For centuries, the dark elf realm of northeastern Criozevan operated as a unified kingdom under the authority of the Darkmane Family — a ruling dynasty that held the forest clans together through a combination of inherited prestige, ritual authority, and the particular weight carried by a family old enough to remember the Crimson Convergence. The family did not govern through formal laws so much as through presence: where the Darkmane head spoke, the tribes listened. Where the family mediated, disputes ended. It was not a stable peace — the Darkmane Elves were never that — but it was a functional one.
It ended in a single night.
The Long Corruption (896–937 ACC)
Vaelith the Hollow took leadership of the Darkmane Family in 896 ACC. By all early accounts he was a capable head: intelligent, politically sharp, and persuasive in ways that commanded genuine respect. He was also, beneath everything, primarily motivated by wealth — and the Darkmane Realm, with its ancient Golem ruins, its impenetrable forest cover, and its complete isolation from outside oversight, had become attractive to parties willing to pay for access and silence.
Over the four decades of his rule, Vaelith accepted payment from criminal organizations — most notably elements within the Arashi — to permit experiments inside the forest. These arrangements were kept from other branches of the family. They were profitable. They were, for a time, contained.
In 937 ACC, the deepest of these arrangements was made.
The Betrayal (937 ACC)
A senior scientist from the Goldhelm Kingdom’s Department of Holometric Advancement approached Vaelith with a specific request: access to one of the ancient ruins within the realm, and a living Darkmane Elf to serve as a research subject. The payment was significant. Vaelith accepted.
He ordered his men to take Thalrith the Wise — his own brother — and deliver him to the scientist without warning, without negotiation, and without any word reaching the rest of the family. They did.
The next night, a scream was heard from inside the Hidden Royal Palace. It came from Luthyrra the Silent, Thalrith’s wife — a woman known across the realm for a quietness so complete that hearing her cry out was, by all accounts, more alarming than the sound itself. Something in the connection between her and Thalrith, some resonance no one had observed before, transmitted enough of what was being done to him that the shock of it broke something loose inside her. The dark magic corruption that followed was total and immediate.
Before dawn, Thalrith and Luthyrra left their room together. Their eyes held a strange purple glow. Neither spoke. They walked into the deep forest and were never seen again.
They were the first of the Fallen.
The Fracture (938–940 ACC)
When the other branches of the Darkmane Family learned what Vaelith had done, they removed him from leadership with a speed and completeness that left no room for appeal. He was stripped of the family head title in 938 ACC. His fate afterward is not recorded.
But the removal of Vaelith was not the end. It was the beginning.
The fracture that followed could not be contained by the act of removing one man. Every branch of the family had tolerated Vaelith’s rule. Every branch had, in doing so, allowed the conditions for this. They turned on each other in cascading recriminations: who had known, who had suspected, who had benefited from the quiet prosperity of the Vaelith years without asking where it came from. There were no clean hands and no neutral parties. The tribunal became a war. The war became a collapse.
By 940 ACC, the last meaningful act of unified Darkmane governance ended without ceremony. No declaration, no treaty, no formal dissolution — simply the point at which the warbands stopped acknowledging any common authority and began treating each other as enemies. The Darkmane Family, as a functioning institution, ceased to exist.
Aftermath
What remained of the realm fragmented into the scattered warring tribes that persist in the present day. The Fallen — their number growing slowly in the years that followed as the corrupted runes scattered through the forest continued to destabilize — retreated deeper into the woods. They do not organize. They do not communicate. They appear at the edges of firelight and at the threshold of paths that should not be taken.
The four cities of the realm — Grousea, Vlurg, Wrediff, and Adlens — survived the collapse but lost any connection to a governing power. Each evolved its own character: Grousea into criminal infrastructure, Wrediff into a hidden warrior stronghold, Vlurg into a black market hub, and Adlens into something unlikely and difficult to explain — a diverse, deliberately peaceful port town operating under its own enforced rules.
The Darkmane Realm is still elven territory. It is simply no longer a realm. The forest remembers what it was, but it does not distinguish between that memory and the present.
No one has united the tribes since 940 ACC.