The First Corruption

The elves came down from the heavens because they pitied us.

It is difficult to construct a more dangerous beginning.

They were divine beings then, though of the lowest celestial order: immortal, unaging, beautiful, and convinced that dwarves, gnomes, halflings, and humans were poorly equipped to resist demons, devils, and the appetites of their own lesser natures.

On the last point, they were not entirely mistaken.

The early elves lived among the people of Mirithar. They taught, fought, and sailed beside them. Elven warriors and Miritharin raiders carried war against the demon lords of the Old World, pursuing them as far south as Monte Tifone. The songs remember victories. Songs generally do.

What they remember less willingly is Bael.

The great corruptor dwells somewhere upon or beneath the islands of Mirithar. Almost immediately after the elves entered the world, Bael corrupted the greater part of them. No surviving account agrees upon the method. Some describe temptation. Others describe possession, revelation, infection, or a truth that should never have been understood.

The elves call the event the First Corruption.

Its victims became the first orcs.

Those earliest corrupted beings are now called Dark Elves. They still resemble the people they once were. Their descendants did not retain that shape. From them came orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, and many of the other peoples that later chroniclers gathered beneath the convenient label of humanoid.

Convenient labels are particularly useful when one wishes to forget a family relationship.

The surviving elves were sheltered by the dwarves of Mirithar. The dwarves helped them recover, rebuild, and multiply. In time, the elves rose to rule the same islands in which they had nearly vanished. This fact is sometimes presented as proof of elven resilience and sometimes as proof that dwarves possess a dangerously generous understanding of hospitality.

Both may be true.

No elf who first descended from the heavens remains uncorrupted and alive. The modern elven people descend from the survivors and number only in the tens of thousands. They do not age, but immortality should not be confused with abundance. A people may live forever and still become fewer.

Bael’s physical form has been slain seven times by elves and dwarves.

This sounds impressive until one notices the continuing need to count.

The First Corruption explains much that outsiders mistake for elven pride. Their severity, their caution, their devotion to light, and their refusal to treat moral failure as a harmless private matter are not merely customs. They are scar tissue. Every elf knows that their people entered the world believing themselves proof against corruption. Every elf also knows what followed.

Dwarven tradition carries a matching burden. Their oldest stories claim that dwarven miners dug too deeply and opened the ways by which the Demon Lords reached the surface. Thus the elves remember failing to resist evil, while the dwarves remember releasing it.

This may explain why the two peoples have remained bound together for so long. Affection helps. Shared victory helps. Shared guilt is stronger than either.

The lesson usually drawn from the First Corruption is that demons can turn even divine beings into monsters. This is correct, but incomplete.

The more troubling lesson is that corruption did not begin with weakness. It began with certainty. The elves came to save lesser beings from temptations they believed they understood. Bael required only that they continue believing themselves superior to those temptations.

There are no living witnesses to tell us exactly what he offered.

Perhaps that is merciful.

Perhaps it is why he may offer it again.

— Lantern of the Thirteenth Word