The Men of Tor Morta'an

> *"They are the saddest of corpses, that which blossoms in its corrupted state and grows to proclaim the sin of its continued existence louder than that purity, forever lost, of which it is a pale reflection."*
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> **Lord Laicanil of the Elvish Kings, on the human underclass of Axan**
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The legends tell that one half of humanity, sundered from their brothers and sisters in the west by an encroaching chill, migrated south-east across Karn in search of greener pastures - what they found was the peninsula of Karanoth, or Axanaira ("Void Law") in Quenya, which was at the time a remote elvish colony. The elves of Axanaira, troubled by the appearance of elf-like beings native to the tundra they found so inhospitable, christened the refugees "Fallen Elves", or Firima, after the legend of the Fallen Ideal, Valatë, theorising that these must be accursed elves who rebelled alongside their prideful master, now themselves betrayed by the Great Betrayer. A brief debate took place amongst the colony's stewards, with the decision to reintegrate the piteous savages into elvish society and so uplift and ennoble them taken, whether through fear of their great numbers, genuine benevolence, or an opportunistic desire to exploit their potential as a workforce adapted to the cold.

At first, these refugees were treated cautiously, allowed to construct their own settlements, assisted in the development of agricultural practices in exchange for providing the colony's masters with a share of the food; attempts were made to teach Quenya and elvish cultural and religious practices to the humans, but these were more often than not abandoned due to their sheer number disparity between the elves and the humans. However, as the elves got used to not farming their own food, and began to incorporate human servants into their households, they took a more relaxed view of their underlings, considering them docile, perhaps even stupid, and thus instituted less fair dealings and more repressive conditions. This led, naturally, to some localised unrest, but with little ability to coordinate across the vast snow plains of Karanoth, these were easily defeated by the well-armed colonial guard, leading to yet greater crackdowns on the independence of the humans.

This society only evolved into that of the Kingdom of Axan, which would last for half a millennia, when the programs of elvish cultural indoctrination began yielding fruit in the form of whole clans of humans who spoke Quenya, worshipped the Ideals, and were very willing to rule over their fellow humans in the place of the elves - with this development, the internal hierarchy stabilised, and the elves were able to look outwards, waging a 20-year war of independence around the 5th century Prior Azur, a relatively bloodless affair after which they split from Ullumálos and formally founded Axan.

Only after the Azurite Rebellion did these humans gain their own realm, Tor Morta'an, for which their race, the Mortanites, was named. In the name of Tor Morta'an and and its successor kingdoms, they subsequently spread across the isles of the Shattered Sea, colonised Zo'an, and invaded Fimbria and Nivena over the course of the First and Second Crusade - thus in the present day, cultural descendants of this cold northern kingdom are widespread and diverse. Due to the influence of centralised Tor Morta'ani governance, they tend to organise themselves into kingdoms more-or-less organised along feudal lines, although in recent centuries a number of republican governments (most oligarchic in nature) have been established. Various other societal practices, most associated with the diktats of the Azurite Church, are common but by no means omnipresent in Mortanite societies. Most such societies speak King's Common, a more complex Old Mortaani with the elemental symbols dropped and some letters and grammar borrowed from Quenya.