Chapter 32: Chapter 32: Races of Eldoria
The map Vespera had sketched was not especially detailed.
[ Image ]
It didn’t need to be.
She had drawn five zones with clean, economical lines, written names in each, and now tapped the paper twice with one finger like she was marking the start of something.
"The races," she said.
"You should know them before you know anything else about the political structure, because the politics is just the races in expensive clothing."
Zara shifted slightly on her cushion, settling in with the particular quality of attention she gave things she was actually interested in.
Alex looked at the map.
Then at his mother.
"How many races?" he asked.
"Five that matter. There are more, technically, but they are scattered or absorbed or so reclusive that they have not made themselves relevant to the continent’s balance of power. The five categories that matter are, us, the Aeonians, the Elves, the Dwarves, and the Giants." She paused.
"I’ll go in order of how often you will encounter them."
"Start with humans then," Alex said.
"Since presumably that’s going to be most of my life."
"The human race." Vespera said it flatly, with the slight inflection of someone who found the subject both important and deeply ordinary.
"No fixed affinity. Every other race has a direction they grow toward, humans have none. A human child can develop fire, water, shadow, lightning, any element. It is determined by bloodline, by environment, by rare circumstance. This is generally considered a weakness."
"It’s not?" Alex guessed.
"It is and it isn’t. It means human have a longer road to mastery in any element because they do not have an inherent attunement pulling them toward it. A Shadow Elf will always understand shadow mana in a way a human shadow mage will have to work three times as hard to achieve." Vespera folded her hands in her lap.
"But it also means humans are unpredictable. In a world where the other races know exactly what kind of mana they will be fighting when they face their own kind, facing a human is facing an unknown. And humans have the largest population on this continent by a significant margin. Numbers matter in war."
’They always do,’ Alex thought.
"The Aeonian race," Vespera continued, and something in her voice shifted. Not more serious. More considered.
"They are not humans with beast features. The description you’ll find in most texts is beast-kin, which is accurate enough, they carry the inheritance of powerful creatures in their blood and it shapes them. But what makes them genuinely dangerous is their relationship with mana. Aeonians have an affinity for mana itself. Not for a specific element of mana. For mana as a substance."
"That means they can control it directly," Alex said.
"More than control. They sense it the way you or I sense temperature. They can move through dense mana environments that would disorient a human mage. And they produce more people with dual or even triple affinity than any other race. Their elite soldiers are a different kind of problem than anything else on the continent." She paused.
"Which is why what they did to Astaria Elysian is one of the greater collective acts of stupidity in Eldoria’s recorded history."
Zara’s head came up. "Astaria Elysian is Aeonian?"
"The greatest descendant of their bloodline in living memory, yes." Vespera’s expression was specific. "She should have been their empress by now. Their greatest weapon. Their icon. Instead, the pride of their leadership and the ignorance of their court turned their greatest descendant into their greatest enemy. And now she leads the Night Order." A pause.
"Every Aeonian elder who participated in whatever drove her out is sleeping poorly and has been for centuries, if they’re sleeping at all."
Alex filed that away.
’So the most powerful independent force on the continent is run by someone who was betrayed by her own people.’
The warmth stirred faintly.
He ignored it.
"The Elves," Vespera said, moving on with the efficiency of someone who had organised this briefing in advance.
"Humanoid, you would not necessarily identify an elf at a distance. Closer, you’d notice the build, which tends toward slender, and the ears, which are sharp and pointed. But the more important distinction is elemental. Elves are attuned to what the texts call nature classes." She glanced at him.
"That’s a catch-all term for elements tied to the natural world. Wood. Blood. Storm. Ash. Shadow. And Celestial, which is its own category entirely."
"Six types," Alex said.
"Six that have been recorded, yes. The wood elves are foresters, rangers, scouts, healers who draw on growth and living matter. The blood elves deal in vitality and life force, which makes them extraordinary healers and terrifying battlefield mages when they choose to be. Storm elves are exactly what the name suggests, they produce the most feared artillery mages on the continent. Ash elves deal in decay, erosion, the end of things. They are not popular at gatherings." Her mouth curved slightly.
"Shadow elves are rare. Their attunement runs deep, and they don’t produce many people, but the ones they do produce are..."
She paused.
"The ones they produce are problems," Zara said.
"Succinct, but accurate," Vespera agreed.
"And then there are the Celestial Elves, who rule over all of them. Their affinity is not something that translates well into simple description. They do not simply control stars or light. They deal with forces that predate the continent’s current understanding of mana entirely. The Celestial Elves are one of the strongest groups on the continent and they know it, and they run the elven empire with that knowledge in every decision they make."
Alex looked at the sketch map.
The Elven Empire sat to the west.
"The Dwarves," Vespera said.
"Short, broad, built with a density that makes them considerably more dangerous in melee than their size suggests. They have metal affinity as a race. Their forgers are unrivalled, the best weapons and armour on the continent come out of dwarven hands. Their defensive capabilities are extraordinary. And they are temperamentally not inclined toward the elves."
"Why?" Alex asked.
"Because Dwarves mine. They cut stone, hollow mountains, clear forests for raw material. Elves, particularly wood elves, consider forests living things that belong to no one and should not be cut without ritual and permission and three separate hearings conducted under a full moon." Vespera’s tone was perfectly neutral.
"The Dwarves find this position idiotic. The Elves find the Dwarves’ position sacrilegious. They share a continent, they trade when they must, they do not trade one word of goodwill when they don’t have to."
Zara snorted quietly.
"And the Giants," Alex said.
Vespera stopped.
A beat passed that was different from her usual pauses.
This one had the quality of genuine uncertainty.
"The Giants," she said, "are the race I know the least about, and that is not false modesty. They are reclusive in a way that makes the term reclusive seem inadequate. They maintain territory in the east and they do not leave it and they do not permit entry into it. Anyone who approaches their land discovers this fact very quickly and very physically." She paused.
"They have the ability to transform. In combat, their size becomes something that defies the word large. But whether that transformation is a racial ability or a cultivation technique or something else entirely, no one outside their territory can tell you, because the people who got close enough to study it carefully did not return with notes."
"So we just... leave them alone," Eclipse said, speaking for the first time in a while.
"Everyone leaves them alone," Vespera confirmed.
"They leave everyone else alone. Making a neutral force into an enemy for the sake of information about their fighting capabilities is the kind of decision that only looks good on paper."
Alex stared at the eastern edge of the map.
’A race that no one knows anything about and that can transform into something big enough that even transcendence ranked people don’t go near them.’
He would have filed that under problems-for-later, except something about it felt more immediate than that. He wasn’t sure why.
Vespera’s voice pulled him back.
"There is one more thing," she said. Her expression shifted. Not dramatically. Just the way a person’s face shifts when they are about to say something they do not enjoy saying.
"It is not a race. It is something else."
The room was quiet.
"The Undead," Vespera said.
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