When I first envisioned them, I was thinking along the dungeons and dragons paradigm. So, I thought of them as humans with class restrictions; specifically Barbarians and Druids of the game and then they could learn other classes, and learn they did. They were the best Mages, the only ones that could tap tenth through twelfth level spells, according to Dungeons and Dragons rules, this was impossible for humans. The rigors of the environment that they lived made it so that only the best of them could succeed, the closeness to nature of the goddess of the planet, who was the only goddess available to them due to the nature of the spell cast, Druids were the only priests option available.
With a paradigm change, away from Dungeons and Dragons, the back story remains unchanged but the methods change. The basic physiological stuff remains unchanged. They are superior. They don't shit, they metabolize everything digestible. The only thing that is ever excreted is dust: the sand and indigestible stuff in our food. The other ways that they are superior to the sentients of Caranus are in the general senses, the only ones that people come in contact with are the very best of their society. Like if we encountered aliens in space, astronauts would give an untrue perception of the average human, they are the best examples of us, peak physical training, multiple degrees etc. So are they, the ones that graduate and are allowed to enter Caranus from their new world are the very best. They are physically nearly perfect, with advanced magical training.
Their world. When the spells were cast they did a few things simultaneously. They opened up an extra-dimensional pocket in the side of a mountain and created a mirror image of Caranus, but with one sun and an odd parody of life that was more challenging than the world they had just left, but safer than the doom that was falling on them. There was also very large time speed difference, large enough that the time lock on the gate gate of one year, was substantially greater for those inside the enclosure, so long that a great civilizations rose and fell and evolution proceeded before they were again to emerge from the safety of their enclosure. Inside, as they were inside the mountain, they were exposed only to the energies of the planet and the fourth goddess, the planet itself. They became devotees to her and she to them. She moulded them to be what they needed to be to protect the world.
Time… there is a Round which is roughly a week, the time it takes the two dancing suns to dance a round, there is a year, the time it takes the dancers to dance around the floor, i.e. around the invisible sun and there is a real year, the time it takes the dancers to dance through the seasons, roughly twenty-four dances. Sidereally, this is just a perception. The dancers dance around the central star, twenty-five times and the Planet once around the central star, so from the perception of the planet, the dancers dance six times per season, or twenty-four times every real year. Humans live, on average about three years. Elves, see more years, but this is dependent on their sub-race. River Elves, eighty years, Mountain Elves seventy-five, Forest Elves sixty, Deep Elves fifty and Sea Elves forty (they are River Elves, but ocean mortality is so much higher). Dwarves live about five years, halflings three. Humanoids live three years too, same as humans. The protectors live about one hundred years without the aid of magic and do not die of natural causes, unless dragons are a natural cause of death!
It is often easier to describe time using weeks, months and years that do not match the same time periods as they do on Earth. In the histories, timescales used are Earth standard to avoid confusion. I have a spreadsheet that explains the weather/climate and seasonal variation better.
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