My Hero!

For most of the Planes, an Elf simply ‘dies’ and is buried. There are usually stories and drama involved in order to make it sound like the elf died through some kind of extreme circumstances. The truth is far less noble than that.

As an elf ages, they continue to weave themselves, forever trying to achieve that perfection of beauty that their Goddess covets so much. Unfortunately, this always ends up with an Elf ‘knotting’. Knotting is an event where weaving an individual has somehow caused the flow of essence through their body to become disturbed, blocked or otherwise negatively impacted.

For Champions going through the process of strengthening, this usually means death. For those ‘fortunate’ enough to survive, they generally become heavily disfigured, lop-sided or unrecognizable as the individual they once were. For Elves, this usually means becoming something akin to Nana. The years and years of weaving suddenly undoing all the work and your physical form aging to what it should be, while your mind breaks from the sudden jolt.

For the Elves, having others see a knotted individual is a major faux-pas. All the other planes are supposed to believe Elves are beautiful, even as corpses (Some Elves literally make a living by portraying corpses at funeral rites in order for this guise to continue). It is ultimately up to the family to decide what to do with a knotted individual – though allowing them out into the public is strictly forbidden.

Most of the times, the Elven families agree to euthanize their knotted relative, to save them the shame of others seeing them in such an ‘ugly’ state.

For us, knotting would be a lot like having magical Alzheimer or dementia. The individual is trapped in their own mind, only gaining lucidity at very rare times, and those times are fleeting at best. Add on the fact that Elves generally survive for thousands of years prior to knotting and you’ve got a recipe for an absolute disaster.