The Alba

Race: Aetheriel -Blooded Men(Human + Angelic Heritage, FC2P pg.13, 100)

The Alba are a race founded by the blending of human and Aetheriel blood (the Aetheriels being of the realm of Air).

After conquering what was to become the Aenean peninsula from the Saurians, the largely male host of warriors took mortal wives and settled the land for their own. There they founded their capital city of Alba Longa from the ruins of a Saurian fortress and forged a culture as mannered and sophisticated as that of the elves.

During those days the peninsula on which they made their home served as a bridge of sorts between Moiragoth to the south and Errolan, Land of the Giants (modern Ossitan) to the north.

Although Lord Toluk of Moiragoth did not share the disdain for their people that he did the immortal elves, they still stood in the way of his ambitions and suffered greatly in the resulting wars between the 'fair races' of Man, Elf, Dwarf and Pech and the Orcs and Urasi of Toluk's legions.

But in the end they endured, and the great city of Alba Longa stood as a beacon of western culture on the Vistrian coast.

But it was not to last. From beyond the middle sea came Princess Anaya Disilla (herself descended from the goddess Eossia), and her children founded the great city of Sallust - first as a series of seven crude hillforts, but ever growing in size and strength due to the resilience of the blood of men leavened with that of the gods.

At first Sallust was allied with the Alba- indeed, Anaya took the Alban Prince Lavinius as her husband. But to counter the strength of the Scoloputeans the realm would have to become united, and after a series of conflicts the great city of Alba Longa was destroyed, and the once-mighty Alba became the slaves or vassals of the rising Sallustrian state.

Although the nation of the Alba is now but a memory their bloodline survived, albeit weakened by centuries of mixing with purely or mostly pure human lines. Some few still have the blessing of the forefathers in the form of an unearthly charm and above-human resistances, and fewer still manifest the feathered wings that marked their ancestors. Wherever the line survives, this ancient race manifests the bygone glories of the Age of Legends, when the division between mortals and the gods was not so sharp as at present.

The Alba lend their name to the range of mountains that separate Aenea from Ossitan - the Alba Altus.