Elves

**Elves** are a race of Elfkin hominid which lives primarily in Saveria, Avamorica, Epsilucia and Eshér in Nesaria. They are the most well-known race of Elfkin due to being by far the most numerous, as well as the most alike Humans in appearance and behaviour.

Elves are physically characterised by their pale skin, long pointed ears, slanted eyes, tall height and slender, gracile build. They have a diverse range of vibrant eye colours and tend to have richly-coloured hair, sometimes in hues that would only be possible with dyes in other races. Elves have very little body hair and weak facial hair; the latter is more pronounced in Saverians, but even Eshérians struggle to grow beards.

As with all Elfkin, Elves are long-lived compared to Humans, and after reaching maturity they age very slowly. The average Elf can expect to live for 110 years, and upon reaching the age of approximately 28-30 (which, in Human years, is equivalent to 21-23) they essentially do not physically age at all until approximately 70-75; at this point they will begin to resemble a Human in their late 30s, and at the age of 95-100 they will start degrading rapidly. This has often led to Elves being regarded as a beautiful race - though this is not because they are themselves especially beautiful, but rather because they retain their youth for most of their life.

Elves not only live longer, but grow slower; as mentioned, they are considered fully physically mature at around 28-30, with females generally maturing slightly faster than males. They take longer to develop in the womb, spending approximately eleven months gestating, and their menstrual cycles are much longer; whereas it is usually approximately one month for Humans, the full cycle takes around three months for Elves. Elvish women bleed for longer - up to two weeks for some women - but also have milder and less frequent cramping. Menopause in Elvish women typically occurs between the ages of 65-70, often - but not always - just before they begin physically aging. Menopause in Elves cannot cause bone degradation as it does in Humans, but still comes with most of the other side effects.

Elves are notable for being the only known species of Elfkin to feature only partial hermaphroditism as opposed to being either fully hermaphroditic or having standard binary sexes. This trait is present amongst the Saverian Elves, where generally between 1/5 and 1/4 of any given generation is hermaphroditic, with the remainder being roughly half male and half female. Hermaphroditism has never been observed in Eshérian Elves, nor in the descendants of unions between Saverian and Eshérian Elves. It is generally accepted that the presence of hermaphroditism in Saverians was due to the effort of a powerful ancient mage or Titan attempting to increase the notoriously slow birth-rates of the Elves, and historical attempts to undo this change have been unsuccessful and bloody.

Elves are notable for having the greatest interspecies breeding capability of any intelligent race. Elves can breed without issue with Sand Elves, a race so similar to them that some scholars argue the two should be classified as subdivisions of the same race rather than two different species. Children of such unions go by various names, but the most common term is Olive Elves, named after their skin. Female Olive Elves invariably lose the horns of their Sand Elf parent, but males always keep them. Peculiarly, Olive Elves can breed with other Olive Elves or with Sand Elves without issue, but an Olive Elf breeding with an Elf always produces an infertile child. Elves can also breed with Black Elves, which produces what are known as Grey Elves - due to their light grey skin - but these are always completely infertile. In ancient historical sources, there are records of children supposedly born to an Elf and a Vampire, but of all the records of marriages between Elves and Vampires going back to the 9th century BC, not a single one is recorded as producing a child. Elves are also the one species of Elfkin capable of breeding with Humans, a union which produces what are known as Half-Elves. These complex creatures warrant their own section, which appears below.

## Half-Elves

Half-Elf is a term given to any person with mixed Elvish and Human heritage, regardless of whether they are actually truly half Elvish (that is, having one Elvish parent and one Human parent). Half-Elves typically retain the vibrant and strange eye colours of their Elvish parent, but sport more standard hair colours, in addition to more rounded and less slanted eyes and a less distinct ear-point.

When magic was still accessible to mortals, Half-Elves could also wield it, though to a significantly lesser degree. The magical ability of a Half-Elf directly correlated with how much Elvish ancestry they had; true Half-Elves were still capable of impressive feats of magic whereas Quarter-Elves could rarely manage more than a spark. During the magical revival of the Civil War, magic returned to all the Elfkin, but only true Half-Elves and Three-Quarter Elves could wield it; those with lesser Elvish ancestry could not.

Half-Elves have a high prevalence of developmental issues. Though Elves and Humans are mostly genetically compatible, they are nonetheless of different species, and the mixing of their genes frequently presents with problems. The most common issues are psychological; compared to both Humans and Elves, Half-Elves have a higher prevalence of autism, social anxiety disorder, depression and schizophrenia. Half-Elves also have a higher frequency of physical disorders, the most common being male infertility (prevalent in as much as half of the male population) and muteness. Whilst Half-Elves also display an increased frequency of muteness due to psychological factors, a particular issue for them is the development of the vocal chords, in that their development may be incomplete or entirely absent. Eron Caleras, the husband of Empress Rixa, is the most famous example of the latter case. Half-Elves additionally display an increased prevalence of blindness from birth, and are slightly more likely to be deaf or have immune deficiencies.

Inecurian academics settled upon a classification system for Half-Elves which ranked them by the degree of Elvish ancestry they had in order to determine how much magical ability they were likely to possess and how likely they were to suffer from defects. This system is as follows:

* **True Half-Elf** - refers to those who are literally Half-Elves, with one purely Elvish parent and one purely Human parent. These typically had weak but not insignificant magical ability.
* **Three-Quarter Elf** - refers to those born from one purely Elvish parent and one Half-Elf or Three-Quarter Elf parent. Whether the mixed-ancestry parent is half or three-quarters Elvish seems not to matter, as both produce generally the same result of a child which more closely resembles an Elf and, back in the days of magic, had magical ability that exceeded Half-Elves but still did not match pure Elves.
* **Quarter-Elf** - refers to those born from one Half-Elf parent and one purely Human parent. Quarter-Elves more closely resemble Humans and possessed very limited magical ability.
* **Eighth-Elf** - refers to those born from one Quarter-Elf parent and one purely Human parent. Eighth-Elves are typically only distinguishable from Humans by their bright eye colours and their slimmer and taller build; they have typically lost all the other physical features of their Elvish ancestry. Eighth-Elves, and those further down than them with lesser degrees of Elvish ancestry, possessed no magical ability at all. Those with a smaller degree of Elvish ancestry than an eighth are still typically classified as Eighth-Elves.
* **Second Degree (SD) Half-Elf** - the term "second degree" (shortened to SD) can also be applied to Quarter-Elves and Eighth-Elves, and it refers to an offspring which does not meet the strict definitions of Half-Elf, Quarter-Elf or Eighth-Elf but still has the same characteristics as a result of their ancestry. An SD Half-Elf can, for example, be the product of a union between a Three-Quarter Elf and a Quarter-Elf; though this does not meet the definition of a true Half-Elf, the degree of Elvish ancestry averages out between the two parents to half, and so produces offspring with the same characteristics as a Half-Elf.

## Psychology

### Intelligence

Elves are known for being an intelligent race, and they rank high in terms of IQ. Across both nations of Elves, the average Elvish IQ comes to 112; superior to the average Human IQ across all the nations (100) as well as the highest-IQ nation of Inecurian Humans (Onshi, at 105) and the highest-IQ nation of Humans anywhere (Singapore, at 108). This has resulted in a great many Elvish geniuses in all manner of fields, such as art, medicine, mathematics and architecture, and historically it resulted in Elvish civilisations often being significantly technologically advanced compared to their neighbours; for example, the masterful Elvish smithing around the 1st century AD is renowned for being over a millennia ahead of its time, producing high-quality weapons and fully-enclosing plate armour which would not be matched elsewhere until 14th-15th century Europe. The long lives of the Elves and the subsequent ability to spend many decades perfecting a single craft also greatly aided them in pushing forward their innovation.

However, a predominantly high-IQ society is not without drawbacks. Higher-IQ individuals are generally less complacent, less easily entertained, and are loathe to perform the menial, repetitive and low-skill labour which is necessary to keep a civilisation running. It has been suggested that this may be a major factor in why, historically, Elves were so keen on converting their Human neighbours and subjects to their own culture; it may have been in an effort to outsource all the tedious parts of running a society.

### Emotional Intensity

As a general rule, Elfkin feel their emotions more intensely than other hominid species; Elves are no exception. It is generally accepted that the strong emotions of Elfkin are an adaptation - accidental or deliberately engineered - to make use of the phenomenon known as Chaos, which is the tendency of intense emotional states to disrupt the Magestream and weaken the barrier between it and the material world. Though this could give a mage far greater magical power, it was a double-edged sword - as a mage in an intense emotional state usually struggled to use their magic safely.

Elves are often characterised as a jolly, light-hearted and loving people, as they feel such emotions more powerfully; they often find joy in little things that other races would overlook. However, they also experience far greater depths of grief, despair, rage and hatred, and are vulnerable to developing PTSD from traumatic events. This can have significant impacts on their relationships; they tend to make friends quickly and fall in love easily, and are very devoted to their spouses, but if such a relationship should break apart then it often does so very bitterly and hatefully.

The emotional intensity of Elves also makes them more susceptible to the psychological effects of drugs. Whilst they are no more likely to become physically addicted to drugs - in fact, they are significantly more resistant to the effects of alcohol in particular, having exceptionally strong livers - a psychological addiction is very difficult for them to break. This has generally resulted in Elvish societies taking a very hard stance against recreational drugs, as they are very fearful of the consequences of them becoming widespread.

## Name

Elves are known in the Eshérian branch of the Elvic languages as *elvate* (singular *elva*) and in the Saverian branch as *elfade* (singular *elfa*). Both of these are corruptions of Old Elvic *alfáta* (singular *alfá*), which itself is a corruption of the older word *ialfáta* (singular *ialfá*). This earlier form of the word is known due to the *i* appearing (though mutated into a *y*) in both the Black Elvish (*yani*, singular *yan*) and Vampiric languages (*yeva*, singular *yev*), as well as the Onshian word for Elf (*yabi*).

What is known is that, at some point in the indeterminate past, Elves were not simply known as "Elves"; the term Elf in the languages of all the other Elfkin refers to the collective grouping of the Elfkin as a whole, and not the specific species now referred to as Elves. However, this ancient name for the Elves is completely unknown. The Sand Elves and Black Elves both refer to the Elves as "White Elves" (with "Pink Elves" also being a common secondary term amongst the Black Elves), and Librarians simply call them the "Neighbours". The Vampires (the ones in Nesaria who had their own culture and language, not the ones in Roulonne who assimilated into the culture of their neighbours) referred to the Elves by the nation they came from (Saverian or Eshérian). Perhaps the best candidate for what the ancient Elves might have actually called themselves comes from the Dark Elvish language, which refers to them as "Water Elves" - but this likely only rings true for the Saverians, who have an ancient and prehistoric maritime association, and not so much for the Eshérians, who have always dwelt definitively on land.