Dark Elves

The Dark Elves name themselves the druchii, and they are the ruin of everything their high-born kin might have been. Once they were the elves of Nagarythe, the proud first subjects of the first Phoenix King; now they are a race remade by exile, defeat, and hatred into something cold and glittering and cruel. They keep the beauty of elvenkind and its keen, quick genius, but every gift has been turned to a darker edge: grace bent to murder, brilliance to torment, ambition to a thirst for dominion that no throne could ever satisfy. To be druchii is to believe that the world was stolen from you, and to intend, with every patient and sadistic fibre, to take it back.

Their kingdom is Naggaroth, the Land of Chill, a bleak and freezing continent of black mountains and frozen wastes across the sea from the world of men. There, ringed by six dread cities and crowned by the black fortress of Naggarond, the druchii endure a land that hates them, and they have grown as hard and pitiless as the ice. They raise nothing they can steal and forge nothing they can wring from a slave, for theirs is an economy of plunder: each year their black arks sail forth to burn coastlines and drag whole populations back in chains, feeding the insatiable altars of their gods and the bottomless cruelty of their nobles.

The Witch King's Cause

All Naggaroth bends to the will of one deathless figure: Malekith, the Witch King, son of the first Phoenix King and, in his own certain judgement, the rightful ruler of all elvenkind. When the throne of Ulthuan was denied him and the sacred flame of Asuryan burned rather than blessed him, his rage became the founding purpose of a whole people. For thousands of years he has schemed to conquer Ulthuan, cast down the kings of his cousins whom he names usurpers, and rule the reunited elven race from the throne he believes his by blood. Every raid, every muster, every intrigue in the black cities serves that single, unquenchable ambition, and the druchii pursue it with the fervour of those who have made their king's grievance their own religion.

Faith and Blood

The druchii worship the Cytharai, the gods of the underworld and shadow, and above them all Khaine, the Lord of Murder. His is a faith of blood, and its high priestess is Morathi, the Witch King's mother, whose Cult of Khaine binds Naggaroth in webs of terror and desire. Upon the Death Night the Witch Elves spill through the cities with poisoned blades, and slaves by the thousand are bled upon the altars and the great Cauldrons of Blood. Cruelty is not a vice among the druchii but a sacrament, and pain (given, endured, and offered up) is the coin of their dark devotion.

The Way of War

The druchii make war as they make everything: with speed, elegance, and boundless malice. They strike from the sea without warning, black sails on the horizon and a city aflame by dawn, prizing captives over corpses and terror over honest battle. Their armies are swift and murderous: ranks of spearmen and repeater crossbows, frenzied Witch Elves, cold-blooded Executioners, knights mounted on savage cold ones, and monstrous war-hydras dragged snarling to the field. They do not fight to hold ground but to break and to take, and where their raiders have passed they leave only ash, empty villages, and the long weeping columns of the newly enslaved.