They say the world was born in silence -
not of peace, but of fear.
Eldermire, vast and unending, stretches across three continents. One was remain cloaked in mystery, veiled by oceans that no sail nor steel has yet conquered.
But the great continent, the beating heart of this world, is known. It is here the realms of man and monster are carved.
The continent itself is divided into three realms:
The City Realm, where the poor and the proud dwell, where laughter fills the markets and shadows crawl through alleyways. It is a realm of trade, of common toil, and of quiet despair.
The Kingdom Realm, where nobles sit on gilded thrones, soldiers march beneath banners, and ruins of kingdoms past whisper of fire and betrayal. Here linger the scars of the Ravaged Queen, whose forgotten kingdom of Gravemarch was consumed in a tragic and horrifying fate a thousand years ago.
The Realm of the Hollowed: a place forbidden. No mortal walks its lands without sanction of the Supreme Spirits, the Hollowed themselves. It is a realm of unshaken silence, where the air breathes riddles and even the stars bend to alien tongues.
Yet what sets Eldermire apart from all other worlds is not only its land, but its threefold time.
Daystrike, bright and golden, where man tills the soil and trade thrives.
Nightfall, deep and silver, where fear prowls and whispers creep.
And the third… the Gloam
Time between time, when shadows grow long and reality thins. Few dare to walk the earth during the Gloam, for it is then that doors to other realms open, and horrors slip through like smoke from a dying fire.
This is Eldermire..
a world where myths are not stories, but scars.
Where the past refuses to sleep.
The notable races of Eldermire.
Eldermire is a land of three continents, divided by oceans unknown, and ruled by the rhythm of three times - Daystrike, Nightfall, and Gloam. But what gives it breath are not its suns, nor its lands, but the beings that stalk them.
Humans
Flesh: fragile. Bones: brittle. Lifespan: brief.Yet no race multiplies faster, adapts quicker, or schemes deeper. Humans of the City Realm live crowded among towers of stone and smoke, scraping survival with sweat and cunning. In the Kingdom Realm, nobles cloak themselves in silks and ambition, while their peasants rot beneath boots. Human bodies may be weak, but their hunger for more - land, wealth, knowledge - makes them the most dangerous creatures in Eldermire.
Humans were not the firstborn of Eldermire. By the time their kind appeared upon the Heart Continent, the Elves had already waged wars in the Far West, and the Draemarians had endured generations of bondage and sorrow. But where others carried memory, tragedy, or bloodlust, humans brought hunger - an endless drive to adapt, create, and expand.
They spread quickly across the Heart Continent, dividing themselves into two great societies: the Kingdom Realm and the City Realm. The Kingdom Realm's humans sought dominion through science, technology, research, and military power. Their minds sharpened like blades, they forged engines, weapons, and vast libraries of knowledge, believing progress alone could shield them from whatever lurked beyond their walls. Their English tongue grew advanced, refined, even rigid - an emblem of discipline.
By contrast, the humans of the City Realm embraced trade, tradition, and culture. Their cities bloomed with markets, festivals, and exchanges of craft. They prized stories, customs, and relationships more than invention. Yet for all their richness in culture, they remained blind to the greater horrors beyond their shores. To most city-dwellers, the Graftlings, Hollowed, Ravaged, and Elves are nothing more than myths or bedtime tales. Their language remained closer to the old roots, simpler but less precise, echoing their communal, everyday lives.
What makes humans unique is not their strength, nor their longevity - for their lifespans are short, averaging only seventy to ninety years. Instead, it is their capacity to shape the world in spite of their limits. They are fragile compared to Draemarians, less skilled than Elves, less cunning than Graftlings. Yet they endure, because they build together, and because they dare to believe in futures that others cannot see.
The old stories say that humans were shaped by the ancient unknown races that once battled in the skies, the same beings whose laughter echoes in the time of Gloam. Whether this is truth or myth, no one knows. What is certain is that humans carry within them a spark - restless, reckless, unyielding.
Though young compared to the other races of Eldermire, humanity has already changed the Heart Continent forever. They raise cities where none stood, they forge alliances with Draemarians, and they divide themselves with their own ambitions. Some say they are destined to lead. Others whisper they are doomed to repeat the follies of those who came before.
But whatever fate awaits, humans remain the race that cannot sit still, cannot accept chains, cannot stop reaching for something more.
Draemarians
Height: males average 8 feet; females, 7. Flesh: dense as hardened leather. Muscle: wound tight as steel, tensile and unyielding. Their skin color like the devil, dark bloody red. Bones: like ironwood, thick and resistant to fracture. Their lifespans stretch past three centuries. They bore horns like devil on their head, and their glow like monstrous
Though they appear like hulking beasts, their hearts are unnervingly gentle. They are quick to laughter, eager to share bread, and warm in their friendships. Yet their loyalty runs deep into madness: to love a Draemari is to live beneath their shadow, for they will never let go. Many fear their bodies; few see the danger in their devotion.
Long before the first walls of humanity rose, the Draemarians fell from the sky. They were not born of Eldermire's soil, but came shackled in the chains of others - captives, slaves, and wanderers torn from their stars by those who sought to use them. It is said their ancestors arrived on black vessels of iron, driven and traded by alien masters, abandoned when their oppressors vanished into the void.
Unlike humans, who built their world through trade and invention, Draemarians shaped their society around memory and reverence. They hold their ancestors as eternal guides, believing that the dead must be honored each dawn, or the living will be cursed with misfortune. To awaken and not kneel before the candlelight is a taboo deeper than any crime, for to forget one's roots is to invite ruin upon the Draemari bloodline.
They have no last names, for to name oneself apart is to divide the family of Draemari. Instead, they walk Eldermire as one people, a nation without hierarchy of names. To them, humans are curious - obsessed with family titles and separations, distinguishing themselves where Draemarians seek to be whole.
Though gentle and communal in peace, Draemarians are forged from sorrow. Their songs tell of endless bondage, of collars around their throats, and of generations that lived and died in chains before Eldermire became their refuge. But from this pain grew their strength: they became skilled fishers, traders, and survivors of the sea, their hands hardened by work, their hearts softened by compassion.
Their language, smooth and melodic, is considered easy to learn compared to the twisting complexity of human tongues. And yet, it carries weight in every word, each phrase tied to ancestry and tradition.
The Draemarians are long-lived - two hundred to two hundred fifty years - but they are not immortal. Their years are measured not in battles or conquests, but in the strength of families, the vibrancy of community, and the honoring of those who came before.
Still, deep in their marrow lingers the echo of chains. Some whisper that Draemarians were altered long ago by their captors, their biology reshaped to serve, to endure. Others claim that their lives are a test, that only by clinging to family and reverence do they resist the hollow fate of slavery.
And so, the Draemarians walk Eldermire as both a people of sorrow and resilience - bound to their past, yet determined to live fully in the present. Their strength lies not in weapons or technology, but in their unyielding devotion to memory, kinship, and survival.
Graftlings
Carapace: slick, black, chitinous. Limbs: too many, jointed at angles that mock natural design. Faces: masks of bone, eyeless, yet seeing everything. Their minds are obsessions wrapped in sinew and needles.
The Graftlings, Unknown, terrorising, hostile, but intelligent and super curious. They are surgeons of terror. To them, flesh is canvas, bone is parchment, and nerves are string for their instruments. They carve, they stitch, they alter - not to cure, but to experiment. To meet them is to become art.
But, what were Graftlings exactly?
The Graftlings are one of Eldermire's most abominable races - grotesque, twisted forms of flesh and chitin, as if nature itself was violated in their making. Their bodies are asymmetrical, some with too many limbs, others with none, their skin layered like burnt bark and bone fused together. They whisper in a language no scholar has ever deciphered, a guttural sound that feels less like speech and more like a memory of screams.
Among the old storytellers of the Heart Continent, there lingers a forbidden tale: that the Graftlings are not of Eldermire at all. They descended from the sky, long before Draemari or Human kind drew their first breath, arriving in vessels of burning light. The "celestial carcasses" they left behind - vast metal ruins buried under earth and sea - are rumored to still exist, though no sane explorer seeks them.
Most dismiss these stories as myths, meant to frighten children. But the oldest families, keepers of memory and bloodlines, whisper that the Graftlings are not merely monsters - they are the echo of something greater, the survivors of an alien war no one alive can remember.
The Ravaged
Formerly humans and Draemarians. Now - unrecognizable.
Skin: blistered with grafts. Jaws: broken and reset with alien bone. Some grow additional arms, others sprout fused faces that scream. Few speak, but when they do, their tongues scrape the Graftlings' language and the remnants of human curses.
The Ravaged are living monuments to cruelty. They wander in packs, hunting the living not only for hunger, but for envy. To the Graftlings, they are "A New Face." To mankind, they are a nightmare with memory.
The Ravaged are a blasphemy of flesh and memory - twisted bodies sewn from what once were men, women, and Draemari. Their veins burn with alien ichor, their skin is a patchwork of scars and grafted limbs, and their mouths drip with whispers of agony. They roam the dark ruins of Kingdom realm, mindless yet chained to the torment of their final days, as though the kingdom itself breathes their suffering into the air.
Their origin lies in the folly of Gravemarch Kingdom's last King, a ruler driven not only by ambition but by envy of the Graftlings' forbidden technologies. He believed he could enslave them, bind their alien knowledge to his throne, and reshape his people into an empire eternal. But the Graftlings were cunning. They lured the King and his loyal court into promises of shared knowledge, only to ensnare them in a grotesque experiment. His armies were torn apart, their flesh warped into living tools, their screams drowned beneath the hum of alien machines.
The Queen, beloved and gentle, was forced to watch as her people were reduced to horror. She herself was seized for the same fate - yet fortune bent in a strange way. One Seeking Graftling, a rare aberration among its kind, yearned not for domination but for the knowledge of humans - their words, their histories, their songs. It freed the Queen, guiding her away from the laboratories of despair.
When she escaped the Graftlings' lair with the aid of the Seeking Graftling, the Queen could not rest - not while her King lay shackled in alien torment. She bowed her head, gathering an army of her loyal subjects and enslaved Draemarians, and led them back to the chamber of horrors. Yet when they breached the lair, they found not salvation but nightmare: their brethren twisted into grotesque shapes, their bodies made into machines of pain, their voices hollow cries of madness. Of the King, there was no trace. He was missing - vanished deeper into the abyss of the Graftlings' design.
Broken yet unyielding, the Queen marched her people home. But fate turned grim. Along the shadowed roads, her expedition was ambushed by a band of the Ravaged, led by a Graftling commander. A battle was fought, the Queen herself standing against their horror. Victory was won, but at a cost - many fell. And yet, secretly, the Queen retrieved the bodies of the slain Ravaged, unable to abandon what was once human.
In her desperation, she journeyed with her survivors and the Seeking Graftling into the Third Realm, the hollowed lands where none may tread without leave. There she knelt before the Supreme Spirits of the Hollowed, begging for aid - to alter the fate of the Ravaged, to restore her King and her people. The Hollowed, ageless and cruel in their bargains, answered: Kill the Ravaged. Kill even your King. Only in their deaths may their fate be undone.
With resolve forged of despair but grieving, the Queen was clarified and ultimately, agreed. She returned to her kingdom, determined to fulfill the vow. But there she found no salvation - only hell made flesh. Her kingdom was already ablaze, her people torn apart, devoured, defiled. At its heart stood her King, no longer human, no longer hers. His body was warped, grotesque, crowned in gore, gnawing the flesh of her people as he commanded the Ravaged in their massacre.
The Queen, her oath shattered, fled into the night with the remnants of her host and the Seeking Graftling. And thus she passed into legend - the Ravaged Queen, who sought to save her people but found only despair. Some say she wanders still, a ghost of ash and sorrow. Others whisper she waits in the shadows, bound by the Hollowed's bargain, until the day comes when she must slay her King.
The Hollowed
Heightless. Weightless. Their forms change like smoke or ripple like water. Biology: none. They appear as silhouettes cut from reality itself, voices echoing with tones human throats cannot produce.
The Hollowed are the whispers of Eldermire's oldest truths. They speak in riddles, promising wisdom, bargains, power. Yet their words never come without price. They dwell beyond the Third Realm, and no one may enter without their permission. Those who return speak broken, their eyes hollowed out by things unseen.
The Hollowed are not a race as mortals understand it - they are the shadows that remained when the first beings of Eldermire burned themselves out. Some say they were gods once, or the keepers of creation, but in their endless pursuit of knowledge and perfection, they consumed their own essence, leaving behind hollow shells of will and power.
Their realm lies beyond the Third Realm, a place where form and flesh unravel. They cannot be touched by sword or flame, for they are not bodies but hungers, voices, and echoes of what once was. When they speak, it is said their words are not heard by the ear but carved directly into the soul.
The Hollowed are known only for their bargains. They have no pity, no rage, no joy - only desire to reshape what is brought to them. They grant power, knowledge, or transformation, but always at a price far heavier than the mortal can bear. To them, mortals are experiments, vessels to pour new forms into, playthings of their endless solitude.
Old tales say the Hollowed envy the living. They cannot live, cannot love, cannot die. And so, they trade - offering fragments of what mortals crave most, only to watch them unravel in return.
And so they are feared, even in rumor: the Hollowed Supremacy, lords of bargains, whose cryptic gifts always taste of ash in the end.
The Song Elves
Long before humans raised cities or Draemari towered over the lands, there were the Elves of the Far West continent - a single, thriving people. Tall and pale as marble, with hair that shimmered in hues no other race would ever bear - silvers streaked with emerald veins, midnight blacks rippling with scarlet undertones, gold that caught light like woven flame. They were a proud race, swift in combat, cunning in thought, and deeply united.
But their golden age ended when the sky tore open. From beyond the stars came the first invaders - the Space Graftlings, alien horrors clad in living ships of flesh and steel. Their mothership fell upon the Elves' lands, bringing slaughter with a science too strange to comprehend. For centuries the Elves fought, blood soaking the soil, and though they grew sharper, fiercer, and stronger with each generation, they were broken by endless war.
It was then they heard a rumor of spirits that can be bargained with so much magic and power in another continent. And so, desperate expedition of Elves sailed east, toward the Heart Continent, hoping to find salvation. Their ships vanished from memory.
They had successfully found the Hollowed. But at what cost?
The Elves pleaded. But they pleaded not an aid against the Graftlings, but peace and freedom from their war. The Hollowed? It only offered them an unprecedented bargain. To be free from war, from blood, from the endless scream of steel, the Elves were given eternal solitude. No other race would find them, no conquest would reach them. But the gift was poisoned - they were struck blind. Their eyes remained, luminous yet sightless, veiled behind silken blindfolds. Their voices, however, were remade: angelic, hypnotic, and terrible. Their song became their sight.
Thus, they became the Song Elves. Hunters who sang to see, warriors who turned battlefields into choirs of death. They wandered the deep forests and veiled mountains of the Kingdom Realm, unseen by humans or Draemari, their presence whispered only in myths of haunting music carried on the wind.
Their lifespan was no longer bound to hardship or war. They lived quietly, for decades - forty, fifty, sometimes more - aging not in the body but in the strength of their song. And when they went to war, it was always said: the air grew heavy, the world trembled, and the last thing their enemies heard was not the cry of steel but the chorus of death.
They are tall and Lithe, averaging 7 feet, slim but sinewy, their pale skin, almost moonlit, sometimes with faint glowing veins under the flesh. Their hair, strange colors with natural, unearthly pattern, like streaks of glowing silver, flame-gold, or star-speckled black.
Their eyes, always covered with ornate blindfolds, their true eyes glowing faintly beneath - sightless, but haunting.
Their voice, angelic, hypnotic, mesmerizing - song serves as echolocation, but also disorients prey and enemies.
The War Elves
When the sky split and the Space Graftlings fell upon the Far West, the Elves bled for centuries. The war was endless, the slaughter merciless. But where some chose to flee in search of salvation, others chose to endure. These were the Elves who stayed behind, clinging to their homeland like wolves snapping at an impossible foe.
The war broke them. Once lithe and graceful, their bodies grew heavier, harder, their flesh thickened with scars earned in fire and steel. Their blood ran hotter, their eyes burned sharper, their hands grew calloused from endless warcraft. They abandoned elegance for strength, song for war cries. What they could not match in the strange science of the invaders, they devoured from the wreckage of the motherships. They forged weapons from alien steel, bent machines of horror into war engines, learned cruelty from their enemy and carved it into their own ways.
It took two centuries of war, but they destroyed the last of the Space Graftlings on the Far West continent. Victory was theirs, but peace was not. The long war had changed them beyond repair. Violence became their language. Honor became their chain. And bloodshed became their nourishment. They no longer trusted gentleness or peace, seeing it only as weakness that would bring ruin again.
Thus, the War Elves were born. Their civilization thrived not on song, but on conquest. Their children were taught the blade before speech, the forge before play. Their cities were fortresses, their thrones built on iron and ash. Where the Song Elves vanished into myth, the War Elves sharpened themselves into predators of nations.
They still remember the betrayal of the expedition that vanished eastward - the kin that sought peace and left them to suffer. To the War Elves, the Song Elves are cowards, oathbreakers, traitors to their blood.
Now, the War Elves have become an empire of conquest, their armies vast, their war machines roaring, their resolve unshakable. And soon, their gaze has turned beyond their continent. To the east, across the great seas, lies the Heart Continent. And the War Elves hunger.
Their height and build, tall as Song Elves, 7 feet average, but broader, bulkier, and scarred. Their skin, rougher, weathered by battle and fire, often painted with ash or blood before war. Their hair, Darker tones. black, iron-grey, blood-red, usually shorn short or braided for battle. Their eyes, burning, sharp - gold, amber, or bloodshot hues from generations of war-torn lives.
They speak harsh, guttural Elvish dialect, evolved from war chants and commands, not melodic like their Song Elf.
The Geography of Eldermire
Eldermire was a world vast beyond comprehension, its lands stretching wider than the reach of human sails or Draemarian strides. At its heart lay the Heart Continent, a sprawling dominion nearly 6,000 kilometers across east to west, and 4,500 kilometers north to south. Here humanity had carved itself into two realms: the City Realm in the south and west, where trade, festivals, and fishing machines clattered against the storm-tossed coasts; and the Kingdom Realm in the north and east, where high fortresses, iron-rich soils, and disciplined academies of science and war stood defiant against time. Between them, cutting like a scar across fertile plains, sprawled the Tormenting Marches - a cursed wasteland of gray skies and poisoned rivers, forever haunted by the Undead, remnants of a war waged long before living memory.
The Third Realm
The Third Realm is not land, nor sea, nor sky. It is a veil-layer, a distorted reflection that overlaps the Heart Continent but exists just beyond mortal perception. Some describe it as a "fold" in the fabric of Eldermire, like a hidden page in a book that only the Hollowed may open. To step into it is to abandon the mortal world - the warmth of sun, the firmness of soil, the certainty of time.
The Third Realm is an endless, shifting expanse, where geography defies sense. Mountains float as shattered fragments above seas of glass, forests whisper with no trees, and the sky is an abyss of pulsing eyes and fractured moons. The terrain seems to imitate the Heart Continent but warped - cities appear as ruins of bone and obsidian, rivers flow backward, and footsteps echo like screams.
The mortal threefold time - Daystrike, Nightfall, and Gloam - does not govern here. Instead, time feels suspended, a constant twilight where shadows stretch but never end. Mortals who wander too long often lose years - or return only moments later to find a century has passed.
The Hollowed Supremacy dwell here, beings of shape without form, whose voices split minds and whose bargains weave destiny. They do not walk as mortals do; they exist as whispers, silhouettes, and forces that bend the very air. Every Hollowed is part of the realm itself - the walls, the winds, even the silence. One does not simply see the Hollowed. One enters them.
Entry into the Third Realm cannot be forced. No gate, no spell, no blade can cut its veil. It only opens when the Hollowed allow it - usually to those who are desperate, curious, or doomed. The Ravaged Queen, for example, only crossed because the Seeker Graftling bargained on her behalf. Without such a guide, mortals are swallowed alive, their bodies left as husks in the Heart Continent, their minds trapped forever in the Hollowed's fold.
To the Hollowed, the Third Realm is not exile but sovereignty. By staying beyond the Heart, they remain untouchable, unknowable, eternal. Their absence is their power - every myth, every whisper, every madman's tale strengthens their legend. To mortals, the Third Realm is the place of impossible answers: the cure for the Ravaged curse, the source of magic, the place where reality bends. But it is also a maw - once it swallows you, it does not let go.
Far across the ocean, ten thousand kilometers to the west, stood the second great landmass, the Far West Continent, as immense as the Heart itself but wrapped in eternal storms. Here, in forgotten ages, the first Elves had flourished before they were torn asunder. Now the land was divided: to the north, the War Elves reigned, their black stone citadels and iron war-engines towering across mountains and valleys; to the south, were all nothing but the remains of the fallen Elves and Graftling during the century war. Scattered among these coasts and hinterlands, the rusting carcasses of ancient motherships - remnants of the first Graftlings - still lay embedded in the soil, reminders that the Far West was the first battlefield between worlds.
And then, farther still, beyond seas no sail had ever crossed, whispered in sailor's tales and fearful prayers, stood the Third Continent. Larger than both Heart and Far West combined, perhaps 12,000 kilometers end to end, it remained unknown to all but myth. Some claimed it was the true seat of the Hollowed, cloaked in eternal mist. Others believed it was the final refuge of the ancient races who had once warred in Eldermire's skies. None who sought its shores had ever returned.
The oceans that bound these continents were treacherous, teeming with leviathans and serpents that could swallow a fleet whole. Only the ingenious sea machines of the City Realm - half-boat, half-engine, with tires and gears designed to grind against storm-waves - made short voyages possible.
Above all, the skies themselves ruled Eldermire, divided not into sun and moon but into three times: Daystrike, when light reigned golden; Nightfall, when silver calm blanketed the world; and Gloam, when ancient laughter shook the heavens, and even the bravest locked their doors in silence.