Humans

From the books

Under elven rule

In The Outcast Knight, most of Luna's humans live in the slums. The trade district is as close as a slum-born human or dwarf ever comes to the residential spires, and the old decrees keep them out of the streets above. Human eyes lack the shimmering glow of Luna's elves, so a human in the citadel is marked as an outsider on sight. Prince Alerion speaks of humans as short-lived, frantic and chaotic, "grub-born" creatures of the gutter who drag Luna downward.

Old Speak, once the battlefield creed of the first human knights and the tongue of early resistance scriptures, has been branded heretical since the rise of the Luminarite creed. Nobles once had its speakers flogged in the streets, and speaking it aloud in public is still treated as treason in some quarters. High Elvish was designed in part to distance the new creed from the "barbaric" human past.

Seraphina Thorn, a human knight once in gold plate, fights through the King's Tournament as a ghost of an old scandal, and as she wins, the crowd begins to call her "the human who bested the elves".

A human queen

King Aurelion takes Haelara Halmund, a seventeen-year-old from the slums, as his queen, and the child she carries is named heir. The match provokes elven protests at the citadel road under the cry "No human queen!", while Prince Alerion has every half-blood in the citadel executed. When Astarion takes up rule with Haelara beside him, he vows justice and mercy for every soul in Luna, elf or human, noble or slum-born, and Haelara opens the Festival to all: human, elven, poor and dispossessed. Human labourers from the outer villages come to the city in their best patched tunics.

Word of the match travels far: Brother Kael describes Luna's king taking a human woman from the slums and placing a crown beside her bed. Near Luminglade, the outer roads cross human holdings, and human prisoners stumble out of the Lower Sanctum alongside the Fae when its captives are freed.

Beyond Luna

In The Highlander, a human servant girl from Luna's lower districts asks Eira Ironvale, in awe, whether the north lets women fight.

Seen from Crowbrook, Luna organises divine power around Light, purity and hierarchy, and calls mixed blood impure. As the changed Light spreads, refugees flee Luna along the roads, some of them humans with festival ribbons burned into their wrists.