The moonless sky darkened the night more than usual as the crowd gathered atop the lonely hill. Thick black clouds blotted out the moon and held the air motionless. It was a bit hot for this time of year, and the crowd that gathered milled around with a tense buzz. At least a third of them held torches high in the air, as if trying to burn away the cloud cover. Orange light danced around the snarling crowd of about two hundred, distorting the faces of those gathered there on the hill. Marlene Thatcher, accounted as one of the most beautiful women in Loran, looked twisted. The light seemed to make her perfect little nose elongate and curve grotesquely. Her smile, which brought joy to men it was directed at in the daylight, became a wicked parody of what it was. The light elongated limbs and features, turning the mob into a legion of demons.
The mob used no words, but moved around the hill growling like a pack of wild dogs. This group needed no words. Every one of them knew why they were here. Many things can bring humans together. Celebrations, religious rites, weddings, feasts, the list can go on. But there is no purpose humans rally behind in a more horrific way than hatred born of fear. Their emotion held the air still and made the hilltop stifling.
"This way!" one of them shouted. Or maybe it was all of them, because they moved like a single creature. With an amoeboid flow, outlined by firelight, they moved north to the thick woods that marked the borders of the lands of the elves. They did not realize what they were really doing.
Five thousand years now the elves lived in these lands, nurturing and protecting the forest from demons and their wicked offspring. They never thought they would have to protect it from humans. They were the rightful possessors of Loran and the forest. The center of Loran was built by the elves, high in the giant redwoods with vine bridges and wooden platforms that supported impossibly large buildings a hundred feet above the ground. Less than five centuries ago, the first humans began to appear in and near the elven forest. They were almost all adventurers and Demonhunters. It was not long though before it was merchants and lumberjacks. They began to tear the forest apart looking for profit, which the forest yielded in the form of lumber, exotic plants and animals and elven slaves. They tore a path through the forest for miles around either side of the Araku river with axes and machines, capturing or killing elven clans who came out of the forest to protect it. For more than a century men and elves fought for the forest until Lir Dagon, ruler of the elves asked for an audience with Goran Wohk, ruler of Taiban. It was their work that finally stopped the bloodshed with a truce signed and honored three hundred years before the humans in this ragged band were even born.
What arrogance! thought the elves as the angry mob ambled to the borders. What insolence! Was this land not ours before you came with your machines and hacked the forest to peices? Was it not our ruler who worked out a truce despite the fact that entire elf clans were sold into slavery and the forest destroyed? The elves near Loran had been more than fair to the human trespassers, giving them trade goods and room to expand the city despite the "need" to clear the forest.