Elven Fading
The slow dimming of an Elf thrown out of rhythm by grief, exile, or loss of place, in which colour, scent, and appetite fade and a long life can wear away.
Overview
Elven fading is the illness most particular to Elves, and the one other peoples least understand. In any Elf, illness and grief show as shifts of vitality, colouring, and scent, and kin say a grieving Elf looks faded. Most such dimming passes. When it does not, and the Elf goes on losing colour, rhythm, and will through the seasons, it is called fading, and it can wear away a life meant to last centuries.
Cause
An Elf's body keeps an inherited rhythm with its kin, its place, and the turning year, a trace of the Verdant ancestry that later Elves still carry. Grief, exile from a grove or branch, long life among strangers, or a shock to the whole of a life can throw that rhythm out of step. Out of step, the body keeps its vitality poorly: reserves drain faster than food and rest restore them, and each season leaves the Elf a little less. It is a sickness of the body's own pattern of vitality, not of any soul.
Who It Strikes
All four branches can fade. Wood Elves, who carry the strongest Verdant traces and the most place-bound life, fade most deeply when cut off from their woods; High Elves least often, and Thorn and Dark Elves in their harder, more guarded ways. It strikes the bereaved, the exiled, Elves living for years in Human towns, and those whose grove is felled or flooded. Other peoples do not take it, though a Human in long grief may look much the same.
Signs and Course
It begins as ordinary grief or homesickness. The Elf's colouring dims and the scent that kin know as theirs grows faint. Sleep shortens, appetite goes, and the Elf loses the sense of the season that others of the branch keep without thinking, mistaking the month or missing a rite. Over a season or a year the skin greys and thins, hair loses its sheen, wounds heal slowly, and ordinary illnesses take hold. The faded Elf grows quiet and still and asks for little. Some turn back of their own accord, often with a change of place or a new tie. Others go on fading for years until the body gives way to cold or a fever it would once have shrugged off.
Contagion
Fading is not contagious. A grove that has suffered one great loss together may fade together, and that is taken by other peoples for a sickness passing.
Treatment and Its Limits
Elven medicine seeks to restore rhythm, vitality, and attunement. The faded Elf is brought back to the grove, kin, and season if that is possible, set to the old work of the year, sung to, fed, and kept in company. Herbs of the Elven woods (see Herbs) give gentle strength. A Vital healer can lend vitality to carry a faded Elf through a winter, and an Elven healer does so best (see compatibility bands), but lent vitality drains away again if the rhythm is not restored. Among the High Elves the work is formalized in the rites of the Ordered Bough. Nothing helps an Elf who cannot go home and will not take a new place.
Mortality
Fading kills slowly and seldom outright. An Elf who fades deeply and finds no way back may die over years, of the fading itself or of what it lets in. Those who recover often keep a dimness of colour, and are watched afterwards in hard seasons.
Lore and Belief
Other peoples call it Elven soul-sickness and say a faded Elf's soul has gone ahead of the body; Elves have no such idea and find it a strange thing to say. Elves say a faded one is out of time with herself. Dark Elf laments of the Drowning Bloom, which still remember Ithaere the Drowned Mother, tell of Elves who faded after the waters took their groves.
In the Medieval Era
Fading is met wherever Elves leave their woods: traders and envoys in the Basin towns, exiles, and Elves in the service of other powers. Within the Elderweald and the courts of the Crownboughs it is known and tended, and kin go far to bring a faded Elf home. Among Humans it is often mistaken for a wasting illness or a broken heart, and Human healers can do little for it.
Where It Appears
- Elves (illness and grief as shifts of vitality, colouring, and scent; a grieving Elf looks faded; Elven medicine)
- the Writers' Guide chapter The Elder Peoples (an Elf who is ill is out of time with herself)