Dominion Era
The Dominion Era, as it is known to historians, is the span of time including the many tens of thousands of years prior to the establishment of the Dominion up until the time when the Dominion set its sights upon the expansive lands to the West, far across the Thundering Sea, which marks the beginnings of the Conquest Era.
The Elfin Diaspora
They say that long ago, many tens of thousands of years before the Dominion was ever even imagined, our people, the Tretallë and them the Elledynnë were indistinguishable. We were one race. The Elves of the East. United. One with the land. They say that one day, when the moons were high upon the sky and the night was calm, the first cries of prayer and ecstasy dedicated to a foreign, three-headed goddess began to emerge.
No one knows where this new goddess came from, much less the enemy—decked with the feathers of a raven and its beady eyes, too—she took with her. All we know is that from that day, everything changed. As the new goddess grew more and more powerful and we lost our connection with the land, no longer were the Elves of the East but one people; they became two.
This three-headed goddess convinced our enemies that we are the spawn of evil, and in their arrogance, their pursuit of beauty, they believed her. They enslaved us and shackled us. They bound us to the mountains to mine their silver and gold. Many of us died, many at their own hands. The Elledynnë, as they called themselves in their blind vainglory, gave us no shrouds of silk or thread to bury our dead with. Instead we used the mountain to cover their bones.
The Elledynnë believed we were stupid creatures, ugly and dumb, capable of only doing what we were trained to do at the end of a whip. They were wrong. They had forgotten that we had once been like them, too. We found something within the mountains, something they never expected. We found the fragments of stars, and in the silence of the nights, we disturbed the graves of our people and forged these fragments into weapons and armour. When we rose against our slavers and shattered the chains of our bondage, many of us died, but those of us who were armed with the fragments of the stars were untouched. Their magic could do no harm to us.
We were not going to flee the mountain where so many of our dead lay. We were going to take it, make it ours, and make it run azure with the blood of the traitors to the once-great Elves of the East. For the longest time we lived upon the mountain. We made do as we built up our stores of Elledtrillë. When the Elledynnë came upon us once more, we fought back and shattered their Silvered Realm. We left the Shrouded Peaks and stormed across the desolation into the forests of our homeland and took it back. Broken and battered, the Elledynnë retreated to the south while the many clans of our people went separate ways to rebuild.
That is the tale of our liberation. That is the tale as it has been told for many thousands of years. How much of it could be true depends on whom you ask, but nevertheless, is it not an interesting story?
The Beginnings of the Dominion
The Forest of Bones and the tradition of the Bone Tree are both believed to have originated from the massive excavation project that followed the discovery of the Throne. It took many hundreds of years for the Throne to be unearthed, and in that same time, many hundreds of lives were also lost. It is believed that the families of these excavators shattered their bones and marked the trees at the site of their death with the bones, thus initiating one of the most long-standing and most important traditions of the Dominion, as well as giving the forest its name.
For a handful of millennia after the excavation was finished, the Bone Elves of the city that had found the Throne established the Kingship of the Bone Trees, a minor kingdom that absorbed nearby Bone Elfin city-states and towns in its domain. It was not until the first Imperator of the Dominion, Cilritanë a'Detvida, who had grander ambitions than any of his predecessors, that the armies of the Kingship swept across the land, subjugating and annexing all the lands of the then-disparate Bone Elfin peoples.
