Shadow Elfese

The Shadow-Elfese are not the twisted wreckage of the Elf folk, as their detractors claim, but the truth that remains when gilded natures peel away. They are consequence made flesh, for good or ill. They are what happens when distance severs the tether to The Folklands, our world, when reverence for beauty, duty, and eternal castes magickally bound by their birth here dissolves into ash; They are born not of some foreign corruption, but of absence from our realm, Elfese at-first, the common Elfs as we know them today; But in leaving this world, severing their natural connection to its magicks to traverse The Hells or other realms beyound our own, they are broken, and reforged. Unbound. Gone is the radiant sheen of the Folklands, the suffocating perfection and rigid ceremony once natural to them. In its place, flesh of silver like the light of the moon, eyes as if perpetually mourning, antlers gnarled like branches that drank too deeply of moonlight. Their culture is inked in silence, not proclaimed in song. Where Elfese of the Folklands etch obedience and routine into the marble, the Shadow-Elfese etch refusal, individuality and uniqueness into every ritual.

They do not build monuments to last millennia, what they make, they unmake. What they speak, they do not repeat. Their truths are carried like poisons on the tongue, their prayers traded in secrets, their legacies whispered only once before vanishing. From this refusal they wrought revolutions. The greatest among them, the Way of the Magus, broke the false divide between mind and flesh. It birthed warriors whose halberds gleamed with runes, whose every strike was spell and blade entwined, a rejection of purity, a weaponized heresy. Though their numbers are sparse, scattered like stars obscured by storm clouds, their imprint lingers everywhere. Elfese courts spit their names with venom. Gaiatian battlefields are scarred by their unorthodox steel. To some they are traitors, deserters who abandoned grace for selfish pursuits. To others, they are liberators, proofs that the Folklands’ tight leash on their people's culture can be cut. But to themselves, they are a shadow that fell where it chose to fall, neither wicked, nor ruined, but unleashed from their inhibitions. Whatever that means for the rest of the world, depends on the shadow falling over you.