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"Humans and Highfolk — scratch the feathers and the pride, and you find the same creature underneath. Frightened, hungry, in love, afraid to die. The Deepfolk are something else. Every answer you find is a door into a darker room."
— Thalis of Aeloria, Notes Toward a Comparative Ethnography of the Three Races
The world of Soul and Wing is shared between three sapient races, each inhabiting a different layer of existence — and each convinced, in its own way, that its layer is the one that matters.
The Highfolk live above the clouds in floating cities that drift at altitude above the surface world. They are tall, pale, and winged — built for flight, possessing a form of magic that runs through emotion and will, and deeply convinced of their own superiority.
They call humans Midfolk — surface-dwellers, wingless, essentially beneath serious consideration. They call Deepfolk Grubmen — a term the Deepfolk return with their own word: khrosh, which translates approximately as sky-demon, and is delivered with comparable warmth.
The defining fact of Highfolk society is wings. Not just as biology, but as theology: more wings means more magic, more divine favour, more worth as a person. Four-winged Celestials form the ruling caste. Two-winged Highfolk do the work of the world. No wings — like a human — means you are not quite a person to the most traditional among them.
Not every Highfolk city is the same. Some are rigidly hierarchical, obsessed with bloodline purity. Others are more pragmatic, trading with the surface world and allowing humans more latitude. The differences between cities are political, sometimes violent, and always deeply felt.
Where to read more: Highfolk · Heart Magic · Aeloria · Tross · Zelos
The Deepfolk live in a vast network of caverns, tunnels, and constructed cities beneath the surface — a subterranean world largely invisible to the other races and very deliberately kept that way.
They are stocky, dense, and powerful — not short, whatever the stories say. Young, they look almost human: darker skin with a faint mineral tint, eyes that sometimes carry a low luminescence. Older, they become something else. The silicon in their biology increases steadily through life, making bones partially crystalline, hardening the skin to stone-grey, until an elder Deepfolk in their third century is visibly as much geology as creature. They call this process the Crumbling. They speak of it with stoic acceptance: the earth reclaiming what was always part of it.
They live approximately 250 years. In extraordinary circumstances, a sacred object called a Bloodstone can extend this by a century — stabilising the mineral tissues, deferring the end.
They are the most technically advanced of the three races. Where humans use scholarly incantations and Highfolk use magic drawn from emotion, the Deepfolk build — but what they build is not merely mechanical. Their contraptions are charged with magic, woven through with crystals, focus pyramids, and arcane components that blur the line between engineering and sorcery. The craft is called Hand Magic: power expressed not through words or feeling but through making, through the precise construction of objects that hold and channel magical energy. Many of the crystals and magical components their devices require they must source from outside — often purchased from Highfolk traders, which produces a relationship of mutual dependence neither race particularly enjoys acknowledging. Their constructions last millennia.
They rarely leave the underground. When they appear on the surface — in trade delegations, in diplomatic contexts — something important is usually at stake.
Where to read more: Deepfolk · The Bloodstones · [The Gashdagan] (page not yet created)
Midfolk is the Highfolk word for humans, delivered with the tone of someone describing a creature that is adequate for its environment. Humans prefer their own terms: people, mostly.
They live on the surface of the world — coastal cities, inland towns, mountain communities, desert tribes — governing themselves through kingdoms, empires, and the nine independent Wild Baronies at the western edge. The largest political entity is the Midland Empire, which sits in the geographic centre between the sky realm above and the underground world below, trading with both, diplomatically essential to both, and quietly contemptuous of being wedged between two races who do not consider it their equal.
Humans live the shortest of the three races. Sixty to eighty years, without magical intervention. They make up for this with numbers, adaptability, and an institutional memory preserved in writing rather than in individual lifespans. They have been here longer than any single Highfolk or Deepfolk can personally remember.
Their magic — Mind Magic, as developed by the Mage Conclave — is systematic, complex, and powerful: long incantations in dead languages, precise gestures, centuries of accumulated theory. It is powerful by any measure except comparison to what a fully trained Highfolk heart mage can do, which Conclave scholars prefer not to discuss.
A small number of humans possess something else entirely — Heart Magic, the emotional, instinctive magic that belongs, by all conventional understanding, only to the Highfolk. In all of recorded history, only one human is known to possess it. This is poorly understood and politically inconvenient for several different institutions simultaneously.
Where to read more: The Midland Empire · The Mage Conclave · Mind Magic · Non-Conclave Magic
| Highfolk see... | Deepfolk see... | Humans see... | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Highfolk | The chosen race; the sky is theirs by divine right | Khrosh — arrogant sky-demons; beautiful and impossible to deal with | Powerful, beautiful, insufferable; lords of a world humans have to navigate around |
| Deepfolk | Grubmen — earth-crawlers; admirable engineers, no wings | Gharzhen — Stone-Kin; the only truly reliable race | Mysterious, ancient, richer than anyone admits; seldom seen, always felt |
| Humans | Midfolk — short-lived, wingless, surprisingly useful | Adequate surface-dwellers; good at trade; acceptable as business partners | Ourselves |
The world is not three separate spheres. It is one world shared by three peoples who need each other economically and resent each other politically. Humans provide food, raw materials, and geographic access. Highfolk provide magical expertise, sky routes, and wind management. Deepfolk provide metals, precision engineering, and the rarest materials in existence.
Take any one away and the others suffer for it. Every diplomatic crisis in the series begins from this fact.
The soul of the Soul and Wing series lives in this intersection. Its heroine is a human with Highfolk magic. Its hero is a Highfolk prince who must reconsider what wings actually mean. The world that surrounds them was built by all three races together, however little any of them would like to admit it.
For deeper reading on each race, follow the links above. For the magic systems that distinguish them, see Heart Magic, Mind Magic, and the Deepfolk entries on craft-technology.
This article is about a Lore Overview — The World's Peoples
| World Overview | World Index |
| The Peoples | Highfolk · Deepfolk · Human / Empire |
| Cosmology | Trion |