Ramifications of the Unaging Elf... and More

The Roots of Tears from Iron, part Ib

This is the third of three articles discussing the nature of the elves (who became Aestari) in my novel “Tears from Iron.” If you missed the first two, here are the links for easy access: “Solving the Elf Problem” and “What ‘Tears from Iron’ taught me about the Elves.” In those, I looked at initial elven inspirations, core traits, polities and organizations, the nature of agelessness, the impacts on age and mastery, and if elves are more magical than other races. Coming up next, we’ll dive into the nature of good and evil among elves, population size, creative order, and the impact of agelessness on memory and family dynamics. As a point of clarification, in the following article I will continue to refer to the elves (mostly) as the Aestari, their name in my world of Isfalinis.

An Update on “Brothers from Flame and Void”

My revisions and re-revisions continue on “Brothers from Flame and Void.” June was a month of big projects so my progress was a little slower than I hoped for. My clean-up of Act IV is nearly done and I am very pleased with the result. Feedback on Act V found far fewer anomalies that I’ll need to adjust. I’m optimistic that Act VI and VII will be similar though the final two acts are the newest and least polished so I anticipate a good bit of work there. Ultimately, I’m still in the same basic target range: shooting for the end of 2025 but perhaps not quite making that goal.

Who is Good and who is Evil (among Elves/Aestari)?

It is commonly held that high elves are ‘good’ and dark elves are ‘evil’, right? Tolkien and Elder Scrolls both defy this trope, but most fantasy buys into it. I did, too, in the beginning. This shifted over time as I became less and less comfortable with the idea of a sentient race being ‘evil’ (or, for that matter, a sentient race being ‘good’). If freewill exists, then to brand one race good and another evil seems like nonsense—depending on your religious and philosophical beliefs, it would be more logical to define all sapient species as either fundamentally evil with a capacity for good or fundamentally good with a capacity for evil. I should add that others have convinced me that evil races can serve very useful practical purposes in games because they give players foes that can be slaughtered with righteous impunity. In a world built for novels, though, it is less useful (which isn’t to say fully useless). I see the roots of a full article on this topic so we’ll set aside the deeper philosophy for the moment.

Ultimately, for Isfalinis I decided that no sapient race is fundamentally evil. So while my high elves remained (at least for a time) scions of goodness, the dark elves shifted into that gray area in which humanity itself exists… they became self-serving.

As I worked on “Tears from Iron,” I discovered what may be a deeper underlying truth: There is nothing more likely to develop fondness for something than working on it and getting to know it. The opposite is also true and is already a platitude: familiarity breeds contempt.

For me and the dark elves, the former was true. The more I worked with them, the more I grew to love them. I wanted to explore aspects of their ‘evilness’ or, at least, ‘selfishness’… especially to seek out questions like “why?” We’ll look at this in much greater detail in my upcoming article on the third root of “Tears from Iron” when we investigate slavery.

For now, suffice it to say that I came to the point where I wouldn’t grade the dark elves any worse than humans. As I worked on “Brothers from Flame and Void” that was refined further. High elves were no longer good and dark elves were no longer evil. Instead, high elves became imperfect in one way and dark elves flawed in another. For those who haven’t read my prior articles I should point out for clarity that the high elves (Hiraestari) and dark elves (Syraestari) of Isfalinis are physiologically identical. They are divided by philosophy and history. If you’re curious about this divide and other elements of early Isfalinis lore, all subscribers to this Substack receive a complimentary copy of “A Treatise on Creation and the Lost Age.” This is a text written by a Hiraestari named Dirtarnys who was among those first given shape before time began.

One of the early reviews of “Tears from Iron” on Amazon commented that the ‘good versus evil was a little obscure.’ While I sense the reader was a little disappointed by this, I was pleased because that’s exactly what I was looking for. Villains are more compelling, and also more realistic, when they aren’t pure evil but instead are flawed creatures, just like you and me… except worse (hopefully). In the same way, perhaps heroes are more compelling when they are flawed, too.

Memory and Memory Dreams

The Aestari, as has already been established, do not suffer from aging death and all of the physical and mental atrophy that involves. Thus one might deduce that among their other gifts is the advantage of marvelous memory. Such a deduction is false. While the Aestari are freed of the terrifying curse of dementia that afflicts our elderly, memory isn’t perfect.

The inspiration for this is my own imperfect recollection. My memory of my childhood, even as a child, was terribly flawed with huge gaps in it. As a young man before age could be rendered as any excuse for forgetfulness, I was reminded on occasions of significant events in my life that had dimmed or that I’d forgotten about altogether. Memory isn’t just about a non-aging brain. It is also about what is subconsciously registered as important and not important. There is so much data entering our brains every moment of every day that the retention of it all is impossible. Eidetic memory is enough of a rarity that I haven’t bothered to try to account for it, other than to acknowledge that different people remember different things better.

Thus, in a way, the Aestari are arguably even at a bit of a disadvantage compared to Humans. Instead of, at middle age, remembering thirty to forty years of life events, an Aestari midway through the average life cycle is remembering about a thousand! The ease with which Aestari can forget things is equal to that of a mentally healthy Human.

Yet the prolonged health of their minds and their great age has given the Aestari what could be regarded as both a blessing and a curse: the Memory Dream. This is based on the premise that huge benchmark memories are often the most vivid in our own lives, both those of resounding joy and utter pain. Such dreams occur while sleeping and are a near-exact “replaying” of a specific event that the dreamer must watch and participate in without the ability to change any of it. Unique from normal dreams, someone in a Memory Dream is usually aware that he is dreaming and thus is forced to mentally reengage with moments that perhaps he’d rather were forgotten. One cannot simply will oneself awake from a Memory Dream. Aestari usually begin experiencing such dreams after about a century of life and they are usually induced during periods of great stress—often similar stressors or events to those experienced in the original moment.

Why do the Aestari have a smaller population than other races?

The cause of the relatively small elven population has already been discussed in part. In the previous articles, I referred to the theft of souls by Ilsul, the Shaper of Humans, and the inability of the Aestari to procreate until about fifty.

Yet I realized that these are small factors in the grand scheme of things. In a population with an average lifespan over two thousand years, a fifty year delay isn’t much. Nor does a reduced initial population result in an exponential difference a thousand years later. If Humans outnumber Aestari by 2-to-1 at the dawn of time, then, all other things being equal, Humans will also outnumber Aestari by 2-to-1 ten thousand years later. Therefore, other causes are needed to explain a proportionately shrinking population. Note: Unlike many fantasy worlds, the Aestari are generally increasing in total population. It is their proportion compared to other sentient races that is decreasing.

One of the biggest causes of this is the female fertility cycle which is much slower than the other races and even has variable lengths. At age fifty, for example, a female Aestari is only able to conceive for a few days once per year. This increases gradually, plateauing around age four hundred at which point a female Aestari is fertile about four times a year. Similarly, after giving birth, a female Aestari’s fertility cycle doesn’t resume for about fifty years. At this point the clock starts over though at a faster rate and hits the quarterly plateau about a hundred and fifty years later. The average female gives birth to about five children over the course of her life.

There has been much philosophical discussion among the Aestari themselves as to the reason for this difference between their people and the other races. Some blame the Etyni for imposing a sneaky limitation even after agreeing to grant the Gift of Birth. Others have theorized that it may have been an aspect of how His Highest Above shaped the Gift to begin with or, similarly, that the Gift conformed to the nature of each race and thus ‘naturally’ became the way it is. On the topic, the Etyni were silent.

I am still working on some aspects of elven marital and childbearing trends, and am currently exploring the idea that monogamy among the Aestari is a biological necessity. As I’m currently conceiving of it (pun intended), such a fact would also lend itself to modestly diminished birth rates. Suffice it to say, this aspect of elven development is still in progress. Perhaps in the future, I’ll share more on this idea.

Parent and Child, Brother and Sister

The nature of Aestarin fertility and population growth has other impacts that make this race unique from other sapient peoples. Imagine the family structure of a species that bears children, on average, about two hundred years apart, and literally cannot have children more frequently than every fifty years.

The result is that every child is an “only child.” Consider also that an Aestarin is considered an adult at twenty, fully mature at a hundred, and entering “True Adulthood” at two hundred. To explain this another way, precocious Aestari leave their parent’s home in their twenties, often taking on some form of apprenticeship though some may linger in the family home for up to about a century. Even with this prolonged stay, relative to Human standards, the Aestarin offspring is still usually absent from the home long before the next child is born. In those rare cases where children are born the minimum fifty years apart, both offspring may be in the home at the same time, but the fifty-year old has already been an adult longer than he was a child. In the case of a close-knit family, this makes the older sibling more akin to an extra parent while in a less congenial home that sibling has become essentially a boarder.

The end result of this is that child-parent bonds are as close as we might see with Humans (we’ll delve into that more in a moment) but sibling bonds are significantly weaker. In some cases, such bonds don’t exist at all. In consequence, Aestarin children tend to form cadres around their own age groups. Friends and near acquaintances of similar age and proximity come to fill the role that siblings do in Human culture. This also means that generational identity is extremely strong. These groups sometimes become the sources of new ideas or, particularly when still young, are vulnerable to manipulation by skilled demagogues. This was true during the Schism when one of the dissidents against the Oath rallied many of the younger Aestarin in the capital of Avenfaili against their elders, sparking the first major wave of violence.

Let’s explore the ramifications of these numbers a little more. We’ll start by assuming a Human lifespan of 60 years which is pretty average in the pre-modern era for those who survived childhood. If a couple has a child at age 20 and that child also lives to 60 years, then there will be an overlap of 40 years. If we use pre-industrial measures where adulthood occurs around age 15, then 37.5% of the overlap period the offspring is a child. By comparison, Aestari typically live to about age 2000 and, on average, have their first child at around age 400. That gives us 1,600 years of overlap of which only 20 are childhood… that’s 1.25%! Even if we consider the offspring’s achievement of full maturity at age 100, by which point virtually all Aestari are out on their own, we’re still looking at a mere 6.25% of overlap.

Thus, while Aestari offspring generally live more years with their parents, a much tinier proportion of their lives are in a child-adult relationship. To a much greater degree, they interact with each other as adult-to-adult. This allows for the possibility of much greater mature relationship which often takes on the shape of shared occupations, shared interests, shared objectives, shared world-view, and so on.

I doubt I’m alone in observing that Human children either end up a lot like their parents or the opposite of them and that is true among the Aestari as well. Thus the “shared” trait mentioned above is common perhaps half the time while the other half become more distant or even estranged just like in our race. But the aggregate difference compared to Humanity, whatever the outcome of that parent-child relationship might be, is a substantially longer period of time where they interact as adults and de facto peers.

The Third-Born of all Creation

The first race to be shaped before time began were the pastoral Bergrist, followed by Humans, then the Aestari, and finally the nocturnal Ie’dhae. I have alluded to this sequence before, but the more I have pondered the Aestari, the more significant this placement has become.

The motives for each of the Shapers was, to some degree, selfish. Ektios rushed to shape his Bergrist in order to be first and claim all the physical, moral, and spiritual advantages that entails. Ilsul also sought power, playing off the vulnerabilities of the Bergrist to make his Humans more pernicious. Ainii was willing to give up the early positions in order to perfect her Aestari. She also was unique in that she held her own council, barely consulting with any of the Etyni or other Cyrleni for her task. She has been praised as a result, because this is how the Aestari avoided the curse of aging death. Siona, the consummate perfectionist, waited the longest and also consulted the most, especially with Cydion. Because of that trust, her Ie’dhae bear a deep and terrible curse… but that is beyond the scope of this article.

For many years, I regarded Ainii’s delay and her disinclination to consult with others as a pure boon for her people (much as the Etyni themselves perceived it). But of late, I’ve realized this is more of a double-edged sword. Ainii was extremely protectionist. There were disputes between the Bergrist and Humans even before she shaped the Aestari. She wanted to avoid those conflicts and ensure the security of her people. As such, instead of being scattered about the world as various tribes and clans like the other three races, the Aestari all resided together where Ainii could personally guide and mentor them.

To put it another way, she exemplifies both the best and the worst of the “mother bear” concept. She nobly wants to protect her own, but at the same time is willing to “let the others burn” so long as her own people thrive. She passed this ideology, wittingly or unwittingly, on to her Aestari. This mentality was a major reason why the Etyni compelled the Aestari to take the Oath before being given the Gift of Birth. It also backfired on Ainii. She was so intent on making her Aestari one people that she instilled an intolerance for aberration. Thus the Aestari, who like all sentient peoples, have the capacity for reason and free will, are heavily inclined toward solidarity. This makes them both repressive and violent toward “minority opinion.” In other words, Ainii introduced a slew of unintended consequences. Their vehement inclination toward unity causes a greater propensity for harsh division—toward Schism. Is this a commentary on our modern age? I wasn’t thinking of this idea at the time… but perhaps.

Conclusion

If you’ve enjoyed this study of the Elves/Aestari, I will close by explaining that one of my techniques for exploring the complexity of the Aestarin (and other) societies in my novel is through the introduction of quotes that start out each chapter. These allow for a little bit of worldbuilding wherein I slightly pull back the novel’s plot to reveal the riches that exist beneath. Here’s an example:

“Just as the Schism sundered the Aestari, so the Second Schism split the Sword-Singers. From that crucible arose the Sword-Whisperers, children born from the mind and heart of Ninanna the Outcast. To this day, I do not know whether to hate and fear them or to respect and honor them.”

--Eloezyntir, a Captain in the Sword-Singers

I like this one because it is directly relevant to the events of “Tears from Iron” which includes Ninanna and the Sword-Whisperers but it goes a step outward from that to look at the Sword-Singers who are only briefly mentioned in the core text.

In the next article, we’ll move onto the second inspiration for “Tears from Iron”—a world in Cataclysm.

Other News from “Memories of the Cataclysm”

This past week, I rolled out two more YouTube videos for my Writing series, both looking at the Three Act Structure.

In the first video, I look at the basic composition of the Three Act Structure and why it is so powerful, using those great Fantasy and Sci-Fi epics of the “Fellowship of the Ring” and “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” as examples.

The second video uses this information and shows a hands-on technique for converting an idea or two into the backbone of a story using the Three Act Story structure as a foundation point.

In support of these projects, I’ve been adding additional resources on my webpage related to each video. You can find those here:

https://jonathanoldenburg.com/writing-worldbuilding-2/

And here, at the end, I want to thank you for reading this article and I hope you found it enjoyable. If there is any topic you’d like to hear about, please put it in the comments. I want to thank those of you who have added ratings to “Tears from Iron” on Amazon. One of the hardest hurdles for any writer is generating those reviews. I confess I’m not as good at posting them as I should be, either. If you have done so for “Tears from Iron” you have my gratitude. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to do so. You don’t have to write a detailed review if you don’t want to and can simply provide a rating (though I love to read the feedback). Thanks and until next time!

Jonathan Oldenburg