Helkah
"Don't go where you can't see the road. Fear Gorta lurks in the woods!
When the elves arrived in the material plane, completing their exodus from the Light, they first found humanity. Though they fought the humans, peace between the two peoples was eventually possible, even if it came in the form of Exodite domination. Such was not the case with what the elves discovered in the wild and untamed woods of Khely, with the fae of the wildlands.
So began Helkah, named for the Khelish Gnome word for "Ending" and "Finality". The Exodites scoured the lands for traces of fae creatures, and sent word to all corners of the land that they would pay bounties for dead fae and information as to where they could be found. Though the guardians of the forests had long been capable of warding off less dedicated defilers of the woods, they were wholly unprepared for the fury of the entire Exodite state. Mysterious and magical though the elder trees and greater fae may have been, one by one they fell.
"We live in the end."
Helkah never ended. To this day, the elves slay all fae they find and though most of the slaughter occurred in the first years, its consequences reverberate to this day. Fear Gortach, a monster spawned from Helkah, still haunts the Khelish lands and has become a common boogeyman in children's stories even as the Exodites still seek to hunt the last of them down.
Cultural Reception
"The bitter truth is we only lived for so long as we weren't worth killing."
Helkah was the defining event of the gnomish diaspora. To them it represents their casting out of their ancestral way of life, the ripping away of their protectors and gods. The gnomes who remain have been forced to abandon the natural world and join civilization which they had shunned for so long.
The humans of Khely, by and large, choose not to remember Helkah. Few would claim to hate gnomes or the fae of the forests, and few today have seen one. The wildspeakers of old Khely are a quaint legend, and nobody really dwells on why this is. The dark legacies of Helkah such as the Fear Gortach have found their way into Khelish folk legend, but as far as anyone is concerned, they either always were there, or simply appeared.
This is so sad. :( It's mad it's still going on to this day.