Friday 2nd of July, 2010

Gav's Eldar guest blog

Black Library veteran author Gav Thorpe talks to us about getting into the eldar mindset.

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How does one get into the mind of an eldar? Short of a bottle of absinthe or licking some of the more exotic species of frogs in the Amazon rainforest, the best I could do was take our everyday human experiences and turn the dial up to eleven. Imagine the greatest slight you have felt, the highest moment of achievement, the deepest times of grief and sadness; now imagine experiencing that for every second of your life, a life that can last more than a thousand years. There is no description in human psychology that could encompass such a tumult of emotion.

Add to this heightened emotional volatility a physical sensitivity and self-awareness that for us would be considered supernatural. Try to picture an existence in which you can feel the slightest current of air on your skin and hair, the subtlest nuance of taste, the infinitely small degrees of hue in the spectrum, the music in silence. The buzz of an insect is an orchestral work; starlight dappling on water is a rainbow of colours; the scent of a flower a melange of smells that each elicit the most powerful response.

But we are not done yet. Each of those exquisite phenomena, every tiniest experience, is imprinted upon your mind in stark clarity. Not for the eldar the comfort of pain dwindling with time, not the hazy, comfortable recollection of love and happiness. With the turning of a thought, you can experience again every strata of sensation as if it were happening right now. Could you fight the temptation to wander through the joys of childhood forever, the dark abyss of every tragic loss waiting to consume you in a moment’s indulgence?

And still there is another facet to eldar life that we must consider; one which with all of the imagination in the world we cannot hope to emulate with human experience. The perfection of emotion, thought and body is physical, chemical, natural. The eldar existence goes beyond this, into the realm of the psychic. I’m not talking the big stuff – the prophecies of the farseers or ravening blasts of lightning – I’m talking about the everyday empathy, the sense of the wider universe and the crushing awareness of all other living things hovering on the edge of detection. Grief shared is not just social or a matter of body language, it is an unconscious touch inside your mind; joy shared is not just a contagious smile, it is a flood of happiness fuelled by the experiences of others.

No wonder the eldar went insane.

And so we come to the Path. This is the means by which each of these tortuous gifts can be turned off and on. The Path is the net that caught the eldar after the Fall. It is the Path that brings calm to the mental storm, brings peace to the constant bombardment of sensation, dulls the psychic sense and allows the exploration of self.

But for Korlandril, protagonist of Path of the Warrior, the Path brings no peace, only war and death, experienced in a way only an eldar can experience it...

Gav Thorpe’s Path of the Warrior is available now.

Posted by The Black Library Team