Ælf-Adal - VotE Remastered Development

Their Origins in Dream

They come from out of Nightmare, though whose, or why, no-one remembers now. They may have been the dying dream of a coma-locked god, that cracked its sleeping skull and clambered out into our world. They may have been a shadow in the deep dark mirror-world of man, the fearful place we go to in our frightened dreams, brought forth by art, or chance or ancient science.

But they spring from the ecology of dreams, they are born from its substance, made to feed and feed upon and fight those visions of our fear.

Imagine a world composed only of the nightmares of all the thinking, sleeping minds, a strand of hallucinatory darkness shifting in its substance as dreamers wake and sleepers slip in and out of terror in the night. A world where the only stability comes from the mass memories of shared catastrophes. A world that contains all knowledge held by any thinking being, yet only in its dark reflected form. A world where predation is absolute, where all things hunt and kill and there is nothing that does not, in some small way, do harm. A world whose demiurges and creating gods, those beings that fill it with their life, who imbue its every moment with their black creative fire, are also its victims, targets and foes. A world that hates its creators.

This is the world of the Ælf-Adal, where they slowly grew, shaping themselves from the coagulated stuff of thought. This is where they first formed independent minds, where they made their society, where they built their mighty civilisation, a city seen in many dreams but never recognised.

How long they lay there thinking dreaming thoughts, nobody knows. Some say longer than the life of man, some say longer than the life of the world, some say longer than the stars.

Their War Against the Dreamers

No-one is certain who declared the war, whether their psychonaut scouts broke out, hunting dreamers as they woke, unwilling to let go, even on the borders of night, or whether some psychic human crusade discovered them and penetrated into Dream to burn out the parasitic thought. But, in dreams and sleep, and in the daylight of the waking world, a war began.

It was a war of tragedy and loss. The regularity and substance of our world made it a kind of hell to them, and the impossible fluctuations of Nightmare swallowed whole cultures of man.

The Ælf-Adal were made from the memory of pain and knew, in some form, everything we knew, and held strange magics impossible to counter and understand. But we were their creators, or the sustainers of their world at least, and they could never fully understand the sights they saw unfolding as the sun rose. The substance of humanity was dense and strange and different than it was in dreams and here, man did not always run but sometimes fought, and sometimes won, and as the numbers of mankind decayed, the world of Dream began to shrink and tighten round the black cities of the Ælf-Adal.

As well as that, once the war began, the nightmares of mankind filled mutually with one shared terror: the fear of the Nightmare Men, and these twice-reflected visions, the Nightmares of a Nightmare, filled their ancient civilisation. As monstrous and strange as they, but not independent, not truly-thinking beings, mere reactions and distractions, but dangerous enough in their way.

The Prophet of the Aelf-Adal

It was a prophet, or strange Nightmare-God that led the Ælf-Adal beneath, away from the light, away from the reach of man. Here, in a dim strange corner of the material world so dark and fluid that it seemed almost like a part of Dream, they lay and waited, rebuilding their mighty and decadent civilisation, one based on and drawn from the shattered memories of the greatest cities ever made. Yet now real, encoded in stone deep beneath the earth.

The Ælf-Adal are not-quite-real and not-quite-dream, but they are beautiful, the colour of the darkness, and they never age.

They can live and eat and breathe and die. And hate.

The Hatred of the Aelf-Adal

Imagine an ocean, a deep one. Imagine the water is black and dark like North Sea mud. Imagine things living in it, thickly-knitted limbs churning like a mower motor left tipped up and switched on, cutting blindly in long grass. You can’t see the limbs, or the things to which the limbs attach, but you can feel their movement in the thick black sea. They regard you. They hate you. A hate so deep they tear frantically at their own flesh in substitute for reaching yours.

Imagine the sea restrained by glass. Like the walls of an aquarium built on titanic scale. You stand before the sea that rises out of sight and curves to the horizon on each side. You can hear the surface fretting up its waves in storm a distant mile above your head. The glass holds everything back. Inside it you can see brief writhings of that midnight high-pressure world, raging at your presence just beyond its reach.

Imagine that the glass is beautifully made. Etched and engraved with perfect smiling forms. Beyond it, the black water, but, when the light slants just so across the pane, a field of translucent harmony gleams, worked there on its surface by hands and minds that leap the greatest human art. A genius casually employed that vaults with ease the best that man has ever made. Crystal signature of thoughtless superiority. So perfect are its fields and processions that when seen, even glimpsed in a trickle of lateral light, you want to live there, with those frozen people, inside the surface of that glass.

This is how much the the Ælf-Adal despise you.

This is how much they control that hate.

The knowledge of you stabs them in the flesh with every recollection and event. Though they know it well, the wound of you will not close. Each memory of you, each experience, all evidence of your continued being, is like a knife twisting in the skin.

No other species could absorb such titanic contempt and remain sane. They would be reduced to raving berserkers, living only to kill, directly, the loathed enabler of their pain.

But the Ælf-Adal are old; they know much of patience and control. And they know that they are born from the substance of your fear and that if there was nothing left to feel afraid, they might well die.

So.

Their Great Plan

Everything that can be done is being done. The situation is difficult, but there is time. There is always time. They must endure, as they have for so long. They wait and plan for an inverted world, a world where societies and civilisations and empires and species exist purely to instil and sustain fear. A world where dreams enslave the dreamer. Where the walls between sleep and waking tumble down and both realms become one sweet eternal whole.

They will live to see it.

Flayed Skin and Stolen Eyes

Flesh

They have real bones and bodies, and beautiful infra-black skin, void against the dark, but diaphanous gusts of smeared flesh can alter in an instant, bones elongating into trollish stalkers, or warping into crone-curves, Darkflesh bubbling with screaming faces - a blistering cancer of fear.

Light will sharpen their teeth and tightly-fitted skins will remind them of their form. They trade in Elf-Skins, or other skins of form and beauty, stitching themselves into suits of the finely tanned flesh, Wrapping these in equally tight clothes, and those in diaphanous gusts of cloudcradle silk, as if to mimic via textiles the formlessness of the twice-bound flesh beneath.

They breathe in the light to sharpen teeth and tongues. Exhaled breaths of darkness curl around their masks like rising steam. Only in light do their teeth sharpen and tongues point so they can speak clearly. In light do they hunger and in light do they feast, tearing at red meat and drinking bright blood and dark wines.

Masks

Each wears a mask, they claim these suppress the natural terror-imbuing presence of the Aelf-Adal, without which they might have no congress, and this is partly true. The unspoken part says that only these remind them of their identity and shape. To take a mask is to tear much of the solidity and sanity of an Aelf-Adal, for they cannot easily organise ‘I-am’ without one. This is another cause of their nobility for they choose only fine and beautiful masks – the faces of princes, kings and queens. Though they may become hounds or monsters if they choose.

Above the mask, at times they seem to have great horns, or black medusa hair; not snakes but things like snakes; blades or sharp penetrating pseudopodia, or they may have washes of ink that move like comic book art.

Beneath the masks are curious mouths; usually matching their assumed identity and role, though with sharper teeth, though in darkness, or extremis, they can twist and melt into vertical slits, tentacled holes or savage crosswise cuts.

Eyes

Their eyes are never their own, for natural Aelf-Adal evolved within a psychosphere, alive to scent and meaning but knowing only imagined light, which does not shine where no attention guides. The dreaming mind, like a theatre-keeper, sends the wash-lamp of its thoughts here and there, highlighting fragments of scene, leaving where it passes, a deeper darkness than just absence. This darkness was the birth-caul of the Aelf-Adal, and so they have no natural eyes.

Thus they must steal or purchase eyes to see with. Always the most beautiful eyes, always the rarest and most prized. The eyes behind their mask are not their own.

The Deathly Stare

The un-masked full-face stare of an Aelf-Adal invariably kills. This nightmare instinct bursts from them in times of stress or intense joy. The false eyes fall from their faces and are trod underfoot in ecstasy. All who face them die, and no closing of eyes will save them, for the face-sight of an Aelf-Adal penetrates flesh like a black sun while the chaos of their horned medusa-hair writhes like a corona of worms.

Fear-Eaters

While they occupy solid, predictable form, bound to a mask, a name, wrapped within a skin, the Aelf-Adal must eat as mortals do, (though only occasionally). Yet at all times they eat fear.

For the Aelf-Adal, the terror, dread and disquiet that emanates from living things is like streams of water falling in a desert land – each life is like a roving fountain moving through a stony maze like ghosts - appearing and disappearing - and the Aelf-Adal like parched Pilgrims who must seeks these miraculous ever-replenishing gourds which pour their bounty in the shapes of living men.

Without Fear they waste away into ghosts or scurry into dreams as petty thoughts. Given too much they mestatise into apocalyptic angels, primal extra-causal terrors. Neither is their desire, so they must farm terror calmly, and spook in moderate ways. Moderate from their perspective anyway.

Magicians

They gain naturally in magical power as they agelessly age. An inherent gift, existing as they do between real and unreal. A world that contains all knowledge held by any thinking being, yet only in its dark reflected form. Though they are not above learning ‘lesser magics’.

Sleep and Waking

The Aelf-Adal recognise no boundary between sleep and wakening, between reality and dream. Naturally amphibious to thought, they are equally present whether you are awake or asleep and can walk through dreams to reach you - dreams which curdle into nightmare in their presence, so that one affected with regular nightmares is said to be Aelf-Kissed.

One might dream of an Aelf-Adal and awaken to see them physically before you, carrying on the same conversation as if nothing has changed, or meet with one and fall into sleep, only to find them still there, again, continuing on. To them, there really was no boundary, the matter is like turning one’s head, or switching between well-known tongues.

M certain twitching morphia hangs about all those who deal with Aelf-Adal - so much involved with those who recognise no bounds to sleep, they themselves seem druggy, now narcoleptic, insomniac, not knowing what is real.

The danger for dreaming mortals is that for the Aelf-Adal, an agreement made in a dream, is as binding and real to them as one made awake.

The Palaces Of Night

The Palaces of the Aelf-Adal bleed into the imagination, for they are built across the bridge of night, with foundations in reality and dream. A gentle terror impregnates all they touch whether they will it or not; Auschwitz fantasies, Ed Gien Decor and Giger-Ossuary Aesthetic, archipelagos of darkness where the unconscious and abyssal meet, courts of dark luxury existing in the limerence of dread. Marked with the emblem of the screaming face, they are always bigger on the inside, and once the inside has been experienced and the boundary broken, larger then beyond.

The Sun

It is not light itself they fear, (and they would say they fear nothing, for Fear they are), but the mass collective concept of 'The Day', the dream of the Above. To them the waking world , with its burning Sun and sharp alien divide between reality and dream, is a conceptually toxic realm.

There is no equivalent, but imagine this; you move to a nation where right-angles do not exist, or where no lines are straight, and even the understanding that things might be otherwise fades slowly from your mind as the collective impossibility takes hold, persisting only as a deep sense of impossible wrongness and an alien nature which you no longer have the concepts to delimit or the words to describe.

Even the dreams of those who come from above can be dangerous, for they remember sunlight and dream of sunlit lands, a dangerous, but yet.. intoxicating, circumstance for the Aelf-Adal.

Society and Economy

Family

While they have a mask, a shape, a name, the Aelf-Adal must eat, must breathe, know pain, hope and, (though they deny it), fear. They even love their children, in a way.

They can mate with one another, or with anything else. Half-dream, they can marry fantasies in nightmares and become pregnant with wonders, or with monsters, and breed fantastic children. It might be that many of the strange and singular things in the Veins of the Earth are their children, and that many wild and black ideas are too.

As they assume nobility-as-selfhood, (there are no common Aelf-Adal, all are Princes (less those formless ones, lost and given to the dark, perhaps they are trolls. Or the mothers of Trolls)), so they must take on the consequences of Nobility; hierarchy, family, descent, inheritance, dynasty and intrigue, even war.

Of course they live for ever so the only means of inheritance is mask-theft or murder, and there is never enough land, or places to rule, but that is not so different from ordinary noble lives.

Nobility

Because their terrors must be harvested gently, they are fine Princes. As utterly inimical to life and sanity as they are, Such power alone does them little good.

Good Governors, Masters of the Silk Trade, Lords of Civilisation. Their interest in complexity exists because they feed off the terrors it sustains. No life means no fear. Therefore they wish to see civilisation bloom. Therefore they are like Renaissance Princes, bountiful characters, often willing to finance and resource expeditions and new settlements. The Courts and Houses of the Terror-Men uphold the cities of the Veins.

Of their meta-culture, few know much, for extended contact with the Aelf-Adal usually destroys even the strongest souls.

Economy

Their 'civilisation' is an act of rationing, and self-control, of drug addicts or vampires measuring and controlling their feeding, and turning that control itself into an artistic act, and a source of further pleasure. Dread is their currency. They trade in hope and dreams, even more than silk, Elf-Skins and beautiful eyes.

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The Question of Hatred

Do we actually need the Aelf-Adal to hate?