29 August 2026
Not everything in Unyha that means a Spiritfolk harm is dead. Between the settled towns and the wild places move whole peoples and powers with their own reasons and their own wars. Where the wiki's article on the dead covers what persists after an ending, this one covers the living — the foes you meet with breath still in them.
The orcs are a war society: not a people with a violent streak but a people built entirely around organized conflict. They keep a labor caste to sustain the war, a disciplined military of soldiers, scouts, wolf-riders, and officers to wage it, and a heavy shamanic tradition that builds power slowly and turns it into summoned, terrible things. They are known to break and enslave trolls to their purpose. At the far end of their tradition is something the orcs who know of it orient their whole lives around, spoken of only as the Dark Mother — what it truly is, no one outside their line can say. An orc presence in a region is not an event. It is a situation.
The Ratkin do not build; they inhabit. They fill the margins civilization leaves behind — the lower passages, the collapsed quarters, the forgotten infrastructure — until their presence feels less like invasion than consequence. They are not mindless: they hold tradition, hierarchy, and a shamanic practice unlike any other in the world, fast and frenetic, magic that comes in bursts rather than waves. Lightly armored and quick, they fight to avoid ever being hit squarely, because squarely is all it takes. At its darkest, their tradition turns toward pestilence. Where the rats gather, the Ratkin are rarely far behind.
The Dark Elves are never an army. They appear in ones and twos, and each is as dangerous as the last — no weak members, no soft edges. They keep no camps, no labor, no held territory. Where an orc presence means infrastructure, a Dark Elf presence means intent: they are somewhere because that somewhere matters to them. They carry little, but what they carry is chosen rather than gathered. The places they value are watched by silent guardians that do not fight the way anything else does. Where the Dark Elves come from, and what they are looking for, no one has established.
Bandits are ordinary humans — the same stock as the townsfolk of the cities, not the called Spiritfolk — who stepped outside the settled world and built something in the space they found. A bandit camp has its own labor and craft, its trained dogs, a fighting line that favors ambush over open ground, an arcane fringe of those who had nowhere else to take their talent, and at the top a Chief who holds it all together by force and ruthlessness. It is civilization, inverted. What drives a person to that life differs with every person; that they wake each morning and keep choosing it is the thing to remember.
Pirates are the shadow economy of the water, working the rivers and coasts where the Circle's reach runs thin. Like the bandits they are human, but scattered, mobile, and individually slight — their trade depends on not being found rather than on holding ground when they are. Almost everything they carry is in transit. The one member of any crew who actually explains what it is doing there is the smuggler; the rest are cover for whatever the smuggler is moving.
These are the living frontier a Spiritfolk is called into — organized, patient, and each dangerous in its own grammar. As with the dead, most of what is known about them is simply what has been survived and carried back, which means the truest map of Unyha's enemies is the one written in its stories.