The Nemo are the ghostly descendants of Caerene elves who sought to achieve immortality and perfect oneness with the forest. Instead of transcendence, they eternally bound their souls to the Eros forests, becoming trapped spirits who can never truly die while the forest lives, but can never truly live again either.
These spectral elves are cold, bitter, and wise, having spent millennia isolated in their forest prison. Their failed pursuit of perfection serves as a warning about the dangers of reaching too far beyond mortal limitations.
The Nemo pray still to Vaerivra, the daemon of the trackless forest, immediate justice, and balance-as-physical-practice, the same patron the Caerene invoke under the living canopy. Where the Caerene come to Vaerivra as practitioners of an embodied ethics, the Nemo come as ghosts. They made their bid for forest-oneness in Vaerivra's name; Vaerivra gave them what they asked for, with the same absence of second chances the Caerene themselves teach. The forest took them. They remain.
The making
The Nemo did not set out to become ghosts. The Caerene who attempted forest-oneness meant to dissolve wholly into the canopy, name and self surrendered into something larger than any of them. The working half-failed, and the half that failed is the part that matters. When their bodies died, soul and shadow made the ordinary departures, soul up to the Astral, shadow down to Malstaris, the two crossings every dying thing makes. The third strand did not. The spirit, which by nature passes to Celestia and lasts only while a name is spoken, was bound instead into the heartwood of the Eros forests, and there it holds, because the forest keeps the names. A Nemo is therefore a spirit with no soul to warm it and no shadow to weight it, lodged in the trees, unable to finish the crossing and unable to draw the other two strands back. That is the cold in them. They asked to become the forest, and kept only the part of themselves the forest could hold.
Aspects
- Trapped between life and death
- Millennia of bitter wisdom