Alon

Alon is not a single species but the great family to which most of Callidore's non-human peoples belong. The name is an umbrella — a shared lineage that links the graceful Alka Alon, the stone-singing Karshak Alon, the iron-mastering Dradrien, the mountain-born Hulka Alon (trolls), the desert-dwelling Gora Alon, the gentle Tal Alon, and — at the furthest remove, acknowledged as distant cousins — the Gurvani.

Most Alon peoples trace their origins to Alonaral, the ancestral homeworld from which the great Kindreds of the Alka Alon and their kin emigrated in antiquity. Others are native to Callidore itself (the Tal Alon, the Hulka Alon, the Gora Alon), having arisen or been seeded on the Dry in ages past. What they share is a common ancestral stock, a deep connection to the Magosphere, and a philosophical cast that treats patience, ritual, and shared awareness as the foundations of civilization.

The Alon are not one people but many, and their relations with one another are as fraught as their relations with humanity. The Karshak and Dradrien dwarfs share blood but have long chafed under one another's rule; the Alka Alon once lorded it over the "lesser" Alon (the Tal, the Hulka, the gurvani) and the Enshadowed faction still dreams of restoring that hierarchy; the gurvani broke with their Alon cousins long enough ago that many deny the kinship at all. Yet every Alon people traces some strand of its heritage back to this shared root, and the long memory of the Alka Alon Council keeps those strands visible even when their bearers would prefer to forget.