Dominion Era
The beginning of the Dominion Era, as used in modern parlance, is interestingly enough not the establishment of the Dominion as the name of the time period may suggest. There is only one account that extends beyond the birth of the precursors to the Tretallë, and that is the legend of Prophetess Llyrileýwa, which in turn begins at her alleged birth toward the end of the Time Immortal—a period of time also known as the Time Primeval and the Shrouded Past. The latter moniker of the Time Immortal, the Shrouded Past, is perhaps the most striking as it is a historian's admission to an utter lack of knowledge. All that is known of the Time Immortal is that the elves born during the height of the period were blessed with eternal youth and life.
This in mind, the Dominion Era as described in modern discourse is the period of time between the alleged birth of the legendary Prophetess and the reign of the Pale Imperator Veltaor a'Adyrrë, specifically the departure of the Urallë across the Thundering Sea to the West under his command. There is a period of time two thousand years long following the end of the Dominion Era known only as the Consolidation, which was ended by the landing of the Ereiltallë on the shores of the West, marking the beginning of the Western Conquest Era.
It is important to note that the Feudal Era of the West overlaps with the last eight thousand years of the Dominion Era and extends right up into the beginning of the Western Conquest Era.
The Prophetess and the Fall of the Elfin Realm
Before there were the Elledynnë and the Tretallë, there were only the Aeneve, the Great Elves of the East, united and undivided. Though little is truly known about the period, the story of the Prophetess hints very strongly at the existence of a strong druidic faith during the Time Immortal, one that dwindled with the passing years until it was balanced precariously on a knife's edge when the Prophetess was born. What is known of the period is that at some point during the lifetime of the prophetess, a new goddess, the Triple Goddess, manifested among the Aeneve. This new goddess bore a message of racial supremacy and promoted hedonism, qualities that are both apparent in the modern-day faith that claims to have descended from that time.
Nevertheless, the Prophetess took on the leadership of the Druidic Order and fought against the growing popularity of the Triple Goddess with all the strength that she could muster. In fact, her dire predictions about the fate of the Elfin realm, if it continued on its path of debauchery, vanity, abandonment of its druidic roots, and its shunning of the Pale God were what earned her the title of Prophetess. The prophetess' words went unheard and soon, it became apparent that there was a change beginning to take root among the elves. Immortality was a gift that had long since been waning by the time the Triple Goddess entered the scene, but after she started to grow in popularity, elves with ashen skin, who matured to have strange stripes across their faces, who were taller and lankier in general compared to the Aeneve, and who lived two or three times longer than the average elf did, began to appear.
Though initially and reluctantly taken as the fulfillment of the Prophetess' warnings, these new elves were immediately seized upon by the growing fanatic base of the Triple Goddess. They were blamed for all the misfortunes of the Elves and called abominations touched by the Triple Goddess' nemesis, the Raven Goddess. The rift between the Pale Ones, as the Prophetess took to calling them, and the rest of the Elfin realm grew to the point that the then-incumbent king declared that they were fit only for lives of menial labour. Despite the Prophetess' best efforts, the Pale Ones were rounded up and herded to the Shrouded Peaks, where they were used as a slave workforce to feed the Elfin realm's growing demand for gold, silver, and precious stones.
Under the pretense of preaching to the savages, the Prophetess introduced the Pale Ones to the Druidic roots of the Elves and promised them salvation through the Pale God. Giving them the tools of a language that only they could understand, the Prophetess secured the future of the Pale Ones and was instrumental in the skirmish that saw them released from their slavery under the mountain. Once the Pale Ones had attained their freedom, they launched a centuries-long war of attrition against the Elfin realm that ultimately shattered the Elfin realm.
Without a common enemy to unite the Pale Ones, who had taken on the name Tretallë, separated into tribes, thus starting the Elfin diaspora.
The Elfin Diaspora
D'Bremiernë Elloreni Qor'Zavë — The Testament of Elloreni the Elder (lit. The memory-book of Elloreni the Elder)
In ages long past, times long vanished into the mists of myth and unknown to the annals of history, lay tales that remain only in living memory as whispers of what has passed. Many tens of thousands of years before our Dominion was ever even imagined, our people the Tretallë, and them, the Elledynnë were indistinguishable. We were but one race, the Aenevë, the Great Elves of the East. We were united. We were one with the land and all its creatures.
We were happy. We were prosperous. We were whole. This peace would not last. One night, as the moon rose followed by its lover, the first cries of prayer and ecstasy dedicated to a foreign three-headed goddess shattered the calm quiet. To this day no one knows from where this goddess hailed, only that she did not come alone. The three-headed goddess came with an enemy, one decked with the feathers of a raven, its sharp beak, and its beady eyes.
From that day forth, everything changed. As the new goddess grew in power, we lost our connection to the land, severed from our druidic roots. She convinced our fair-skinned brethren that we were the spawn of evil, twisted versions of them corrupted by the raven-goddess. In their arrogance, in their pursuit of beauty and earthly affluence, they believed her. In their vainglory they made themselves golden by the light of the sun, cut down our sacred trees to grow new ones of silver, and called themselves Di'Elledynnë, the children of the stars. As they rose from the forest floor and reached for the stars, enslaved us and shackled us and bound us to the merciless earth.
The Elledynnë caged us in the mountains and shoved picks in our hands to mine their silver and gold. In our people's weakness, we could do naught but comply to our new cruel masters. Many of us died, many by their own hands. The Elledynnë, in their vainglory and self-perceived superiority gave us no shrouds of silk or thread as was customary to bear our dead with. Instead we used the mountains as our shroud. We used the stone to cover our people's bones.
The Elledynnë believed that we were stupid creatures, ugly and dumb, capable of only doing what we were trained to do, from birth, with the crack of the whip. They had forgotten that we had once been like them, too, intelligent and strong. As we toiled and grieved for our betrayal, he came to us, pale and radiant as the release of death. We called him Lertanys, Stranger, for we did not know him.
This Stranger led us beyond the depths where the silver and gold glittered and into the very heart of the mountain where the Primeval Wurm lay slumbering. It was there, in that chamber, that we discovered fragments of stars. As the Wurm stirred from its rest, we fled its lair. As we did, we realized that there were shards of stars buried in the rock of the mountain. For the first time in many, many, many years, we had hope.
By morning we toiled under the cruelty of our masters. By night we disturbed the tombs of our dead and forged our weapons and armour within them. Under the guidance of the Stranger, we waited until the day came that the moon turned crimson in the sky. It was on that day that we broke our chains and rose up against our slavers. So very many of our people died that day, but those of us that were armed with the shards of stars remained untouched. What magic the Elledynnë could muster shattered against our weapons and our armour as we cut them down and made the stone of the mountain slippery with their blood.
We took the mountain. We shattered their kingdom. We spread across the lands that they once called theirs and made it ours. Our many clans drifted apart to start our own towns and cities, to build new lives atop the rubble of our old ones. We may have become separate, but we knew that should the Elledynnë ever threaten us again, we would waste no time on bickering. We would come together and crush them as we had that fateful day we broke our chains and seized our freedom.
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.
