Elves: what they do and where they come from

In theory, elves are immortal. This is why they are so incredibly old, though often not as old as you think. 

Elves can recover from the most severe wounds, if they can live until the next moon. This is why elf medicine is so sought after. That no such medicine exists has broken many desparate travellers who came to the elves looking for aid. 

And somehow, they always already knew you were coming. Elves seem to know everything that happens. Information spreads among them like wildfire, they seem to understand each other without ever needing to speak.

Their armies are undeafeted, as there always seem to be more of them, each as highly trained as royal guards and with experience unequaled by even the most seasoned human veterans. That these elfs all seem remarkably similar in their physical appearance always seems to go unnoticed in the disorder of battle.

And yet the world is littered in their ruins, their great empires collapse. Somehow calamity always strikes. Somehow these miraculous beings never seem to last. And when their world crumbles they 'return home', often traveling great distances to do so.

All of this is due to a few important differences between elf and human bodies.

Elf biologie 101

Elf life starts off rather differently from humans. Whereas we all enter this world the same way, elves come about in either one of two ways: Either they emerge from the goopy mess that will go on to form their identical twin sister, or their emerge from a significantly larger goopy mess that will go on to divide up into 'sisters' who have less resemblance to one another than cousins thrice removed.

This is because elves make like amoebas, bacteria and other cellular organism: they split in two creating two identical daughters of the one original mother. Obviously, elves aren't normally single cells, they way dungeon oozes clearly are. But when elves get ready to reproduce their cells merge together after which they duplicate any genetical material and any knowledge currently contained within the elf body, before splitting in two. Once split, the single cell elves quickly divide up into specialised cells like before and you result in two elves identical in every way. 

It is their unique reproduction, that is unique to creatures who spend most of their time with way more cells, which is the secret behind their theoretical immortality, their potent healing, their ability to communicate information without speaking, their vast armies, and the inevitable collapse of their civilisations. 

We are the next generation

When an elf splits in two, all knowledge the of the 'mother' is passed down to the 'children'. Two philosophical ideas are important here to see how this might result in de facto immortality.

First, if we follow Hume and say that there is no self underlying ones ideas (taken in the broad sense in which he uses that concept), it makes sense that when the mother transfers all knowledge she has to her two children these children will be the same as the mother. After all, if a person is just a bundle of ideas and that bundle is dupicated perfectly, you get two identical persons.

Second, if we follow Locke and say that personal identity is the result of memory, we can say once again that because all knowledge is transfered, including memories of the past lives, the children are identical to the mother. After all, if I am the same person as yesterday because I remember doing what yesterday's me was doing at that time, the newly cloned elf is the same person as their mother was yesterday if they remember what the mother was doing at that time as if they were doing it themselves. 

This then, is why elves are so incredibly 'old' while retaining eternal youth: By cloning themselves they gain new bodies but retain all knowledge prior to cloning, retaining the same person over many generations. 

Most elf cultures track age in terms of cloning cycles. Elves clone in tandem with the moon, because that is where they are from: made in the perfectionist image of a creator being unable to be satisfied with their work, starting over after each attempt at perfect creation. They descended to earth only when boredom and curiosity got the better of them. Or so some elves say.

By measuring age in terms of cloning cycles, of lives, most humans get the wrong idea about elf age. When an elf says they've lived for 'over 12.000 lives', humans think the elf means 12.000 times the average lifespan of a human. What the elf means is 12.000 moons, an age still beyond comprehension for humans but nowhere near as big as what humans unfamiliar with elf reproduction think has been said.

Born this way, each and every time

Each time an elf's cells divide up again after splitting, they start from scratch. If before splitting the elf had lost a limb, organ, or other part of their body, after splitting both copies have regained their lost or broken body parts. This means that as long as an elf lives until the next new moon, they'll completely recover. 

Humans witnessing the regenerative abilities of elves without understanding them often covet the medicine they imagine must be the cause of such recovery. But not only do elves not have such regenerative medicine, what medicne they do have is incredibly ill suited for human needs.

Elf medicine is centered complete;ly around this monthly regeneration, and therefor isn't concerned with even the most horrible side effects that occur over prolonged use. Why fear organ failure as a result of a high dosis of stabalizing medicine if it won't be deadly until after many weeks of continuous use? And a few weeks of blindless is a cheap price if it means a full recovery at the end of those weeks.

The only concern elves have to take into account when using medicine is weight loss. When dividing mass is retained and though it doesn't have to be divided equally among both children (to the point that one of the children might not even survive after splitting), if weight loss is too great that will cause complications during reproduction. 

Side note: Retainment of mass is why elf populations rarely explode in the way bacteria do. Given sufficient resources elves can binge prior to division to produce two full grown children, but often this is either not possible or undesirable. In those cases elves divide their mass during splitting in such a way that only one of the children lives. More on population control further down below.

Mind diffused in matter

There is no need for elf language. Elves often develop one for reasons that will follow, but it isn't required for communication among elves themselves. Instead, elves are able to share pure information by merely touching one another. 

The reason for the is the same reason they can transfer knowledge to the next generation when they clone themselves: Elves do not store knowledge in a centralised point, like humans do with their brains. Information flows freely throughout the an elf's body, only entering the brain when it is recalled. 

And they can share information among one another as well, because elf's are essentially all clones of the same original elf, born onto the earth after plant and fungus, but way before the creatures of flesh. Or so some elves say.

If an image is worth a thousand words, imagine not only passing an image along but also all the feelings, impressions and associations that accompany it. When one elf speaks to another they immediately 'get it', even when they disagree. 

As elves can share knowledge through their bodies, the quickest way of long distance communication is rather macabre: Severed flesh. This method of communication isn't foolproof, as the shelflife of flesh message is far shorter than that of paper, but it does allow for near perfect communication even among large distances. And because elf bodies are restored each moon, the severing of digits, earlobes or pieces of nose is relatively without consequence. 

This also means that elves do not take their secrets with them to their deaths. Assuming the body isn't already decomposing, everything a dead elf knows is available to any elf within touching distance.

The price of a life

All of the above is why elves have gone nearly undefeated in history: 

• Given sufficient food and water their armies can double in size each moon, making losses incredibly easy to compensate for.
• Fresh bodies are all endowed with training and experience of seasoned veterans.
• Reliable information can be shared incredibly quickly, and can be recovered even after death. 

Just imagine the strategies available to elf generals and it is no wonder that even when they lose battles, elves rarely lose wars. 

Stagnant waters turn foul

What happens when the world changes, but you always remain the same? As viruses and parasites adapt, becoming better and better at bypassing your defences, as biomes and climates change, becoming less and less able to accomodate your needs, you seize to thrive, begin to struggle, and slowly fade away into extinction. 

This is why elves haven't dominated the world, or at least never for long. It is why their ruins litter the land, and why they so often isolate themselves from the rest of the world; that filthy world full of new germs that might kill them, unknown parasites that will bleed them dry, and invasive species that will outcompete their sources of food. 

Though there is a way out. It is the reason elves have hung around for so long, the reason they all 'go home' when their world is in ruins, the reason there are no elves who actually still remember their origins. 

Individual elves cannot adapt their bodies. Barring the rare occurance of a mutation here or there they make perfect copies of themselves, even if those copies are no longer suited to the world they are to live in. As long as the individual lives, extinction is inevitable. Only in the death of the individual elf is survival of the species possible.

During the new moon, when elves return to a single cell state, elves can merge together with oneanother. When they do, they mix their qualities, knowledge and genes into elves wholly new. And when the mixing is done, this humongous blob separates out again into  Their bodies unlike any elf that came before, their minds containing only clear understanding of knowledge shared by each elf that partook in the merger. Individual memories are lost, the people that merged together are effectively dead, but the new borns are perfectly suited to deal with whatever calamity tormented their parents. 

Ever wondered why different accounts of elves all vary? Small winged creatures, tall regal humans, elves that live in the water, ones that see in the dark, with barklike skin, or pale like snow. It is because though they are all elves, each community has adapted to suit their environment (or what was their environment the last time they merged). 

Elves are the original creations, from which all other life originates. Humans, dwarfs, animals and plants, even fungi and diseases are all elves specialised to a point beyond recognition. Or so some elves say. 

Closing

This take on elves is stolen from very heavily inspired by two posts on mayfly elves by Monsieur le Battlier. Like with the dwarfs from the previous post I wanted to make elves more different from humans than is often the case in fantasy, while also trying to account for some of the tropes that surround elves.

For example, collective knowledge surviving in new born elves could be the reason elves in your setting are all proficient with longbows, even if the individual elf might have never done archery. 

Discussions on the FKR Collective discord server also helped me think of avenues to have fantasy creatures without a lot of the common problematic baggage that comes with them. I hope that by focussing more on biological differences it becomes easier to come up with as much variety among elves and dwarfs as there typically is among humans in fantasy, and that this will prevent me from making these fantasy creatures accidentally stand in for particular real world ethnicities or cultures. 

More elf or dwarf stuff might follow. Or I might do other creatures. Also working on a HUD-less adventure game to go with the setting these creatures would live in that I might share at some point. Anyway, stuff is in the works I guess.