Elves

Core concept

The past is not gone. We walk it.

Memory made present

Elves do not sleep; they Trance, and in trance they relive their own memories with all their original colour. To an Elf, a joy from two centuries ago is not a faded story; it is a place they can return to tonight. So is a grief. So is a betrayal.

This is why Elves seem unable to “move on.” They are not brooding; they are simply still there, in a moment others let fade long ago. A debt owed to an Elf’s grandmother may still, to the Elf who watched it made, feel owed this week.

Kindreds

• High Elves keep the memory of cities, lore, and the old arts.
• Wood Elves keep the memory of the living wild, and are common in the deep forests of Arcanum and eastern Onyxia.
• Drow, the elves who went below during the Divine War and stayed, relive not the world’s memory but the bloodline’s, ruled by matriarchs who hold the longest memories, and wary of a sunlit surface that forgets so easily.

Friction

The short-lived races find Elves aloof and slow to forgive. From the Elf’s side, others simply forget too fast, treating the dead as gone and old wrongs as settled, when to the Elf nothing has faded at all.