Elfaivar (el-FIE-vahr)

Before the Great Malice, the kings of Elfaivar held power to rival all the other nations of Lanyir. Commanding legions of slave armies from the far east and fielding battalions of fey mages and monsters, the long-lived eladrin monarchs were able to ensure the security and prosperity of the mightiest nation in the world.   Today, only ruins survive.   The Great Malice slew every eladrin woman in the empire and beyond, with only the rarest and most unlikely survivors: women currently polymorphed, on other planes, or who had forsaken the Elfaivaran faith entirely. Within weeks the once-glorious empire, which had been poised to crush the impudent Clergy who had twice launched a holy war against it, descended into chaos. Within decades the population had collapsed to the tiniest sliver of its original number.   A stirring eulogy of the poet Vekesh convinced a few eladrin to seek harmony, to endure, and to prosper — and above all else, to find and free eladrin women from bondage so the race could heal. But for millions of grief-stricken eladrin men, the aftermath of the Great Malice was a time of constant battle.   Those few women who had survived were quickly claimed as property, and anyone who could keep ownership of a wife against a hundred thousand other suitors could command enclaves of desperate followers. Whole cities of despairing men would fight to the death for the chance of winning their lord another wife. Mages laid curses upon swaths of cropland, but some enclaves chose to starve rather than hand over their “queen.” Slavers brought ships of human and elf women magically transmuted to pass as eladrin and then sold into servitude, only to be slain when the truth was discovered.   Many eladrin men fled to other lands, seeking wives of other races, but they could sire no children. As attrition whittled down survivors, and too few children were born to keep society alive, ever more wealth and magical relics pooled in the hands of fewer and fewer men. When foreigners from Crisillyir or the distant east tried to claim Elfaivaran land they were driven back by fearsome eladrin warriors. Trained by constant battles for survival, and possessed of the finest arms and armor of entire cities, each man was match for a hundred normal soldiers.   Eladrin are long-lived, but old age eventually claims even them. Some made pacts with the powers of the Dreaming or other planes, but after two centuries, Elfaivar was practically a ghost nation. It took nearly a century more for Crisillyir and other nations to defeat the few vengeful hold-outs and begin to colonize the empty landscape.   Jungle had reclaimed cities. Mighty magical effects had lost their cohesion, spilling strange enchantments into the land. In some places the material world had blended and merged with the Dreaming. It was in these confusing borderlands that a handful of Vekesh-inspired enclaves survived.  

Modern Enclaves.

Early on, the freed women of Vekesh enclaves gained great power, both politically and magically, for they came to embody the hopes of thousands of survivors. New daughters were fiercely guarded and intensely trained so they could defend themselves and someday lead their own enclaves. Despite this, sometimes foreign mercenaries would manage to abduct an eladrin woman, for they became prized status symbols in the rest of Lanyir.   These abductions led to the first Vekeshi retributions, as mystics undertook daring missions to rescue lost women or at least punish those who would steal them. In general, though, the enclaves stay hidden. They’ll deploy spies to keep eyes on human activity in nearby lands, and will make bargains with fey to scare off those who get too close, but they realize that they cannot risk antagonizing the human nations.   A rare few eladrin seek to integrate with human society. They wear as much gold as they can, which prevents them from using their fey step, in an effort to cut themselves off from their fey heritage. By contrast, some Vekeshi mystics also adorn themselves in gold, but only as rituals of self-flagellation, to meditate on their distance from their people’s history so they can ponder how best to reclaim their birthright.  

The Fallen Goddess.

Srasama was just one of dozens of prominent gods in the Elfaivar pantheon. Traditionally she was the six-armed sculptor who gave form to the raw creation discovered by her husband. She had dominion over the lives of women, and she particularly oversaw rituals of womanhood, marriage, and grief. For these, she would take three different forms of maiden, mother, and crone, but in all she was a fierce defender of the Elfaivar empire.   The famous adventurer Hamyd of the East claimed in the year 72 a.o.v. to have witnessed a conclave of eladrin matriarchs, wherein they performed the ancient rituals of Srasama. According to him, though, they cut short the rituals of the crone, and his guide alleged that this was because the matriarchs had forsworn grief, and so can never age.