Knights

first appearing in valina in around 230 A.E. knights are a combination of low ranking nobles and elite warriors.

here they are defined as armourered warriors who hold power within their local government often in a feudal relationship

## Humans:

in the cidel empire, Knights, clad in chain mail, help to keep the social order running, pledging their loyalty to the various lords and kings in a never ending war for control.

in turns of training, a knight, most of whom are the children of minor nobility, although the children of kings or even the high king might be trained as knights, will most likely begin their training as pages when they are sent to a different family's stronghold, usually with someone with close ties to their own family to be taught their place in the world by serving as servants to the host family, however after eight years, they are expected to find for themselves, a mentor in the form of a fully trained knight who will teach them combat, if they manage to find themselves after those eight years, they become a squire and live and travel with their mentor until their training is complete, and if they don't manage to find a mentor, they are expected to see themselves back to their birth family in disgrace. If they earn their place as a squire, their mentor will teach them combat skills in the mentor's chosen weapon, horsemanship, often times minor magicks, and many more skills.

however noblemen are not the only ones able to earn the status of a knight, a warrior who had earned the respect of a clan-lord could be granted a knighthood even without years of training and so given permission to take their sponsor's coat of arms as their own.

### Knightly orders:

while most knights will pledge their services to a lord or king, some sixty percent of all knights serve as retainers to nobles of various ranks, another twenty percent roam across the land taking jobs from local villages as monster slayers, or even man slayers, or die trying at either, however the remaining twenty percent have banded together into the five knightly orders, each representing either Soerin himself or one of his four children, each child being a different aspect of warfare, (please note if playing dnd knightly order members are to be considered paladins whereas other knights are merely fighters)

## Elves:

perhaps because they were the first knights, or perhaps because of the difference between elf and human minds, elven knights can be very different from their human counterparts depending on what sub-species of Elf one is talking about:

### Wood Elves:

wood elves have no one formalized knight equivalent, however it is not uncommon for either a wild elf, or even just a regular wood elf, who has decided that it is there Oberon given mission to travel the isles with an animal companion who doubles as a mount for the elf aiding others either directly or by defeating some evil. common for such purposes are large elk, horses, or sometimes even hippogyph while the knight themselves tend to prefer armour, as is typical of wood elves, a mixture of thick leaves and chain mail stitched together and capable of providing protection and flexibility for the elf while a helm made of solid metal is common although for obvious reasons a wild elf would eschew such things.

### High Elves:

High elves were the first people to create knights and it shows, while the details of the knights defer between the three high elven kingdoms, they share for the most part similarites for their elite cavalry/heavy infantry mixed force.