Moroi
Contents
Fast Facts
Height: 5’4"-6' Males, 5’-5'8" Females
Weight: 120-180(lbs) Males, 100-150(lbs) Females
Lifespan: Adult (18 years), Elder (100 years), Deathly (120 years)
Notable Features: Horns, Glowing Golden Rings, Ivory-Gold Eyes, Red, Purple, Onyx, Peach or Pale Skin, Constellation Tattoos, Tails
Player Restrictions: None
Racial Ability: Travelers: The Moroi have an innate ability to navigate using stars and their constellations. They have an instinctive awareness of the direction of constellations relative to their own location, allowing them to always be able to determine their relative distance and direction. Because of this, they rarely become truly lost on long journeys.
Population: 6,000 on Atharen
History
The Moroi carry with them the longest history of any known race. While the Hyr'Norai were the first people on Atharen, extensively tracing their ancestry back nearly 5000 years ago, the peoples of the Outlands can cling to stories that span much further back. It is said that the Moroi initially evolved on the planet Kornos three hundred thousand years ago, diverging from a more primitive species of horned, gremlin-like people, hunched over and crude. The more poised and intelligent products of their evolution slowly began to spread and in time, came to rule Kornos as its leading race.
Kornos was a planet primarily consumed by jungle, with occasional plains lying in-between, beautiful coasts and tall mountains. The Moroi quickly settled into the valleys of their planet at first, whichever they could find around rivers and lakes, before eventually expanding to settle the mountains themselves. Learning to build terraces on high structures, and to travel between their high peaks through complex tunnel and bridge systems, they slowly mastered their world over time. It is said by the living scholars of their race that this expansion of knowledge is what drew the Adac to them, an interstellar species of immense arcane depth. Masters over reality, formers and shapers of the environment surrounding them, some of these Adac found the Moroi home and made contact with their race.
The Adac immediately left behind a tremendous mark. They introduced materials foreign to the planet of Kornos, and helped the Moroi build the greatest wonder of their world, the Keminalis. A massive telescope colored black and gold, the structure was capable of peering out even beyond their galaxy, staring through and beyond the dark unknown. As the Moroi learned of space, they began to understand how their own world worked. Theories blossomed, scientific concept becoming the core of their society. From the beginning, they had always loved viewing the vast beyond. It became a singular goal of their race to go as far enough as to be able to explore it. And that meant growth, and change.
While the Adac continued to help guide their progress, at some point they began to disappear, one after the next. Their great allies in the stars went away, and so they were left to navigate their uncertain future alone. Despite this, the Moroi did well. They advanced quickly, through era and hurdle after another. Some few thousand years after Atharen had been created, they were a truly advanced race. Kornos had been converted into an Ecumenopolis (or a planetwide city) known as Byzantium. They had learned to overcome the apocalyptic hurdles that held them apart from progress, and unified as one nation. An era of prosperity overcame them, and even in the darkness of their quiet galaxy, the Moroi looked outward with promise. They had already found worlds teeming with life, and they were near enough to building a vessel capable of reaching them.
It was then that they began to notice something, through the eyes of the Keminalis. The Megascope as they called it had always possessed the ability to view magic through a lens that had at once helped them to understand the ethereal nature of their universe, the Moroi conceptualizing Magithermal Entropy and other arcane laws by viewing reactions and arcane waste through that lens. This lens was also how they kept track of other races: their advancement, their locations. At one point in time, they believed themselves to have found the home of the Adac, a great beacon of light within empty space, always shining brightly along the scope's peripheral no matter where they looked. As they peered more and more across the Outlands, they found that more and more of these sources of energy had gone dark. Equivalently, for every lost signature of energy, one began to grow more and more. At the core of their universe burgeoned what began to appear as a force for total destruction: an adversary they began to recognize far too late.
The Outsider discovered their planet after cleaning up the waste of other advanced civilizations. Many believe that pointing at its energy signature through the Megascope was what led it to discover their people, as only weeks after their first extensive study did it appear on Kornos. The result was immediate, and devastating. A peaceful, disarmed people, they were helpless to its destruction. Their magical technology was devoured, their people slaughtered by the billions, their souls harvested into the maw of the great predator. Like a force of the end-times, it cleaved through their planet, their only hope the stars beyond. Through the scope they looked back towards that one remaining signature they could find: a planet still rife with people, a landmass both large and scattered, perhaps enough that the Outsider might fail to notice it. The final measures of their voyage were put into place, and ten thousand were hurried into a vessel set to explore beyond the boundaries of their galaxy.
Finally, the Moroi had left Kornos to explore the stars beyond - only their ancestral dream had only come at the end of their race. As the people aboard that vessel sailed through the empty skies, the population of Kornos was harvested to extinction, every last liter of arcana extracted from their grand machines, drunk like liquor by the insatiable monster they left behind.
The vessel, its name translating to 'The Promise', landed on Tarkus not long after. Propelled by advanced magic that allowed it to fold through space, it only took a few months before they arrived at their intended destination. Not long after landing, they were met with a delegation of odd, green-colored men and women who identified themselves as the Krishkir, the rulers of that world. Though curt and seemingly impolite, they declared their intentions for peaceful coexistence, and first contact appeared to go reasonably well. For a few months, the Moroi lived within their ship and in small camps they had set up outside of its boundaries. They were frequently met by a Krish scholar by the name of Kixan, who appeared deeply fascinated by their species, inquiring as to how they had managed to cross what his people called the 'Great Divide', the world they had come from, and whether or not they had emerged from some unknown corner of 'Atharen'. It was the first they had ever heard of the world, and so the two shared knowledge: of Kornos and Byzantium, of Atharen, of the Outsider that had destroyed their land.
Kixan informed them before long that his people were terrible brutes, and he needed aide in building a megaportal so that he could guide the Moroi to safety. Using what resources they had left within their vessel, they helped to build and construct an Interplanar Portal through Kixan's Resonance, one they came to power in the coming days. As the man predicted, however, his people attacked before long. They intended to eradicate the Moroi, and destroy their vessel so it did not lure the Outsider to their home. Nearly half of all of the Moroi present were killed, and the Promise was left a smoldering ruin, though with Kixan keeping true to his word. The Interplanar Portal opened, and thousands of the Moroi flooded through; the very last in their galaxy, flooding into Atharen as they were hunted and lashed by barbed flails from behind.
The portal closed as the last few emerged on the other side. What lay before them was a great valley, as they peered down from the mountains above. Overlooking Daravin and Radenor from the mountain range along Vendigad's eastern edge, they viewed the world they had found with relief and surprise. Finally, in the year 4598, they had made it beyond the breadth of the stars to a new home: their first and perhaps final voyage. Atharen was theirs to explore, as they built whatever structures they could along the hills that peered towards Mornoth from above.
Physiology/Biology
A humanoid species, the Moroi are roughly equivalent to humans in height (if not slightly shorter), with comparable muscular composition, including the shape and structure of their hands, feet, their skulls and brains. This is despite the fact that they physically evolved within the Outlands, where humans were created intentionally on Atharen. Scientists on Kornos who once studied Moroi evolution noted that, long ago, there was a sudden deviation in the structure of their species... roughly coinciding with the introduction of the Adac to their kind. This likely means that the Adac intentionally altered their evolution, making them evolve to more closely resemble them.
Moroi have two horns along either side of their heads, which normally grow alongside the diameter of their skull, but frequently may grow in front of them, lower along their ears and towards their neck, or in a variety of different shapes. Their horns tend to resemble the color of their skin, which is most commonly red, purplish-gold or peach, but can also present as onyx, pearlescent or a combination of any of these colors, sometimes shaded in surprising, chromatic hues when shone upon by light. They virtually always have ivory-gold, bright eyes, though there are rare exceptions, with some Moroi having red, black or deep blue eyes.
Moroi tend to have golden rings along their horns and sometimes other parts of their body that glow faintly under sun and moonlight, appearing to draw in the energy of that light to illuminate. Aside from this, they do carry one evolutionary remnant of their origin species: medium-length tails, which are skin-like in texture but with a small tuft of hair at the end. These largely remain within their species to help them balance while navigating mountains and hills.
Technology
Moroi were, among all the species on Atharen, the most advanced to have ever been known. They converted their entire planet to an Ecumenopolis, learned to harness enough of their sun's energy to power their world, had technology that allowed them to peer out towards and eventually travel through the vast reaches of space. Despite this, with the near-extinction of their species, they have lost all or the vast majority of this technology. What remains of their old world are but a few things, largely trinkets: their clothes which appear to be made of advanced technology, their books on the universal cosmology, documenting solar systems, constellations, galaxies and spatial structures, and a few lockets that are said to interface with the old ruins of their homeworld, which most Moroi contemporarily call 'Vaults'.
These Vaults were the storage facilities for many of their old technologies and secrets, with the Promise itself constructed and launched from a Vault. With Kornos left barren by the Outsider, however, these lockets remain a trinket of history. Tragically, the Moroi have found that virtually all of their old technical knowledge only applied to the resources of their old planet, with their understanding of biology and other sciences completely incompatible with Atharen, which operates with entirely different laws.
Psychology and Culture
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Clothing, Grooming and Art
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Religion and Worship
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Reproduction, Aging, and Death
The Moroi are largely similar to the majority of the other races on Atharen in that they reproduce between one male and one female of their species. x
Language
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