Who are the Wolven?

For those who have read MATHION: BOOK ONE OF THE MAVODURI TRILOGY, you will notice that the main characters aren't exactly human...per se. They are Wolven or Cénáre, a race of humans with a long life span, and many inherent abilities found commonly in the Trilogy's antagonists, the werewolves. But they are NOT werewolves. Nor are they some haphazard equivalent of vampires or elves.

I'd like to take a moment to compare the names Wolven and werewolf. "Werewolf" comes from Old English and literally means "man-wolf," that is a man who assumes the form of a wolf. More metaphorically, a werewolf is not just a man who transforms into a wolf, but a man who has accepted and glorifies the beast inside, forsaking his humanity. "Wolven" (as far as I'm aware) is a word of my own invention, and is roughly a poetic adjective in its style and sound. For someone to be "wolven" is to be wolf-like, or in this case werewolf-like, but in this case the Wolven retain their humanity and compassion for their fellow humans.

That is not to say the Wolven are flawed, which will be a major theme on THE LAST ASCENSION, but more on that later.

The Wolven creation myth (in short) is that they crashed on the shores of what became Ánovén roughly 20,000 years before Mathion's time. Five ships, five clans of men. In time, the "God" figure of the Mavonduri Trilogy, Ka'én, sent his emissary Ktindu to them to offer them a choice: aid the White Wolves and save them from the genocidal persecution of the Werewolves, or live out their lives as they would. No punishment was threatened for refusal, and in the end three of the five clans accepted. They adopted the name "Cénáre" which is Anglicized as "Wolven" but the actual translation is "those who are Shaped by the Shaper (Ka'én)".

In addition to a long life span (around 1,500 years for the royal clans of the Wolven) they were blessed with gifts of strength, agility, sight, hearing and smell, all of the physical attributes of a werewolf in manform. To put it simply, they were genetically engineered to fight werewolves, and win. However a few of them were also blessed with a form of clairvoyance or Foresight, some more powerful than others. This ability was most attributed to the Sages of Avakaš.

But at their core the Wolven are, fundamentally, human. They live, they fight, and they die. They love and they hate, but ultimately they share a fundamental connection to the world around them, and have passed into even our later myths and legends...as Atlanteans.