Elf

By and large, elves are a race of fey warriors who boast of their great deeds and yearn to die heroically in battle, who fight hard and celebrate harder, and who tell great tales of heroic exploits that pass into myth through the ages. Long ago before they emigrated to the mortal realm, the elves' ancestors were among a pantheon of gods in the fey realm called the Álfir, nearly all-powerful and suffused with so much raw Anima that auroral lights tattooed their bodies and radiated from their forms. Some millennia ago, though, the Álfir were deposed by the modern pantheon of the Faerir, who killed or imprisoned their leaders, split their race into disparate clans, and left them no other option but to abandon their homeland for the mortal realm. These shattered and scattered political emigrants would become the elves of Etheria whose descendants yet walk the land in their clans in some of the most remote and inhospitable locations on the continent, yearning to reclaim their former glory. Appearance-wise, elves possess pointed ears, sharp canines, and often well-trained muscular physiques, standing about as tall as Humans and having skin colors often similar to humans but also appearing in grey-purple and blue-green depending on the clan.
Though they are a clannish and remote-dwelling people, elves are not unsociable. In fact, boasting and sharing sagas of personal feats over mead are cornerstones of their culture. Rather, most elves simply just do not live near other peoples, and if they do, it is only other peoples who they share remote living conditions with. You see, some say elves live in such inhospitable climes to prove their endurance and mettle, but really, elves remain in such locations because they do not feel at home in an increasingly modernizing and urbanizing Etheria, especially one where fey are mistrusted and the Alpenwode, a space sacred to any fey, has been mostly destroyed due to reactionary human fear of and retribution for The Wild Hunt. In modern Etheria, elves primarily live in Jötnir, Henebruck, Thamra, Djeda, and Llychlyn.
Often animistic in belief, elves, like many fey, are extremely close to the natural world. As a result, most Etherian elves respect and some even revere Theromedeon the Wild Guard as a central force in their daily lives. Many elves also still remain tied to the old ways, worshipping two primordial deities who predated even the Álfir and could not be killed or entirely contained by the Faerir: Ulvhara the World Bear, a giant six-horned and rune-scarred bear with a thousand blades from a thousand fallen warriors stuck in its hide that left a swathe of destruction in its wake as it traveled the lands, allegedly hollowing Llychlyn out into its den from its pacing and leaving lakes to fill its paw prints, and Skuld the Great Serpent, an unimaginably long flying serpent whose lethal venom could fell entire armies in a single dose and who, it is said, left tunnels in between the mortal and fey realms called omentracks that can be used to travel between the realms. These deities, like all other fey gods, shine with auroral light and bear twisting prismatic tattoos of arcane energy on their bodies. As a result, modern elves often incorporate ursine and serpentine visual motifs into their clothing and appearances, braiding their hair to look like scales, adorning themselves with ursine teeth, weaving designs to resemble serpent coils, wearing actual snakeskin and bear pelts, etc. Elves carry weapons and wear armor made from an ancient, bronze-like metal said to have been brought by their ancestors from the fey realm. Each weapon is custom smithed for a single elf and is carried through that elf's lifetime, then melted down and re-shaped for the next generation. These weapons too sometimes bear the marks of the elves' chief gods.