The Lumin, remains of the Domain of the Illuminated

The Lumin are the eldest of the Elfin community, though their dilute bloodlines mean that they are also slightly difficult to pin down. They had arrived around the same time as the Fey and in that location as well, and the area had been known as the Domain of Illumination long before the Fey overtook it. It ran nearly the entire length of the Rotwood north coast at one point, though not deeply into the hills or center of the continent. Many spell books, tomes and devices still are relied upon from this culture; they were extraordinarily good at magic – though in their original form it was mostly spell-magic.

However, their highly competitive culture almost destroyed itself and faded from visibility for several thousand years. In those intervening years, their scattered descendants took hold on the rugged lands between the Wyldkin and the Fey. It should be noted that they don’t usually refer to themselves as Elves, only as Lumin. Their emphasis on spell-magic has been tempered in the last few thousand years with reliance on personal psionics and technology. It is likely that they managed to leave and return to Dragondeep via portals of some sort, since their power is both personally-innate, and aided strongly by foci now. They still reside near Rotwood, but farther west and bordering both the Summoners and the Wyldkin.

Physically, the Lumin are taller than most Humans, though several family lines are quite stocky; they could pass as fully Human if not for their elegantly long ears and very strong psionic power. They have a wide range of skin tones, eye colors, and hair color and textures, sometimes with exotic shades thrown in with the brown-dominated palette. However, their genetics and powers tend to favor their mothers, while their political and financial influence follows their fathers. There are more males than females by a small margin, politically the women have not challenged for the right to rule – they’re busy enough doing much of the medical, instruction, record-keeping and fine crafting work.

Lumin live quite long, in fact they’re capable of surviving and even thriving for many thousands of years. Their childhood aging is slightly slower than Humanoids in general, and they tend to look young for a very long while – deceptive in ways, because a forty-year-old Lumin might attend a high-school with teenagers of other species without drawing notice. Males become sexually mature around age twenty, the females a bit later, and the females can bear young well into their older age. They only very rarely have multiple births and hardly ever more than twins; though when twins are found in a line, they often remain thus and have multiple births at least every other generation. They tend to have smallish families within townships and larger ones in rural areas, but even though they are seemingly immortal, their fertility is not adversely affected. Perhaps due to their ancestry hardly ever living long enough to find this out, it has helped them regain a foot hold on their territory. Though they are long-lived, most Lumin still manage to get themselves killed long before reaching what could visibly be called ‘old age’, from hunting, challenges, magical accidents and exploration. (They’re like Griffins, in that regard…) They tend to look handsome or beautiful, and young, until quite close to their death.

The Lumin have five fingered hands, but they’re known to interbreed with other Humanoids frequently enough and with enough variety, that you may see a family with cousins having four, five, or even six fingers based on who might be in their genetic line. It is very well known that they did have to rely on this feature on their return to prominence, because of their low surviving population. For the most part, they bred with Rotwood Elves, and very likely a good amount of Jewel Witches. There are perhaps two or three family lines which can claim to be ‘pure bred’, but in all honesty, no one – not even their own record-keepers – believes them. Only recently have the Lumin actually had to work out ‘who bred with whom’, mainly due to their ‘Bloody Mutt’ king Vaelan.

Lumin children are very well educated. The culture of their ancestors was filled with many ways to advance themselves including libraries, schools and seminaries dedicated to magic or psionics. Though it varies among the Twelve Kingdoms, in general all children are afforded a strong basic education (perhaps second only to the Grape Barony, with the Jewel Witches culture closely following them) regardless of their birth circumstances. Children of royalty as well as rural farm kids, so it’s said, deserve equal footing in case one of them might advance. And while they are almost uniformly adept at psionics or magic (and sometimes both), the Lumin culture has eagerly adopted electricity and technology from other cultures and even other worlds. Lumin generally begin showing their psionic powers in their early teens, and are at their full strength around one hundred years. Not all Lumin begin using spell magic, and it seems to be a somewhat dying art in some of the Kingdoms. Primarily it seems that this is a rebound from their prior focus, and it’s said that their diversification is to alleviate any problems from too-heavy reliance on any one feature or ability.

Though they, like the Jewel Witches and Clockwork to some extent, are strongly technologically advanced, because of the area in which the Realms rest, there is a bounty of hunting done, and most of the Twelve Kingdoms have a thriving ranch system for both meat and fur exports. There are probably more sheep per capita in the Lumin realm than practically anywhere else (and that’s not counting Wyldkin, of course!). Their textile exports keep the Lumin communities competitive world wide.

However strong they are in psionics, the Lumin Kings and their associates also adorn themselves with diadem crowns that amplify their psionic powers – a mixture of Jewel Witch construction and high tech, offworld cybernetic design – which are physically plugged directly into the brain of the user. Unlike some other cultures, this electronic interface has never interfered with their abilities. Lumin medicine combines physical skill, psionic powers, and technology in equal amounts. So you’d be likely to see a scanning machine in one wing of a hospital, and a set of quiet massage rooms in another, and a third bearing a batch of highly skilled Psionic healers working with surgeons on the same patient.

Most higher ranking Lumin have direct lines that can be traced over ten thousand years back. There are currently twelve such ranked families, and rather than being the types to rest on the laurels of their ancestry and money, the Kings are not only required to, but usually enjoy, going out to their people to do their administrative work. The Kings are needed as judges, arbitrators, lawyers and caregivers in addition to simple paperwork. When this shifted from the ‘personal gain at any cost’ featured in their distant past (given that they grew from the Domain of the Illuminated), no one is really absolutely sure. But their ancestry would hardly know the culture today.

The Twelve Kingdoms are not equally spread in terms of landscape, nor are they equal financially. However, each of the Kings tends to respect the others (for the most part) since any decisions which involve the Lumin as a whole, must be made by the entire group of Twelve. Because they do thrive with both other Humanoid genetics, and encourage ‘low’ born individuals with talents to make the most of themselves, there is rarely a stigma about a royal or noble marrying or having children with an outsider or peasant-born. They are not nearly as intent on this as the Jewel Witch society, however.

Even though they reside in a portion of what their Domain used to be, the current Lumin communities rarely live in or even purposefully explore their ancient habitats. Though there are plenty of ruins around many of the Realms, most of them are considered dangerous or haunted at best, and taboo at worst.

Lumin names are simple, often lacking a family designation because their telepathy allows them to instantly recognize who is whom. When needed, the addition of ‘from Cliff Crag’ or ‘of the Watery Dell’, place based modifiers are used to distinguish those who have the same given name. Vaelan has a full title (“something something master of Narrow Vale, high administrator something something, inheritor of the Blind Rock refinery, blah blah King, son of Vorhel, son of Aelka, son of Lukif…”) thanks to his family line being royal, but he genuinely enjoys going by just Vaelan.

Prominent Lumin of the Current Era

King Vaelan – among the Lumin, Vaelan is a bit of a loose canon and isn’t always as respected by his peers as a King might expect to be. However, he is certainly the most visible, and definitely the most popularly liked, of the royal lines. His personal history is quite tainted with terrible events, including the loss of his Human (offworld) fiancée and the betrayal of his brothers against their father. Due to that betrayal and his inheriting the throne amid poisonings, assassination attempts, exile and executions, he became known as the Bloody king. It is because his personal family genetics include not just his Jewel Witch mother, but a number of Necromancers, Summoners and even rumors of a Starcourt Elf, that he’s known as the Mutt. He neither questions nor is offended by the moniker, in fact he introduces himself that way to most people. This shows both his ability to communicate and put people at ease, while getting his point across, in action. (“That’s ‘your highness’ Purple Hair!”)

Vaelan is tall even for a Lumin – nearly seven feet tall in fact – and is quite slender but much stronger than he looks. He is also remarkably durable (a fact which he’s had to show off unfortunately, also adding to the whole ‘bloody’ moniker, his father’s genetic influence), and has undergone numerous life-threatening encounters. His skin is a pearly white (though crossed with numerous scars), his hair is straight and long, a dark violet shade with several streaks of brighter heliotrope near his face, and his eyes are a bright shade of red-violet bordering on pink. He does not usually wear any other jewelry than his embedded diadem, and it is fully embedded under his scalp after the incidents with the Fey ripping it out of him. (“If they want the gems that badly, they’ll have to pry them out of my skull.” – so they did just that.) He speaks in a soft but clear voice, and has a remarkably commanding vocabulary – as an arbitrator or public speaker, Vaelan is hardly matched.

Because his mother was a Jewel Witch (and quietly rumored to be more varied in her own genetics than a pure breed) he also inherited an extremely strong set of psionic powers. Unfortunately, complications from his birth killed her, so he’s never known quite what she thought of him. His brothers were from his father’s first marriage, though they were only about fifteen years his elder. His father proclaimed Vaelan to be his heir when he was only around fifteen, himself – producing the deep and terrible rivalry which his brothers manifested decades later.

The ‘Bloody Mutt’ Vaelan is among the few individuals on Dragondeep who frequently moves between their world and others using a technologically advanced Portal generator. Though not all the other Kings appreciate his frank and generous nature, they are hard pressed to do anything but follow his lead or be left dreadfully behind. The competitive spirit of the Lumin still lives on. As do Vaelan’s children with the Wolf Queen… Their daughter Navala will remain with Wynnah, while their sons Nalhaw and Wael stay in the Lumin territory, one inheriting the crown – the other, well, no one knows what he will wind up doing, Vaelan hopes for him to become an ambassador to other worlds. Knowing how jealousy ruined his own line, Vaelan is careful to note his sons’ behaviors. *

Alorel – As an example of that prior culture of the Domain of Illumination, Alorel is the pinnacle of the competitive arrogance they showed. Thousands of years before, he was exiled from this culture and spent hundreds more years wandering the stars as well as through portals looking for power to bring him back; or at least, power to allow him to command his own world. He is functionally immortal, and like the newer Lumin population, he has ‘bred out’ of his line on at least two worlds he’s visited. *

Alorel is mad, and not just angry-mad. A bit touched in the head, even by his people’s standards. After all, a people who all but died out because of their own crazy infighting exiled him. But he is clever, cruel, and remarkably talented in magic as well as what would become psionics. Tall and pale, like many might associate with the Starcourt elves, he has hair of frost-covered maple-leaf brown, and eyes that are glittering green. His appearance is almost always flawless, he’s remarkably vain. As a matter of fact, the Starcourt and Ravenhill elves might also be either related to him, or sent to Dragondeep by him. They won’t say. No one on Dragondeep remembers this madman. Just wait till he shows up again after, what, fourteen thousand years.

On one of the worlds he has visited he gained a follower, and together they formed a plan to dominate several other portal-bound worlds. A plan which was thwarted by elves from the Otherforest (a world which was seemingly populated by the same portal technomagic as Dragondeep – it’s possible that the Gods were experimenting there as well) and he was further exiled to a distant planet. He has use of a starship, in addition to numerous spells, to get around the multiverse.

* Winterkill (Alorel’s daughter with one of those Otherforest Elves) and Vaelan have not only met, but in accordance with her mother’s elfin genetics, ‘recognized’ – they have twin children, but we can’t really talk about them here. They will not be inheriting anything on Dragondeep… at least not until Alorel can control his megalomaniacal urges… Meanwhile, Winterkill’s mother Snowdrift is in negotiations with Vaelan for Otherforest-Dragondeep cooperation. Reinforcing the Domain’s bloodline this long after its demise, and adding further strains of even more psionic magic isn’t continuing the Mutt trend, it’s compounding it. Maybe Wael will hit up the Portal and go jaunting, find himself a Zeddian or Zekiran for a partner…