They were the Wair, and, by the present age, they had been hunted to the brink of extinction.
It was not that they were really so different from those who hunted them; in truth, if an unmarked member of each race, Wair and human, were seen side by side in a street in broad daylight it would have been impossible to say which was which. By night it was much the same, save for on that one night of each and every month, the night of the new moon, when the Wair showed their difference. Every Wair alive- and, it was sometimes rumored, the corpses and skeletons of those Wair long dead- became, for that night, an animal. The timid and flighty were rabbits and mice; the fierce hunters, wolves and bears; and all other animals depending on the personality of the Wair. Once the night was finished they resumed their human forms and again no one could tell what they were.
At one point, they held the continent to themselves. There were no humans living there; neither group even knew of the other’s existance. And then, in times long lost from a place unknown and for a reason uncertain the humans came. They sailed across their oceans wide and landed on the shores belonging to the Wair. For a short while there was peace between the two. Then argument rose between them over some forgotten matter, and open war broke out. They were well-matched foes: the Wair had the numbers to drown the human invaders and were no poor fighters; but the humans had bows, made from some foreign tree that grew in their lands alone, that were far more powerful than those of the Wair- and they had the magic of the Wair on their side. While the new moon gave some Wair the shapes and power of formidable beasts, many others assumed the bodies of weak and helpless creatures that could no more battle the humans as an ant could battle a lion. The humans were aware of this and used it to their advantage and the bane of the Wair. They launched their attacks on the new moon’s nights, viciously murdering the then largely-defenseless Wair. And so, the war turned in their favor and soon finished with the humans victorious.
The Wair, defeated, fled into hiding with the humans in hot pursuit. Without mercy, the humans hunted the Wair down, eradicating their villages in the mountains when they could find them and dragging off the Wair who survived to the new human-built cities. There, according to two lists which had been drawn up of which sorts of Wair were dangerous and which not, some- most- Wair were put to the sword and some- the lesser part- were spared. But only in a manner. The Wair who lived were forced to become ‘registered’- that is to say, a painful process that brutally marked the unfortunate Wair for life then pushed him out into a world that scorned, shunned, and often killed him.
And such events have continued until this day, with hunters seeking out the Wair in their secluded and isolated villaged then attacking them when the moon is new. Few Wair are actually left, but this is not enough for many humans of ten thousand years later. They wish the Wair gone from the earth.
The continent has changed masters.