Author notes
The Witcher:
What stayed with me wasn’t just the monsters, but the Elves. I liked the idea of them arriving from another realm, enslaving humans and other races. Not noble guardians — but conquerors, with blood on their hands. That sense of history echoing into the present shaped how I wrote the Imperium and the memory of Elvern rule.
Dragon Age:
I admired how Dragon Age stripped away the “pure and wise” cliché. Its Elves are not ethereal saints — they’re oppressed, fractured, often complicit in their own downfall. That tension — between memory of greatness and present decay — fed into my own vision of the Elvern legacy.
Norse Mythology:
The Dökkálfar, or dark elves, fascinated me. Not as villains, but as creatures bound to shadow, ambiguity, and ancient places. Myth rarely paints in black and white. That greyness bled into how I write races and factions: flawed, contradictory, carrying scars.
Why My Elves Aren’t Unique — And Why That’s the Point:
Fantasy always returns to Elves. From Tolkien’s mythic guardians to Sapkowski’s bitter exiles, they’ve stood as mirrors for the world around them. Immortal, fragile, noble, corrupted — they’ve been written every which way.
So I’m not trying to pretend mine are “unique.” They’re not. And that’s deliberate.
What I’ve done in A Tale from the Unbound Realm is compliment the genre — not erase it. My Elves are part of that tradition, but they carry my world’s weight:
Once-conquerors, who ruled and enslaved in another age.
Survivors of their own hubris, their empire left to rot.
Feared and resented, their memory written into the stones of the Imperium.
Not shining immortals — but weary remnants of power, still dangerous in their decline.
I didn’t want “a new kind of Elf.” I wanted the old ones, dragged through mud and rebellion. A race that once looked untouchable, now facing consequence.
That’s where the genre breathes — not in discarding what came before, but in reshaping it.
Copyright © 2025 by Daniel Butler
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2025