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The forest is bright. The fog is gone, but somehow the world looks a bit strange. A red, barely visible haze hangs over everything, but what catches her attention is the hair that is scattered among the decaying leaves and branches on the floor. The smooth threads are so blonde that they shine white in the sun. Astrid narrows her eyes. Her hair isn't white. At least it shouldn’t be. She wants to touch one of the strands and raises her right hand. The limb feels stiff but moves much faster and with more force than Astrid wanted. Her stiff fingers slam into the forest floor. They are thin and long and part of a pale hand that sits on the end of a thin upper arm. The hairless skin covers thin and well-developed muscles like vacuum-packed foil and emits a red glow.
— Astrid's awakening in the New World
Elves possess a slender physique that is accentuated by their triangular faces and pointed ears. Through their thin skin, tight strands of muscles can be seen bulge and contract with every movement. Long and strong legs stride with large and fast steps that makes it as though they are flying over the soil beneath. Split-second reflexes and limbs that move just as fast more than compensate for the innate lack of toughness that comes from having a body made from nothing but muscle and bone.
Most elves are just below or over 2 meters in size and weigh anywhere between 80 and 150 kilograms. Males and females are about the same height, and males are only marginally heavier and stronger than females. Their skin coloration goes from the pinkish ivory of the High Elves to the smooth gold of the Common Elves and the ebony black of the Dark Elves.
Piercing orange-yellow irises surround their pupils. Elves see in full color. However, the cones that provide most other species with the ability to see red are instead tuned to the deep infrared. While elves cannot perceive the normal color, they instead see the heat radiated by all things in different shades of red. This infrared vision not only means that an elf can see in absolute darkness, but also that there is no hiding from those yellow eyes. To an elf, a living creature is a shining red beacon that is hard to miss, as long as they are not too far away. A downside of their infravision is that the unique way their brains process visual information makes it hard for elves to understand small two-dimensional images. As a result, all elves suffer from a form of dyslexia that prevents them from reading many languages properly. Only their own, specially formatted script circumvents these limitations.
Elves’ pointed ears perceive high-pitched sounds slightly better than low ones, and a bit better from the front than from behind. In general, their hearing and sense of smell are decent.
Elves have an extremely skewed gender ratio where seven out of eight children are female. Both male and female elves are attracted to physical fitness, speed, and combat prowess. Female elves heavily favor males more proficient in combat than themselves, something they test in mock fights against potential partners.
Unlike those of most races, female elves don't have a monthly menstruation cycle. Instead, only an orgasm will cause an egg to be released and immediately fertilized. A pregnancy takes at least 16 months. If the mother enters a state of intense stress and/or hunger, and no more than 11 months have passed since inception, the fetus enters a sort of hibernation, during which it stops growing. It remains this way until the woman spends a week in a calm, well-nourished state.
Elves are born gaunt and vulnerable and grow slower than humans. For at least the first two years they rely entirely on their mother for sustenance, before they can start eating solid food. Most elven children learn to walk at the age of three. At this stage of their lives, they share their parent's vulnerability to starvation but lack their resistance to infection until they reach full maturity.
As children, elves can have a wide variety of hair colors, ranging from pitch black to dirty blonde. However, when they mature neither gender gains more or new hair. Instead what they already have turns a white, grey, or pale blonde. Most elves start off with only a few white strands in puberty and finally receive entirely white hair by the time they reach full physical maturity at the age of 30.
After reaching full physical maturity elves age at a very slow rate, a fact they owe to their bodies' exceptional regenerative abilities. Coupled with their resistance to disease, elves that survive their childhood can look forward to lifespans of up to 300 years.
Elves benefit and suffer from a body built for performance. They only need 4 hours of sleep a day and their aggressive immune system makes them all but immune to mundane infections. While their bodies are relatively fragile, their aggressive immune system is too much for most diseases to overcome. Instead of growing fur or insulating layers of fat, the elven body adapts to changing environments by aggressively regulating its body temperature. This makes them highly resistant to environmental effects. All of these features require a lot of energy and because of them, elves are ravenous creatures that require massive amounts of food to sustain their insatiable metabolism. Especially because their slender forms can't contain much in the way of energy reserves, they need a constant supply of protein and calorie-rich food. Fruits and vegetables can stave off starvation but only meat will properly fill them.
Should an elf not fully sate their body's needs, they will find that all those wonderful benefits their bodies provide them disappear and leave them as stumbling skeletons. Starvation is an elf's greatest enemy and it is indeed a formidable foe. It is the reason that, despite their long lives, few elves make it past their first century, as they either die of starvation or in battle trying to secure their survival.
Like the branches of a young tree, elves tend to be flexible. They bend easily and snap back into form just as quickly. They are restless and in constant search of something to do, however, few things can retain their attention for long before they move on to the next distraction. By nature elves value their freedom highly and are naturally drawn to things that guarantee it. Magic or martial arts are prime examples of such things. As predators, elves have no natural sense of empathy towards non-elves (though most elves do emphasize with other creatures by choice). This, coupled with their natural individualism, causes many elves to adopt a careless, selfish, and arrogant demeanor. Some speculate that it is because of this lack of empathy and natural individualism that elves, despite being very emotional creatures, are so resistant to magic that manipulates emotions.
