Feueraugen

"Is not the diabolical glow of their eyes sufficient evidence of guilt? I see no need for a formal prosecution, and will move directly to the sentence, which shall be death by wire."
-Judge Konstantin Fenner, Award for Most City Improvement in a Decade (Rescinded), as quoted in the transcript of the Trial of the Mekhtheim Three


The exact origins of the ethnic minority group known as the Feueraugen are not entirely clear, with some claiming them to have been the result of unholy unions between humans and creatures from the Underworld, others the survivors of previous cities and empires living on the site of the city, and still others claiming that they immigrated to the city from elsewhere, possibly from across the sea or throught a portal in some unrecorded previous period of open portals. Facts are difficult to come by: their arrival appears to date back to well before the earliest surviving records. This fact has lead some to speculate that they may be related to the greatest unanswered historical question in Falkensburg1, the KalendarRatsel. Their own limited internal oral tradition does not provide any answeres as to their origins or to the question of what event was marked by 'year 1'2.

Culturally, the Feueraugen are as assimilated as any group easily identified by bright red, slightly glowing pupils can be expected to. During many periods in history, they have been the preferred scapegoat group of various movements or governments, such as in the Reign of Terror, which has led to a certain amount of justifiable distrust. Some of the wealthier Feueraugen families appear to be collecting substantial bribes from the other families of the upper class to refrain from presenting their young daughters at the Apafell Ball each year.

Their identifying feature appears to pass down in ways that defy the science of genetics: when two parents are Feueraugen, the children always are. In a mixed marriage, of which there are many, most children are Feueraugen. However, the few who are not do not carry any form of recessive gene for the trait: in no case has a Feueraugen child been born to two non-Feueraugen parents.

—Doktor Plasner


1: Or, for that matter, the entire former Empire.

2: Or, according to some extremely pedantic Scientists, "year zero"

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