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The ylvar, the people who remember
A second playable people, old enough to remember the continent whole. Why they refused the Kindred's oath, and the twilight forest they start in.
The ylvar are the oldest people on the Accord's side of the Rift and the only ones who remember the continent whole. A ylf lives about three centuries; many were adults on the night of the Sundering.
They lived in the eastern old woods before the empire came, and the empire never conquered them. It bought them: roads through the wood by leave, the wood itself never cut, and ylvar guides to show the legions into the vargr's hills.
On the night the capital went into the Rift, the ash fell east and killed half their wood. That dead half is the Ashwold, and the dead walked out of it. When the Kindred later swore its bands together on the oath-stones, the ylvar refused: their elders say the land's voice changed that night, and what the Kindred listens to now is something else. The Kindred calls them the oathless.
So they sit with the Accord, which calls itself the empire's heir and honoured the old compact when its ships found them. The Accord's navy stands between the ylvar and the vargr, and it needs timber the walled west does not grow. Every Accord keel is ylvar yew, seasoned for decades and built by ylvar hands.
The Gloamholt
A ylf starts in the Gloamholt, a wooded headland on the Kindred's coast where the light stays at dusk all day: giant yews, ferns that glow after dark, bark with light in its cracks. You begin in the Cuttings, the yew nursery, and work down to Yewhythe, the harbour town where the keels are built. Thirty-two quests take you to level ten, starting with a blight in the yews; then the Yew Run carries you across to Hightide on the Accord's shore.
Ylvar give their age in rings instead of a family name: Ennet of Ninety Rings. Six skin tones, from dusk blue to moss grey-green, and three racials. Heartwood: stand still like a tree and mend. Firekeeper: resistance to fire, from the controlled burns of their woods. Read the Grain: for a minute you see what old wood remembers, and some quests are built on it.
The ylvar can be every class in the alpha, like humans. The male ylf is still a stand-in; the female has her own body and he is next. Whether a forest that is always dusk still looks good on the tenth hour, I don't know yet.