However, something happened to break the unity of the Elves. A quarrel began, which no one knows the source of, around the same time as the Elves began to learn magic. For the first time, herein the Elves knew sorrow, as they found to their mistake that they were ageing, and that some amongst their number would die.
The result of this quarrel was war, and many were horrified to see violence shatter the peace of the city they had made. Yet others revelled in this violence, and worked with their new-found anger to wreak havoc upon their home, and destruction upon each other. In horror, the First City was destroyed, and the Elven Nation along with it. This tragic event was known as The Sundering.
After the loss of their home it took many years for the Elves to recover, yet it is a tribute to them that they did, gradually. Dispersed throughout the world, each family and each tribe swapped stories and told of their past, gradually they strove to re-create it, and some the Elven Kingdoms were born.
The Tales of the Kingdoms are lost to the past. Even their names are not known. In there work, the Elven people strove to reawaken the sentience of the nature they had known. In the lands before the Sundering, they had known a time when they were in harmony with the life around them, yet though they wrought mightily to attain it once more; this harmony was never to return.
In the name of life, the Elves worked miracles upon the land, re-invoking much of the powers of life. Yet, to their sorrow they could not re-awaken it all. In their work, they laboured with the magic they had found, and to their amazement, found other peoples and races upon the earth.
One of which was man.
Some say that man was the undoing of the Elves, others say they brought it upon themselves. Yet no one can dispute the terrible suffering each brought to the other. The Elves saw man as a race that could strive to achieve what they had failed, and so sought to teach him of their ways. Man saw the Elves as pretentious dictators, who assumed they knew better.
The final result was war. These became known as The Race Wars.
Once again the magic proved a factor in the argument between the two races. The humans demanded the secrets of the Elves, who in turn refused to teach them. The result was the destruction of the fragile kingdoms that the Elven people had founded, and the tragic loss of the path they had sought to follow in preserving the life of the land.
What came after was the Human Empire, which was to last five hundred years
In the early years of the Empire, the prejudice of the wars made life difficult for the few Elves who remained within the lands. Rumours abounded of those who had escaped or had preserved something of the idyllic lands they had once called their own. Yet gradually such tales were lost, and the details of the past became a dim memory as the struggle to survive became of more import. For the shorter lived humans this loss of the past was all the more apparent, and gradually the remaining Elves found themselves more able to walk freely without fear of persecution.
Then came the cataclysm; The epitome of misuse of magics by humans. The Empire destroyed itself. In its place came centuries of dark years where people fought to survive. Yet when a semblance of order was restored, the Elves found themselves walking side by side with those who they had counted as foes in the past. Amongst many of the races, there was a wish for a new day, and a will to strive for something better without prejudice. This was a goal to which many of the Elves abroad in Erdreja today came to agree with.
The Gathering Treaty and the years of the Factions ruling the land have seen the shattered remnants of many cultures of Elves gradually emerge from the secreted places and hidden paths. The fragile peace is not constant, but all have learned to see that nothing ever is. A fact, which those who support it have grown, accustomed to.
