Aaulin's Morning

A little gift to my dearest friend Aldric of her character Aaulin, the flexible elf from the Oriental village and a very inspirational character for me ^-^ I previously made a drawing of his brother, Aorev, that was named simply "Aorev":

And so I guess I'll name this drawing just "Aaulin" then XD

The elves of the Oriental tribe have always considered flexibility a divine quality and believed that only true gods could do whatever they liked with their bodies. The elves themselves always tried to get as close as possible to the gods, flexibility has been the major part of religion in the Oriental village.

There is a legend that tells about a group of religious devotees, all of them extremely limber elves, who discovered a beautiful place and simply loved it, the forest, the river, the plains and the hills. They loved the place but had nowhere to live, so they built a huge house made of carved stone, so they could sleep there and live. They kept decorating the house year after year and eventually it became a temple, and they built more houses to create a village around it.

That's how the Oriental village was born. It's a legend that the elves really love, though nobody could tell if it's true. But the fact is that contortion is very highly praised in this very special village. Every child is encouraged to become limber to please the gods and make sure that good foods and easy life fall upon this growing tribe.

Contortion is part of everyone's life and every elf stretches for at least half an hour every day. The rest of the day most of the elves are too busy with mundane things: building, sewing, making jewelry, gardening, harvesting berries... The village is growing bigger and many elves are now too busy for religion, but they still practice for at least half an hour daily.

But there are boys who continued the tradition of extreme contortion. They grow up to become trainers and raise the next generation of bendy elves, and so on. The village's chief (more like the representative of the tribe) is usually the most flexible elf, spending his whole time to practicing. All other elves who don't practice extreme contortion, are still welcome in the temple to pray and watch the limber dances dedicated to the well-being of the village.

Aaulin had become the chief of the Oriental village when he was only a boy. As a child he was already seen as a half-deity in the tribe because of his exceptional abilities.

Aaulin's trainer usually liked to focus on bending the boy backwards as much and often as possible, saying that backbending is essential in contortionism. Aaulin liked his backbends very much but he often wondered what other things are possible... Whenever his trainer wasn't there, the boy tried to bend in all kinds of silly ways, checking how far he could stretch this or that body part, even fingers or toes, or what kinds of knots he could tie himself into.

His trainer Emaryl was sometimes secretly peeping at him just to make sure that everything is fine, and one day all of a sudden master Emaryl appeared from behind a curtain when the boy was least expecting, and asked the young elf to wait and hold that particular position for longer. The trainer was specially impressed that Aaulin not only stretched himself into a great oversplit but also used his leg as a handle of sorts, to pull his torso into a deep backbend.

The whole posture looked incredibly extreme, something you'd only expect from a deity. Immediately the position was included in Aaulin's regular performance. At that time Aaulin was only 8 years old and he's been doing the pose for many years since. Over the years, he learned to fold his back even tighter and polished the pose to perfection as we can see it now.

Aaulin specially loved to strike this pose upon a high stone block. There were several of such blocks across the village and they were made specially for contortionists who used them to perform handstands and various poses. The blocks had different sizes, some were the size of a table, so even newbies could practice upon them, but the young chief always chose the highest and most narrow one.