Since the release of Path of the Warrior I have been asked a number of questions about Eldar culture, war, the Aspect Temples and many other things concerning the pointy-eared inhabitants of the Craftworlds. I’ve rounded up a few of them, which I will answer over the coming days, but the real purpose of this post is to invite Hamsterites to ask any further questions in the comments section.

A caveat: None of this is necessarily ‘official’. I’ve been working on Eldar in a variety of forms over the years and my answers are based on some of my extrapolations and interpretations over this time. They are my take on Eldar and nothing more (and depend upon the value you wish to attach to my opinion!). Feel free to posit contrary theories in the comments.

Another caveat: Please try to keep questions relevant to themes and issues raised in Path of the Warrior. This is to keep the questions within the sphere of subjects I have already thought about – in the following two books, Path of the Seer and Path of the Outcast, I’ll be delving into Eldar psychics, Harlequins, space travel and all sorts of other things in more depth but I haven’t necessarily formed my own opinions and answers on those yet.

The last, and most important, caveat: There are contradictions in the established Eldar background. A good example is the nature of Eldar Exarchs and whether they become meshed with their armour. In most cases I have used the most recent Codexes and material, but I have also taken a few liberties for the sake of storytelling. In doing so I have probably created new contradictions. Sorry about that…

Question for the day, from Xisor:

“ Exarchs are Exarchs because they’re ‘trapped by Khaine’. Taking Eldar overlap of myth and actual ‘scientific/precise’ language, is the nature of ‘becoming an exarch’ related to the continued existence/pull of the god?”

Right, let’s get started with some nice theology/ metaphysics! First off we must decide how much of Khaine as an entity is a mythological analogy and, because of the funkiness of the warp, how much a reality. At a basic level, as with all myths and belief systems, the Eldar gods are analogies. Khaine is a representation of the murderous passion and destructive potential that exists within every Eldar. As such, his continuing existence is simply a reflection of the Eldar’s continued need for aggression and violence (mainly to protect themselves in a hostile universe).

It is explicitly stated that Eldar can become trapped on any Path, so for those of the Path of the Warrior this is described as being trapped by Khaine. Are healers who do not move from their path trapped by Isha? Are Bonesingers trapped by Vaul? From that standpoint it might simply be a feature of the Eldar language that the state of becoming an Exarch is simply described in these terms; a linguistic shorthand.

However, this leads one to wonder why it is the Eldar believe that the other gods were slain when Khaine survived, as they still need healers and engineers but do not require the continued existence of Isha and Vaul to explain this. Which brings us to the Avatars…

I would say that the continuing existence of Khaine in the form of the Avatars is a chicken-and-egg situation. For much of the time this fragment of psychic energy given material form is inert. The Avatar sits dormant until the call to war, so it must be assumed that it has only a small effect upon the Eldar in this state otherwise they would be in a state of permanent, violent agitation. As described in the background, it appears that the process of awakening the Avatar is begun from within the Avatar itself, and is completed by the Exarchs and Warlocks with the sacrifice of the Young King. What first stirs the Avatar?

The Avatar’s throne is connected to the Infinity Circuit of the craftworld, itself a gestalt psychic intelligence of the living and dead Eldar; each is also a sub-network of the massive Eternal Matrix that exists alongside the webway connecting all of the craftworlds together on a faint but potentially powerful psychic level. That the Infinity Circuit is mainly powered by the psychic energy of the dead may be important here. The death of the Eldar gods, their removal from the warp, may be a euphemism for the withdrawing of the Eldar psychic presence from the warp into the semi-material world of the Infinity Circuits. Whatever powers were once represented by Isha and Vaul. Kurnous and Lileath, no longer exist as part of the diminishment of the Eldar following the Fall.

For reasons of pure survival if nothing else, the Eldar needed to keep their god of war; their intrinsic capability for violence. This manifested itself in the forming of the Avatars as a lodestone for their violent tendencies. The psychic gestalt of the Infinity Circuit exists on a level beyond the material and so can work as an early warning system for oncoming conflict. It resonates with the minds of the Eldar, so as Farseers and Exarchs, and other Eldar, become troubled to a certain level, even on an unconscious plane, the Infinity Circuit will pick up on this and respond by stirring the Avatar, thus signalling that war is approaching and the Eldar need to prepare.

In ‘real’ terms, I see it like this. When the Fall happens and Slaanesh is created, the psychic energy of the Eldar, as represented by the mythical gods, clashes with the newly born Warp Power. Obviously within the context of the mythology, this conflict would be represented by Khaine, their god of war. While the Eldar die in their billions, a small fragment of their surviving warp presence manages to protect a few, becoming manifested as the Avatars of Khaine.

What does this mean for the Exarchs? For this we have to go back to Asurmen and the founding of the shrines. In my version of events, the Avatars were born active to some degree; that is, they exerted their warlike influence over the Eldar, protecting them against the birth of Slaanesh. However, Khaine’s continued presence (that is, the continuation of the capability for extreme rage and violence within the Eldar psyche) would soon become as much of a peril as the emotional free-for-all that led to the Fall. The Avatars were feeding on and being fed by the Slaanesh-Eldar conflict in the warp. They needed to be put in their place, and this meant that the Eldar had to learn to control their warlike instincts.

This brings us to Asurmen and the first Aspect Temples. Asurmen was able to create the first path, that of the warrior, which through ritual and practice allows the Eldar to suppress their violent instincts until needed. To do so, Asurmen first needed to embrace his violent nature rather than fight it from outside, mastering his urges with pure willpower. In order to spread the teaching of the path, he recruited the first Exarchs, Eldar capable of performing the same feat of will. This teaching, the Path of the Eldar, will always require instructors for following generations, and thus there must always be a few Eldar willing, unconsciously but probably guided by the Infinity Circuit as hinted at in Path of the Warrior, to embrace their warrior nature in order that they can pass on the techniques of control required for the Eldar to keep their violent tendencies at bay; also to continue to promulgate the martial prowess required to keep the Eldar alive in a universe that seems determined to destroy them.

In summary, the Exarchs exist to contain the continued influence of Khaine on the one hand, but also to ensure Khaine’s continued existence. A rather distasteful but appropriate analogy can be made with a Champion of a Chaos God. A Chaos Champion requires the input of warp energy from his chosen deity to continue to achieve his goals, while the Chaos Power he serves requires mortal followers to continue to propagate its existence. The Eldar need to be able to fight but not be consumed again by violence, and so between them the Exarchs and the Avatar exist to act as a valve mechanism for this destructive behaviour.

More later…

Another from Xisor:

“What do you feel was your biggest ‘this might not make it’ idea that made it to the final cut? (Were there any such ideas which didn’t?)”

The answer to both questions is the same – Eldar gender-bending… For a long time I dabbled with the idea of having a prominent character who was a male member of the female Howling Banshees. I initially wanted to examine the somewhat fluid nature of Eldar gender and their attitude towards male and female roles and characteristics. In the end I abandoned it because it was too much to get across for a secondary character and would have been more confusing than enlightening; and it simply would have been too much to use such a character as the protagonist for the majority of the BL readership. I did, however, make a very small nod to this by having a female Exarch as the ‘Young King’; something that did cause some discussion with the editors but was eventually kept with a more explicit mention that the title was a non-gender honorific.

From LordLucan

“I liked the myth which hinted that exarchs were once the footsoldiers of Khaine against the normal eldar of Eldanesh. It could be taken as a metaphor or as a veiled reference to perhaps an actual civil war within the war in heaven. Was this a deliberate move on your part Gav?”

I like to muddy the waters when I can, and one thing that has bugged me a bit about a lot of the War in Heaven stuff is the mutation into part of the C’tan/ Necron background. Obviously such a monumental event would be featured in the Eldar mythology, but I wanted the myths to be a real mosaic of different things, not just a poetic record of a single period or event.

This is why some of the myths are deliberately contradictory to some of those already published in the background. A lot of the pantheistic mythologies started out as a real grab-bag of tales and beliefs, and even after a lot of recording and rationalisation they are far from consistent.

For me the War in Heaven is the Eldar take on the expulsion from paradise. At some stage, even before the Fall, the idyllic existence of the Eldar was torn apart by a cataclysmic event. The fact that Khaine, the embodiment of violence within the Eldar themselves, is at the root of this suggests to me a civil war of some kind. If the instigating figure had been Death – now equated to the C’tan Nightbringer in the background – that would have been more of an indication of external attack. How the two are connected, if at all, can remain a subject for fan (and author!) speculation.

There were already hints of division in the background with the rivalry between the houses of Eldanesh and Ulthranesh and I thought it would be cool to extend that a little further. Internal strife has been the downfall of countless civilisations and it seems natural to me that the almost eternal Eldar society would have suffered at least one internecine war. The myth itself I see as a warning against this sort of thing in general, rather than relating to one specific incident – they were likely several such divisions and unifications over the long existence of the pre-Fall civilisation.

More to follow…

More Eldary thoughts.

From Xhalax:

“Dear. Mr Thorpe.

Are Harlequins trapped on a Path like the Exarchs are?

Thanks.”

The short answer is no. The long answer gives away too many of my ideas about Harlequins that I have vowed never to reveal in full. Here is the medium answer…

In the time leading up to, during and following the Fall, the Eldar society as it had been was fragmented. There were four different responses to the creation of Slaanesh and the potential doom of the Eldar, leading to the emergence of four different Eldar sub-societies.

Let’s deal with the Exodites first. They saw something of the cataclysm to come and decided to try to wind back time. They left for the Maiden Worlds and retrenched their lives in a culture that existed (or they believed to have existed) before the descent into hedonism that led to the Fall. Their attitude harks back in time, trying to reverse the state of the Eldar. The spirits of their dead are locked up in the World Spirit of each Maiden World, forever protected from Slaanesh but divorced from reality, unable to truly die.

Then we have the Craftworld Eldar. They fled at the time of the Fall, and through the creation and adoption of the Eldar path, they seek to maintain the status quo, suppressing the cultural and personal factors that led to the Fall. They are in stasis, neither going back nor going forward. Their spirits end up in the infinity circuit of each Craftworld, neither dead nor alive, trapped for eternity but able to be given the semblance of life again in spirit stones.

Next are the Dark Eldar. I don’t know what new information and revelations may be in the forthcoming codex, but here’s where we were the last time I talked to anyone else about this sort of thing. The Dark Eldar strive to maintain the society of the Eldar as it was at the time of the Fall, ignoring the lesson of the past but unable to move forward. They live entirely in the present, hand-to-mouth in a psychic sense, sustaining their existence on a day-by-day basis. Their spirits are drained and replenished in an unending cycle.

Which brings us to the Harlequins. They see themselves as the future of the Eldar. They look upon the other Eldar societies and see that all of them are simply trying to survive rather than change. They are the true radicals of the Eldar, and they have a plan so audacious it fills other Eldar with horror. Their plan, their existence, stems from the myth of the Laughing God. This myth tells us that the Laughing God, Cegorach, eluded Slaanesh’s grasp and survives to this day. He is the only god to have properly survived the Fall according to the Harlequins, and in this lies their secret.

The myth goes on to say that every now and then Cegorach steals the soul of an Eldar from under the nose of Slaanesh, spiriting it away to safety (possibly whilst dancing, that’s Harlequins for you). They believe that in the long term, the only way to defeat Slaanesh is to break the link between the Eldar and She Who Thirsts. The Harlequins see themselves as those saved by the Laughing God, and in performing their masques, and in particular the Dance Without End, seek to show the other Eldar that the Fall cannot be turned back, it cannot be ignored, it cannot be appeased. The future of the Eldar depends upon being able to live in freedom from Slaanesh’s grip, and the only way to do that is to be rescued by the Laughing God. Their spirits…? Their spirits are saved by Cegorach, free to live and die without the touch of Slaanesh.