The Ansari are a reclusive subrace of gnomes inhabiting the Pelican Isles. Distinguished by their blue-green skin and dark hair, they are a people of the tidal coves and the near reefs. They are famously wary of outsiders, often retreating into their hidden coastal coves when strange ships approach. However, once trust is earned, they display a warmth and hospitality that rivals the tropical sun of their homeland.
Culturally, they disdain heavy clothing, preferring to go shirtless or wear simple woven grass garments to feel the sea breeze against their skin. They are master navigators of the local archipelagos, reading the waves and wind with an innate sense that baffles mainland sailors.
The making
Every gnome carries the unclosed command, a working that spends its whole life reaching for an ending it cannot reach. The Ansari are what happens when the reaching is caged. Their founding line was cut off on a ring of tide-washed isles in the Pelican chain, water on every side, no deep stone to ground a working and no old inscription for the command to snag on and mistake for its close. It found only the sea, and the sea walled it in on every horizon. So the reaching turned back on itself and set against the inside of their own skin, where it has stayed in the line since. The blue-green of an Ansari is that command held against its own surface, brine-dark and going nowhere. A people whose magic never leaves the body keep close to the edge that shaped it. The Ansari hold to their coves and their home reefs, read the water like a second skin, and meet a strange sail the way folk do who learned young that the boundary is the safe place.
Aspects
- Wary of the horizon
- Island hospitality