The Elven Peoples

As descendants of the Cephareth, godlike beings who inhabited within the beginning era of the mortal plane of Aurius and who would shape the face of the worlds, the elven peoples are known and distinguished apart from the mannish races through their affinity for magic and an earlier advancement of culture and practice. This is thought to be because of the stability which the Cephareth had procured, and thus, from this stability was born a kind of sophistication and intelligence that lent to the practice of magic and the manipulation of such energies. The advancements which the Cephareth were believed to have propagated throughout the Altori Era were inherited by their descendants, and as their blood became split throughout the vast genealogies of the elven peoples, aspects of these ancestor gods would find a resurgence, and the elven peoples could accordingly share in the grandiosity of the Cephareth through a reverence for the security which they had earlier provided.

The Arethara, as they inhabit still within the elven homeland of Arethayn, are thought to be those who had preserved the practices of the most grandiose of the Cephareth such that they retained all aspects of the culture which they had professed and instated among their descendants. The elven peoples that would become known as the Arethara and who had so preserved the memories of their ancestors are thought to specifically uphold the decrees and rulings which the ruling Cephareth had laid out before they had passed into the state of death, and thus, they are thought to be the most direct continuation of the Cephareth as they are compared to the other elven peoples who had notably diverged in some amount from these ancestors. From the Cephareth came the striving of the preservation of Caelarkhe, as it is thought that from Caelarkhe came the gifts of immortality and longevity, in addition to a prowess in the arts of magic and creation. Caelarkhe, then, was thought to be the force which had found itself in the world, and as the stasis and light of the force had become less prevalent as a result of the battles launched by a warlord who possessed control over armies of dark spirits, they sought to rather preserve the light and stasis and reject the blight of mortality which that being of entropy and chaos had brought and cursed upon them. Then, there emerged powerful gods born of the flesh that called themselves the Elefyr, and they professed that they had retained the gifts of Caelarkhe such that they had regained an immortality. Thus, worship of these beings became commonplace throughout Arethayn, and there was then founded a religion that idolized these gods and strove after their perceived perfection. The Arethari concept of purity, then, had evolved to resemble these of the Elefyr who had most taken after the ruling Cephareth, who were believed to have achieved apotheosis through supernatural virtue and the aforementioned embodiment of the earlier Cephareth.

The Neiara, as descendants of the lesser Cephareth of the world of stability and mana that was called Arethayn, were marginalized by the caste system and concept of purity that was instated by the Elefyr of Arethayn and those same who had become intoxicated with apotheosis, and thus would, in time, flee the elven homeland so that they might have a place of their own. As worship of these gods of the Elefyr became commonplace among the Arethara, they were thought to have inhabited within a cultural space in exception to this ruling, and instead chose to preserve worship of the Cephareth rather than those gods of the Elefyr born of the flesh. As they rejected this religious practice, they were excommunicated from the temples built in honor of the Elefyr, and thus, the Neiara would eventually settle the lands of the west which they called Driayn as they fled from their ancestral world. It was in Driayn that they founded the practice of ancestor worship of the Cephareth, and as they were not united through any means of governance or law, many eventually would stray from this worship of ancestors as they evolved culturally and philosophically; from this phenomenon came a freedom of thought and ideation that had never before been seen by the elven peoples, and the Neiara were accordingly thought by themselves to be the pioneers of a new kind of being and existence among the worlds of Aurius. Exploration of magic had become common, and as they held little to be sacred, would eventually diverge into two kinds of elven peoples: the Mirara and the Vaathara. The Mirara, notably, were born from the echelon of Neiari thought that prized intellect and reason, and saw no reason to hold anything but themselves as sacred; the Vaathara were those who had adopted worship of the Valdaen by the token of their propensity for reverence of spirits and their great abilities, and they idolized the form of being in the afterlife which the Valdaen had granted upon and promised to them.

The Mirara, a people that had earlier descended from the broader racial classification of the Neiara, were those elves who inhabited within the space which they called Driayn, and saw themselves as the ultimate potentiality of divinity. Notably, they occupied both the lands of fertility and those of a barren air, and often employed the slavery of humanity in order to accomplish their feats of architecture.