Yvitkhain
The Yvitkhain call themselves Ïvt, which in their own tongue means simply “us.” Their language holds no first-person “I”: an Ïvt speaks always of itself in the plural, as one of the many, and never as one alone. They are a rat-like people endemic to Raetun.
“Yvitkhain” is not their word but the Nortr’s. It is Norkhelsk: yvit, “to hunch”, joined to khain, “speaking beast”, the hunched beasts, reckoned among the khain the Nortr dismiss as animals that merely talk. The contempt is the Nortr’s; the naming records the prejudice of those who gave it, not the truth of those who bear it.
The Ïvt are not merely resistant to the radiance of the deep places; they are nourished by it, and thrive where other peoples sicken and die. This gift binds them to the Jubdaiā, who bear no such resistance: together the two peoples mine and refine the radioactive belly of Nurrheim, the Ïvt working the poisoned seams the Jubdaiā cannot, and the symbiosis sustaining them both.