Races

These are the established races in *Fallen Throne*.

## Demians

Main Article: *Demian Race*

The Demians are a war-mongering race that make their home in the Demian Wastelands, a harsh and unforgiving sprawl of desert and volcano-ridden ashland. They have no particular enemy - or, more precisely, the **entire** world is their enemy, and they wage war not as a tool for some geopolitical means, but simply because war is all they have ever known.

The Demians can be easily recognized by their overall human-like appearance. They stand, on average, around seven feet tall (213cm), though Demian heights can range from just shy of six feet (183cm) to just spanning eight feet (244cm). They are very thin and wiry, their skin a deep, burned crimson. Thin plates of hardened bone grow on their trunk, legs, and arms, of the same black-gray material as the horns that protrude from their heads. Demian hair is often white or gray, and is incredibly thick, coarse, and often untamed.

The Demian army is separated into three main divisions: Executive, Magical, and Supportive. The infantry are the typical soldiers, using weapons such as khopesh blades, bows and arrows, or mounted cavalry. The battlemages, as the name implies, use magic as weapons against the enemy. The warpriests use magic for defense and support.

## Elves

The elves (Elvish : Blas'Yun, lit. "Blessed Children" ; historically, Xiuz'Yun, lit. "Slave Children") are a people with a tortured past. Long-lived, they grow quickly from adolescence in the span of a few decades to maintain a youthful appearance - approximately the early-to-mid twenties in human years - for upwards of a thousand years. Youthful, beautiful, hypersexual, and with aunique ability to mate with virtually any other race, the elves have historically been abused for such properties. Most elves have not known true freedom for millennia, due to the Elvish Rebellion and the subsequent Elvish Division.

There are five distinct subraces of Elves:

#### Light Elves

The Light Elves (Elvish: Azri'Yun, lit. "Blind Children") were the original Elvish race. Pale with skin that is milky white, their innocent color is a perfect parallel to their innocent upbringing. Untainted by the perversions of the other sapient races, they were considered the only pure elves. For most of their history, the Light Elves barely maintained capacity for speech or conscious thought - the acquisition of such knowledge ultimately led to their destruction, in the Elvish Rebellion and subsequent Elvish Division. To this date, the Light Elves are believed to be extinct, though there are rumors of some still wandering the world, lost and without a home to return to.

#### Wood Elves

The Wood Elves (Elvish: Abo'Yun, lit. "Forest Children") are one of the Elvish subraces to be borne from the Elvish Division. Taken by the humans into their camps and villages deep in the woods, the Wood Elves developed a crisp, golden tan to their skin. At first, their use by the humans was the typical sexual enslavement that had plagued the Elves to this point, but over time, the humans discovered that the Elves' lithe form lent them to be exceptionally adept hunters. Their enslavement was loosened to an agreement, where the Wood Elves hunt and range for the humans, who exchange their services with equipment, care, and sexual relief. All references to enslavement in regards to the Wood Elves is more or less vestigial now - most all living Wood Elves offer their services willingly to the humans, having developed a deep, symbiotic bond with their human coevals.

#### Blood Elves

The Blood Elves (Elvish: Sani'Yun, lit. "Crimson Children") are an Elvish subrace borne from the Elvish Division. Taken into the heart of the Demian Wastelands, their latent magical potency was quickly discovered by the Demian Warpriests. The Blood Elves were subsequently weaponized by their perpetually warmongering masters, their magical potential trained and honed to operate well beyond their natural limits through the use of blood magic, using their own blood to fuel it. Similarly, their hypersexuality was channeled into a macabre sadism, where violence and killing would reward them with immense sexual gratification. Such extensive transformation has stained their skin a deep pink-red, a reflection of their now-innate violence. The Blood Elves are widely considered to be a barely sapient subrace: their individual thought has been trained into submission, to consider themselves nothing more than a cog in the Demian war machine, and their actions are predominantly purely instinctual: do what brings them pleasure (namely, kill) and avoid what brings them pain (namely, insubordination, which is punished severely).

#### Ice Elves

The Ice Elves (Elvish: Fossa'Yun, lit. "Heatless Children") are an Elvish subrace borne from the Elvish Division. Taken into the Northern Wasteland, little is known to the greater world as to the fate of the Ice Elves. The Polaini Empire are exceptionally reclusive and wary of outsiders - indeed, their appearance at the Elvish Division was considered a curiosity, due to them historically having as little to do with the world as possible - and their claiming of Elves that they never historically abused has also been the subject of study for many scholars throughout the years. The only truly known fact is that the Ice Elves do indeed exist, their pale blue skin having been spotted by the occasional exploration parties skirting the Polaini borders.

#### Dark Elves

The Dark Elves (Elvish: Vael'Yun, lit. "Shadow Children") are an Elvish subrace borne from the Elvish Division. They are the only of the Division-borne races to have escaped enslavement. Their Light Elf ancestors hid deep in the mountains, their skin darkening to take on the color of the shadows in which they found solace. While their brothers and sisters dwelled in an existence of torture and abuse, they slowly collected themselves and used their intelligence and magic to protect themselves against future abuse. In particular, the construction of the suppression field was the single greatest advancement in Dark Elf society, which eventually culminated into the now-world-renowned empire of Vael'Aser . One trait of particular note is that, as an intentional side-effect of the suppression field, the Dark Elves are a subrace consisting of only women - men were expunged from the genepool, and mating is done purely through a magical bond, itself as artificial as the suppression field that requires its existence.

## Humans

The humans are, if not the dominant race, then certainly the most prolific. Short lifespans and a penchant for self-destructive tendencies has led them to not only breed often, but to spread themselves out as much as possible. As a response to this behavior, the human-owned territories spawn thousands of square kilometers, but the rigidity with which they hold said borders varies almost as much as how much each human varies from one another.

A property that makes humans distinct from virtually all other sapient races is that they do not have any sense of racial unity. Instead of a single empire spanning all of humanity, they are splintered into countless kingdoms, fiefdoms, and unaligned independent factions. Such lack of unity makes the humans exceptionally susceptible to attacks of brute force - they simply lack the numbers to hold up against such hard pushes - but their volatile lives have led them to develop distinct edges in unconventional war tactics and a rapid development of technology. As such, all-out war between humans and another sapient race has been broken out in centuries - any such conflicts have been nothing more than individual skirmishes.

In the times of interspecies peace, the humans hone their combat skills by waging wars with one another. The humans are one of the only known races to systemically war amongst themselves in anything that isn't considered a civil war - which predicates that all parties involved are originally of the same society and government.

## Polaini

The Polaini, also simply known as **Northerners** or **Far-Northers**, make their home deep in the icy Northern Wasteland. An extremely paranoid race that spends most of their time - as far as the rest of the world knows - hiding behind their immense, frozen walls, they are exceptionally wary of outsiders. No living being not of Polainish descent has ever been inside the Polaini empire and lived to tell of it. Skirting their borders is generally not met with much resistance, but an observant explorer would notice pairs of pale yellow eyes staring at them through the snow-laden woods, if they were to spend enough time near the edge of Polaini territory.

Very little is known about the Polaini way of life, or even what a modern Polaini looks like. Their last appearance in the world south of their home was the Elvish Division, an event that has been the subject of student for scholars for the millennia that came after.