Wild Elves scattered throughout the sylvan woods never had a reason to ban together until Orcs landed on the shores of Quantrell, in the year 1,492.  The name Quantrell means "Silver Cloud".  They called their world that because wherever you went silver lined the streams and lay just below the grass.  Orcs had visited before and they were very interested in the silver in the streams.  At first they just wanted a little and that wasn't a problem.  Soon they came in larger numbers and always wanted more and more silver and food and women and slaves.  It became unbearable so the wild elves stopped complying.

That was when it got violent.

The Orcs started killing.  First those that got in their way or didn't want to work, then indiscriminately.  Before long many Wild Elf tribes had vanished - wiped out.  Others were forced to flee from ancestral homes and try to live in Centaur territory.  Centaurs have always been territorial.  Without regard for the Wild Elf situation, Centaurs aggressively ran out all trespassers.  Orc invaders, Elven refugees, and Centaur hunters clashed constantly throughout the sylvan wood.  Other sylvan races became involved and soon the whole of the island was in chaos.  Things changed forever when flights of giant eagles came down from the mountains and attacked the invading orcs.  Picking the orcs up and tossing their flailing bodies into the sea as easily as a hawk snatches a field mouse and takes it to her nest.  The eagles, who were (and are) intelligent, called on the elves and the centaurs to fight the orcs - they did.  The orc invaders were repelled.

From 1,492 on, the orcs would try to invade again and again but would always be driven off by the sylvan defenders.  Eventually the orcs gave up and the wars ended in 1,867 O.R.  Centaurs went back to the woods, eagles went back to the mountains, but the elves stayed on the plains.  They had become more comfortable in the fortresses they built than they were in the trees of their ancestors.  Their wild nature had given way to a "higher" sense of being.  Salatian High Elves were born.  They started recording their own history shortly thereafter.