Sylphs

No group of people’s origin on Ducorde have sparked as many research papers and scholarly debate as the sylphs. Were the flighty and intense people the result of some long-lost magical experiment gone awry? Were they the remnants of an ancient line of elementals, siring mortal offspring for some inscrutable purpose? Were they birthed by the Great Crystal, their paths in life far more strictly defined than the rest of the people of the Alternan Empire? Or did they hail from a different country, a different world, with its own Crystal and its own draconian rules?

Each sylph is born attuned to one of the five elements; fire, ice, lightning, air, or earth. The outward manifestation of this differs from sylph to sylph. One earth-attuned sylph may be squat and stout, with an even temper and stoic resolve. Another of the same element could be tall and imposing, eager to watch over everyone and act with the inevitability of an avalanche. The one guaranteed similarity between all sylphs attuned to a particular element is their eyes. All sylphs have a shimmering green pupil in each eye, but the iris is tied to their element; red for fire, blue for ice, purple for lightning, brown for earth, and green for wind.
With the most unusual and unearthly appearances among the five peoples of Ducorde, sylphs can be off-putting for some at a distance. Consciously or not, though, sylphs tend to work hard at getting along with other people, often willing to chip in on any project, with a remarkable work and an affinity for difficult, back-breaking jobs. Sylphs of all kinds tend to wind up in the industrial side of the world, showing up in mining operations, construction crews, and refineries.
Whether or not this verifies that they were tied to the Great Crystal has yet to be answered. They’re certainly not interested in helping solve that puzzle; they have other work to do.