From the Lunar Archive of Sancta Gloria, Book II — The Peoples of the Surface. Compiled by Archivist Ophira Reyne, 7th Cycle.
Preface
"The sea remembers, but it is the land that chooses to endure."—Fragment of the Antler Codex, attributed to the First Watchers of the High Ranges.
This chapter concerns the first peoples to claim the dry world as home: the Kuranta (horse-kin), the Caprinae (goat- and sheep-kin), and the Elafia (deer- and giraffe-kin). Others would follow—fleet Cautus in the dunes, quiet Itra in the hollows—but it was these three who turned bare stone into road, crag into hearth, and horizon into promise.
I write not to praise them but to preserve their truth, for the land forgets names as easily as the wind forgets footprints.
I. The First Steps on Stone
Silurian–Devonian; First Cycle
When the waters drew back from the newborn continents, Flux pooled in tidal scars and cliffside basins. There, the Landborn awoke.
Kuranta, with lungs like bellows and tendons tuned to the drum of the earth, were first to roam the gravel plains. Their foal-sprint remains the fastest ground-start ever measured in the Archive.
Caprinae learned the language of angles: hoof to ledge, horn to wind. In their marrow, geometry became instinct.
Elafia rose on long frames, eyes set high to read distance as scripture. They did not merely see horizons; they kept them.
Their earliest tools were wind: kites of sinew and kelp-silk to test gust and lift, then hooks of horn, then sling and staff. Fire came later, guarded like a newborn, for grasslands were scarce and trees scarcer still.
Contact with the Aegir was cautious. Sea-folk offered shell blades and pressure-glass; the Landborn traded salt, bone, and a promise: "We will hold the heights. You will hold the deeps."
II. The Pastoral Cities
Carboniferous–Permian; Second Cycle
Abundance swelled. Fern forests blotted out daylight; rivers braided the lowlands. The Landborn learned to build.
Caprinae devised hornwork—arched frames of layered horn and bone, bound with resin and wind-cured hide. Their hill-settlements hummed in storms, singing through reed vents to relieve pressure.
Kuranta stretched roads between oases, the first Wind-Relay: stone mile-markers set by stride and heartbeat, with drinking cisterns sunk on the shadowed side of every third ridge.
Elafia raised the Watch-Towers, bare-limbed spires whose lens-sap windows magnified sun and star. At their feet were carved the earliest calendars of drought and flood.
For a century of centuries the Concord of Hoof and Horn held: a pact of caravan-rights and pasture-rotation enforced by sworn arbiters who traveled with no weapon but a measuring staff. Trade with Aegir blossomed—salt for copper nodules, felt armor for coral-glass. It might have endured an age.
It did not. The War of Vapors—a folly begun far from the ranges—choked the skies. The Second Cycle died coughing. In the ashfall winters that followed, the Landborn learned the first of their hard lessons: a road is only as strong as the valley it crosses.
III. Silence and Return
Triassic–Cretaceous; Third Cycle
The Age of Scales and Wings belongs to another book. Here it suffices to say: the Landborn stepped aside. They did not contend with the thunder-lizards or the river emperors; they watched. In gullies and on lee slopes they kept the craft of tether and compass-lore alive. When the sky burned and winter fell, they were ready.
IV. The Mammalian Dawn and the Antler Compacts
Paleogene–Pleistocene; Fourth Cycle
Grass returned, and with it the long view.
Kuranta redrew the continents with post-roads—a relay of rest-camps, oath-stones, and signal-fires. From these would descend, millennia later, the post riders and courier guilds of the Fifth and Sixth Cycles.
Caprinae perfected feltplate: quilted armor stiffened with resin and threaded with copper wire to bleed away Flux lightning. Mountain keeps sprouted ropeways and counterweighted lifts.
Elafia convened the Antler Compacts, treaties exchanged by antler-crests carved with lineages and star-paths. Their observatories (the forerunners of the famed Antler Observatories of later ages) predicted monsoons and mapped the slow sway of the poles.
Humans multiplied—quietly, inexorably—settling in the margins the Landborn did not want: floodplains that drowned every other year, coasts that stank of rot, frozen valleys where even goats balked. The Landborn found them useful and unnerving in equal measure. "They return like grass after fire," one Elafia keeper wrote. "This is not insult. It is prophecy."
V. The Age of Kingdoms and Fluxfire
10,000 BCE – 1300 CE; Fifth Cycle
History unfurls. Names crowd the margins. We remember only the pillars.
Kuranta founded the Ten Thousand-League Relay, a lattice of waystations from the steppe to the sea. They could have ruled by speed alone; they chose instead to be neutral ground. Their law was delivery: oath-carried, not oath-owned.
Caprinae became the Crag Wardens, perfecting avalanche walls, wind-harp alarms, and frost-ware kilns that baked at thin-air temperatures. When plague came on northern winds, it stopped at their border fires.
Elafia refined the Lens-Sap—a clear secretion from their horn-grafted trees that, when set in frames and flux-purified, produced optics unmatched until the Sixth Cycle. Their Star Courts arbitrated disputes by the calendar and by the stars, not by blade.
In this Cycle the Landborn wove their lives with Humans most intimately: mixed caravan families, lodges where hoof and foot kept the same hearth. Yet even here the old truth held—Human numbers grew, and where pasture needed a century to heal, a village rose in one season.
VI. Iron, Smoke, and the Hollow Sky
1300 CE – early 20th century; Sixth Cycle
Engines changed everything about distance except its temptation.
Kuranta traded hoofbeat for rail and wheel, then regretted it. The Steel Right-of-Way—their proudest treaty—became a corridor that fed war. In the archive carts we keep a single iron spike, pitted with salt, labeled: "We made the world smaller; we did not make it kinder."
Caprinae turned their geometry to bridges, cantilevers, and airship moorings on knife-edged peaks. Many were blown apart in the Siege of Seven Updrafts, defending passes that fed whole continents.
Elafia built lighthouse-constellations across the coasts: horned towers that pulsed coded light to warn fleets off shoals and—secretly—to measure Flux tides.
When the Reverse Side bled through and the Sarkaz spilled into dusk-lit cities, the Landborn learned that no wall is high enough to keep out a story given teeth. Many retreated to sanctuaries carved in the bedrock; many did not survive the Ash Rain. The Sixth Cycle ended with roads empty but unbroken, towers dark but still standing.
VII. The Seventh Dawn: What the Land Remembers
Modern Age; Seventh Cycle
The Sankta descended, and for the first time the Landborn accepted stewardship they had not written themselves. Balance—never growth—became the measure.
Kuranta revived the Relay not as empire but as Commons: wayhouses open to any traveler who swears the old delivery oath. Their couriers run beside electric trams and humble carts alike. No one is turned away for lack of coin; all must carry a message on to the next mile.
Caprinae keep the Highworks: avalanche nets, rain-catch spines, and wind organs that bleed storms safely into the sky. Their guilds train human engineers and Aegir liaisons side by side, for stone is an equal teacher.
Elafia tend the Antler Observatories reborn—spires with lens-sap arrays calibrated to Flux infrasound. Their wardens are quiet people. They speak only to give dates: sowing, storming, mourning.
Humans remain the majority—by chance, by vigor, by the Ancients' own quarrels. The Landborn do not contest this. They have, instead, chosen persistence: to make roads that outlive regimes, towers that outlast tongues, and covenants that survive even when those who swore them do not.