The Elves: High, Wood, and Dark

The elves were old when men still huddled in caves, and they have never quite forgiven the world for moving on without them. Long-lived, beautiful, and matchless in war and sorcery, they might once have ruled the whole of the Old World. Instead they broke: a single graceful people sundered by pride and civil war into three, each nursing its own version of the same ancient grief. To understand the elves is to understand a family torn apart and still bleeding ten thousand years on.

The Island of Ulthuan[edit]

The oldest and proudest of the three are the high elves of the High Elf Realms, who dwell on the island continent of Ulthuan far across the Great Ocean. Theirs is a civilisation of white towers, dragon-haunted mountains, and princes who remember the founding of the world. At the island's heart spins a great magical vortex, raised by their ancient mages to drain the world's excess sorcery and hold the powers of Chaos at bay, a working of such scale that the high elves have tended it, unbroken, for five thousand years. They are scholars, mariners, and warriors of terrible skill, and they carry themselves with the weary grace of a people who have already seen every mistake made at least once.

The Sundering[edit]

The three kindreds were not always separate. Long ago Ulthuan was riven by civil war, when a faction devoted to darker pleasures and crueller magics rose under a charismatic and monstrous leader. The struggle that followed, the Sundering, split the elven race forever. The losers were driven from Ulthuan and sailed north to the frozen land of Naggaroth, becoming the dark elves: bitter, brilliant, and utterly without mercy, raiding the world from black-sailed ships and dreaming always of the homeland denied them. The war between Ulthuan and Naggaroth has never ended. It is a family feud pursued with the intensity only immortals can sustain.

The Forest of Athel Loren[edit]

The third kindred took a stranger path. Some elves, rather than sail to Ulthuan or Naggaroth, remained in the Old World and bound themselves to a single vast and living forest, becoming the wood elves of the Wood Elf Realms. In Athel Loren they are less rulers than partners of the wood, sharing it with spirits, ancient trees that walk, and powers older than the elves themselves. They have grown wilder and warier than their island cousins, guarding their borders with silent arrows and caring little for the affairs of the outside world, until that world is foolish enough to set foot beneath their branches.

Magic and the Winds[edit]

No people understand magic as the elves do. Where a human wizard learns to ride a single wind of magic and prays not to be thrown from it, an elf mage weaves many at once as naturally as breathing. It was a high elf, the great mage Teclis, who eventually taught mankind to work magic safely, founding the wizarding colleges of the Empire of Man and forging one of the few genuine bonds between elf and human. That gift was an act of desperate alliance against Chaos, and it reshaped the Old World forever: proof that even a sundered, prideful people can, at need, choose to help.

Elves, Dwarfs, and Old Wounds[edit]

The elves' oldest quarrel is not with men but with dwarfs. In the ancient world the high elves and the Dwarfen Mountain Holds were partners in trade and something near to friends, until pride, misunderstanding, and blood turned that friendship into the ruinous War of Vengeance. Both peoples were diminished by it, and both remember it as the other's fault. Along Bretonnia's marches the wood elves keep their own uneasy peace with the Kingdom of Bretonnia, whose legends of the fay are half-remembered glimpses of the forest folk. The elves make careful neighbours and worse enemies.

The Long Twilight[edit]

For all their gifts, the elves are a waning people, and the wisest among them know it. There are fewer of them each century, their glories lie mostly in the past, and the vortex they guard grows harder to hold as the age darkens. Yet they endure (proud, divided, and magnificent) because the alternative is to let the world fall to the Dark Powers they have fought since before mankind could speak. Their story reaches its terrible climax in the End Times, when the vortex itself is threatened and the three kindreds must reckon at last with the wound that sundered them. To place their realms on the wider map, walk our tour of the Old World.