Article 36: Dark Elf Society 2
The heart of each matriarch's vote is "The Deed", an attempt to measure merit from within the population of Dark Elves. Every year, officials perform a consensus of deeds, measuring the contributions made by each citizen, determining how much weight each deed carries, and dividing it as seems correct between the various family lines. Conversely, criminal and selfish acts are deducted, though many unsolved crimes and the subjective nature of judgement make these numbers much more fuzzy. These deeds are then further ascribed to the generation responsible for them, with a generation being a division of close to 5 years. A deed stays on record and therefore contributes to the power of a family line's Grand Matriarch as long as any members of that deed's generation still live. On at least five separate occasions throughout history, a family line has been deemed to have a negative deed balance, and as a result has been cut off from power completely, their Grand Matriarch disrobed in a secretive ceremony on the matriarchs' home planet of Enlernal.
All of this filters down to the Dark Elves' civilian life, and has combined with generations of tradition to create a number of customs and celebrations that are unique among the galaxy, starting before a Dark Elf is even born. Most of them are heavily tied to family, specifically a Dark Elf's mother. The most well-known among these is the Mother's Ceremony of Intuition, held one month before a child's due date. It's largely similar to a baby shower from other cultures, where a mother is the star of a celebration centering around the life she is soon to bring into this world. Most attendees will bring a pair of gifts. The first is for the mother, and is invariably an item to help her raise her child, such as baby clothes, instructional holograms, and tounge-in-cheek joke gifts such as stress relief devices or invitations to take care of the mother's husband for a week so that she can be uninterrupted in her care for the child. The other gift, however, is meant for the child, often to be given to that child later in their life, and is usually a tool of some sort to help them in whatever path they choose for their life. These are often very meaningful and sentimental items, sometimes including magical relics or weapons passed down through many generations. During the ceremony, the mother will choose one of these items and adorn it with something of her own. This can include fastening ribbons or gems, carving in an image, inscribing a short phrase, or even improving the item's usability in some fashion. The chosen item then becomes the child's Instrument of Legacy, a special memento that they will take with them throughout their adult lives that is said to help them accomplish great deeds for their people.
As a Dark Elven child grows into an adult, their mother is considered by most to be the central figure in their life. As mothers act as caregiver, teacher, and in many cases the one who chooses their path, disrespect to one's mother is highly taboo in Dark Elven society, and the most foul insults are those directed at a mother. When a mother dies before their child has reached adulthood, a premeditated wish from the mother can determine the child's custody over the wishes of the surviving father. This can lead to highly polarized behavior from the children, some reverential towards the one that brought them into the galaxy while others become more and more rebellious. During this period, Dark Elves are educated in the same manner as most children of other races, though as one would expect their mother is often given extra agency over the children and the path they pursue through their education. It is customary at the age of adulthood for a Dark Elf to hold a ceremony honoring their mother, living or dead, and some repeat this every generation.
As a Dark Elf grows older, they are expected to generate some amount of deed for their family line. Not all are expected to propel themselves into the lofty heights of greatness, and while each individual mother will place different expectations on their children, most are pleased so long as they contribute to their generation's total positive deeds. Because each deed's equivalent power lasts for as long as the generation that performed it was still alive, this means that the elderly among Dark Elf society are often highly prioritized by the Grand Matriarchs. The older someone is, the more of their generation's deeds they carry on their shoulders, and therefore the more valuable their input is to their Grand Matriarch. When a generation has been reduced to a single member, that family will often do everything in their power to keep them alive, with a few even placing them into prolonged stasis. The ruling on this has so far been that they do not count as alive for the purposes of deed totals while frozen, but the hope is that advances in medical technology as well as magic can keep them and their generation's deeds alive longer once they're removed from stasis.
As violent events have shaped the structure of the Dark Elves' politics, it's far from a perfect system. Females are still considered more societally valuable than males by a considerable margin, assassinations of matriarchs, apprentices, and the elderly alike are more common than in most other races within the CTS save the trolls, who are okay with it, and there's little a single person can do to affect change on a large scale without first creating their own family line, but for generations of galactic rule they've managed to stay out of a number of aggressive conflicts and make life better for their citizens without harming a large number of outsiders. What the future holds for the Dark Elves is not certain, but so long as they keep their rule over their own destiny stable, it's likely that they will continue to prosper for millennia to come.
