I wanted to get away from the stock-standard fantasy cliches developed by D&D and its offspring in modern fantasy-fiction, delve into the more surreal fantasy of writers like Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany, and so add an element of the mythic to their existance, rather than describing a history/culture of "funny-looking humans."
None of this is meant to be "the whole truth" or even indicate what the whole truth is -- I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader: to make up his own mind, pick and choose what he likes. Nor is this meant to reflect anything from the Elves of Athas supplement (which I haven't read, though I own it), and probably even contradicts it (though it might not for all I know).
If anything below doesn't make sense, or you want me to expand on some bit(s) of information here for a better idea of my meaning, or even just the reasoning behind my choice of it, just ask.
I hope you all find something useful or intriguing for your own games amid this!
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Elves. Perfect, immortal spirits. Wise and tall. The first-born of the Rebirth, the time when those halflings who were not among the few who had fled into hiding in the distant wildernesses, entered the Pristine Tower to emerge changed: the Reborn...who could live and survive upon the new face of Athas in the Green Age.
Elves. The wisest among us. The most skilled. Leaders, diplomats, and life-shapers. Bound to the essence of the spiritual earth, knowing it as a mother knows her child, or as lovers know the touch of each's too-familiar hands. They were those who were to guide the Reborn in their construction, through their inborn intimacy with the new land.
In those times, when an elf's days had grown long upon the holy earth, he would feel a call "to the edge of the world", and would be compelled to set forth on a journey, to walk into the mists and shadows of the world to reach the Undying Land that they called Shallahakri. Yet the Undying Lands are not truly a "land" or a "world" as might be imagined, not a place like Athas is.
They are a state of existance into which ancient elves would pass when their nature demanded it, when their evolution required it, a state both seperate from and intertwined with the (meta)physical realm of Athas, a spiritual existance created by their close binding to the holy earth and the land's spirits. A realm of purification and mingled thoughts, of eternity and what mortal peoples could only describe as places of jeweled lights.
And to reach this, the elves would walk upon paths guarded by the lost sprites of the wilderness, who were the children of the spirits. Sprites were guides and prophets, mysterious creatures whose intuition made them great trackers and guides through the new wilds of the Reborn Land, as well as great oracles and soothsayers. It is said not even the elves could pass through the wilds as could the sprites, nor were any others gifted with their understanding the harmonies among the planes of Athas' existance, the elemental boundaries and facets that underpined the world and bound it together.
When the blood of the Reborn washed across the land like a drowning ocean at Rajaat's hand, a fate was spoken: it is said out of Faerie, out from Shallahakri would come the Wrath of the Elves, to bear down upon Rajaat the Unclean, to sweep the filth of the Warbringer from the land, to crucify his Champions and with their blood replenish the holy earth they had defiled.
And so Rajaat ordered the Sprites slain, the guardians and guides upon the pathways between worlds, the little ones who had crossed once and back, who were the children of the living earth and not born of the Pristine Tower like the other races, but were born of the land's spirits.
He ordered this so that the Wrath of the Elves would never be able to challenge him, that the Land's Champion would not interefere, would not salvage the Green Age and the Reborn Lands, and thus keep the Blue Age from its Restoration, for without the guides, there would be none to walk between the worlds and bring the Wrath of the Elves back to Athas, the way would be confused with shadows and false paths and none to untangle them.
To Rajaat and those who followed him, the Wrath of the Elves was the Devil, come to trap them all in the unclean hell to which they had been consigned when the Blue Age ended. To the elves and the loyal races of the Rebirth, the Wrath of the Elves was their Saviour, a protector of the living and holy world their ancestors had bequeathed to them from the ashes of the world's first death.
Today, the only ones who know of these things are the few survivors of the Cleansing Wars, living and undead -- one wonders though, as wizards walk between the worlds, as they are wont to do, if one will stumble upon the Wrath of the Elves and lead it back to Athas...for sorcery and the path of the mind both were young at the time Rajaat made war, and neither had yet pierced between the barriers of the worlds, and were thus no threat in the fashion of the Sprites.
With no paths left to follow, hunted and crucified by the savage Andropinis, feet broken and legs cut from them, the elves went mad and died. The survivors were led by the last of their kings, led by the longing that was left in them to traverse the world to Shallahakri, and they kept running in order to escape the terrible armies of the Betrayers, to run until the sands ran out, to run to the edge of the world, to run until they met the sky and their souls could once more reach the lost Undying Light.
So it is that the elves are like fallen angels, once shining beings who have been severed from their source, longing for yet unable to know it, and so the elves wander still, for they feel the call of that other realm in their blood and breath, though they would never find it for the ways had all been lost and sealed, the path had curved, and one could no longer walk to the Far Land, into the Faerie place, where they were to dwell.
The elves have a saying, "I run like the wind that I may join it," for if they can run fast enough, they will be released from the earth, like the wind, and can run the straight path to the Undying Land, to Shallahakri. To find the Undying Land, to find Shallahakri is to find the completeness denied to them by their birth upon the dust-scoured remains of Athas.
Perhaps this is why elves burn the bodies of their dead and release the ashes into the wind, to set the soul free upon the wind, to unbind it from the earth, and allow the empty place to fill as it escapes to Shallahakri, and makes the straight run over the horizon.To run like the wind is to escape the death-clutch of the empty earth upon their soul.
The elves of today have another saying, "Only when Athas has burned away into cinders, when the empty land finally dies, will the elven soul be free of its weight." Perhaps that is why their sorcerers ravage the already tortured and dying land with magic, to hasten its death and their own freedom.
Perhaps the defilers among the elves, defilers among a people who were once bound so tightly to the holy earth, seek out necromancy and illusion to fulfill this prophecy, to heal their souls of the dead weight of Athas, the hollow place each carries deep inside.
Created with an intimate connection to the green lands of the Rebirth, they are still bound to the land, bound to what they now call the empty earth, part of their soul unfilled and incomplete for the dying and vanished spirits that once populated the land. The elf looks out across the wastelands and knows it, knows it as one knows and yet knows not the corpse of a loved one.
Perhaps this connection to a dead and dying land might explain why necomancers are so common among elven wizards, they are the only possible expression of the race's once vibrant connection to life, the results of their intimate binding with to the world that remains even today as Athas dies.
Among men, it is whispered, "If you wish to know of the unquiet dead and the spirits that wander the wastelands, speak to an elf, and mind your soul or it too will soon be stolen." The elves have an intimate connection to the emptiness, to the death that claims the earth.
And so they must run because the land clutches at their souls if they do not, it withers them from the inside. They cannot remain in one place long else the empty earth will take them, and they will fade into darkness, melancholoy, and then nothing.
As all the sorcerer monarchs know, as Andropinis discovered when he slew and crucified them, elves do not last long in prisons, for they shrivel and die, uneating, undrinking, unspeaking. The elves run in an endless search for freedom and release from this spiritual burden, and they say, "Over the curve of the horizon is where we will find Shallahakri and the One."
The One. The Creator. The first of the elves, who bore the rest. The shaper of the earth -- whom the Rhulisti would recognize as a life-shaper, the one who formed the modern world from the brown tide and the Pristine Tower, who set the laws that would become the druidic ways, so as to keep the new world from the same destruction that had claimed the old. The One who imagined the shape of the Rebirth from the dying world of the Blue Age. The One who learned the secret of shaping the halflings themselves, and who birthed the new world from his mind, bringing forth life from death.
Time has confused legends, blurred one into the other, changed the very face of history into that of myth. To the elves who endlessly wander the deserts of Athas, the One is lord among those who passed into Shallahakri, a wise and benevolent chieftan who waits for all his people to join him in their paradise. He is thought of as the king who first led the run, who escaped Andropinis and spat in the sorcerer's eye by creating an invisible fortress beyond the curve of earth's horizon, a place in which to hide the elven people from genocide.
Even today, mirages are called "the King's Whispers" in his memory -- for they are like the illusions said to hide this fabled city of the elves, which misdirect those who seek for it. This is Shallahakri, which has become a legendary lost city in the desert, or in the mountains, or even hidden amid the silt, just over the horizon, one day to be found by those tribes who diligently search. The elves know this must be true, for they feel its call in their souls, telling them to seek it out in the shadows and hidden places on the horizon.
The elves say illusion and shadow are bound in kind, that illusion is the light that remains in the shadow, or rather the echoes of light that linger, though they are the trickery of the will-o-wisp in the darkness, summoning doom with its beautiful lies of warmth and fire where there is only cold ash.
Perhaps, even more than stories of their hidden city and its illusionist king, their ancient inborn drive to seek Shallahakri among the shadows is why the elves number so many illusionists among their wizards, they manipulate the shadows, they follow the echoes of the path, seeking their lost world with its ghostly remains. They are drawn like moths to the flame of these last echoes, hoping to fill the hollow inside with the false comfort of the will-o-wisps that are all that remain to them of Shallahakri.
Yet...when Andropinis returned from his banishment in the Black, leaping from the realm of crystal and light he found there to the center of all shadows that is Athas, perhaps he used what he had once helped destroy to gain his own reentry to the physical world.
Perhaps he found Shallahakri and the ancient elves...or perhaps that shadow he found was simply a twisted version of what once was; an echo whose properties were used to open a way back into Athas for the banished sorcerer, a reflection that held that memory of a pathway between the worlds, or the memory of what a man would have believed it to be.
All pathways were lost for the guides were lost, and it is told that the Undying Lands vanished into a cold, horrible darkness, like that of a forgotten memory...and in this, the realm Andropinis attained took three centuries to find, so long forgotten and erased from memory.
He sifted through a multitude of shadows to uncover it, a path he walked hopping from one shadow to another, back through the false reflections of forgotten ages, desperately trying to find a shadow that might contain the memory of this path, lost somewhere in the depths of the dangerous, unreal and ever-shifting shadow worlds of the Black. Perhaps he unwound the path Rajaat had confused between the worlds with his shadowy magics.
If the place were truly Shallahakri, then what terrible irony that the hand who slew so many of the elves would be the one to have found it once more. Only if the legends are not confused, if time has not erased their meaning, if Shallahakri is a place...
That's excellent! Well written, soooo well, with nice sentenses and well placed words, that I had to read it 2 or 3 times to gather almost all the sense of everything
Although, it's a compliment, I do not speak english as my first language.
Thanks, That was hell of a nice story.
Even still, your story is still an awesome read bro
good work.
Beautiful rendition of the legendary times of the Green Age and ancient history. Don't contradict anything from EoA, and even if it did, it's a legend, so why not use it. It's very evocative. Have you given thought to the other Rebirth races? dwarves, humans, pyreen?
And I always searched for a kind of Messiah/savior for Athas, not for really saving it but more as a figure of hope since so much misery in the populace could have given rise to such a legend.
I'm also glad I didn't accidentally contradict anything from EoA! That's quite cool.
Have you given thought to the other Rebirth races? dwarves, humans, pyreen?
Yes, I have. I'll get around to posting some of that when I have time.
You've seen some about the Sprites above (though I am suddenly recalling it is supposed to be Pixies, isn't it?), and I've also written up material on the Pyreen, Trolls, and Ogres.
And I always searched for a kind of Messiah/savior for Athas, not for really saving it but more as a figure of hope since so much misery in the populace could have given rise to such a legend.
Heh, and you've got two to pick from above! (The One and the Wrath of the Elves)
First I should note that the Wrath of the Elves is a forgotten legend -- that is, I included it for completeness. That said, go ahead and ignore that if you like and give the elves some twisted memory of a version of it (maybe they recall it as a being that will someday strike down the Sorcerer Kings and lay waste to Athas, thereby finally freeing the elves from the empty earth).
That would make an interesting adventure: the PCs are hired to stop this horrible, terrible threat to the survival of Athas' future -- some horrible spirit the elves are summoning somewhere out in the desert -- and should they succeed in disrupting the ritual, they realize (either immediately, or some time later) that they just canned their one and only hope against Rajaat's eventual escape and return -- all because the original legends had been forgotten and twisted.
Or perhaps they discover the truth of this legend during the course of the adventure, that the Wrath of the Elves is a protector and saviour rather than the harbringer of apocalypse. Their goal suddenly changes to trying to thwart the attempts of other parties (frightened nobles and misled sages, worried Sorcerer Kings, crazed cultists, etc.) to disrupt the ritual and stop the summoning.
Now, I've had some other ideas about that: supposing the Avangion (Oronis) is the Wrath of the Elves...not quite what the elves were expecting, of course. "Where's the rivers of blood? Where's the endless destruction?" The elves are going to be seriously disappointed, probably furious that their freedom is not coming (or so they believe).
The druids of today and the Green Age would be the inheritors of the ancient elves' knowledge, and their legacy. Perhaps the first "druids" were elves who taught the elven ways and magic to the other races because their people were being hunted down and destroyed, and could not continue their work. They hoped to stem the depletion of the world's lifeforce as it was devoured by magic, to make warriors who would help them protect the land's spirits from Rajaat's murder of them.
EDITed to add: So why the elves? Perhaps their function, in becoming Spirits of the Land, was to help sustain and stabilize the ecology of the Reborn Land. Those responsible for the Rebirth realized or believed that the new world's ecology was unstable and might break down without nuturing and oversight -- hence the elves, who would at first guide the other races in tending to and understanding the land, and then merge with the land itself to continue their duties.
Ironically, this would conflict with the elves current beliefs ("BECOME the land?! We wish to ESCAPE it!!") and they would wholly reject the idea.
I can see introducing that part of the saga to my players- they really get into that type of background.
Hmmmm....so maybe an old elven crone has a plan for gaining back the responsibilities they threw away....maybe it's a good plan that should succeed or maybe it's an ill-conceived and vain plan that should be thwarted. Oh, these decisions hurt my head!