the Laeren are a people of the elf, not a bloodline, a treaty-oath identity rather than a separate lineage. The Laeren are the settled elves of the Farlands, the people of Lenora, Illron, and Deo Esari who have kept one treaty for four thousand years. The name is not a bloodline. A grain-farmer in the Lenora lowlands and a bone-priest in the Kelder peaks share little in dialect or daily work, but both call themselves Laeren, after Laeroth Esori, the enchanted ground where the Three Kingdoms Treaty was sworn. To be Laeren is to keep that oath. The plains Rakiten, who signed nothing and follow the buffalo west of the mountains, are not Laeren and have never wished to be. The Caerene, who once ranged these forests, left them entirely when the fae treaty was made. In build the Laeren are slighter than their towering plains cousins, woodland-pale and long-fingered, a people shaped by orchards and river-towns rather than open grass.
No practice marks them more than the keeping of names. A Laeren learns the true names of the dead in their line as a child learns to walk, reciting the chain back through the generations until it runs without thinking. The reason is not sentiment. An ancestor whose name is lost is more than forgotten; the Laeren hold that the forgetting ends something no rite can restore, and they have built their whole sense of duty around preventing it. Those who fail the keeping, who let a name slip past recovery, are sent downriver to Imyena Edhil, the City of the Grieving, a place walled to hold its own people in. Exile there is the heaviest sentence the kingdoms impose. It is reckoned worse than death, because the exile has in some sense already caused one.
Say your mother's mother's name, and hers, and do not stop until I tell you to stop. A child who tires of the list has not yet understood what the list is for. — a Laeren name-keeper's instruction, common across the three kingdoms
The Laeren live small inside a large country. Whole forests belong to the fae: Iyaklomori Grera in the south, the living heart of Amholia Greras in the center. The elves keep to the edges, the coast roads and the river-margins, and cross the deep interior only by the two waterways the fae allow. They wrote this deference into law after older lessons taught it. King Kilren raised a fortress in the forbidden wood three thousand years ago and lost ten thousand soldiers in a single night, and came home unable to speak. The Laeren did not avenge him. They marked the place, left it standing, and the lesson held.
Their politics run on patience. Each kingdom sends four voices to Laeroth Esori, two men and two women, and each kingdom carries one vote regardless of how many it speaks for. Lenora feeds the confederation and holds most of its people, and is outvoted at every turn by Illron and Deo Esari, who prefer the old arrangements. The titan bone Deo Esari draws from the Kelder peaks, most of the world's supply, is confederation property under the same treaty. So a Lenora landholder grows rich on grain while the rarest material in Alaria passes through hands he is forbidden to touch. The resentment is old and quiet. It has not yet been enough to break four thousand years of habit.
Aspects
- Keeper of the unbroken name
- Small inside a large country