29 August 2026
The Spiritfolk are Unyha's sacred tribe — not a race and not a class, but a calling. They are medieval goth-punks: people who refused the grey pull of mundanity and were, in answer, summoned by Unyha herself. Every player in Unyha is a Spiritfolk.
Unyha calls the Spiritfolk directly. There is no rite, no warning, and no application — one moment a person exists in their ordinary life, and the next they are pulled into being: aware, mortal, and carrying the ache of a purpose they cannot yet name. The exact mechanism stays opaque even to those it happens to. It simply happens, and that mystery is part of what they are.
For most of recorded history the Spiritfolk were a persistent rarity, known the way comets are known — most people had seen one once, or never. The current age has broken that pattern. Unyha now calls in earnest, in numbers beyond anything in living memory, and the tribe is consolidating into a people with its own Houses, rivalries, and naming culture. The first of the called generation are historic, and know it. Every tavern is asking the same question: why now? No one can answer it.
During a season — the span in which a Spiritfolk is actively lived — they cannot be permanently killed. Cut down in battle, they are given back: the dark cannot keep them, and they wake at a Tree, whole. This is openly known, and it is what lets a season be spent so fiercely.
A Spiritfolk is not immortal, though. Beyond the season they die as anyone dies — in battle, to poison, to the slow arithmetic of age. What sets them apart is only the when: no Spiritfolk has ever fallen for good during a season, yet every Spiritfolk's story ends somewhere outside one. For those who reach the end of their years, Unyha gathers them home, and no Tree returns them.
This is why death still has teeth even where it cannot stick. What a blade takes in the field is never the life — it is the moment, the ground, and above all the unclaimed story. Among a people who hold that a story untold counts for nothing, being given back empty-handed is its own kind of grave.
Their aesthetic is goth-punk medieval: dark fabrics, ornamentation, defiance worn as armor. It is not costume but conviction made visible. They are not nihilists — they care deeply, which is exactly what makes them dangerous to mundanity. Above all they value:
Deeds over words — a story untold is a story that counts for nothing.
Legacy — what you leave behind, in heirlooms and House reputation, matters as much as what you do.
The strange and the beautiful — wonder is sacred; boredom is a kind of death.
Defiance — against forgetting, against smallness, against the ordinary.
A Spiritfolk knows another on sight, and beneath sight — a wordless sense of sameness, the same fire and the same refusal. The bond is given and involuntary, prior to any word spoken. But it comes braided with rivalry, because renown is the only lasting thing a Spiritfolk earns and there is only ever so much of it. They love their own kind and compete with them at once.
This is why Spiritfolk announce themselves. A name given is fame tended; a name unspoken is a name already dying. To withhold your name and House from another of your kind is almost unthinkable — so anonymity is always a signal that something is being guarded: shame, a fallen House, an untold deed, or a drift past caring at all.
Ordinary people recognize the Spiritfolk — they are a known phenomenon, not a myth. The reaction is almost always conflicted: a Spiritfolk is exciting, a crack in the routine that fills taverns and reminds settled folk the world is stranger than daily order admits; and a Spiritfolk is chaotic, a defiance that unsettles those who have built quiet lives. Most people feel both pulls at once, drawn and wary together.
Some ordinary folk lean all the way into the draw. Called tellers — often whole families, generations deep — they keep the Spiritfolk's stories, learn the narrations by heart, and retell them gloriously wrong from the good corner of the tavern. They are also how fame travels: a legend moves from Tree to tavern to road because tellers carry it, and a wise Spiritfolk is generous to the trade.
Unyha summons her Spiritfolk at three ancient points in the world. The Circle's founders built their greatest cities around those sites — not the other way around — and each city faces a different frontier of chaos:
Brimmar — coastal and northern; a port where trade and piracy tangle, tested by everything that washes in from the sea. The threat comes from outside.
Rikhan — central, the heart of the Circle's power; a vast walled city ringed by prosperous farmland, with an underworld thriving in the dungeons below. The threat is the rot within prosperity.
Darak — southern, a desert city on a lakeside ringed by cliffs; haunted by a graveyard and the ancient crypts beneath. The threat is the restless past that will not stay buried.
To be a Spiritfolk is to be called into a world that both wants and fears you, given back from death yet racing a finite light, bound to your own kind and set against them for the same renown. It is the starting truth of every player's story in Unyha — and the reason a deed done here is never small.