Val

Domains: Creation, Knowledge, Life, Nature, Protection

Val, the Noble Lord, First Among Equals, is the patron of the elves. He created the celestials—the true elves, second of the five speaking peoples—who then created the younger elves: the high, wode, and shadow elves. His name is the root of the Caelian word "valiant," and the dwarves named the most precious ore in Orden—Valiar, the truemetal—after him.

Val holds that the greatest purpose a thinking being can commit themselves to is the creation of art and the appreciation of beauty. He keeps the magical, elf-haunted forests called wodes close to his heart because they represent his vision for Orden. What the world could have been. His growing disgust with the concept of war led him to leave Orden and take up residence in his private manifold, Arcadia where all elves hope to someday join their patron.

Heroes of the Elves

The legendary heroes of the elves are once-mortal heroes who now dwell in Arcadia and make up Val's court there. They answer prayers and dispense blessings and boons, even manifest in the world during times of great need. (Though, like all the speaking people's saints and heroes, what these legendary figures consider "great need" is very personal and has little to do with politics or great kingdoms.)

The high elf heroes detailed in this book are A Sea of Suns, the Taste of Morning, and Ripples of Honey on a Shore of Gold. The wode elf heroes are Yllin Dyrvis, Thyll Hylacae, and Illwyv li Orchiax.

A Sea of Suns

Domains: Creation, Life

A Sea of Suns, also known as the Composer.

Credited with inventing harmony, it is said that after she discovered the power of blending many voices into one, the elves sang for an entire century uninterrupted1. The harmonics so complicated they created new beings like faeries, dryads, and the elgenwights.

The Composer discovered, or invented, the power of music to manipulate reality. Her troubadours, it was said, could return the dead to life. "In the music, you can live forever." Legend has it she was at the battle of Kalas Valiar when the first Army of Night besieged its walls. When their corruption engines weakened the impenetrable walls, she stood alone on the parapets and sang. For forty days did her voice bolster the walls, stemming the flood of evil. Her song ended only when her life was taken by A Heart Trapped in Amber, the sorcerer-assassin of the star elves.

1. If this story wasn't invented by the dwarves or humans, it must at least have passed through one of their cultures. The celestials did not reckon time the way younger species do and would not have said "for an entire century."

The Taste of Morning

Domains: Creation, Knowledge

The Taste of Morning, also known as the Librarian.

Credited with building the first library, most scholars consider this a real, historical event (never a certainty with the tales of the legendary heroes) and adventurers through all ages have sought this legendary building. If, indeed, it was a building.

He canonized the idea that knowledge, truth, was a kind of beauty. The Library of Morning was a temple to thought, wisdom, scholarship. It contained plays, poems, histories, treatises on the nature of reality. The knowledge held within was incalculable. Legends say it held codices written by the elder dragons, though modern scholars suspect this is a literary conceit, as there is no evidence the elder dragons bothered with writing.

Ripples of Honey on a Shore of Gold

Domains: Life, Protection

Ripples of Honey on a Shore of Gold, also known as Warkiller, the Diplomat, was both scholar, sage, and soldier. She served as emissary between the humans and the dragons when the former sought war against the latter. For many years she brokered peace, but she could not stem the tides of war forever.

In the end, her efforts failed, and the elder dragons live no more in this world. Like Val, the Diplomat hated war so much, after her failure she sought to pen a new codex. A work so powerful it would bind the world. The Codex Pax Universalis would banish the concept of war from Orden. Alas, in the end she realized there was only one way to finish her great work, and she was not willing to take that final step.

Yllin Dyrvis

Domains: Knowledge, Nature

Yllin Dyrvis, also known as the Beast Heart, the Wodespeaker, the Warden, witnessed the Composer's first song, and took it upon themselves to communicate with and care for the speaking creatures A Sea of Suns created. The dryads, elgenwights, the giant birds and intelligent fish who populated the ancient wode that once covered all Orden, all came under the Beast Heart's care. Dyrvis learned their speech and taught them who they were.

To this day, many ages of the world later, the wode elves consider themselves the stewards of the speaking creatures, and those creatures rely upon the wode elves for protection.

Thyll Hylacae

Domains: Life, Nature

Thyll Hylacae, the Forestal, Apothachron, also known as the Sacrifice. Thyll spoke to the plants, learned their truths—discovered many magics hidden within. The power to heal, harm, change. It was Hylacae who first sensed, then learned, the language of trees. She studied, cared for them, and protected them when the folk of farm and field came to cut them down.

Though she was mighty in warlore, she could not be everywhere. In the end, she sacrificed herself for the trees, the ritual she performed uplifted a small population of trees, creating the derwic—the thinking speaking tree-peoples few of whom remain in Orden.

Illwyv li Orchiax

Domains: Nature, Protection

Illwyv li Orchiax, the Moonknight, Marshall of the Gloaming, Manslayer. When humans first arrived in Orden—it is said—they were welcomed by the other speaking peoples. But they were unlike the other creations in the world. While the dwarves cut rock for the ore within, humans cut down trees simply because they were in the way. Other ancestries had their own territories and homelands, but humans sought constant expansion into even the most inhospitable territories.

Illwyv it was who first realized the folly of treating with these creatures. A great hunter of the Quercus Court, she gathered her band of elite Helriath Harriers and made war on the humans who would kill the wode.