The Culture Column
Physiology
Elves aren't totally alive. They aren't undead so far as anyone can tell, but it still might be most fitting to use the words of Terry Pratchett and call them "differently alive." While they require air in order to speak of course, elves have no need to breathe for more vital reasons than this and can neither suffocate nor be poisoned by toxic gasses. Elves need to drink between one-half and two gallons of liquid every day but no specific liquid is necessary. They will settle for water if they have to but prefer the taste of alcohols and blood (many elf bands even mix the two together). Food is not required though they will readily consume living beings- elves have teeth that are perfect for shredding flesh and cracking bones. It's not uncommon for someone to experience that up close and personal when an elf decides not to bother with killing her victim first.
Of far greater importance to an elf is sleep- elves spend nearly half the day in a sleep so deep that they don't even appear to be alive to those who know nothing of elves. The more knowledgeable man knows that an elf physically withers away from lack of sleep as if he were starving and that no matter the cause of death, a lifeless elf lasts only a second before all but its bones turn to dust in the blink of an eye.
Social Structure
Elves are almost always born in identical pairs (twin-less babies are considered dead and given funerary rights) and this is reflected in the band's hierarchy. Elfish bands are ruled by twin brother captains who share equally in all things. This includes not only authority and mates but also death. Normally the twin of a slain elf continues to live but a captain without a brother is like a newborn in such a state, considered no longer alive. Soon enough he really won't be because elfish funerary rites are ghoulish affairs where the body is ripped open with knives, claws, and even teeth by as many as a dozen participants before it is treated as any other piece of meat and divided up for consumption. In the case of captains this last step is put off long enough for the eldest pair of twins to read the entrails in order to determine who should next lead the band.
Others whose twins have died are in slightly better circumstances, but not by much. The so-called Wretched are at the bottom of the pecking order, last in everything, and despised by all, not to mention that the loss of their companion causes them to suffer what may be the sole pain that an elf is capable of experiencing. Not that it helps with their empathy skills at all; Wretched are even more nasty and violent than normal elves.
The captains have the sole right in the band to mate and reproduce. Males who infringe on this right are killed. One might suppose that they would find an outlet for any frustrations in other species but there is some undefined quality in non-elves that makes them filthy and undesirable in the eyes of even the most desperate elf. Children are left to fend for themselves as soon as they can walk on their own, which causes less deaths than in other intelligent species given their lack of need for food. So far as anyone can tell, the elves do not suffer from the incestuous relationships that their restrictive breeding practices cause.
The Forbid Dance
They say that they were thrown out of the heavens for being too noisy. Everyone knows that tale if they've heard of elves at all. Even you've heard it now. It's as embedded in the mind as the image of burning buildings and torn corpses cut by wicked bone-knives and stuck full of elf-shot. But it's hard to figure out where they got the idea that they were too noisy, if you somehow spy them while they're on the prowl. Elf bands move in double file as quietly as cats, with captains in front, and whether they're at camp or on the move they barely speak above a whispering tone.
It's when they've found something to kill that the story of their origins here makes sense. As quickly as they turn to dust in death, the silence becomes sheer noise. The air is filled with the sound of shrieks, resembling more than anything else the sound of pigs squealing in a slaughterhouse. It's the sound of death. There's few who survive an elf raid in life who manage to escape it in their dreams at night too.
The elves call their raids the Forbid Dance. It is savage ritual and hedonistic indulgence wrapped together. The scene is full of the screams of killer and victim alike, combining into a twisted melody where, if you listen from your hiding place, it seems almost like each terrible fits perfectly into a greater structure. It is not a far leap to imagine that through the killing and the torture and their own exultant cries they are creating for themselves some horrifying symphony.
The maenads of Greek myth could do no better than the elves, who rarely leave survivors and never leave anyone- living or dead- physically intact. You can always tell the survivor of an elf raid by his looks. His eyes have lost their light, his skin is scarred. He is missing fingers, maybe an ear or even an eye. The elves always have their fun. Even the villages themselves can be said to be killed during the Forbid Dance. Few people are interested in setting foot in a place of mutilated corpses, burned-out buildings, and booby traps set down for the express purpose of hurting anyone who decided to enter.
Elves are infamous for their knives carved from the bones of their victims (not to mention various other gruesome accessories, like necklaces of fingers and rudimentary armor made from tied-together bones and leathered skin) and for their three-foot-long blowguns whose "elf-shot" can reach distances of thirty feet and are capable of killing by piercing the throat or heart as easily as by poison. When thrown with enough force a bola can crush bones, and thorns and pieces of sharpened bone are tied into the rope so that the weapon not only ensnares and breaks but punctures and cuts as well. Another weapon common to the elves is the rope javelin, a piece of sharpened, barbed bone or stone attached to a long rope. The head of the weapon is thrown (sometimes propelled from an atlatl) and then the rope is pulled back, dragging the elf's target back with it.
Those who wield one of these weapons will see and hear the spirits of the people who had been killed by the elf with that weapon, and the spirits will torment the wielder until the weapon has a new owner. They bear no ill will toward the weapon's wielder per se, but whether these are truly the souls of the elf's victims or just fragments and shades left behind, they do not possess enough presence of mind to understand that the man they are tormenting is not an elf. The elves themselves are able to perceive the spirits but it seems impossible to wear them down. In fact, they actually enjoyment out of talking to and taunting the spirits, which only adds to their fury.
The Forbid Dance must have something to do with it, many theorize. It is, of course, possible that this curse is simply somehow intrinsic to the elves' very being but the Forbid Dance almost seems like a dedication. There are strange markings carved into bones. When the Forbid Dance is over the air is silent save for the whimpers of the still-dying and the slish-slash of working blades- and the elvish whispers of names that inspire dread without knowledge of what they mean.
But there are hints here and there, clues carefully gathered over the generations from centuries' worth of survivor accounts. Elevated altars built with the bones of birds and men to the chant of "loth, loth." The words "kutunluu rel lunath nagl," frenziedly whispered over and over with each word emphasized in turn while the elves split their victims' bodies in what almost looks like an attempt to give them the appearance of having eight limbs. "Azat nor azat," as skulls are broken open and the elves turn their attentions even to their own, and countless other events that appear time and time again.
Nobody can figure out what the Forbid Dance is. A magical ritual to harness the energies of pain and deathÖ A sacrifice to the alien things that the elves whisper of or a festival in their honorÖ An attempt to summon those monstersÖ The possibilities are endless and so, it despairingly seems, are numbers of the elves, always lurking just beyond the edge of civilization, in the dark and wild places where they cannot ever be rooted out for long.
Next month: Historian-magicians, dances that last for days, and construction projects that last for centuries, all from a bunch of rat-people.
