Froslaz Elsa, Frost Elves

She is short for an elf, delicate and finely built, hair white as new fallen snow, skin pale with a hint of soft blue and her eyes are the soft cool azure of a robins egg. Then you realize she can't be real can she? this blizzard and the killing cold you have endured have surly started to drive you mad. She draws closer and you huddle in your furs trying to dismiss this gorgeous phantasim from your mind. She is nearly nude clad only in a thin dress no one could endure this cold in such a garment. Then she is before you and she has pity in her beautiful eyes she whispers a world of magic and suddenly the cold no longer bites your skin or sinks into your bones. She then whispers and somehow you hear it over the storm   "The storm and my magic will end as the sun rises, go south and follow the sea for half a day and you will find a village, continue north and I will not save you from the next storm for you are not permitted in the lands of the Froslaz Elsa"   Frozen Beauty   We are of the Second Branching and our ancestors were Nytalf Elsa who rather favored the snow capped mountain forests over the river vallys. Our first great queen was a powerful ice witch and artist and it was in her image we were cast. She taught us to embrace mastery of ice and snow, she taught us how to carve glittering cities of steel strong ice out of the great glaciers and how to survive in lands of ever winter. We the most beautiful of the elves, beautiful in our art, our souls and our purity we strove beyond the mere mastery of arcane magic or nature but mastery of music and sculpture, ice and stone fueling our inspiration to create. We declared ourselves the Froslaz or Frost Elves in the decades before the Dark Walker war, a colony of artists and crymomancers dedicated to mastering and understanding our chosen life paths.   We served the Elven empire though its polatics were never our main concern and we welcomed the resources and patrons for our creations. In those high snow capped mountains we built fortresses protected by Ice, Snow and Mountain Stone. Hidden beyond great pine forests where bitter storms and mighty beasts ward us as we work in the warmth and beauty of our sheltered homes free of much of the trouble of the outside world.   Ice Eternal   We were glad to do our part for the empire but we also were not comfortable with their demands at times, we were smaller in number then our cousins and our preferance for reclusion often left us uncomfortable with how fast the outside world was changing. At heart we were artists, thinkers and crafters who longed for tranquility to focus on our works. As the Empire grew so to though did the demand for our creations and the need for us to hold the frozen passes from invasion. Our warrior caste became strong and proud of their role protecting the cold mountain peaks and our great fortress city endured a two decade long siege by giant kind. We feared giving our warrior caste too much power but the Nytalf Elsa would knight them, grant them land and to our discomfort the warrior caste would rise above the artists and spellcasters of our people.   We did not care for this change but we endured the civil strife of the growing power of our warrior caste exerted on the artist caste, the art of war war was one of service to protect the beauty of music, craft and magic but the Nytalf Elsa Emperor changed that by rewarding duty with power. The shifting of the power of our castes would push the merchant caste to become little better then the labor caste and this would form the seeds for civil unrest between our castes. By the time of the Tarnishing we were on the verge of an internal struggle that might have driven us to the same evils that consumed the Swart Alflar if not for the Elf-Dwarf War and the subsequent betrayal. The Swarf Alflar attacks us without mercy, they came from below ground through our very own escape tunnels where our icy walls and the deadly cold could not slow them. Our warrior caste stood bravely and many of them died to ensure the safety of our artists and common folk. In the face of destruction the caste conflicts became unimportant to us. As all of the empire burned and was conquered we fled, we fled far and away going northward putting the world we had once known behind us.   We dissolved the castes of old and any notion that the art of labor or war is any less valuable then song and sculpture and we vowed to never let the outside world poison our path to perfection. We watched the world change the wars and disasters as we rebuilt new glacial fortresses and glittering homes in the far north. The Nytalf Elsa no doubt consider traitors for abandoning their empire but it was they who abandoned us, they who pushed the Swart Alflar and they who nearly sent us into a civil war of our own. No it is far better that we remain as we are now in our artistic and redoubts for if the world need us then it will prove its desire by risking winters embrace to reach us.