The Dark and the Deep

Deep Dwarves and Dark Elves

The Dark Elves and the Deep are not separate creations, but the result of the same slow adaptation unique to these two warden-tampered races. Whatever the Wardens did in creating Elves and Dwarves left them unusually responsive to generations of life without light. Over centuries, peoples who embraced the dark and night gradually changed in both form and temperament.

The Dark Elves first emerged among the Raven Domain, where a culture devoted to umbral arkana, astronomy, and the nocturnal life it fueled slowly gave rise to a distinct people. Their features became dark, but desaturated, their eyes better suited to light of the moon and stars, and their lives shifted almost entirely to the night. Their shared avoidance of the sun fostered an uncommon kinship with the Virborne, and as a result the Bloodhorn elf population slowly shifted to predominantly Dark Elves, though their origins remained in the Raven Mountains.

The Deep arose through a similar process among Dwarven civilizations that seldom left their subterranean halls. Generations spent beneath mountains in stale air and perpetual twilight gradually transformed them into a similarly dark, but often grey-blue people with keen low-light vision and remarkable endurance in deep caverns. Unlike the Dark Elves, whose transformation reflected a life beneath the open night sky, the Deep became a people of stone, content to spend entire lifetimes without seeing the sun. Though both peoples share a common origin in this strange adaptive phenomenon, the expressions of their transformation remain distinctly their own.