Friday 31 October 2008

I have finished putting all my living elves into households, and the households into villages, so at last I can say I know who and where everyone is, and how they’re related, and just what Lar and Sorin are dealing with on their respective sides.

Link: List of Elven Villages

This may be strange information to make available to you, since although we have seen one of the kisór villages (namely the village of the Elder Nídara), and although we have had a glimpse or two into the so-​​called “Khírrón Compound”, you don’t really have any idea where they are located or how they “work”.

However, there has seemed to be some interest in seeing just that, so I hope that by making this available to me it will be easier for me to work the affairs of the elves into the storyline. I have put a new poll up on the forum to gauge interest in that.

Now that I have mostly finalized the elven population, I will mention a few things that came up, subsequent to my initial I am become death, the destroyer of worlds reaction.

First, I resurrected 19 young ksaltón males and put them all as servants in the Khírrón compound. These are so-​​called “half-​​bloods”, who are not considered quite noble, but whose children can be. There are also quite a few females of this caste in the “harem”.

I had to do this because of something that was mentioned by Imin and Lar in “Surr sees his father’s friends”:

“That Iyyis just came wandering in, and he — ”

“Wait!  Iyyis is the one in the Khor’s kitchen?”

“That’s right.  And he’s sleeping with the girl who takes the laundry in the household of the elf Dru, and she is friends with the girl who dresses the Lady Madra.”

I have always had the idea that the rebels had a number of “agents” in place among the khírrón, and they are a crafty bunch, since I have mentioned that they occasionally pull off an assassination.

However I did forget to include them when I initially created all the elves. That means there are now more than 11 male kisór adults. Thus we must assume that Lar is counting the number that are living in freedom. Certainly not one of those 19 has ever managed to have a child, through some interference of the khírrón we must assume.

The second thing I noticed is that I seem to have more living elves than Lar led us to believe in a few chapters where he thought about how many they were. I am still not sure how I will handle that — either revise those chapters, or go through and delete a bunch of elves (though since I would also have to delete all their descendants, that could be tricky to do cleanly), or simply decide that Lar himself doesn’t really know how many there are. Certainly he knows how many live underground, but there may be some villages on the outside that he doesn’t really have contact with at all. (He would have to ride the better part of a day just to reach the Raegiming end of the valley, for instance, and he’s certainly not going to send his elves there and back in a night just to make some babies.)

Finally, I don’t have anything nearly naked to show you (except for Shirtless K, but he’s going to be somewhat overexposed as it is), so here’s a sneak preview of architecture to come:

Aeds_Hall_019_sm.jpg