Peoples of Aurelion
Aurelion does not classify peoples by ears, skin or ancestry first. It asks what Time does to the body, what Memory survives, whether Function can become choice, and whether a Soul remains when the rest of the formula fails.
A Taxonomy of Broken Cycles
The Forbidden Ethnographic Compendium offers the best rule for reading Aurelion's peoples: each is a comment on existence before it is a biological category. Elves, dwarves and humans are described as chapters in the world's argument; beastfolk, orcs, vampires and later peoples are marginal notes, distortions or transitions. The classification therefore begins with the Great Cycle - Time, Body, Memory, Function, Will and the possible remainder called Soul - and asks which links are present, substituted, fragmented or impossible.
"Living" means more than having a warm body. Personal Time must pass through a body and leave change behind. Humans are the clearest full case: Time becomes Memory, Function can be chosen rather than merely obeyed, and realized free Will can produce a Soul. Other living peoples complete less of that chain. Lizardfolk repeat ritual Time without much true alternative. Molefolk narrow Memory and choice to place. Beastfolk divide bodily and cultural Function. Goblins retain flowing Time but Golden corruption fractures Memory and compresses choice toward short-term gain. Mycosids live, grow and remember collectively rather than individually.
"Undead" is a different failure. The body may continue, but Time has been replaced by something else: a core, ritual, borrowed Memory, phylactery or golden mechanism. Orcs repeat war and machine-inertia in place of ordinary personal Time. Vampires refuse their own Time and preserve themselves through the Time and Memory of others. Ordinary dead are bodies animated by residual Function; liches preserve Memory and self-assigned Function at the cost of life. Ratfolk occupy one of the framework's deliberately uncomfortable borders, their Time still moving while Golden corruption has formatted Memory and Will into pack survival.
Half-living, dead races and transcendent entities make the taxonomy even less like a bestiary. Fairies exist in contractual Time; sirens are resonance with unstable embodiment; storm people are partly bound to environment; ancient elven spirits are place-bound Memory without a normal carrier. Elves and dwarves are called dead races not because corpses fill the landscape but because their civilization-level cycles ended in dissolution or fixation. Elementals, demons, Gatekeepers and Lords break multiple links so thoroughly that "race" becomes misleading. The point of the index is not to decide who deserves personhood. It is to show why that question is politically explosive in a world where Soul is neither guaranteed nor easily measured.
