The Lacirean are a people of the gnome, not a separate lineage — a refugee community that made silence into culture, their quietness a practice inherited from necessity rather than from birth.
The Lacireans are the gnomes of Lacire, the one settlement of any size in the Walking Forest of Ierya, and they are the only people in Alaria who raise their children to make no sound. Their ancestors were refugees from the Postronamas Empire, the band that fled east when the deep crystals broke the minds of the empire's leaders and the madness ran pillar to pillar until everything collapsed. Where their cousins climbed the Chakatann and became the Seyiki, the Lacireans ran away from every humming stone until they reached the Springs of Vyowehr and the patience of the Grayls. The full account of that bargain, the Compact, belongs to the city's entry. What it left behind is a people.
A Lacirean is born into silence and learns Stillspeech, the city's sign-tongue, before learning to walk. To call it sign language undersells it. Stillspeech carries argument and poetry and gossip and obscenity at conversational speed, and a Lacirean raised in it reads a face and a pair of hands the way other peoples read a voice, catching sarcasm in the tilt of a wrist and a lie in a held breath. They walk softly without thinking about it. They set objects down rather than drop them. The quiet is not a discipline they maintain so much as the shape they grew into, and a household of them at full argument is a storm of moving hands and absolute silence.
This marks them anywhere. A Lacirean abroad will flinch at a slammed door and answer a shouted question with their hands before catching themselves and reaching for words they find clumsy and loud in the mouth. Many never leave at all, and those who do tend to keep to trades where silence is no handicap and is sometimes an asset, guiding, watching, keeping accounts that no one overhears. Other gnomes find them unnerving and restful in turn. The Lacireans are not ashamed of the strangeness. They came to the springs a broken people looking for somewhere the noise would stop, and they found it, and they have kept it for as long as anyone has counted.
Two Lacirean traders in a loud foreign market, settling a price between themselves across the stall. The vendor sees only two small people staring at each other, hands flickering, faces working, not a sound between them. He charges them double for the trouble of being looked through.
Aspects
- Fluent in silence
- Heirs of a broken empire