The Dark Elves are an extinct lineage that once ruled the southern forests of Aboyuinzu as dragon riders of terrifying power. Their ashen gray skin and coal-black eyes marked them as a people touched by draconic magic, while their heavy furs protected them from the perpetual chill that followed in their wake. These elves formed soul-bonds with the great wyrms of the south, sharing consciousness with their mounts in a symbiosis that made them nearly invincible in battle.
Their civilization came to an abrupt end during the Dragon Purge, when rival nations united to destroy both the dark elves and their dragon allies. The forests of Aboyuinzu are now filled with towering totems to the old dragon gods, massive stone monuments that still radiate faint draconic power. The dark elves raised them, and the charge held in the stone is the same draconic working a wyrm once pressed into the people themselves.
The line is held to be extinct, but the working bred true, and a trait that breeds true is hard to end completely. In remote communities there are still people born with the ashen skin and the coal-black eyes the wyrm set into the founders. Those who carry the marks often feel a pull toward the old totems, and a few wake with the words of long-dead dragons still in their ears.
The making
The ashen skin was made, not inherited by accident. A southern wyrm took a measure of the forest elves and worked them over, folding draconic substance into the old druid-craft: scorched scale ground to powder, ash from its own fire, a charge of the dragon's own bound life pressed into the elves' wood-and-life frame. What came out bred true. Their skin held the grey of cold ash, their eyes the black of a banked coal, and they could open their minds to a wyrm and ride behind its eyes. The dragon meant to raise itself a loyal cavalry. It raised a people instead, who outlived the wyrm's purpose and kept the bond after the maker was gone. No Dark Elf was ever crossed with a dragon. The draconic in them was put there once, by a working, and the working held.
Aspects
- Dragons' blood calls to dragons' blood
- The old ways demand remembrance