The Age of Man (10,000 - 3,000)

The Age of Man marks the explosion of the Human population, as their dynamic energy, creative drive and reproductive fertility ushers in a boom throughout the stable world. As More and more cities and towns begin to grow into massive civilizations, the non-human races are increasingly displaced, introducing tensions and exarcerbating frictions in strained alliances, especially where the elven and dwarven peoples are concerned. During this time, the six great Empires arose, and eventually come to claim dominion over almost 80% of all the lands of Aosha across the continents: Sval, Abessai, Tupanqi, Vayokar, Srijansu and Songchuan. With the richness of civilization, mastery of resources and relative stability of life as contrasted with the previous ages, the empires contest between themselves as principle aggitants, perpetually making alliances and vying for control over resources and lands, fostering colonies and trade routes throughout the world. and tensions rise. Such expansion eventually drives the dwarves deeper into their mountain citadels, ceding the land to the vast armies of the human empires.

The elves, proud stewards and sheperds of the world, increasingly argue among themselves about diplomatic concessions to lands and where the lines should be drawn regarding the unchecked human populations grasping for more and more lands. Some of the Seldarine, led by Corellon Larethian's own wife Aurashnee, are infuriated by the constant provocation and fruitless diplomacies and take action themselves, directing attacks upon nearby human settlements and cities, arguing that the advance of Humanity across the world is itself a declaration of hostility to elven kind. These Elven deities and their followers are swiftly, irrevocably banished from the Seldarine, and seek refuge in the only places left of the world's lands between humanity's land grabs and the dwarven holds of the mountains: the Underdark. In the aftermath of this betrayal both, internally to the pantheon and in the subsequent relations with the human kingdoms, a great schism is exposed among elvenkind. Eventually buckling beneath the weight of their own disagreements about how best to procede, ushering in the Retreat. Many among the elves, pessimistic about mankind's avarice and lack of apparent self-control with regard to resources and the lands their populations continue to fill, decide it is best to leave them to their own devices, and withdraw to Evermeet, the Eternal Isle. Those that disagree, whether on principle, or notwithstanding that mistrust of humanity's natures but unwilling to give up their connection to the world at large, splinter and fashion their own settlements throughout Aosha.

The Retreat, in the elven tongue, loses something fundamental in translation. To the common tongue, the Retreat is conceived of as a geographical relationship, a withdrawing from the lands they once inhabited to no longer contest mankind's expansion. In the elven tongue, there is a more poignant and meaningful nuace, as of self-chosen loss, like giving something precious away. It is a withdrawal not from the land, but from the sacred responsibility they'd claimed in nurturing the world and guiding its regrowth in the wake of the devastations visited upon it in the preceding ages. The Retreat, for many elves, is a complicated matter of great racial hurt and bitterness that the world they nursed back to health, they have now been forced to leave in the less capable hands of short lived, short sighted Man and it's ultimately self-destructive greed.