Sidereal Aulfin

Aligned to the stars, distant galaxies, and the dark spaces between them, Sidereal Aulfin have a natural preference for the dark. Surface dwellers tend to be nocturnal or nomadic, following the winter solstice all year long. With the invention of the steam powered engine providing more reliable travel, some Sidereals have begun travelling from one pole to another, seeking the locales where the sun stays darkest longest each year. Subsurface dwellers hold their own hours, heedless of the cycles of the sun, acting according to subterranean rhythms.   Sidereals tend to be the strangest of an already strange race. They are travelers and observers and like both vast, dark spaces and deep caverns. In the open spaces they see the mysterious expanse of the cosmos; in twisting caverns, the pathway between stars and planets. They believe that the patterns in the heavens are repeated within the depths of the world and feel equal senses of kinship under the distant light of a million stars and deep in the lightless abysses of the earth.   Sidereals ignore the present shape of things in favor of perceiving them as how they will - or should, by personal determination - be. Consequently they are difficult to mislead or lie to, since such attempts are usually rooted in immediate circumstances which the Sidereal may have overlooked entirely while focusing on the future shape of events.  

Physical Characteristics

  Sidereals are darker skinned than other Aulfin, generally having deep shades of grey, blue, purple or even black. Being either nocturnal or subsurface dwellers, their eyes are larger and rounder than their sibling races, with highly responsive pupils for enhanced darkvision. Their bodies are naturally flexible, easily contorting into poses other races have to work long and hard to be capable of. Though they can live anywhere, some speculate this is so Sidereals can be more effective spelunkers, slipping through harrowingly narrow underground corridors that would be a constricting tomb to any others who foolishly attempted passage.   Because of their densely pigmented skin, as Sidereals age and develop age spots the natural bioluminescence of all Elanni is magnified enough to become visible. No other race exhibits this quality, and in the darkness ancient Sidereals begin to look very much like the star-scattered heavens they are made in the image of.