DemogonyThe Serpent Nation rules the world with a howl and serrated claw, the open violence at the heart of organized society. They know know family but their city nor mother nor father but the Tisroc - even the wayward children. They worship with blood and fire, which are the same to them - blood is the fuel of the warrior, fire the revealed essence of buildings as they bleed; blood where a body stores heat in lean times, fire the secret essence coursing through the ceque lines - each registers the same scent on their senstive tongues. Honor demands that all offense recieve blood, and so when two Serpent Nationals make peace, they kindle together a fire. Kin to
behemoths, they are covered in beautiful golden and green scales; red, blue, and white feathers. More sensitive to the changes in temperature than other races by far, each has a many-colored coat woven by herself for the cold night, sewn with runes of warmth and records of its deeds, and a sacred torch too; otherwise they go unplumed save by their scales and feathers. Tatoos and glyphs cannot mark their skins, but with meditation, prayer, and combat, a Serpent's scales themselves develop miraculous properties.
Members of the Serpent Nation are found at the bottom of gullies and mudflats, in eggs painted white with spotted blue - microcosms of the world-egg, whose spots are stars which reveal the Serpent's life and glorious death. Regional metropoles gather these eggs together and immerse them in burning blood, singing coaxing songs and stiffening songs alike. To think above the level of the common behemoth, the young National must consume one human heart, to think above the level of a clever animal, another, to finally initiate into the ranks of cultured beings, a third. This might contradict the reptilian boast to be the most ancient race, but they claim the amniotic sac of the world-egg contained enough blood for the first generations - until it soaked into the soil, enabling the creation of humanity. Metropolitan kings and Evil warrior-poets are oft enamored by the idea that with enough meditation, fasting, self-analysis, and cardiophagy, they can achieve a fourth state, more exalted yet, with, in the words of one poet, "breath to sunder cities and wings that bear as the pterodactyl's," a line most frequently interpreted to mean emotional self-control and masterly intellect. Some say the World-Shaker, unseen by most of the elites for years, has already attained this state; but then, some whisper that he has disappeared or died.
The Serpent Nation is found everywhere and raised in the cities, but the distribution of eggs is centrally controlled, as it would destabilize the empire if one city had so many Serpents as to revolt and conquer another. It is for this same reason that the clutches, eternally loyal to each other, are often switched between cities, by exchange programs - a Serpent calls city "family," but he means the noble population, not the encampment. They are raised as janissaries for the state, simultaneously the cities' slaves and owners, rising by merit and honor to more administrative positions, which they often despise and leave to the human intellectuals. "There is a people who leave knots in rope, but we are a people who leave notches in obsidian." Though the human technocrats have spun the cities into quite diverse forms, the relocation of clutches makes some things constant. The Serpent Nation prefers to keep to more sacred duties: expand the empire, prove the self in combat, compose philosophical ballads, guard the train of the huaca, which govern the course of the ceque lines and thus the health of the expanding world.
But the ranks added to the Serpent Nation decrease every day; fewer and fewer eggs are found. At some point the final clutch will hatch - will it be before or after the empire falls? (Standard rules for Dragonborn apply, except that History has been renamed Politics, to emphasize that most obscure and relevant trivia about the mortal world concerns the present rather than the past.)
The Clay People are a simpler people; barely even part of the empire, they understand the principle of cooperation, but little of sociality or politics proper. A single worker makes another from the clay; specialized, perhaps, to a particular function; notches a thousand miniscule runes of life in him, carries him to Xactotlabla, Mother of the Forgers of the Earth, or Cpuxati-nonueon, Life-Granting Kiln of Nonueon, or one of the nine other volcanos at the edge of the formed world, and there whispers a long poem in his newly-shaped ear: his tasks in this life and the life he has remembered. O yes: the dwarves can lie, and they lie their pasts to each other. There are Clay people who remember every moment of their lives, stretching back thousands upon thousands of years - could anything be more absurd? Since their stories all contradict each other and because the basics if not the details of their creation are well known among civilized folk, they are not taken seriously by anyone else. But most go on naively believing their own pasts, naively completing their assigned tasks - there remains a subgroup more self-aware than the masses of their kin, and these are the most likely to take up residence in true civilization, rather than laboring in vast teams forming mountains and valleys amid the lightning seas and burning skies. These dwarves who transcend the status of mere homunculi either doubt all their past - even up to the last moment, because it can take a while for the glammer to kick in - or contexualize it. A popular theoryis that the poem is a summoning ritual from another world (as if one could exist), one where the past is true; one's memory, then, is the clue to selfhood, the key to making the outside world in the mirror of the inside.
But these more philosophical, self-aware dwarves tend to consider themselves defective, too, and if so, they are at least a little kin to humanity, the People of the Soil, the Loam Nation. It is said that a lazy dwarf once decided to reproduce itself with material gathered from the fertile topsoil rather than the malleable clay beneath it, which explains both why humans are so lazy - needing to sleep for six or seven hours a day, and much longer if they're given the chance! - and why they make more of them in the way that they do. Sex tends to be regarded as what makes humanity humanity, explaining why the Serpent Nation often views the Dialectical School of philosophy as inauspicious - it is, some suspect, an idea of human nationalism put in purely formal terms. Humans are thus also the only people to have
sexes and thus gender and gender roles: among the tribes that constituted and constitute pre-imperial humanity, women are generally regarded as superior, men being reproductively deficient; within the empire, the expansionist state is often seen as necessitating a different regime of gender relations, in which the status of men is higher - but in both realms, diversity prevails. (The male and female pronouns only describe members of the other races for lack of a better option - the languages of their world do not have this problem - and can be freely alternated.) Most humans sweat out short lives from their namesake, the soil, malnourished, feeding the metropoles. Luckier ones live as craftspeople or other free folk in the cities; but the best of all are usually slaves of the metropolis again: officials, intellectuals, people who debate and compose and manage. It is this group who view themselves as the true representatives of Law, with the Serpent Nation, their nominal masters, as its teeth and flail: though they are slaves, they live in comfort, and more are commanded by them than command them. A good deal of humanity still lives in in those tribes: but they have been flattened and enslaved for a century or more.
And they must war not only with their kin the Lawful but their kin the Chaotic: the elves, who are born human, who are hunter-gatherers like many humans, but have thrown away their humanity: both their sexedness and their awareness of the suffering of others. These monsters kidnap human children and castrate them, drug them, teach them only the joy of hunt and murder and song. All human tribes use hallucinogenics to peer into the future and into the self, but elves - who care not about the future nor insight - seem to incorporate them into their daily diet. Tracks of jungle ruled by the elves are madlands, plants growing more vivaciously than anywhere else, ceque lines discombobulated and severed, magic strange. Elvish erraticism means that an elf separated from the tribe might fancy most anything, offer its services to a group on any quest. Only one limit remains to their madness - they cannot break a promise. They are not even capable of it. But they love wordplay, often making the promises just to escape them in a particularly clever manner. Watch out. Humans are at a disadvantage fighting them, for they know the beautiful androgynes to be their own stolen children, mourning with each one cut down, but it is too often neccessary. Often one will be caught before the drugs are too fully incorporated into its sense of self - quixotically raised as humans again, these creatures are called half-elf. Though rarely acquainted with philosophy, and no party to sexuality, they would understand the logic of the Dialectical School better than any.
I don't know what to do with the other races, but I'm tempted to just make halflings a human ethnic group and combine elves and eladrin. I don't know. Suggestions appreciated.