Elf
Lithe, long-lived humanoids, elves are easily recognized by their pointed ears and pupils so large that their eyes seem to be all one color. Possessed of an inherent bond with the natural world, they tend to subtly take on the coloration of their surroundings over the course of many years and have a deep spiritual regard for nature.
Of all the races common to the galaxy, elves were perhaps the hardest-hit by the Gap, and the slowest to adapt and recover. Where shorter-lived races quickly gave birth to children who had never known any other way of life, and thus were personally unaffected by the loss of history, the elven generation whose lives extended back into the Gap continued on, broken and confused by the blank centuries in their own lives and memories. What’s more, those leaders charged with trying to piece together their social history from scraps soon came to a grim conclusion: during the Gap, their race had been betrayed by another—yet exactly which race was involved remains unclear, all suggestions of the answer scrubbed by malicious intent or the Gap itself.
Reeling and angry, elves from across the galaxy retreated to their ancestral homelands in the Castrovel system and dug in, determined to never again be caught unprepared by disaster. Even this was a fraught endeavor, however, as many of the established elven families already in Castrovel resented the chaos and upheaval caused by the sudden flood of refugees.
Today, the elves are a reclusive, xenophobic race, little understood by their neighbors and uninclined to remedy that situation. Though their starships still travel the void, trading with other worlds, they largely carry exclusively elven crews, and most elves choose to live among their own kind either in the Castrovel system or in predominantly elven enclaves on other worlds. Those adventurous or rebellious individuals who choose to live among other races are called the Forlorn, due both to their loss of elven companionship and to their tendency to outlive friends of other races. Most are viewed with pity and suspicion by their kindred.
Within their borders, elves tend to be whimsical and passionate, yet when dealing with outsiders their laughter disappears quickly, replaced by a cold, unyielding wall. Elven warriors and diplomats operating outside of Castrovel space on government business sometimes even choose to go masked, hiding their identities around other races in order to better represent a united elven state.
While elves have embraced technology and the security it brings, they also maintain a deep affinity for magic, seeing in its practice a continuity with their ancestors. Elves are most often mystics, operatives, and technomancers, and when they go adventuring, it’s often to recover bits of magical lore lost to history, or else to find ways to ensure Castrovel's strength in the centuries to come.
The primary exception to all of these tendencies are the dark elves—purple-skinned elves who reject the company of their brethren to live in the Dark Swarm that surrounds Apostae and mine alien tech from that world’s interior, making them some of the most feared and respected arms dealers in the galaxy. Ordinary elves and dark elves despise one another, and while Castrovel's leadership generally tries to distance itself from political entanglements, supposedly rogue elven fleets have launched several surprise assaults into Dark Swarm sectors in an effort to “cleanse the corruption.”
The fact that these attacks have resulted in sanctions from the Galactic Council has somehow done little to deter the elves.
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