In the odd rare location, border towns and mixed settlements are where all our grand theories about race and purity quietly fall apart. You will not find many of my people or the dverger there who still care about family etiquette or clan politics; those who settle in such places are usually the ones who have had enough of being told what they must be. The humans are almost always commoners: traders, craftsmen, retired soldiers, and those with more curiosity than fear; with perhaps the local lord realizing the advantages to their fiefdom they can gain from allowing all in.
In these towns, perched near mountain passes, forest edges, or major crossroads, and mainly in the east, laws are less about ancestry and more about whether you pay your taxes and keep your sword or knife sheathed unless in self-defense. Aelvar knowledge and long-term planning meets human earnestness and industriousness with dverger skill, and somehow a working order emerges. The posted edicts are usually written in Ætaini, with a second line in Saelarin or Letharin if some industrious scribe has the skill or knowlege; in practice, half the bargains are struck in a muddle of trade-tongues, gestures, and whatever curses everyone recognizes. Prejudices do not vanish, but they are forced to compete with more immediate concerns: who can mend a broken axle, who has grain for sale, who is willing to stand watch when bandits or varvarski come sniffing around.
These towns are where half-aelvar and quarter-aelvar are most likely to find something resembling a normal life, rather than being insulted or used as ornaments in human courts or pitied in distant aelvar enclaves. It is also where dverger who turned their backs on their people can earn a quiet living as skilled craftsmen without hearing, every day, how they have disappointed their clans.
There is but one exception to this rule. Pale-aelvar, solely, are not welcome even in these locales. Old stories cling to them too tightly; most folk would rather bar their doors than test whether any individual pale-aelv might be different… I know of one who is, but Isha is the exception that proves the rule. The rule, from my own personal experience, is founded in facts and blood.
If you wish to take the measure of the world as it is, not as temples and kings claim it to be, do not start in palaces. Start in the markets of a mixed border town at dusk, when caravans roll in and everyone is too tired to hate each other properly. Listen to what they complain about, what they laugh at, and who they trust with their children for an hour. That will tell you more than any royal propaganda.
Ætaine and Valmark come closest to carrying these border-town ideals into true cities: imperfect, quarrelsome, but at least attempting to treat worth before blood. It is no coincidence, I think, that they are the only human realms ruled, in whole or in part, by those of aelvar descent, however much their entrenched human nobility grind their teeth at the arrangement. Though, I do find it interesting that their leaders grew up, at least partially, in human society. So I would not say that those of aelvar descent make the best rulers for humans, but perhaps a mixing of our differing cultures is necessary for the makings of a harmonious environment in large cities between the races.
