Elvish Enclaves

The **Elvish Enclaves** are an elvish nation linked to the Elvish Paradise Worlds

## Overview

The Elvish Enclaves are the outward facing manifestation of the Elvish Paradise Worlds, the eternal dominions granted to the Elvish Triad gods by the terms of the Partition at the end of the Pantheon War. The Enclaves are thus, in a sense, an embassy with a nation, serving the grand strategic aims of the Triad (or their clerical interpreters) through a portfolio of diplomacy and intrigue.

In almost every way, the Enclaves are somewhat attenuated forms of the deeper paradise worlds: angels and other manifestations of the Triad still walk the Enclaves, but less often and less overtly. Enclave cities are still fashioned from the miraculous living rock and obeisant trees gifted to the elves by their gods. Though they surely do not match the splendor of the inner worlds which admit outsiders but once in millennia, these “frontier” settlements serve to project the ageless grace and power of the Triad to the cosmos. The Enclaves are thus objects of admiration and envy, especially from their less developed neighbors. As the power of the Triad grows weaker with distance from its allotted worlds, the Enclaves cannot serve as a platform for exporting an elvish way of life, however.

## Government

Each Enclave world is ruled by a Priest-King, who answers to the Elvish Triad and its angelic intermediaries. Beneath this Priest-King is a vast hereditary hierarchy of elvish nobles, immersed all their long lives in an arcane system of divine contemplation of the will of their gods. Enclave strategy is thus directed less by an autocratic ruler than by the divinely inspired consensus of its nobility, with their advice concentrated in the person of the Priest-King, who takes the role of a vessel for divine will rather than an originator of political decisions.

## Society

Most Enclave subjects live quiet, comfortable lives as farmers or craftworkers: to be an Enclave Worlder is to enjoy the certainty that the world is built for you and that the gods are real and invested in your well-being, down to ensuring the optimal weather for agriculture. Unsurprisingly, most elves seek nothing more than this existence: they enjoy some three centuries of contented work before giving their bodies to the soil and their souls to the gods that cared for them all their lives (anti-theistic Aeldman commentators have made endless analogies between the average Enclave elf and various domestic herd animals). Economically, the Enclaves enjoy a high standard of comfort but relatively modest material standards: even elvish palaces, though sumptuous, commonly do not match the sprawling footprint of the great villas and castles of the magnates of the cosmic powers. The Enclaves import comparatively little (though foreign curiosities are not entirely outlawed, they are certainly not culturally favored), largely using their modest exports of exquisite handiworks and specialty foods to develop currency reserves to advance their foreign policy objectives.

## Foreign Relations

Naturally, this peaceful lifestyle makes it difficult for the Enclaves to mobilize mass armies: for this purpose, the Elvish aristocracy supplies its children as elite soldiers and spies. Common elves who are temperamentally ill-suited to the idyll of the Enclaves are encouraged to take off-world appointments in the retinues of these nobles-at-large. These small bands of elves abroad are the Enclaves’s predominant means of gathering even basic intelligence about the wider cosmos that has not been filtered from the stories of foreign merchants. Bearing extraordinary gifts of elvish handiwork (including more than a few magical items), elvish “errants,” as they are called, are prized and dangerous courtiers in foreign governments; an Enclave warrior might be a prized bodyguard or assassin fit for a king, and might just as easily turn the blade against an employer after the slightest expression from a newly arrived fellow Enclave elf (an elvish craftsman might do much the same by turning a gift on its recipient). The irony that the Shantaran and Enclave elves have such similarities in their foreign policy and intelligence strategy is viewed as delicious by the Shantarans and denied fervently by the Enclavers. Broadly, the Enclaves seek to keep their neighbors in a carefully calibrated limbo: too weak to threaten the Enclaves directly, but too strong and coherent to be conquered by a greater power.

Outside of its pattern of “court capture,” Enclave foreign policy doctrine somewhat resemble that of the Kirvan Church; with countless elves scattered throughout the cosmos, the Enclaves have historically claimed a special right to protect and “reunify” the elvish peoples, often establishing far-flung Enclave Protectorates for isolated elvish populations which soon bear a close resemblance to the colonial enterprises of other powers. Non-Enclave elves may be promised the salvation of their lineage through service, but only the rarest few are deemed sufficiently “pure” to readmit to the lost paradise of their distant ancestors. Purity is not only philosophical but also racial: few indeed are the elves abroad in the cosmos who do not have some mixed ancestry (or less often, but more damning, some buried influence of Shantara), and the Triad gods look dimly upon admitting subjects who deviate from the elvish phenotype (which Triad angels find easier to influence, and whose souls are more nourishing to the Triad gods).

In more recent centuries, the Enclaves have taken an attitude of cordial kinship toward so-called “heritage” powers which consist of largely elvish or near-elvish populations: a charm campaign in the Serene Duchy of Aeldrum is perhaps the most evident example, but Enclave emissaries have long operated in the Kingdom of Bec, advancing elvish cultural ideals and ensuring the protection of Triad-worshippers. Though not a heritage power, even the Shantine Empire has seen its share of Enclave “advisors” working for the autonomy of various “wild elf” populations in the Shantine protectorates, and in so doing attempting to curry the goodwill of the Shantine court (a number of elvish volunteer regiments fighting for the Shantine during the Fialta-Shantine war were organized and led by Enclave agents – the eventual upside was a modest Enclave political presence in the new conquests of the Fialta, which suited them just as well as influence with the Shantine).

The Elvish Enclaves today face a key challenge to their foreign policy doctrine: with the cosmos increasingly carved up among highly developed, industrial great powers, Enclave neighbors become an increasingly attractive target for the next (perhaps last) wave of territorial or influence grabs in Imperial space. Though these neighbors (such as the Republic of Delarma or Deutschreich) have avoided conquest, it is dubious whether the Enclaves will have the capability to support these powers against a unilateral influence campaign from a great power: most likely, preserving the local balance of power will require the Enclaves to seek alliances among the great powers themselves, playing them against each other. Another essential problem which follows is what the Enclaves have to offer the great powers: baubles and luxury goods which might sway minor kings are unlikely to have the same effect on Emperors who rule hundreds of millions. Worse, should influence fail, the Enclaves face a fundamental problem of adaptation to modern warfare: Elvish ships are splendidly engineered, elvish swordsmen the finest in the cosmos and elvish weapons excel even some of the masterworks of the Mage Imperium. However, the relative share of the Enclave economy required to produce one of its superb frigates could in Aeldrum easily produce a warship with five times the firepower. An elvish sword is little proof against a platoon of conscripts with repeating rifles. Thus, the Enclaves face a crisis of military capability, unable to raise the population or industrial base necessary to compete with cosmic powers. Whether the Enclaves will find a new niche in this era of industrial warfare may determine not only their continued relevance to cosmic politics but the security of their own worlds.

## Notes

1. ↑ For instance, despite their own Enclave-inherited obsession with lineage, the high elves of Aeldrum are widely believed by demographers to have somewhere on the order of ten to twenty percent human heritage, on average.