So I've missed the 7th day's post and now I've technically missed day 8 too, which means I get to combines them, because I can.
Economy
I actually spent a good hour working that out—I have a chart of what different races of elves do and everything—and while I know most of the exchanges that take place in the Lands of Mist are still at bartering levels (where they exchange merchandises instead of using money) mostly for the sake of simplifying things for everyone while they all work out the new worth of things according to their brand new geopolitics) there's one clear winner in this game, and it's the Sand Elves' people.
Contrary to the other elven species, the Sand elves of the LOM don't produce much material that they can trade—they do produce stuff, but most of it, for now, are things they need to keep to themselves for survival purposes. Pretty much the only thing they sell to other species is the cheese they make out of their cattle's milk, but even that is something they are partially dependent on others species for, as they use plants they get from the Earth elves to feed their cattle and help flavor the cheese.
However, what they do have is a vast habitat at the center of the continent that allows them to make contact with the other four species/kingdoms of the LOM as well as the Dragonriders and the only biology that can easily survive a hot desert environment. Because of this, they quickly became the main providers of on-land transport* for both merchandise and messages. Basically any kind of inter-kingdom commerce on the LOM transits through them, whether it's food or furs (the Fire elves buy them, the Earth elves sell them) precious stones or metals (usually from Night Elves to Fire Elves, who then transform them into Jewelry that is sold to Earth elves or, ironically, to Water elves when possible) or processed objects like bone daggers or digging material transiting from one country to the other.
Key players
Because of the above economic situation the Council of Elders, the people who govern the Sand elves, are among the most powerful people in the LOM (the Sand elves obviously don't travel all as a group, and the Elders are roughly a dozen women who are each at the head of one traveling group).
On a different scale, Naleesie (my princess MC) is considered a key player because she is a princess, the guardian of Earth Elves' sacred seed and the chief of the armies of one of the most influential nations of the LOM and pretty much the only one that can and does still bother with maintaining relationships to nations on other continent (something that will no doubt boost their regrowth in the future). That being said, this is a power that she has inherited, and part of her arc through the novel is to learn not to be too snobbish about it.
There's also the higher ups of Dragonriders, who aren't often there but when they are people are expected to shut up and listen (partly because inherited traditions of respect/worship toward dragons, partly because woah, giant fire-breathing lizard man) which makes them difficult/complicated to deal with mostly because their experience is very removed from what goes on in the external world, particularly for those who were order-born and experienced a very different developmental phase from other elves.
Also, Myranael later grows into a major figure of his people (though a very ambivalent one as far as they're concerned) both because his mixed ancestry gives him a fire magic that is different but also more powerful than average, and because his friendship with Yamaël and Naleesie end up having a huge influence on decisions made by Naleesie's sister (queen of the Earth elves) and Yamaël's father (not a king, but pretty high up in the chain of military command) and it eventually, much later, leads to a cessation of hostilities between Fire and Water elves**
*Dragonriders can and do provide transports, particularly with Stompers, but they tend to avoid traveling too far or long in the LOM because of their history with those populations.
**Yes, it was inspired by Legolas and Gimli, hush.
So reaching today's prompt was a bit of a revelation in that I realized that I actually don't really have much planned in terms of architecture and civilizations xD
Like I said in an earlier post, most of the remaining structures from Rune elves are going to be Renaissance-inspired (it started out as just Renaissance Europe for all the tired reasons you can probably imagine, but should I develop the other continents I'll probably pick inspiration sources from different civilizations). Actually, typing this is making me realize that I barely have an inspiration board for the verse, let alone each specific culture...my excuse is that about 90-95% of my story takes place outdoor anyway so having an idea of what the landscape is is possibly more important than thinking about architecture.
Or something ;)
I think the architecture I thought the most about was the Fire Elves' capitol city, mostly to determine how they'd organize in it.
See, at the time of the Run elves, the most prominent members of society used to built large and airy palaces around the river, in the inner circles of the city. Since they could endure colder temperatures than fire elves and the nearby volcanoes provided them with efficient geothermal sources (there are a lot of abandoned bath-houses in this city) having large palaces with little regard for heat conservation was a way to show off their wealth and power to the rest of the citizens.
Fire Elves, however, have to stay constantly warm and have grown to hate and fear water and everything related to it, which includes the bath houses (where the constant humidity is an actual threat to their health despite the heat) and leaves them with a problem because the farther you get from the river, the closer you get to the battlefield.
As a result, and considering they can't really build their own city right now, what is happening is that the more influent people are consolidating what used to be hovels on the outer rim of the city, as well as reinforcing the outer wall, and building another one inside to separate themselves from the poorer elves.
Which was more or less a conscious inversion of our usual city organization system but that's a bit of a different beast :P
FANDOM: Original Work
SERIES: FOTSM Verse
RATING: General Audiences
WORDCOUNT: 503
PAIRING(S): -
CHARACTER(S): Alamatheï, Alamatheï’s father (and his dragon Tu’aran), Alamatheï’s dragon
GENRE: Bittersweet fluff?
TRIGGER WARNING(S): None
SUMMARY: There are things Alamatheï can feel that others can’t.
DEDICATION(S): -
NOTE(S): This is a rewrite of this piece from 2010, about the first time Alamatheï experiences the magic he got from his mother. @misericordemika asked where she could read about Matheï and Izayah so I figured I’d crosspost stuff...but then the writing style was just unacceptable tbh, hence the rewriting :P
✗ THE FIC
Alamatheï giggles when his feet land on the dark ground and a soft tingle climbs up his legs, slips between his toes into his shins and the bones of his knees like ants racing in his blood.
“What is it, baby?”
“It tickles!” Alamatheï laughs, covering his mouth with chubby fingers, “There's something in the ground!”
He giggles again, hopping from foot to foot to escape the odd sensation even as he goes to retrieve his dragon—only a hatchling still. She doesn't even have a name, yet—from under Tu'aran's left wing. The tickles in his legs don't ease up though, rising and falling like a dragon between wing strokes, and it reminds Alamatheï of his nights in the egg farm, heat from the shells tucked into his stomach, his back, his neck. He smiles.
“I don't know what it is,” he says with a giggle, toe squirming in his sandals, “but I like it!”
Alamatheï's father stands very straight by his side, his back rigid under the pristine wine-red and white tunic. He looks all serious and grim, like always, but the amber of his skin looks duller today, and his hair lost some of its snowy shine. When he looks down at Alamatheï though, it is with the same shiny eyes and downward tilt to his lips, and the hand he uses to muss up Alamatheï's brown hair is as rough as ever.
“It's your mother's gift,” he sighs with a nod at the mountain-like trunk in front of them, mottled with houses and palaces hidden in the branches, “It's yours to understand.”
He takes his hand off in his custom, abrupt way—like it was never really there in the first place—and Matheï's gaze falls to his feet and the thick sheet of rotten leaves poking between his toes, questions crawling in his mind like skargnes on his feet. If this came from his mother, he knows, Alathian won't answer any more question on the topic.
It's the tree.
Matheï spins on his heels and turns back to Tu'aran, whose large, scaly head has tilted, his better ear turned toward the higher branches.
“What is it doing?”
It breathes.
Alamatheï follows the dragon's gaze up, toward the topmost branches of the queen-tree where elves and leafers swing from one branch to the next, run between leaves taller than they are and call each other out with sounding horns and shrieks of laughter. The light is different here—it tastes greener on his skin, wetter too—but the people in the trees look like falling stars and the earthly feel of dead leaves fills Matheï with the same rush of happiness as sunrise does—like breakfast, only better.
He stares into the sunlight filtering through the branches and thinks of his mother's green eyes, her earth-colored skin. Maybe one day, she'll come back, and he'll be able to ask if she can feel the tree breathing, too. For now, he turns to Tu'aran, grins, and says:
The intro post's tip for today's prompt is to make up three major events:
An old one
One that happened in the recent past (recent enough to still resonate with the world as it is in the story)
And one that happens in the course of the story.
And I‘m going to stick to that because honestly, while I have a detailed account of how the war went somewhere in my notebooks, I’m too lazy to dig through my stuff for it right now :P
An event in the distant past
For my oldest event, and keeping in mind that I'm still focusing on the Lands of Mist here, I would pick the day a dragon ate an elf for the first time. At the time it wasn't a very big event—some elf king with a thirst for power had a poor sod tied up and sent to the mountains that were then known as the Dragons' Nests (now the Dragons' Tombs) and that was basically it, until of course the information leaked.
The first elven sacrifice, while a small business in the moment, allowed the king of the time to build up his empire thanks to the dragons' military help (because giant flamethrowers are generally helpful to win a war) and later on led to the downfall of this same empire and to the more-recent-event: the Split.
An event in the recent past
The Split, as you know/have guessed if you read my previous #worldbuildingjune posts, is the even in which the deities of the World of Mist (oh WOM for short) decided to turn the one elven species into seven elemental-linked new species.
It was a very painful event, during which more than three quarters of the elven population was lost, some instantly, some very soon after as their bodies failed to adapt to brand new kinds of magic (and biological requirements) and some several decades (elven count) after the Split, as their magic suddenly starts attacking their bodies for no identified reason. It's still a very fresh wound at the time of the story and informs a lot of the decisions taken around the main characters (though not necessarily the ones that are taken by them, mainly because they don't really have that option.
An event that takes place in the story's “present”
The starting event of the story, or at the very least the one that forces my three main characters together, is actually the crash of a human satellite in the middle of the Fire elves' capitol, which nearly kills my MCs and forces them to flee West so they can 1) get Naleesie back to her home, 2) get Yamaël back with Water elves who'd be willing to get him back to his own home (gigantic detour, but still his best bet) and 3) Get Myranael a passage for the Dragons' new HQs.
On the larger scale, the landing of humans near the Silver Mountains is something that will definitely change the face of the world, not just by introducing a new specie to the local fauna (so to speak) but also because this is basically going to be THE reason why some of the already present elven nations will actually try to talk to each other so they can deal with the issue in a collected manner.
(And to be honest, now that I write this, I'm actually really interested about the possibilities that open up once you mix Renaissance-ish era and magic to high-tech-making humans who age about ten times faster than elves :P)
As the prompt post says, cultures are a vast topic which we can't possibly hope to tackle in detail for the entire world we're creating, let alone every continent. In view of that, and because lot of things in this verse are still in the process of getting major shifting things, I'm going to focus most specifically the Dragonriders' culture, and cultures from the Lands of Mist, which are my primary focus in the novel anyway.
I. CULTURES FROM THE LANDS OF MIST
As I mentioned in the Geography post, the Lands of Mist is the continent where my novel is set. During the time of the Rune Elves, the entire thing was dominated by a single empire (of the classically plagued by patriarchy variety). After the Split, the emperor's children, who weren't all that fond of each other to begin with, were each changed into a member of one of the seven new elven species with very different ideas as to how said species should live and organize.
Skip over a couple hundred humans years and several pretty bloody war, and you now have the only continent where the populations are divided by species (on pretty much all of the other continents, where there were several countries, the land-based elves are still living and trying to make things work together rather than dividing by species).
The Earth elves live in the forests of the western continent, mostly avoiding the southern part due to lingering traditions. The Sand elves have the desert in the middle, Night elves the mountains in the south (right next to the giant patch of land covered in a plant that's poisonous to elves but not to humans) and the Fire elves live in the east, between the volcanoes and ocean, where the Water elves live.
I actually don't have a lot of solid elements to the cultures right now. Most of what I built so far was either jossed by the application of logic or jossed by trying not to use racist tropes (which I mostly have Tumblr to thank for tbh) but most of the elemental parts are probably staying, so I'll just try to talk about that.
I.1 Earth Elves of the Lands of Mist
Like I said in an earlier post, the Earth elves live in giant trees (easily the size of one of our buildings, some species reaching skyscraper-like proportions...I was very amused when James Cameron's Avatar came out :P) in which they mostly regroup in families and matrilineal bloodlines, with the placement of the house determined mostly by rank.
For now, the style of buildings they have, grown out of the trees' very bark, have a strong resemblance to renaissance-like building because that's the kind of architectural style I want for the Rune Elves, and since it's only the second generation after the Split they haven't really started changing yet. However, the royal palace (they're still organized as centralized monarchy for now, although some groups are starting to detach to re-colonize the woods further south, leaning more to a feudal-style country), built in haste after the stone buildings from the Runes' Era proved uncomfortable to live in, is starting to crumble and the three reigning monarch (the queen and her two sisters, the royal advisor and the chief of armies, Naleesie) are seriously considering scrapping him in favor of something more nest-like that would be more adapted to living in the trees.
Another element of Earth-elves that has been there from the beginning is that their soldiers use trees' seed (like acorn or chestnut) as both weapon and armor: the seeds are embedded in their hand when they join the army and, with their magic, the soldiers cans makes them grow into armor or weapons made of plants at will. Usually, the soldiers specialized according to the type of seed they were chosen by (it's commonly admitted that you don't pick your tree, the tree picks you) and the chief of the army, for now, is designated by a sacred seed, inherited from the first queen of the Earth Elves. Luckily for her, Naleesie is good at what she does despite being very young, but the selection method is going to change drastically in a couple of generations because magic seed =/= military talent.
Historically speaking, the Earth Elves have mostly been pacifists, and their army is mostly here out of habit and a certain defiance for their cousins of the East, who are still at war. Part of that pacifism, though, comes from the fact that since they were the closest to the Dragons' original dwelling mountains, many Earth elves ended up being paired with dragons early in the beginning of the Dragonriders (they actually make up the second largest population among partnered elves) which left their nation with a severely reduced population and unable to wage war on anyone.
They're kind of due for a revision/more building on the structural sense, and because I'd like to implement this idea into the novel, I'll probably be basing them on the Mosuo, which is a people of China that @misericordemika told me about a few days back and sounds like it could be a good fit for that.
I.2 Sand elves of the Lands of Mist
So like I said, Sand elves have blood-red eyes, pretty much without exception, which freaks a lot of people out, and was the reason why many of them were driven out of the more hospitable regions of the continent. The whole 'living in the desert' thing is mostly an accident, because they felt unwelcome in the East and unwelcome in the West, and they couldn't live in the Silver Mountains in the south because they were already taken, so they fled to the center of the continent and realized they were actually pretty well adapted to traveling in said desert, which is when they started running errands between families separated by the mass migrations (most of them motivated by newfound biologies at first) in exchange for supplies (they don't use money anymore).
Up until now I've always sort of imagined them as living in a hot, sand desert, what with the continent being close to the equator of the planet, so when I start building them up again I'd like to draw inspiration from nomadic populations of Africa, who I still have to research a lot (the Massaï came to mind early on, but I still have a lot of researching to do to figure out if they fit with what I want to go for, or if I could use a culture where people are physically closer to how I picture sand elves looking).
I.3 Fire and Water Elves of the Land of Mist
The reason I lump those two cultures together is because for now, one of their main ways of defining themselves is the war that's been going on between them pretty much since the Split. Their first kings were twin brothers who didn't get along (at all) and when they singled out the same piece of land for their people to live in (one because the volcanoes would provide them with constant heat sources, the other because the proximity to the sea and more accessible coastline meant an easier on-land settlement) they decided to be brats about it and go at war over the land. As a result of their stubbornness and various propaganda methods, Fire and Water elves in the Land of Mist literally cannot stand each other.
The Fire elves think the Water elves drown people to turn them into underwater monsters, they despise water (which is not a pleasant feat given that the main city they salvaged from the Rune Elves is built over a river and has a lot of canals, Venice style) and consider the color blue to be extremely bad luck, which explains why Myranael, whose grandfather was a Water Elf, is a complete outcast at the start of the story.
Meanwhile, the Water elves are convinced Fire elves roast and eat the soldiers they capture, and they're mostly told that getting rid of the Fire elves is meant to prevent said Fire elves from turning the sea to a boiling pot and killing them all (they wouldn't have that power, by the way, but the Water elves' king had to figure something out to keep them fighting when they stated settling into the water and getting disinterested in going back on land).
As a result of the ongoing war, neither of the two populations have had tie to start properly building something or even grow their numbers, and while they did start to build customs like funeral rituals (because of the war, but also because some elves are still dying from their new magic consuming them) it'll actually take the humans' arrival into their respective territories (several hundreds of human years after the novel) to really make them look outside their own conflict.
I.4 Other cultures from the Land of Mist
I don't remember if I stated this earlier, but there are no Air or Light elves in the lands of Mist (so named because of the war between Fire and Water Elves, btw) as they all migrated out of the continent, and the few exceptions who remained aren't close enough to form their own cultures. The Night elves, being a fairly recent addition to the soup, don't have much of a culture either yet, aside from the fact that they use ritualistic tattooing.
Lüssyoles are mostly organized in colonies that I haven't developed too much yet, but when I do they'll be most strongly based on bees because come on. Who doesn't love bees?
II. THE DRAGONRIDERS
First of all, Dragonriders isn't a name they picked for themselves—most of the Order-born elves think of themselves as dragonlings, as in children of dragons. The reason behind this is that at the beginning of the order (and it's still mostly the case during the novel) the newly brought-in elves are mostly too busy to take care of their kids, so they just leave them with the eggs and the hatchlings, and the adult dragons take care of them while the elves do most of the construction and adaptation work on the mountainous island the Order picked as its new home.
If you're starting to think this sounds like the dragons got the better end of the bargain, good, because that's exactly what's going on. Pre-Split, the dragons were pretty much treated like the Deities' envoys, revered in their own right, and they had a lot of influence over world politics. One of the reason why rune Elves formed an empire that spanned the whole of the Lands of Mist was because the Dragons (all of whom could fly back then, and almost all of whom lived in the mountains of the west) made a pact with the royalty: they wouldn't interfere if they were properly fed and respected (cue elven sacrifices, cue population rebelling and intending to kill dragons, cue the Split).
This means that as a group, they're still very much disdainful of their elven partners and still expect them to work like servants, which the younger members of the Order don't really mind because they've either been raised to do just this, or they're too young to remember the snacking-on-elves part (which the older elves carefully avoid talking about). Overall, Order elves are a lot more relaxed about many topics than their outsider cousins (their multicultural background with one major common point in the form of telepathy means they don't have as much of a problem with accepting each others' difference, for example) which include gender and sexual identity among other things. However, they're starting to experience some tension as outside elves are brought in (notably water elves, who make better partner for Swimmers) and push back against the idea that they're only good to serve, which is kind of breaking the dorm-party feel people had up until now.
Pssst the air elves living "in the cloud" is probably not what you were going for unless they're actually computer data :P (Also…Lüssyoles I see what you did there ^^)
Ah well, who knows, maybe one day the world of Mist will evolve into cyberpunk fantasy and they’ll actually do that xD
The world of Mist was originally dominated by two intelligent species: the Dragons, masters of the sky and favorites of the gods, who took a liking for snacking on the other intelligent species, the Elves. I’ll skip the hows and whys here, but in the end the deities of the world of Mist decided to change the way things were, and now there are seven elven species (mixed unions rarely manage to produce offsprings) and three dragon species, who 100% can’t crossbreed at all.
I. THE DRAGONS
All dragons have the ability to influence the world around them in various ways (generally linked to the elements around them) and to communicate with other creature via telepathy. The flip side of that is that, now that they can hear the world think, they need to be paired with elves at birth in order to survive: the elves provide hatchling with a telepathic shell, allowing them to grow into fully-fledged dragons. This creaed a lot of resentment in the older dragons, who were paired as adults, and the resentment is kind of transmitted to the new generation.
I.1. Skydivers:
Skydivers are flying dragons. They have four limbs (including hands with opposable thumbs) as well as wings, and long tails that can make up about a third of their total length (sometimes it makes up hal, there’s a lot of body types). Most of them are big enough to carry up to two adult elves on their back, though some are small enough to be carried on one’s shoulder. Their key element is air, meaning that their magic is somewhet unpredictable, inflences the weather and operates mostly on intengible elements (air current, of course, but also occasionally feelings or the mind of the people who surround them, though that last variation is a very rare one).
Elves paired with Skydivers tend to be more reckless and absent-minded than they would otherwise be. Some can get mild levitating abilities, but that’s a rare subset.
I.2 Stompers:
Stompers are the Earth dragons. They sort of look like sauropode dinosaurs (think Littlefoot from The Land Before Time, except in shades of greens and browns) and are generally tasked with on-land transport and protection. They do not have opposable thumbs, but their ability to influence the earth and plants around them helps compensating for that, in that they don’t need much tools to make themselves shelters.
Elves paired with Stompers usually gain in stability what they lose in jumping abilities--most of them don’t react well to having their feet off the ground.
I.3 Divers:
They’re the swimming dragons, who evolve exclusively in the oceans--they can, if asked, go trough sweet waters and use rivers to travel inside a continent, but it’s not their prefered methods as there is a risk they could stay trapped inland in case of drought. Their overal silhouette is similar to that of an orca, but their size can go from big dolphin to blue whales proportions--the larger ones usually take care of spreading messages between continents or protecting ships on long journeys. Their main influence is on the water currents that surround them, which they can modify to various degrees, but because water is an element associated with quick change, some of them can provoke character and/or genetic evolution in selected individuals if they want to.
Elves paired with Divers usually have excellent breath-holding skills and higher resistance to the cold, which allows them to stay in the water longer than their peers (or, in the case of fire elves, to survive getting in it at all)
II. THE ELVES
All elves currently alive in the world of Mist are descended from what they call Rune Elves (in reference to their runes-based magic). Some of them were alive before the Split and, like dragons, there are legends about individuals who survived the gods’ punishment without having their magic (and, as a result, their bodies) changed. While my novel takes place a couple hundred human years after the Split, the Elves’ long life spans means that they still very much live in a fairly post-apocalyptic environment, in which they’ve organized enough to settle down in the ruins of the Rune Elves’ kingdoms and make their own frontiers, but not enough to have solidly established governments and/or dynasties yet.
II.1 Fire elves:
Also called black elves because of their very dark skins or coal elves as an insult, their fire magic allows them to produce and manipulate open flame, and resist heat well enough that their prefered method of cleaning up is to rub themselves with hot embers. The flipside of that is that they have extremely low resistance to cold or even fresh temperature: if they fall in water, for exemple, they usually get seriously sick and often die.
They’re among the elves with the shortest average size, and generally have frizzy black hair (though most of them end up with permanently straightened hair due to the heat of their fingers when they comb through it) red or golden eyes--dark brown is also an option, but it’s a rarer color and is usually considered the luckiest.
Myranael, one of my three main characters, is a fire elf.
II.2 Earth elves:
Also called tree-elves because of their ability to bring trees to life (and in the case of one notable family, to travel via tree trunks) and occasionally insulted with the nickname “Stump face”, their magic allows them to influence all sorts of plants, but not the earth itself. They prefer to live surrounded by trees and often in the very branches, and they’re well known for their talents at cultivating. They don’t do well when they’re cut off from plants though, and they need regular watering (drinking water, of course, but also bathing) and time spent walking barefoot or with their toes in nutrient-rich soil to maintain proper health.
They have rich, earthly-toned skin (very often with red-ish tinges like sienna) and coiled or curly green or brown hair. Occasionally, some will grow thin vines instead of regular hair, but those are the exception. The most common eyes among them are green or brown, with the favored color being hazel brown, mostly because it is the same color as their sacred seed.
Naleessie, one of the three main characters of my novel, is a, earth elf.
II.3 Water elves:
Also called blue elves but more often than not refered to as cold elves or fishfolk, the vast majority of their population lives underwater and shies away from going on land because dehydration can settle in and kill them very easily. They’re anthropomorphic like the other species, but have webbed hands and fingers, and are covered in scales like fishes. Their colors and appearances are about as varied as the fishes we have in our world, and not all of them have hair at all (when they do, the colors vry on where they live and what kind of fish they’re inspired from). Some of them have skin that’s similar to sharks’, but that’s a rarer subset, and they generally tend to be relegated to their own corner of the oceans. Eye colors vary a lot, but generally the closer they are to the surrounding water, the luckier they are presented as.
Yamaël, the last of my three protagonists, is a water elf.
II.4 Air elves:
Also called grey elves, when they’re even known about, they’ve mostly left the ground and now live as nomads in the cloud, powered by their collective air magic. Most of them have the ability to levitate on and manipulate air currents, and they resist cold temperatures easily, but they don’t do well with enclosed spaces or being anchored down for too long. Grey, white and light blue hair is common among them, with grey and blue eyes the usual eyes colors, though you can find the occasional white-eyed person (it looks like they don’t have irises, and it’s extremely disturbing to the other elven species).
II.5 Sand elves:
Contrary to the other species the desert elves (also named poison elves) don’t really possess a magic that allows them to visibly manipulate the world around them. They are, however, able to eat most of the plants you can find in the deserts of the world of Mist, the majority of which are poisonous. The sand elves’ blood is a highly deadly poison to almost all othe rspecies if injected, but it can also be distillated in the most potent counter-poison known to elfkind. Because of this and their nomadic habits (adopted to avoid depleting a desert’s reserves) they tend to live more closed in on themselves and limit their contects with other species to commercial exchanges. As a result, they are sometimes feared, but in the lands of Mist they’re also highly respected as the only elves able to cross the deset and bring news and needed supplies to the other elves. (Sand elves have, as a result, become excellent scolars through oral transmission of knowledge, and on the continent concerned by the novel, they are the ones with the most knowledge of how the new elven species work and what is going on in vaious parts of the continent).
Sand elves usually have bronze skind of various shades and thick, often curly black hair as well as blood-red eyes and, since chance had it that women made up the bulk of their population, they ended up as matriarcal societies more often than not.
II.6 Night elves:
Considered to be legends in some part of the world, night elves are often refered to as spirits. They have pasty white skin and very pale eyes, and live underground to protect themselves from the sun, which burns and hurts them to the point of causing great damage and can easily blind and kill them. They usually dig galeries inside mountains (like the Silver Mountains I mentioned in yesterday’s post) and only come out at night for short periods of time so they can trade the silver they dig out for other goods and services with the Overlanders. They have the ability to manipulate shadows and see in the dark with very little help (although they do enjoys some glowing animals called skargnes as pets) and often have pale yellow eyes and thin blonde hair. Most of them also decorate their bodies with tattoos and scarification which they decorate with glowing ink and stones.
II.7 Light elves:
Considered like dragonlings in the lands of Mist (but not the rest of the planet) because of their early association with dragons, they’re elves born with the ability to run close to light speed and extreme resistance to impacts (though their accelerated metabolims means that they run a very high risk of bleeding out when cut, even from seemingly shallow wounds). They survive partly on photosynthesis and are often mistaken for exhibitionists when they dress accordingly--and they are, indeed, more comfortable with nudity than many other elve species, something that is especially appearant in the traditions of the Dragonriders, who are populated in great parts by Light elves.
Light elves have brown skin too, more often than not with golden undertones, lighter than the Earth elves’ but generally darker than sand elves. Most of them are blond or white-haired though, more often than not with curly or wavy hair, and it’s very rare to meet one whose eyes aren’t some shade of gold, amber or yellow.
III. OTHER CREATURES
The world of Mist has another, sentient but widely dominated species that is native to the world and then, through the course of the novel, they are accidentally contacted/attacked by another one, just as sentient as they are and technologically (though not necessarily biologically) advantaged.
III.1 Lüssyoles
Lüssyoles are small, glowing fairies who are generally no higher than an elf’s palm. Too small to interest the elven world, they usually live next to but not with them and mind their own business, although in some places the Lüssyoles (who can resist to a wider palet of environments than their larger neighbors) have managed to strike arrangements for living of an almost sybiotic nature.
III.2 Humans
Humans aren’t native to the world of Mist. However, through the course o fhte story, a fleet of humans looking for a new world to colonize (due to overpopulation on their home planet, which is itself three or four times removed from Earth) land on the Lands of Mist and, through believing themselves alone on the planet due to ill-timed streaks of bad luck, accidentally start a war with the natives. Later on, thigs get better, but it takes a while.
Behold, followers, I have unearthed this from the ruins of my (first) deviantart account that haven’t seen any dusting since 2011! I still maintain it’s their fault for being so fucking ill-suited to texts posting, tbh.
Ironically enough, this is the only map I never re-drew, which may or may not be a good thing seeing as I’m thinking about reworking the geography and using a different technique to re-do my maps.
Anyway here’s the beast (sorry about the crap quality, babu me didn’t know better xD)
Carte des Terres de Brumes by Fanderpg on DeviantArt
This is the continent named the lands of mist (terres de brume)! To the East, you have the Fire Elves’ kingdom, stuck between volcanoes (basically the entire reasong why they settled there was the constant source of heat) and the sea, where their mortal enemies, the water elves, live. I wanted to put them in the East because back in my days of being on a LOTR fan forum, we had a conversation where everyone wondeed why the heroes were always set West of the world.. and this was born.
Mind you, on the western side, you have the Earth Elves’ country which is pretty much entirely forest and borders the dragons’ mountains (now empty, but that bit is getting ahead of the prompts), and which is also the native land of Naleessie, one of the three MC for my novel.
On the whole I kind of want to scrap most of it--the main landmarks (such as the mountains and the desert in the middle) will remain, but they’ve mostly been renaimed now, and I have a clearer idea of their influence on the geography and geopolitics of the world (if you look South, for example, the mountains there became the Silver Mountains, because of what the Night elves who live under the rock trade with the other nations).
It’s actually really fun, looking back on this, because while I always feel like I don’t work enough on this world it shows that it has evolved a ton! And even if I’m a little bit jealous of @shippingismypersonalhell’s shiny map (it looks super cool really) I have a clearer idea of where I want to go with this whole thing...so that’s cool :D
