~Elaura Aelukema~ - The Stormshield Elves

On Castrovel, the Elves’ height of influence on the continent of Asana ended long ago. With their return to Kyonin on Golarion, a corresponding retreat occurred, where Elves left Asana and consolidated their communities on Sovyrian. Aiudara/Elfgate-colonies such as Ofu-Laubu, Jabask, and Candares were abandoned and left to their Lashunta successors. Only Qabarat retains a significant Elven community, and even there they are a minority. Yet further north from that city, in one of the strangest and most alien environments upon this world, other Elves still exist, isolated from the rest of the continent, and singing their own strange songs.   In a world rain-drenched and where the Sun’s sight is already a too rare occurrence, the Stormshield Shore on Asana’s west coast set new marks for rainy gloominess. The Lashunta name it the Land of a Hundred Thousand Waterfalls, because with the constant storms blowing off the Western Sea, it does not undergo flash-floods, but rather an everflood. One can walk across a mountain’s slope and never have one’s feet leave the water. Under such waterlogged conditions, even the hardy, shade-tolerant megadendra trees of Castrovel yield place to different flora: giant, frondy, mushrooms that tower ten feet or more high, along with algae-moss covering the ground. Within this gloom, a different kind of Elf has evolved a society based on the sea and fishing, and with an enigmatic bond to this land.   The Elves had founded Qabarat during the age of the Warrior-Queens after the Azlanti mysteriously abandoned the site. The found the Yaro River’s delta, protected by the Stormshields, rich in hunting waterfowl, thurse-toads, and Qoelu, and in harvesting wild catcorn and riceberries from the marshes. Yet the native Lashunta, both the half-wild marsh-clans and the ancient cities of Hesenya and Reiefya, resisted this incursion. When Lashunta also settled in Qabarat, making it a joint-city at the start of the Age of the Thief-Queens, some Elves sought new homes free of these growing population pressures. So they eschewed the Stormshields’ protections and migrated northward along the seashore.   What Lashunta, and even other Elves, know of the Stormshield Elves is based more on rumor than fact. They draw their lives from the sea, on boats made of wood and hide, and also from snaring the great yearly eel-spawn runs when they mate and lay eggs within the mountain streams. Seafare affords their most common traffic with their kin in Qabarat, along with more circumstantial trade with the Lashunta of the Northern Shattersea Islands, and also with the Selkies, a tenouous relationship they have cultivated where all others have failed, but which has yielded wealth in pearls, coral, and other sea-gems greatly in demand within Qabarat. Occasional tales have come southward of Elven cities grown from this alien shore’s mushroom forests, even as Elves build their other cities in the treetops, or hewn from the mountains’ sides, though no civilized Lashunta has laid eyes on them, and if other Elves have, they do not tell.   As the Elves grew along the seashore, naturally they made inroads eastward, into the Mountains, where they stumbled upon the Lashunta Highland Clans who have dwelled within the Stormshields since even before the Warrior-Queens exterminated the Moqeva. Although the cities of the Yaro Valley have long esteemed ~Homaelauri~ - love of Elven lore and culture, not so their rougher Highland kin. Even if in some areas the two species have coexisted peacefully, tales have come down the mountains’ eastern side of long feuds and sharp wars, clashes within the upland jungles and passes, and even forays to the mushroom-haunted other side, where the Elves’ reputation as shadowy, stealthy killers wielding uncanny bows and dreadful ~Ahyelauri~ - Elven Magic, may not differ to greatly from accounts on Golarion or other Elf-colonized worlds of hostilities with wild Elf-clans.   Some tales of also come down of wars fought in the mountains, but not against Lashunta. A folklore has arisen of Elves warring against an unknown foe, not on the surface, but in caves and eldritch burrows under the Stormshields’ sides. What this unknown enemy may be falls prey to wild speculation, descriptions of many-headed, ophidian fiends that more critical, less credulous scholars from the lowland cities hardly accept.