The Tragedy of Ara'lon was a series of events that led to the fall of the promising fey Princess Ara'lon, how she was touched by the Bhiast, and became the Dark Mother.

Events

Ara'lon was a Mūyn'ell of great renown. She was beautiful beyond measure, capable with magic, and already endowed with numerous boons that made her supernatural. She was also Princess, considered to be promoted to Queen by the Seelie Court. She had many ardent followers and was widely hailed as a perfect fey.

But with time, she started to do too much too fast. She exaggerated her powers, sought to do a trick where none was necessary. Once, she was attracted by a great lord, and played him trick after trick to tease him and get his attention. But he reacted with anger, and she was banned from his court; and so her fall began. She started doing even more trickery, stalking out Fey Crossings and persuading visiting mortals through seduction and list, enslaving them and making them suffer for their foolishness. Many told her to stop, that she was going too far, but she did not listen. Emissaries of the Unseelie Court started reaching out to her then, feeding the beast.

After a few decades, her great house-tree that she had neglected lay dead and was but a husk of its former self, and inhabited by hundreds of flayed and bleeding mortals. She was again attracted to a fey, a faeling of some prestige, but when she tried to court her and bring her closer, she was pitifully rejected and laughed at. Ara'lon was no longer the great and promising Princess she had been, but a decrepit and fiend-touched hermit living alone in a dead tree.

Bestye

When she locked herself in, and tried to remove her great pain by inflicting it upon others, she was contacted by an Unseelie fey, and was offered to become a Princess and Queen in a short time. But Ara'lon did not wish to turn to darkness, and refused with all her might. She was touched by fiends already: her eyes had turned to a black void, and purple scars shone from beneath her skin, but her soul was still Seelie. A battle ensued, and more Unseelie retinue came. Ara'lon called for help from her former friends, and from all the Seelie fey, but her words were ignored and she was abandoned to face her fate. Desperate, she fled her tree and forest, running as far as she could go.

Eventually, she came into a secluded grove, one surrounded by thick and tangled thorns but inhabited by lively and very wild beasts. Arynoch Bestye, the Keeper of the bestial refuge, welcomed her and offered her a safe haven from the world that hated her. She embraced this safety she had been given, and happily lived with the Keeper and his many animal followers. During this time, she grew more and more touched by the Bhiast, the spell of the wilderness and the beast; and she grew more savage, gained sharper teeth and light fur on her legs.

She loved Arynoch, so much so that she forfeited her ancestry that had forgotten her already, and instead fully embraced the wild. She turned into a Bestye herself, and mated with her protector.

Dark Mother

She gave birth six times, and each time there came twins, a male and a female. They had dark skin, an odd mix between brown and purple of a dark shade, as well as very long ears, fierce sharp teeth, and fur on the extremities. These were the first Elle'Nūr, the night elves. They were fierce and savage, and attacked their own mother, biting into her tender skin and drawing blood. This is how the Dark Mother fed them, by feeding them with her own blood.

Soon, the beasts grew of age, and copulated among themselves, producing more pairs of fierce children. They eventually strode out into the world, abandoning their wounded Mother in the grove and searching through the lightless tunnels of the Feydark for a new home. They could not stand under the sun of the surface that cursed the horrors they were. The Dark Mother, meanwhile, never fully healed: she remained riddled with small punctures bleeding a dark red blood, weeping in her forgotten grove. Arynoch and his beasts took on the role of protectors, keeping anyone from entering the grove and disturbing the Mother's eternal weeping.