Danu's Fall.

While on the Material the first cultures began to form, with the great empires and ancient civilizations of prehistory rising and falling in their disparate terrains, a similar change was occurring in the land of FaeReie. The time had, after untold years, at last come for the Lords of FaeReie to surrender their thrones to their heirs. Though Cernunnos, his heir stolen by Ahriman’s temptations and Xaos’s morphic touch, had yet to select a successor, his three counterpart Queens each had prepared and raised a daughter to see to their throne as their time came to an end.

But something happened that changed the intented outcome of this change of power. The exact details are a closely-guarded secret, even all these eons later, but what is known is that Danu, minstrel queen of the third Court, had turned her eyes to the World’s Shadow. None know if she was collaborating with the banished enemies of the Lost Court or seeking to extend the hand of forgiveness and redemption; however, the other courts were fearful of the risks inherent in whatever action she took. Once more, FaeReie went to war - and this time, without the aid of Echidna’s monsters or Ahriman’s hordes, the victory was far swifter and far more decisive. The three other courts descended upon Danu and her people - the Tuatha Dé Danann - and routed them in an overwhelming defeat.

The price to be paid for this defeat, whether Danu’s intents were benevolent or hostile, was nothing less than banishment, just as the Lost Court before them had been cast out. Many of the Tuatha, seeing their imminent departure, chose to defect to the other courts, begging succor and pledging eternal subservience to their new Queen or King in an attempt to escape the dreaded sentence of exile. However, the vast majority remained loyal to their lady, and departed with her. Mighty magic, the last true power of Danu and her people in FaeReie, was used to pull their ancient home - the eternal forest of Sentara - through the gate by which they were forced to depart.

Sentara and its people emerged on the continent of Stormwind, filling a vast coastal plain on the continent’s eastern shore with the sudden arrival of the entire woods; despite the great forest’s size, however, its new finite boundaries made it immensely tiny compared to the endless forest they had once called home. A vast city was immediately built, called Abartach after one of the Tuatha’s heroes, from which Danu would rule her people from her new throne. For a short time in the life of the Fae, they lived peacefully, believing that in exile they could continue on at least in a shadow of what had come before.

It was not to be. Time took its toll on the Tuatha, and as the centuries passed, they began to change. They began to weaken, their strength and magic sapped away by the mortality of the Material. They began to age, and to die. And their children were born weak, small, and powerless, and while in the eyes of other mortal races even these diminished creatures lived impossibly long, in the view of the once-immortal Tuatha their lives were painfully short. Slowly but surely, all but the mightiest and greatest of the Tuatha, and all newborns, became something else: a race of fey-tinted creatures more mortal than majestic, who the Tuatha deemed as Elves.

Now a race in cultural and existential decline, the Tuatha and their Elven offspring turned to new goals - to establish, secure, and strengthen themselves among the other mortal races of their new reality. Meanwhile the dread secret of the cause of their departure remained hidden away, secured only by Danu and her closest confidants, unknown and unknowable to even the newborn Elves, much less any from beyond Sentara’s borders. The fallen queen became a recluse, never leaving Abartach, to the point where only a few short Elven generations later her very existence was considered something of a myth, and even the most stalwart Elf had to consider within himself if she still lived at all, or whether the few and dwindling remaining true Tuatha clung to the memory of a ghost, the last shred of their old lives gone to the winds of mortality.