Dark Elf History
The Dark Elves' history remains a turbulent and cruel thing. Many millennia ago, the Elvish gods had a sorted falling out. The Goddess, Ashramora, had started to grow agitated over her husband's rule of the Elves. She felt that he was letting their potential go to waste and keeping them weak. They were the oldest race, and thus they should have had domain over the world. Their love grew tainted as Ashramora became increasingly annoyed with her husband's lack of motivation and his eagerness to shoot down all of her plans and ideas. Ashramora became bitter.
It didn't take long after that for Ashramora to scheme her takeover of her husband's portfolio. In the night, she attempted to send servants to kill her husband, but Silaya had seen the betrayal in a vision and thwarted the attempt. Enraged, Ashramora did a last ditch effort to kill him with her own magic, but now aware of her intentions, Iliharian easily stopped her. Even though he still loved her, he was prepared to return her to the ether, but Silaya objected, she begged him for mercy and to send her to the depths with her Dark Elves so that he'd never have to see her again. This sadly also meant that Iliharian banished their two children along with her, as he wanted no more trace of her left where he could see.
Living for thousands of years underground with no light of day or contact with the outside world twisted Ashramora's mind. The spiders that trailed the grounds became her only friends, she even rejected her own children and people. She began to see them as reminders of where she failed and somehow convinced herself that they only needed to be stronger, so she started the massive infighting among the Dark Elves, causing their hate for other Elves to only be rivaled by the hatred of their own kind.
The Dark Elves would have become a force to be reckoned with if they hadn't remained underground preoccupied with their own scheming amongst themselves to win Ashramora's favor. The Dark Elf houses began to make raids on the surface, inflicting their cruelty on anyone who got too close to the Underdark, taking anyone they found back as slaves and thus increasing their house's power. Anyone who was captured was treated mercilessly and used for the Dark Elves' own amusement when not worked or beat to death.
This continued for millennia until Ashramora's children, Vestus and Nefra, finally broke her spell on many of the houses. Even though their goals directly conflicted, the siblings had come together to do what they could to free their people, oddly enough with the help of Iliharian's new wife, Silaya.
Their success, however, wasn't celebrated by the other races. After facing many years of pain and torture from the Dark Elves, they were less than welcomed on the surface. While Nefra advocated repentance for their wickedness, her brother refused, not believing it was truly their fault for what Ashramora had done to them. He believed that they deserved every right to be an equal among the races. What ensued was a split of the factions, Vestus led his band against the ensuing races while Nefra had her followers set down their weapons and face their punishment.
The surface races were not kind. While most of the races found it to be none of their business, the largest of the races, the Elves, Dwarves and Humans, all of whom had suffered the most at the hands of the Dark Elves sought penance. Many of them found it fitting to return the pain they had inflicted back onto them, turning many of them into slaves, treating them, though more nicely than the Dark Elves had treated their slaves, with cruelty.
This continued for near to a thousand years before the races were facing the Plague that wiped out so many of the people in the world. The Dark Elves, being an oddly hardy race, lost very few even though the Plague had affected their ability to bear children just as it had other races. Because of this, many more Dark Elves survived than their capturers and thus the majority of the Dark Elves found themselves free of the Underdark and free of the enslavement for the first time in their lives.
The Dark Elves now strive to prove themselves as allies among the other races, though many do so through disdain and perhaps even hatred.