biologyofelfin

Because of their extreme longevity; 22,000 years is the average age at Homegoing, Elfin are limited in their fertility.

Only about three per cent of the total population, male and female, are fertile. Over time they have become designated as the Lords and Ladies of All Elfin.

To further control population density, Elfin Ladies are fertile only once in a century. This time is called "Season". During Season an Elfin Lady becomes quite a different person from her normal, loving, gentle self. She becomes, in fact, a raging inferno of desire. She little cares about who her mate might be, or even how many there are, so long as she is mated; frequently. Once conception has occurred though; Season ends rather quickly and the Lady in question becomes once again the gentle being that is her normal self.

Custom and social maturation have altered some of this, but only by working with Elfin biology, never by trying to circumvent or deny it.

Elfin Bond: that is they undergo; in the presence of and caused by ,He Who Is ,a ritual which literally binds two into one. A Bonded pair will sequester themselves during the female's Season, thus preventing any mating save between the Bonded pair.

Unbonded females are free to indulge themselves in Season with any agreeable Lord, so long as that Lord is himself unbonded.

Since there is no such thing in All Elfin as the institution of marriage as humans know it, there can be and is, no concept of legitimacy; no notion of bastardy.

Genealogies are kept in order to maintain genetic differentiation on the widest possible scale. All mature fertile females know their own genealogies and will avoid males too closely related when they are in Season. Adult males are expected to honor the female and remain apart from those who deem themselves too near by blood for mating.

As Elfin infants take a very long time, 150 All Elfin years, in fact, to mature and it is the rare Elfin pair who will do it; from the earliest available times, humans have been given the responsibility of raising our young on the Isle of Infants. These humans have proven themselves over countless generations to be excellent surrogate parents. We hold them in the highest honor.

Most often the fruit of an Elfin-Human mating will be raised in the human world. Although an Elfin Lord retains the right to have his offspring raised wherever he chooses, unless the child is patently more Elfin than human, he will usually choose to have it raised by its human mother. An Elfin Lord with mixed gene offspring NEVER shirks his responsibility to the child or to its mother, sometimes even going so far as to assume a human glamour and marry the woman according to her rituals and to remain with her throughout her life and then for the life of the child.

Elfin Ladies are far less prone to mate with humans as the human male is often more sexually active than most Ladies not in Season care for. And an Elfin lady in Season generally prefers that her offspring be Elfin and so eschews the company of human males at that time. There have been exceptions.

The newborn Elfin stays with the mother for the first few months of life. Elfin ladies prefer to nurse their own young. Babies are weaned at about 2 years of age, when their first teeth begin to erupt.

Each Elfin Lady has a family upon the Isle of Infants who then take over the care and raising of the child. Since it takes about 150 years for an Elfin to fully mature, this is obviously a generational undertaking for the human family. But our human caregivers are specially chosen for their unique talents in child-rearing and for their unswerving love and loyalty to the children and to the Elfin Lady who bears them.