dignity remains—call them Narfyr. Suggest that they are mixed. Imply that someone in their family could not keep their bloodline clean. It is the old insult, the one that meant death in the Second Age, and it still cuts just as deep.

  The Lysfaer endure. Not as they once did, not as rulers or architects of empire, but as survivors of their own history. They are long-lived, calculating, and bitter in the way that only those who have lost everything can be. They watch the world change at a pace that seems frantic to them, and they remember when it moved slower, when they were the ones setting the rhythm.

  The Narfyr endure too, but differently. They are the inheritors of a word that was once a curse and a people who have made it their own. They are practical, proud, and unburdened by the weight of an empire they never ruled.

  Together, they are a people divided by blood, bound by history, and shaped by the same truth: that time is the greatest power of all, and even time runs out.

  A Note to Readers: