Editing World of Warcraft (section)

====Night Elves====
Purple-skinned [[Elf|elves]]. Their ancestors were [[Troll]]s, who discovered a massive source of magic - the Well of Eternity - and lived near it so long that it turned them into the first Elves. The nobility became hedonistic assholes who suckled the arcane magic, while the peasant classes tapped into the magic of nature and the priesthood that worships the moon goddess Elune discovered Light magic. Their [[Morathi|queen, Azshara, became drunk on power and hubris]] and hatched a plan to tap the Well of Eternity for enough mojo to wipe out the other races. Drawing all that power drew the attention of the Burning Legion, who started sweet talking Azshara into letting them in to do the job for her. Azshara accepted, and she would become infatuated with the Legion leadership, deluding herself that she was betrothed to Sargeras.

The rest of the Night Elves, who were still sane and also seeing that they weren't on demons' "do not kill" list, united with the other races and started a civil war, which would later be known as the War of the Ancients. The leaders of the sane side were: a young elf named Malfurion Stormrage, a student of the demigod Cenarius and the first Druid; Tyrande Whisperwind, the high priestess of Elune, and Malfurion's lover; and Illidan Stormrage, Malfurion's brother and a magic-addicted douchebag mage.  Despite fighting for years against endless hordes of daemons, the Azerothian races realized they would need to invade the old Night Elf capital and destroy the Well of Eternity to beat back the daemons permanently. In this time, Illidan would defect to the nobility's side; originally it was due to his magic addiction/obsession and envy of his brother, then [[retcon|he was trying to bring down the Legion from the inside as a double-agent without telling anyone, then the latest retcon merged the two; he went to join the Legion for real out of envy and addiction but had a last-minute change of heart and worked to bring them down]].  In every version Illidan also wanted to close to the Well of Eternity to bottle some of its waters to keep for himself.  Eventually the Azerothian side reached the well, and a climactic fight between Malfurion and Azshara ended with the spellworks summoning in the demons to implode and cause a chain reaction which was going to destroy the Well.  The Azerothian forces fled for as long and as hard as they could before the Well exploded, ripping the world into four continents and leaving a gaping hole in the planet in the middle.

As for the nobility, during this time they'd been slowly whittled down by the war, but were relatively untouched enough that they evenly divided into three general groups. The first group had realized that Azshara was well and truly fucking everybody with her vanity and hubris, and defected to the other side; after the war, their views on aristocracy and the commons - plus their addiction to arcane magic - would force them to split with the surviving elves again, and they sailed East and would become the ancestors of the High Elves. The second group would be founded by Xavius, Azshara's chief mage who was killed and resurrected by the Legion as a demonic Satyr, and he would seduce Azshara's other minions into Legion service exclusively and corrupt them into other Satyrs. The third group was lead by Azshara, who survived her duel with Malfurion, but refused to abandon her palace as it survived the Well collapsing and started to fall into the new ocean. Azshara got a bit of divine help again, but from an old god who refused to see her potential go to waste, so kept her and her followers alive as the Naga.

After the war, the Azerothian side split into separate peoples again, and the Night Elves opposing the Legion would form their own society in the forests of Kalimdor. Illidan - who survived and managed to get back into his brother's good will but not off the shit list - took three of the vials from the Well of Eternity and dumped them into a lake to try to remake the Well.  While having the Well in the first place is what drew the demons, Illidan said they would need arcane magic again should the demons come back (and while he did kind of have a point, everybody could see that the bigger factor in his decisionmaking was that he was a junkie trying to get his fix, which was even clearer when he killed some of the people who tried to stop him). For being an idiot, a murderer and a traitor, they put Illidan in jail for an Eternal Sentence.  Not letting a good catastrophe go to waste, the Night Elves and the dragons planted a tree over the new well as a means of protection, making them immortal again so long as the tree stood. In the new society, the male Night Elves became druids who would go into hibernation to protect the spiritual side of the world called the Emerald Dream (more accurately, they did this when needed and most recently was hundreds of years ago, not millennia), while female Night Elves became rangers and clerics who stayed behind to guard the world (meaning staying in their forest doing nothing and then attacking humanity for trying to save the world purely because they believed only Night Elves can do that among other nonsensical reasons). Because this state of affairs wasn't friendly to MMO character creation, it was eventually retconned that gender roles weren't so strict or segregated, and only all the male Druids went to hibernate, while everybody else stayed awake to watch over their ass.

The first time they appeared in WarCraft III, they were a more hardcore version of Amazon/Celtic [[Wood Elves]], to the point that Grom Hellscream was delighted in fighting them due to their savagery and determination (and got something of a WhyBoner watching them kill his men). Yes. [[AWESOME|The Night Elves used to be hardcore, savage, moon-worshipping, druidic elves with bitchin leather, cool weapons, sweet powers, and would royally obliterate your ass with nature's wrath if you so much as sneezed at a tree in their home that is Ashenvale Forest]]. 

As of Battle for Azeroth's War of Thorns, the Night Elves' tree house burned down by the superweapons of an undead edgelord and humanity welcomed them into their homes.  Then many elves went to retake their lands and Darkshore along with their Gilnean allies while complaining about Stormwind doing nothing to help them (rather purposely ignoring the fact that they were well busy fighting the Horde on other battlefronts).  They still manage to have a presence in other battlefields, though.

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