“In most places that called themselves a nation, agriculture holds an important spot for their continued ability to function as one.” - Old sociological saying.

“Got to admit… This is the first time I’ve seen farmwork done with… well… those,” said Celia as she looked at the rich and fertile farmlands that surrounded Alfheim.

The city itself was built around the confluence of two rivers, with the smaller Ayubtha and Drovudi rivers to the west, joining together into the great Kahupali river that flowed eastwards towards the oceans. The main walled city itself was rather small, built on the west side of the confluence of the rivers, with most of the surroundings more sparsely settled, as they were dominated by farmlands and orchards of various sorts.

The source of Celia’s wonderment were the beasts of burden that pulled the plows and tilled the land under the control of the farmers. Unlike the typical usage of oxen or draft horses like in the Empire, the residents of Alfheim used great flightless birds as their primary beast of burden. While each bird was not as powerful as an ox or a horse, they simply tied the plow to two or four of the birds instead, and work went on as normal.

Even the people themselves looked somewhat foreign to Aideen’s eyes. The elves from the Forest of Shadows back in Ur-Teros leaned towards paler skin, often with dark hair color to boot. In fact, the most common hair color amongst the shadow elves – as they called themselves – were either silvery white or jet black.

The local elves, on the other hand, had more of a tan to their skin, with some having a deeper brown shading. Their hair color also varied greatly, with Aideen having seen the entire range from platinum blonde to dark brown, and even a few who had hair with an odd but pleasant greenish tint to it. The hue looked completely natural on them, even if they would have normally been out of place as a hair color otherwise.

Another difference she noticed was in their affinity.

Life and Death were the most common affinities amongst elves from the Forest of Shadow. She knew that some elves who lived in the frozen lands to the east tend to lean towards Ice affinity, and small communities that survived in the desert leaned to Sand affinity. In the same way, the elves in Alcidea seemed to primarily lean towards Nature affinity as a whole.

Those amongst them who were born with greenish hair were those who had particularly strong Nature affinity flowing through their mana conduits, not unlike the albinism the shadow elves exhibit when one of theirs were both with particularly strong Life affinity. In a way, it just further highlighted how different the two denominations of elves were, despite their obvious similarities otherwise.

Despite the city’s location right in the center of the plains, surrounded on all sides by vicious wildlife, the locals clearly had the situation in hand. Locals – both elves and people from other races, including the hybrids – patrolled the perimeter of the fields in small teams of ten or so on a regular basis. Besides them, many small watchtowers were erected on the outside of the city’s area where sentries kept watch for any large-scale beast movements.

As for the smaller-scale ones that could slip past the sentries, the locals paid them little heed. Aideen and Celia even saw how one of the large birds pulling a plow ran into a vicious local predator that looked mostly like a lizard-like wolf and simply kicked with one of its sturdy legs. The large, vicious talons at the end of the bird’s leg tore the wolf-like lizard in two halves, while the bird just continued pulling the plow as if nothing ever happened.

Another predator – a large constrictor snake – was caught by another of the birds, its tail caught in the bird’s beak, after which the bird simply swung its long neck side to side. As a result, the snake’s head was slammed against the hard ground repeatedly until all that was left of it was an unrecognizable pile of mashed meat. Then the bird proceeded to swallow the snake whole like it was slurping a noodle.

“You know how it is,” said Aideen eventually. For her own part, she was experiencing the local culture – where many elvish traditions had been mixed with the local traditions from the late Gumaghal kingdom – for the first time as well. Despite them both being elves, even the local elvish traditions differed in many ways from the ones Aideen was familiar with. “Different strokes for different folks. They have their own way of living, especially in lands as wild as these. It’s not like you haven’t seen something similar back when we were living with the orcs, no?”

“True, I guess. I think I just didn’t associate elves with this sort of… peaceful coexistence. Had thought the Greentusks back then were the exception, not the norm,” admitted the younger woman.

“It’s just how it is. Times change, and people either adapt to those changes or get left behind,” replied Aideen with a nod. “These folks caught on and initiated the change for themselves, from within their own society, which is likely going to be better for them in the long run compared to having such changes forced by outside forces. I’ve seen how those work. At times it’s not pretty.”

“Oh?”

“Plenty of conflicts and disagreements amongst the people so forced, especially early on. It often took a generation or more before people started to adapt better to the change of circumstances they found themselves in, or at least their children could do so in their stead,” Aideen explained. “With people like elves, that becomes a more difficult proposition, since each generation is measured in centuries, not decades. Plenty of time for things to go wrong that way. I think those in the south only adapted so well because they were under truly dire circumstances back when they were forced to change.”