The Echi began as a demonym and are a people of the gnome, not a separate lineage.
The Echi are the gnomes of Echea, the small magocracy on the tip of the Watar peninsula, and the word for them began as a demonym before it settled into the name of a people. There is no Echi homeland apart from the two Iri peaks and the universities carved into them, and there is no Echi who did not pass through one of those schools. To be Echi is less a matter of blood than of having been raised inside the only culture in Alaria that treats a university the way other peoples treat a temple or a clan.
Every Echi learns elemental magic, the practical crafting that turns it into magitech, and enough combat doctrine to make the result dangerous. The product is a population of trained elemental war-casters who almost never fight, because fighting is beneath the work and interrupts it. An Echi will sooner win an argument over a flawed citation than win a duel, and the academic feuds that run between the universities are conducted with a viciousness that outsiders mistake for the real thing until they see the rare occasion an Echi is actually pressed to violence. Echi scholars turn up across the world, hired for enchantment and artifice that few others can manage, and they carry the Echean manner with them, exacting, faintly superior, more interested in your problem than in you.
For all that, something is wrong on the Iri peaks, and the Echi will not name it because most of them do not believe there is anything to name. People in the capital have begun dying slowly, without sickness or wound or pattern that anyone has been willing to admit is a pattern. The deaths are attributed to overwork, to bad air off the sea, to age. They are not connected, the Echi say, and they say it a little too often. In the years to come the universities will thin as quietly as their dead, scholars leaving for posts abroad they cannot quite explain wanting. The Echi guard a secret that, for now, is being kept from the Echi themselves.
A junior lecturer writes to a colleague who has taken a post in Camaran: You ask why I am leaving. I am not leaving, I have simply accepted a temporary visiting chair, and you will note the third of our reading group to do so this year. I am sure it means nothing. The faculty is in agreement that it means nothing.
Aspects
- The university is the homeland
- A war-caster who would rather not