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When the world was new elves ruled and there was peace, there was prosperity. Golden cities were filled by the People, markets flush with wares and goods sold for a song. The People were vibrant and quick to laughter. Days came and days went in a celebration of life and no one despaired.
When the world was a season older elves ruled and there was greed, there was war. Sects and guilds paved the way. All exclusive; limited. There was plenty still, but that plenty was drab and older than yester-year. With expansion came great distance and the People grew apart. Celebration turned to pride and pride turned to entitlement and bred with contempt. The Great Houses turned on another and soon nothing was left.
When elves ruled the world they found they were not the only ones to walk the world and so, they did not rule all. Here, at last, was a unifying thought. Conquest; turned outward, farther still than the known lands. Defense; turned towards the Nation of the People, for these outliers were encroaching. And so, war-torn city-states came to heed the call of a single banner. They fought in the manner adopted by years of civil strife – they fought and planned and schemed in terms of years and eons; a battle of attrition.
Yet those who walked the world were not all alike, and while elves sat close to time immemorial it was not so for their new fledged enemy.
With sneering privilege shared by the once more Great Tree of Houses, they underestimated the quickling creatures as children playing at war when they had perfected mastery. For while the elves had many years to walk the world, these newblood creatures did not look towards eternity. They knew death, saw and felt it with a regularity that might have horrified the People, had they cared enough about them. These quickling lives were lived and fought for fiercely for all their brevity and their battles were staged to be won now and tomorrow and not come to fruition in the ever-years ahead.
In their arsenal the quicklings discovered and invented and wielded weapons the Nation's brightest had not thought to create. There was a melding of creatures, newblood created newerblood in a monstrous amalgamation of magic and something else. Weapons in elven likeness, but too big, too beastly. Weapons that could walk, could scream and yell and terrorize the already destabilizing nature of two sides meeting.
When elves ruled the world, they did so for long days and long nights, but their rule was not absolute and did not last indefinitely.