It’s complicated, but the answer is: it’s mostly allowed but not necessarily encouraged! If you serve together (for example, you’re both in the same squadron), it’s absolutely not allowed. If you serve in different divisions (for example, a Khehi Ket who’s an assassin or spy versus one who’s a soldier) and you never see combat together or are assigned on missions together, it’s generally okay, but it’s definitely a case-by-case basis. And if it ever progresses from hooking up/casually dating to having the actual intent to marry, you have to ask your Drasil (basically your president/ultimate commanding officer) for permission to marry, and it’s typically seen as a nerve-wracking thing. But there are plenty of Khehi Ket who are no longer active-duty, have earned retirement, or are in the reserves, so it’s not generally seen as a conflict of interest and in those cases it’d be okay! So it just depends! But in the Khehi ranks of the Rebellion, it’s definitely seen as something people who play fast-and-loose by the rules do and is a bit taboo. Generally, the idea of the perfect loyal upright soldier that gets hammered into you during basic training doesn’t involve fraternization, lol, and there’s a bit of cultural friction against it, but it does definitely happen!

Hi there, I don’t have any real life aesthetic inspirations, but if you take a look at the original interactive map I uploaded to worldanvil years ago, you can see some reference images for Elven cities like Shyrduin and Sylfaen! In short, Elven architectural varied a lot by region and city, and their cities were also much smaller than other places, owing to the fact that Elven populations tend to be naturally small and not as expansive as other races: slow aging, low birthrates, means they were quite small and contained and weren’t really sprawling metropolises like what Haven or Ambryn eventually became, primarily out of need.

The most advanced cities were constructed out of stone and even metal, meticulously and with the utmost standards of perfection, treated as works of art in and of themselves: but were often more comparable to keeps or holdings rather than full-blown cities that were constantly expanding:

These were heavily warded, and evidence of Elven small magics was interwoven into the very architecture itself, and is still apparent even to this day. This is where the aristocracy and leadership of Elvenkind tended to reside, with complex politics, dynamics between houses, clans, and dynasties, and different factions and infrastructures to contend with.

Most Elven cities, though, which I would really liken more to towns and settlements, were more organic and integrated into the natural environment, favoring more mobility and less strain on natural resources, though they still could get built up quite a lot over time! Vale was like this, as well! Communities here tended to be much tighter-knit, albeit smaller, and often had a lot of blood relations and family ties going on: these were the Elves who later adopted the more nomadic clan structure that you see in Vale and Tallys’s Ironwood clan!

Credit goes to their original sources: AM-Markussen, Maxime Bibi, Yun Byoung Chul, Nentir Vale, Ein Choi, Gran Blue Fantasy

Hope that helps!

This happens all the time between Elves and non-Elves, which is why the Elves of yesteryear straight up did not want to deal with outsiders and just stuck to their isolated forest cities–Elves themselves would never comment on this because it’s just so improper and crass to them! XD It kind of bred an insular preference to interact exclusively within their own circles, lol!

Hi there, there’s a #language and an #accents tag that that addresses what the accents sound like! As for how the languages sound compared to Common:

Kettish: Kettish, to an outside ear, tends to sound more clipped and precise in tone, with both hard, sharp stops (hata'ki, meaning neurotic) and some flowing, more fluid sounds (mythas, galvorn-aith and megil-aith). It tends to sound more moderate and even in tone, often slow and careful (depending on the speaker and their background) or even flat, but it is also a pitch accent language where occasional subtle drops or raises in tone on a syllable can sometimes change a word’s meaning–just not as systematically or extensively as an actual tonal language (like Mandarin or Vietnamese).

Uth: Uth, the Hunter ancestral language, is extremely guttural and throaty, emanating from the back of the throat. It tends to sound very harsh to outsiders, forceful and somewhat short, with a strong emphasis on raspy, rumbled growls, barked, punchy commands, or tight, constricted sounds. Like the Hunter exorcist arts, a lot of it is shaped by breath and vibration. So it can sound deep, harsh, tight, or forceful; sometimes it will sound to outsiders like Hunters are mad or arguing with each other when they’re really just talking! It’s also one of the simplest ancient languages out there, with a more limited vocabulary that is heavily dependent on context, which is why so many Hunters also grow up speaking Common or use it as their default/first language instead of Uth (the same goes with Kettish). It just tends to be easier to express oneself in Common because there are more ready-made words for complex concepts!

Elvish: highly musical and lyrical, flowing, airy, and (you nailed it) often described as silvery. It’s frequently compared to the sound of running water or wind through grass. It lends itself very well to music and poetry, has a smooth cadence with few harsh stops, and tends to sound soothing and fluid to listen to. It also has the broadest vocabulary of any known language, which leads many scholars to believe it was the Continent’s earliest mother tongue. Even its hard stops tend to be softened–the word taika (which you can look up in the Glossary, as it’s a pretty lore-interesting one) is very soft, to the point where you don’t really hear the click of the ‘k’ when a natural Elvish speaker uses it, if that makes any sense. Although it’s not a tonal language in that changes in tone alters the meaning of the actual word, tone is still extremely important in Elvish speech when it comes to social and cultural cues (kind of like avoiding asking direct questions to elders because it’s seen as impolite), making it one of the hardest languages to master for an outsider.

Magid: Magid isn’t used as a spoken language anymore and tends to only be read as a written script consisting of complex runes and hieroglyphics: it would sort of be like speaking Ancient Latin, or Sanskrit, or Abyssinian, or any dead language like Ancient Greek, where there aren’t really native speakers but people who can learn how to understand and piece together the written language through study (primarily for casting magic). Part of the reason why it fell out of use/experienced such drastic linguistic drift was because it had ridiculously complicated grammatical rules, where you could add on an endless amount of syllables or compound words to a base word in order to change its meaning, so instead of “Valeth orum kael” (“Where is tool?”) it’d become like “Valethorummelanka'elsheth” (“Where are my tools, that you were last seen holding?”). Something like that. I like to headcanon that this is where the tradition of Mages with long, wordy names that they truncate into shorter nicknames (Panrachus -> Pan, Saleneon -> Neon, Liefred -> Red) came from!

Costa: Costa, the language of the southern isles and the coasts, tends to be very sing-song, warm, animated, lilting, and bombastic. It’s expressive and musical, with wide pitch variation and rolling vowels that rise and fall dramatically across a sentence. Speech in Costa might sound almost performative to a Common-speaking outsider: it’s really bombastic, emotive, and rhythm-driven, with every conversation sounding like a really exciting story or passionate declaration, lol. It’s full of confidence and tends to carry easily over distances and crowds, which is why a lot of seafarers use it!

Korkyth: Korkyth is blunt and weighty and thick and curdling, very dense and heavy. It’s kind of similar to Uth, their being from the same region, but Korkyth tends to be slow and rolling, almost like molasses or syrup, whereas Uth tends to be sharper and more glottal. However, they’re both deeper, low languages and almost so practical as to sound simplistic. Some outsiders might think of Korkyth as sort of slurring together; it doesn’t use a lot of differentiating tones to distinguish words from each other.

Gangara: Gangara is bright, fast, confident, and jabby, relying a lot on speed and rhythm to convey meaning. It favors quick, jabby consonants and tight phrasing, giving it a sense of momentum and verbal sharpness. To outsiders, it often sounds energetic and confrontational, even when the speaker isn’t being hostile at all, or like a constant back-and-forth bargaining/haggling exchange going on, kind of playful but also assertive, if that makes any sense? Two speakers speaking in Gangara usually talk like they’re trading punches. There’s a confident, declarative rhythm to it, a lot of emphatic verb punch packed into short phrases, and crisp, percussive consonants. It’s sort of brassy and blaring, like a trumpet!

Thanks for your question, hope that was interesting to read!

Hi, there’s a codex document that unlocks about this after Trouble’s first day off! :) Basically, there’s a stereotype that drunk Mages lose control of their powers and their magic can go haywire, so the Autarchy did a blanket ban on it, ostensibly to protect the population!

So the Fext are probably the most “benign” of the Tainted in that a large part of their population are people who are cursed to need to drink blood for sustenance, but they’re otherwise not typically inherently violent (though of course this varies, and some definitely are). Shades, being the offspring of Endarkened and Mages, have to destroy things because their powers are fueled by destruction, violence, etc.–just like Endarkened themselves–so people fear them a lot more due to the unavoidable chaos of their natures; similarly, Ghasts are driven to feed and cannibalize, and Balor (Ket-Endarkened mix) have a biological imperative towards violence, conquering, and war. The demonic heritage manifests in all kinds of malevolent ways, which is what generally makes Tainted so dangerous, and it often causes the inherited traits from the Child of Light parentage to warp or mutate or rebound in odd ways. Like, those traits are often present, but they’re just… twisted, corrupted, like a bad painting smeared into a tawdry mockery of the real thing. Endarkened love doing stuff like that.

However, while Fext have to drink blood to survive (as a consequence of their demonic ancestry), their minds are largely more rational, so they’re much better at hiding their true natures from society and going incognito. Of course, this doesn’t make them that much less feared: a normal (albeit beautiful-looking immortal) person that’s actually secretly a blood-drinker isn’t exactly a comforting thought. However, a lot of people tend to forget about their existence or not think of them as much: certainly not as much as outright, straightforward threats like Banshees or Nightgaunts, which are liable to swoop in and snatch travelers right off of the road!

The defining characteristics of Fext are that they’re as beautiful and long-lived as Elves; they need to drink blood to survive; their senses are often overwhelmed by sunlight (but they don’t burn or anything in it, it’s more that their eyes are so sensitive that it causes them headaches); and they’re in possession of some “small magics” in the same way that the Elves are. They can live on animal blood, but while it’s sustaining, it’s never satisfying. They also start appearing notably aged when they’ve gone a long time without access to human blood, which sometimes they use to their advantage to pass themselves off as different people (your 80-year-old neighbor is my elderly aunt who passed away and left me this house, that kind of thing). Notably, they’re solitary when it comes to each other (Fext don’t like to operate in the same ‘territory’ as each other because of the competition and the increased risk of exposure) and almost never associate with each other. It’s about half and half, the ones who chose to live out in the wilderness, preying occasionally on sleeping travelers or farmers or 'van guards, versus the ones who live in cities and try to pass through the streets undetected.

Some of their small magics include use of the mesmer, a kind of enthralling, hypnotic power they have to lure, confuse, bewitch, or subdue victims. It typically only works on one person at a time, though, so it’s not something they really use in battle. They also, of course, possess superhuman strength, speed, and agility when running at max capacity! They typically look like Elves, maybe with oddly-colored eyes or particularly sharp features, but there are no obvious tells like having really pale skin or being really cold or anything like that. They’re very good at hunting, tracking, and stalking their prey, just like their sylvan cousins…

The one big downfall for the Fext that they inherited from the Endarkened (other than the whole blood-drinking thing) is their propensity for obsessiveness. They typically try to stay on the DL, but there are occasions when a kind of madness or fixation arises in them and they become utterly obsessed with a particular victim. Typically when they drink blood, they prefer not to kill, because it’s not sustainable and draws a lot of attention; they prefer to feed from a target multiple times if they can, so killing is a moot point unless they’re a particularly sadistic individual. But sometimes a kind of mania descends on them, an orgiastic compulsion and desire to consume (which takes hold of Endarkened in Hael at their worst), and they get so fixated that they accidentally end up over-indulging and killing their victim. It’s kind of like the uncontrollable fits of lycanthropy, they lose all rational thinking and become quite monstrous. This is typically what leads to them getting caught and destroyed themselves!

Last crumb: in the novels, Croelle had a kind of Fext servant/familiar/lieutenant/companion who become fixated on him in this way, but couldn’t drink his blood (Tainted can’t drink the blood of other Tainted, it doesn’t do anything for them), so he just… followed him around and did whatever Croelle told him to do, lol.

Hope that helps!

Hi there, thanks for your interesting question! I’ll try to keep my response succinct, but it’s a big mish-mash of things. If we’re looking at the Autarchy’s last 100 years, the government and Consortium leaders leaned heavily into baroque spectacle (shock-and-awe power), with a touch of renaissance humanism (faith in reason, systems, mastery of knowledge). The aristocracy went heavily rococo–it’s very apparent in their art, architecture, fashion, design, and the style of their literature (a lot of romance novels, epistolary novels, lightness and sensuality). So this is the historical backdrop of the Autarchy heading into the current day.

As of this current generation, there was a brief period of time (this is discussed in one of Riel’s short stories when he was around 14) when rationalism and objectivism had a huge surge in popularity, particularly in the literature, philosophy, and academia of the Autarchy. Everything that wasn’t purely rationalistic or stemming from pure reason was denounced, and even ultra-relativism became buzzy and haute. There’s since been some pushback against this 5-10 years of trendy academia (Riel specifically tells his tutor at the time how ridiculous he finds it), but it left its mark, and the glittering rococo decadence of the “old money” aristocracy is starting to fade in Enik’s generation in favor of a style that embodies institutional confidence and power, restraint (i.e. the shaved heads that Prihine arrived to), and orderliness, so more neoclassicism (reason, order, restraint, moral clarity, duty over the excess of the baroque). Things feel a bit colder, more sober, and the art incorporates a lot more symmetry, logic, and balance than it had in bygone years.

Of course, this being the Autarchy, there’s always undercurrents and subversive art movements going on beneath the official channels! The other races all have their own styles of art: I would say the Elves lean more towards impressionism and romanticism, with some of that Pre-Raphaelite, fairytale-esque soft style being particularly popular.

The Hunters employ a very dramatic art style that’s typically very epic and heroic in scale: I’d say it’s sort of a mix between romantic nationalism, baroque (very chiaroscuro), and like mythic romanticism? It tends to depict huge murals and ensembles of people or gods, typically meeting in battle, painted in frescos on ceilings or walls and being extremely grand in scope, with a lot of elements of light and dark (again, chiaroscuro).

The Mages tend to be heavily into art nouveau and symbolism, so their art is considered very diametrically opposed to what’s considered popular in the Autarchy today! It’s patterned, but not in an obvious way, reflecting their ideas about reality as having some kind of organic structure or hidden truth. There’s a lot of integration of form and function and depictions of nature-as-pattern, lots of encoded meanings, hidden messages–it’s a bit like expressionism, but leaning more heavily on the sensibilities of art nouveau! The Autarchy, of course, hates its sort of mystical, esoteric opulence.

The Ket prefer an elegant, minimalist, inky art style most similar to sumi-e painting or guó huà painting or literati ink wash painting. It favors economy of lines over spectacle, negative space as meaning, and suggestion over declaration, so it can be very subtle, but it has color incorporated in its landscapes! (Portraits tend to be done in monochrome inks, for whatever reason.) It can be very flowing and graceful and unbroken, typically focused on uniting the entire collective painting as a whole!

Hope that’s helpful!

Hi there, projecting thoughts into someone’s mind is a common method of communicating between Mages, and the Shepherds themselves even utilize it regularly in the field: I believe Trouble and MC do it in the Equalists’ compound, and Red links everyone up this way in Chapter 7, if I’m remembering correctly off of the top of my head! So yes, it is possible, though it’s considered extremely impolite to do so without explicit permission from non-Mage recipients! How difficult it is depends on the recipients: a non-Mage with particular mental training, like Blade or Tallys, or a specific disposition, like Ayla, might be harder to project at right away than someone like Shery or Lavinet. Mages explicitly have to “bump” or “nudge” each other mentally beforehand before they start talking into each other’s minds, and the receiving Mage also has to explicitly open up their mind/grant permission to allow it to happen, so it’s simultaneously easier (it comes more naturally to them) but more difficult (they will notice you doing it and have to “open up” to give you permission to do it beforehand) if that makes any sense!

And yes, your second example would work, though of course if the binding work was smudged or smeared (say if you used blood or ink), that could alter or break the spell, so it’s not that common either! But it would work!

Thank you for your kind words!

Hiya, this has been fortuitously answered here! :D

I like to keep some mystery in the universe, about other races that might have come and gone in the vast ancient history of Blest, and about the line between myth and legend and fairytale and reality! MC just glazed past that one because they were already being told some pretty crazy stuff, but it was just a brief mention to kind of allude to questions of what else could be out there in the world that we don’t know about! The characters in their current era are so preoccupied with the questions of their time, the Castigation or the problem with the Hunter population or the conflict between the Old Faith and the church, and these problems are extremely preeminent in their culture and psychology, but what about all that came before it? Before the written word and recorded history, what was going on in Blest, and are their current accounts and estimations even accurate? The Elves claim to be the firstborn in the world, and the Elementals are pretty adamant about their version of things, but when Dwarves (and Faerie, and dragons) are randomly thrown in there, the question has to be asked, is that actually true? Or is the One-God’s version of things more accurate, as knowledge might evolve and be refined in a more ongoing, contemporary process? And if neither of them are totally true, are these other common conceptions 100% accurate either, or are they just the modern day Blest’s best approximations, distorted by eons of history and exaggeration and conflict and compromise, but presented as absolute fact?

…I just like alluding to questions like that randomly. It’s a common theme in all my worlds! Just as modern-day science is making new discoveries that challenge our taken-for-granted understanding of things every day (i.e., the James Webb Telescope a few years ago finding galaxies that are too old and mature to really align with the Big Bang Theory as it was commonly understood, meaning all the models probably have to be readjusted, and leading some scientists to start working towards “Tired Light” theory or the theory that we actually exist inside of a black hole instead), I like to think stuff comes up that continually challenges the supposed “canon” and knowledge the characters have of their own world, too.

In the novels I had a really whacky analogue that Dwarves and Giants were kind of like Blest’s version of dinosaurs, where they’d unearth bones and ruins that adamantly did not fit into their “fossil record” or their understanding of the world’s existent races, which also (for me) adds fun mystery and speculation about whether the story/mythos/timeline of the world is actually all that accurate or not! That’s sort of vague, but hopefully that makes sense! Basically, I always like to keep things loose and mysterious rather than nailing down a really hard, canonical version of things, so that’s why I threw that in there!

They’re more common among certain groups–Halek uses a spear, for example, and it’s an extremely common weapon among the Hunters–as well as riders on horseback, the Ket in the southlands, and sometimes rural farmers, but they’re not used much in the Army of the Sun, for instance!

Yes, there are troupes of traveling performers who do this! They’re typically not referred to as circuses or carnivals, but specific companies or theatre troupes that have performers, actors, musicians, acrobats, fire-breathers, or what have you! Hope that’s helpful!

There are sleight-of-hand and parlor tricks, but no one really has a career as a stage magician: why would you when people could pay to see someone who actually can do magic and can actually breathe fire and disappear and whatnot, not just fool you into thinking they did? The closest equivalent, I think, would be Hedgewitches, who can manage such a tiny amount of magic that it might as well be equivalent to a stage magician, and various performers like acrobats and fire-breathers and people who impress audiences with their feats and sleight-of-hand! But at that point, it’s more an admiration of the skill involved to pull off, say, a card trick or an optical illusion, rather than anyone thinking it’s “real” magic! And no one ever goes too far with it and does like David Copperfield-style magic where they make the moon disappear or conjure a horse on-stage or something, because in a world with Inquisitors, why would you actively want to portray yourself as an enemy of the state and an oppressed class? 😅 Reading an audience member’s mind to say the number they’re thinking of isn’t very fun when there’s an actual real fear of mind-reading Enchanters in the world: you’d probably summarily find yourself run down by a mob if you weren’t careful, so it’s not worth it to develop that kind of practice!

Some Mages also tend to be a bit snobby about such things (like charlatans who “make a necklace disappear” and ignore the physics and theorems and years of study that a real Mage would have to learn to make that happen, and also you are dismantling the serious reputation of magic into something cutesy and easy!), but others, like Red, try gamely to admire the separate skills involved!

Haha, I love the implicit matchup, I hadn’t even thought of that!! I wonder if it did give Caine any pause? Honestly, people sharing first names or surnames is a holdover from an era of worldbuilding where I thought it was ✨ ReALiStiC ✨ for that to happen–in real life, we know multiple Nguyens and Johnsons and Smiths and Garcias, and multiple Brittanys and Kevins and Joes and what have you, so in my mind it was reasonable to know different Aerins or Kinpols or Wards (without their being related to each other), with names having varying degrees of commonality and prevalence!

Nowadays, having matured as a game developer and having any sense of the user experience and what can be confusing to people, I’ve reconsidered my stance–of course it can be confusing for characters in a story to have shared names but no relation, it’s never really done–but some part of me still likes the realism of it, so I kept it in! XD

I wouldn’t say the Diminished are immune to problems like sexism or discrimination, and they’re also not a monolith: how culture developed on [REDACTED] is still going to be very different from how Diminished culture developed on the Continent or in Thielwood or in Haven, even if they’re all technically “Diminished”! I also try to take pains to not idolize or idealize the Diminished races, or make them seem utopic or clearly superior in comparison to the Norms; Halek, Blade, and Tallys all either criticize or showcase specific pitfalls and flaws in their respective cultures or societal backgrounds too, and you can even see what ancient Mage culture was like towards Norms in Chapter 8, so I don’t want to give the impression that just being Diminished would make a society less prone to any specific flaw or sociocultural behavior! Hope that makes sense!