Elven nobles vs Elven commoners

-Simone asks:

“Hi Jonathan, I have a question about world of Cloak Mage. Is made clear that elven commoners intensely dislike nobles and live separately in their own cities. Does that mean that every elf in say Duke household is of noble birth? What about Elven Inquisition? Are they of noble birth too?”

Nadia’s only just started to interact with commoner Elves on a regular basis, so let’s fill in a bit of the background!

(I should note that this has spoilers for CLOAK GAMES: MAGE FALL in it.)

The relationship between the Elven nobles and the Elven commoners is, overall, very bad. Obviously there are exceptions to this, but the general relationship is not good. The nobles blame the commoners since so many of them sided with the Archons during the start of the war, and the commoners blame the nobles for losing Kalvarion to the Archons. However, like any hostile relationship between two groups, there are gradients and variants within it.

Overall, there are about 250 million Elven commoners living on Earth in about six hundred separate free cities, and just under a billion on Kalvarion. (By contrast, there are about 2.5 million Elves on Earth who are noble to some degree or another. All the nobles on Kalvarion were either slaughtered or joined the Archons.) Tarlia is organizing the commoners of Kalvarion into self-governing cities similar to the arrangement she has with the Elven commoners on Earth. On Earth, the Elven commoners all live in individual self-governing free cities that are sworn directly to the High Queen, a lot like how Imperial Free Cities were sworn directly to the Holy Roman Emperor in medieval Germany to avoid interference from the local nobles. In practice, that meant the Imperial Free Cities were mostly self-governing since the Emperor was usually far away and busy fighting with the nobles. For the Elven free cities, they’re mostly self-governing, but the High Queen takes a levy of taxes and soldiers from them. Each male citizen of a free city is required to put in twenty-five years in the High Queen’s army (some like the military life and reenlist) and each female citizen is required to spend twenty-five years in some sort of military support position in the city – usually medical or logistics or clerical. It’s more common for women to get married and have children instead of re-enlisting, but it does happen. The High Queen also has an unending need for talent, so exceptionally talented commoners (like Tythrilandria) tend to end up working for her.

The free cities are governed by an elected assembly and a Consul, who acts as sort of the chief executive officer and the face of the city for negotiations. The Consul appoints Councilors in charge of various departments – the Councilor of Roads, the Councilor of Public Safety, and so forth. The assembly appoints magistrates to handle criminal matters, but really serious cases can get tried before the entire assembly. As Nadia has already learned, every free city has a Master of Thieves in charge of organized crime and making sure crime remains orderly, since all the Elves love order. The High Queen can dismiss a Consul or any other officeholder of a free city, though she rarely does so unless there is a problem.

The citizens of Elven free cities can travel freely between the cities, though they need a passport and a visa to do so. Obviously they have to travel through human areas to do that, but the Elven commoners are strongly encouraged to maintain Mask spells while they do and interact with humans as little as possible. In fact, interacting with humans too much while outside of a free city can potentially lead to prosecution, since Tarlia wants the humans, the Elven commoners, and the Elven nobles to all have their own spheres and mostly stay away from each other.

What Tarlia would like for each Elven free city (and each human nation, for that matter) is to be completely economically independent and have no need of trade. Reality doesn’t work that way, of course, and so the Elven free cities frequently trade with one another. They also trade with the humans around them, both legally and illegally (Masters of Thieves are responsible for making sure the smuggling remains orderly, tidy, and out of sight.) Frequently an Elven free city will find itself needing skilled human workers or human products. Humans generally aren’t allowed to visit Elven cities, but they can get work visas to take jobs there. Some human companies also have special licenses to operate in Elven cities – Regency Trucking, for example, carries Elven fruit from Moran Imports to the various Elven free cities in North America.

But, generally, humans aren’t allowed in Elven cities unless they have a very good reason to be there. Tarlia really wants the Elven commoners and the humans to have separate societies that don’t interact except on the fringes and don’t really pay all that much attention to one another, and for the most part, she has succeeded. The average human and the average Elven commoner knows very little about one another, and likely will never meet. Most humans will see far more of their local Elven noble than they will ever see of Elven commoners. Essentially, Tarlia took the Elven commoners away from the nobles and set them to serve as symbolic figureheads over the humans instead.

Some of the nobles, like Vashtyr, Carothrace, Curantar, Nerastia, and Tamirlas, have figured this out. Curantar, Carothrace, Nerastia, and Tamirlas think it’s a good idea. (Curantar dislikes Tarlia personally, but he despises Vashtyr, and otherwise agrees with Tarlia’s policy.) Vashtyr absolutely hates it and wants to change things.

Elven nobles are not allowed to visit free cities for any reason, save for an invitation, and they’re almost never invited. When a free city and a noble have a dispute, the High Queen or one of the Marshals usually has to arbitrate it. If an Elven noble did visit a free city without an invitation, it would be a massive political crisis, something on the level of a US governor sending his state police to arrest members of a neighboring state’s legislature. It would be a big deal that would require the High Queen to calm the situation, perhaps forcibly.

Commoners can get visas that let them work in a noble’s household, but it’s very uncommon. Most noble households are staffed entirely with either humans or lower-ranking Elven nobles. It usually only happens if the noble and the commoner strike up a friendship on the battlefield, like if the commoner saved the noble’s life in the Shadowlands at some point, that kind of thing.

The biggest advantage that the nobles always had over the commoners, other than legal privileges, was magical ability – through a combination of genetics and better training, the nobles were usually more powerful wizards than the commoners. All the Elves can use magic, but there are wide variants in ability – most people can run or do pushups, but some people are a lot better at it than others. This was sufficient to help the nobles to maintain their dominance on Kalvarion before the Archons, but now that they’re living on Earth with modern technology and post-feudal economics, if the nobles tried to assert themselves over the commoners they would be in for a rude awakening. (The wiser nobles have figured this out.)

One thing that both the Elven commoners of Earth and Kalvarion share is both a strong respect for royal authority as a check against the nobles and a massive reverence for Kaethran Morvilind. Morvilind, in their opinion, is the greatest hero in Elven history. When he was alive, Morvilind was feared but respected by the Elven commoners of Earth. Unlike most nobles, he did not care a whit for birth or bloodline, and he got results when he went on campaign in the Shadowlands, usually by annihilating the enemy to the last man. But after the Mage Fall, the commoners absolutely reverse Morvilind for destroying the Archons in a single day. A large number of them think that after three hundred years of suffering, God sent Kaethran Morvilind to liberate the commoners from their oppression by destroying the Archons, assisted by his two chosen Champions, Tythrilandria and Nadia MacCormac.

Nadia hates, hates, hates that opinion when it comes up. For one thing, even though she came to respect Morvilind as much as she could manage, she knew him better than the commoners and still hated his guts because he was a ruthless jerk who used up people and discarded them. Like Rosalyn Madero, who didn’t end up in the legend. Nadia is also annoyed that Riordan’s part in the Mage Fall never gets mentioned, but Riordan is a Shadow Hunter so he prefers his role events to remain anonymous. But it seriously grates on Nadia that Morvilind is remembered as this self-sacrificing ultimate hero and all of his negative traits get forgotten, and it’s even more annoying that she can never point this out to the Elven commoners because they love Morvilind’s memory so much.

Of course, as we so often see in Real Life, the gulf in history between what actually happened and what people think happened is often quite wide.

So that is a summary of the relationship between the Elven nobles and the Elven commoners. As you can imagine, this is going to cause problems for Nadia at some point. 🙂

-JM