Sea Elves

Sea elves are a civilization of magically adapted elves living in the Mer. Long ago, their ancestors used powerful magic to grant themselves gills and fins and walked into the ocean, turning their backs on the surface lands and the magic storms that plagued them in hopes of finding a more quiet life at the bottom of the sea. Now they thrive at the bottom of the sea in a tightly knit network of coral cities.

Culture

Art & Architecture

Sea elven cities are realms of astonishing beauty. Over the milennia, they have mastered the delicate art of caring for corals, using magics brought from the surface to maintain conditions in their city ideal for coral growth, training it to grow along prepared scaffolds to produce the desired shape. Excess growths are carefully pruned and relocated to more suitable locations. This allows them to grow a functional home in decades rather than the centuries it would take coral to grow to such a size unaided. Their cities are each grown in a unique spiraling fractal pattern, whirling outward from the original settlement in patterns that repeat and evolve as the city slowly grows in population.
Many sea elves have a fondness for painting, and each city has a thriving industry harvesting the various pigments and sediments used in their art. A favourite subject is the beautiful sea life that thrives as well in their artificial coral cities as they do in natural coral reefs near the surface, though art pieces intended for trade to the surface carefully avoid any indication that it depicts a city-- one of many ways sea elves keep the details of their life under the sea secret from those who still dwell on the surface.
The "paintings" produced here are unique, produced by applying a thick paste made by combining the desired pigments with certain types of sediment found on the sea floor, then adding a specially prepared binding agent that causes the paste to solidify over the course of an hour. This allows the artist to produce a three dimensional effect similar to a mason carving a frieze, but with endless potential to adjust the shape of the carving until it fully solidifies and colours that persist even in very old art pieces as pigment is laced through the entire shape rather than simply being painted on the surface. Artists on the surface have tried a number of methods to replicate these effects, but even if they were capable of producing the right materials, the paste would dry far too quickly for the binding agent to properly penetrate if it were not submerged in water.