Eluni

Eluni was an ancient city-state in eastern Renova, on the shores of the Sea of Resolve. At the time of its founding, the Sea of Resolve was still full of water. Eluni was abandoned around 800 years before the Ascendance.

Description

Eluni was built on an elevated plateau on the south-eastern shores of the Sea of Resolve. The area surrounding Eluni mostly consisted of gentle hills, which were used to cultivate grain.

The city itself was built between two higher points, with the centre of the city actually the centre of a small sinkhole. Above this depression, the earliest inhabitants had built a large pyramidal temple, nearly 60m high, which served as a sort of artificial hill.

Around the temple were densely packed buildings, and the city was surrounded by a wall. Few if any of Eluni's residents lived in the fields around the city, with farmers instead returning to the safety of the walls at night.

Eluni's local economy mostly relied on farming and simple industries such as basket making. Traders often visited Eluni, but the city had no permanent market place.

The Temple Eluni's temple was the centre of life and culture in the city. The artificial hill construction did not contain any passages or caves beyond a single shaft in the middle of the summit which connected to the natural sinkhole and cave system the temple had been built on top of.

In these caves, the priests of Eluni carved the names of every citizen of Eluni had been died, an important part of their rituals of remembrance.

Culture and Religion

Most of Eluni's inhabitants were foxfolk and followed a particular culture endemic to the city. The people of Eluni organised themselves in large family groups, with children, their spouses, and their own children continuing to live with their parents in the same large family dwelling.

Elunian conceptions of gender featured a third distinct gender that was often assigned to children at birth.

Life in Eluni was closely tied to their worship of the deity Saoru. Whether or not this being fits the modern Renovan understanding of a deity is somewhat up to debate, as Saoru was not necessarily considered to be immortal in the traditional sense: rather, Saoru was narrated as being a particularly wise sage who had taught the ancient people of Eluni their core philosophies centuries before. Saoru had eventually passed away, but one of her teachings was that the dead only really died long after their bodies had stopped breathing: they were only truly dead when their name was uttered for the last time.

The people of Eluni believed this to be undeniably true, and their perception of death was shaped around this. Someone dying was not so much a time to mourn as it was an inconvenience, and reciting the names of dead family members was considered as normal of a responsibility as helping the family put food on the table. The priests of the temple, were all names were recorded, would spend most of their days reading through all of the names in the temple caves, a cycle which would take nearly a year. All of Eluni’s feasts and festivals were tied to the recitation of certain names, and so varied in their exact time as some years the priests would be slightly faster than others in their recitations, although by the time of Anvelope’s birth, the priests had worked out most of the issues and had a near-perfect cycle every year: certain priests would perform calculations each year to work out how much faster the priests would need to go, or how many more priests would be needed, in order to account for the new names which had been added to the list.

Naming conventions in some Elunian families followed a tradition of using a shared initial syllable for children born in the same generation, to make recitation of their names easier.

Known Residents

• Arvex - Anvelope's sibling
• Angenglen - Anvelope's sibling
• Anvelope
• Unnamed Chief Priest

References

Anvelope - A Renova Character

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