[@The Fated Fallen] Ha, you think that's a tale? Compared to what the Elves go through every year, inviting a Dragon over for Christmas is as simple as baiting fish to bite a hook.

The most famed of Elves, of course, are the Silver Elves, and as everybody knows, their civilisation is rife with magic, and every year their displays of Christmas cheer are glorious to behold... for any non-Elven individual, that is. For an Elf, and in particular a Silver Elf, magic means all such Christmas decoration is but common fare by their standard, even boring to some. They struggle to find any joy in their decorations, as the average Silver Elf has "seen it all", so to speak, by around their fiftieth year, leading them all to try and develop wilder and wilder decorations with every passing Christmas, their civilisation for a good month every year turning into a wonderland of glorious festive colour, incredible displays of runecraft and power, sometimes verging on the dangerous as they attempt to outdo themselves again and again and again. Indeed, the royal households more than any other are often the most wondrous to behold, for even compared to other Silver Elves it is hard to find a display of magic and power that the monarch and their family have not discovered, rich and powerful as they are.

But of course, they are not the only Elves to discuss. The Wood Elves, evidently, often find their lands accosted by those who would cut down trees to decorate their homes, and being that they live in those trees, they tend to be hard-pressed to defend their territories around this time of year from all sorts, ranging from Humans to Dwarves to Gnomes, and even Drabarians at times, many of whom are great mages in their own right. Their Woadian counterparts, of course, help protect the trees from their Northward territories, but every year the available forested land gets less and less, even considering how their greatest mages are capable of regrowing lost trees to full size. Meanwhile, their cousins to the East of the Great Clans have even more work to do: many of their seasonal traditions are quite different to those that are generally considered "standard" for this time of year, and that's not considering that some of their number even celebrate both the old and new traditions at once, to the point that various points of both clash quite terribly with one another. Inter-familial warfare is rather common between the Great Clan Elves at Christmas time, any Christmas gifts that are given tend to be some form of dried foodstuff, and you would be hard-pressed to find any Clanself who experiences more than a modicum of joy in the festive season, high-strung as the season oft is for them.

And yet no other subspecies is quite so hard-pressed as the Dark Elves and those who live amongst them at this time of year. One wonders that they even have the goodwill to celebrate Christmas, for all their hedonic impulses and cruel actions by the standards of their untainted cousins, and yet somehow they all manage to pull themselves together and set up celebrations of "The Red Time" that are often surprisingly cordial. Deaths dealt to one another drop by at least 50% at this time of year, and for the most part, one might even mistake the Dark Elves as being briefly happy... but it is of course a façade, for they all know what comes next, be it at the very start of the season or the eve before the big day. You see, certain aspects of their celebrations are often somewhat sacrificial in nature, and of course when one sacrifices enough life in a short enough timespan, you tend to end up accidentally summoning... rather nasty creatures. Indeed, even if this weren't the case, they would still be put upon by none other than the being that cursed them to begin with, for it happens that Bal'thamon finds their celebrations pleasing to it, and inexplicably winds tendrils of its being into every Dark Elf's home in an effort to experience what they do.

Now, picture the size of such an extradimensional entity, however it might try and mostly fail to fold into three-dimensional space. Picture the effort it must go through even to manifest but tiny fragments of its being into our world, and then imagine how insatiable such a beast must be, and how angered it becomes when, on the day of Christmas itself, it is inevitably disappointed by its patron race's inability to feed it. Picture the impossible, unnatural force such a creature can exert to flick a Human-sized body across a room, or into an unnaturally-gaping maw as it were. Any Dark Elf would laugh to hear the Dwarven tradition of attempting to feed a dragon; they would respond "try exhausting your food supplies entirely and still failing to feed the thing that has invaded our world". Naturally, though their natural rate of attrition drops substantially beforehand, the eldritch monstrosity that attempts to ingratiate itself into their homes almost always takes the lives of thousands, even tens of thousands of Dark Elves every single year, and even once it is vanished from our dimension, the utter loss of food leads to mass famine over the next few months that of course lead the Dark Elves to become rather crabby, setting off their cycle of infighting all over again, and consequently to excession and hedonism once the available food is back to normal levels. And yet that all fails to smother the sheer existential dread that lurks in the background constantly, peaking as the Red Time approaches... no wonder, then, that Dark Elven civilisation is so heedless of the good of others, when they hardly have goodness enough to share amongst themselves. Do not pity the Dark Elves, for they damned their kind when first they summoned Bal'thamon... but have a thought for them, nevertheless, and be glad you are not amongst them at Christmastime.

And of course, a Merry Christmas to you all.