Race - the Kagamijin

According to their own traditions, the Kagamijin, or 'Mirror-People' were originally of elvish stock, uplifted by a cabal of Outer Dragons to serve them in the vastness of space beyond Kalsema. Their progenitors, as is written in the Kagamijin's books, were taught only some of the Metamorphosis rituals, permitted to take on a few of the Outer Dragon's characteristics while avoiding the full-fledged transformation that became their cousins doom. For generations, the Kagamijin served, protected from the hostility of the void by their modified biology, exploring and seeing wonders that the earthbound never could. This age of exploration would come to an ignoble end however, with the Kaze no Koohai, a great "Devestation of Shadow" which scoured and nearly wiped out everything. It was, the Kagamijin claim, they who guided arks of survivors into the void to hide from the devestation before returning to the Land of Long Light and regenerating the earth. Most scholarship descended from the Dragon Teachers and Students consider the story of the Kaze no Koohai as self-aggrandizing allegory for the war that ended the Dragon Age.

Physically, the Kagamijin are indeed an offshoot of elves with draconic traits, tall and slender with metallic scales on their hands and forearms, thickening into plates on their shins. Along with their silver or golden horns and long, plated tails, they polish these protective parts to a bright, preferably reflective sheen. Their bodies are quite tough, and they have an advantage quite unique amongst the population of Kalsema in that they do not need to breathe, and can in fact survive in a vaccuum. Admittedly it is an advantage that rarely comes into use, but it does make them well-suited for their homeland in the unreasonably high mountains.

The Kagamijin make their homeland in a range of, as mentioned, unreasonably tall mountains along the eastern side of Sanaadnida. Atop the sharp, near-conical peaks of these mountains are large, complex monastery in which the mirror-people make their home, and from afar, the monasteries glitter like diamonds. This is because they are filled, and often covered, by mirrors, constantly shifting to capture and redirect the light of the suns. Some of these mirrors are used to communicate with other monasteries, flitting light across tens of miles, others for defense, able to condense the light into pulsed beams of devestating heat and power. The few accounts of visitors to the monasteries however say that the majority of light they capture is sent deep into the mountains, the Kagamijin talking about filling the world's 'inner sea' with light.

Philosophically, the Kagmijin revere stars and suns, including the three that grace Kalsema, and discuss such heavenly bodies as 'perfect spheres of light', seeing them as the origin of life and the ultimate power of the universe. Light, they say, can heal and harm, communicate and empower, and as such should be rightly venerated as powerful. They are also, perhaps unsurprisingly one of the few groups in Kalsema to take a deep interest in what lies outside their world. Most people do not believe in the tales of stars and worlds outside Kalsema (although highly-educated groups know full well that there is a whole universe beyond their narrow slice). Elvish polities tend to view the Kagamijin as failures - partway through a transformation they were too cowardly to fulfil, and only reluctantly acknoledge that they have an elvish heritage as well.