Excerpted and condensed from: The Combined Human/Elvwist History - The Big Sleep, The Turmoils, and The Change, as Recorded by the Elvwist Historian, Nightingale
After the Dome went up, the Elvwists, being of a calm nature, helped the Humans through the tumultuous era after the Big Sleep - as it became known - assisting them with their crops and animals and with the building of their other villages.
They co-existed peacefully for around twenty years, the Humans setting up several more villages. Then, a faction - some who had originally blamed the Elvwists for the Dome - agitated against them, accusing them of having an ulterior agenda involving the Humans. They seized weapons from a central storage building and sought to destroy the Elvwists.
They succeeded in murdering nearly everyone in one village before the unsuspecting Elvwists had a chance to activate their force shields. Even though the Elvwists could have crushed the Humans, they chose not to retaliate. Instead, they retreated into their villages behind their force shields, isolating themselves for their own safety.
Unfortunately, the budding Human society became fractured as the Humans fought amongst themselves, eventually degenerating into savagery. This period, later known as the Turmoils, lasted a thousand years.
Over the centuries, the Elvwists, sometimes perceived as demons, sometimes as gods or angels, helped the Humans when they could safely do so, and preserved all the Human records and artifacts they could find, although some were inevitably lost. If not for the Elvwists, it is questionable if the Humans would have survived at all or if they had, would have any history of where they came from.
These conditions persisted until after the period called the Change began. This was when Humans - and the Cats and Dogs that had traveled to Boucher’s World with them and who also became sentient during this time - began being born with extra-sensory abilities, or “esas” as they ultimately came to call them, the same as the Elvwists.
The Elvwists learned from the Cats, who Changed first and went to them for safety, that some of the Humans were banishing, sometimes even killing, their own children for being different or because they feared them as either witches or demons, or thought they were possessed.
The Elvwists rescued as many children as they could, teaching them how to control and use their abilities. They also set about trying to educate the parents on what was happening to them, and over the next thousand years helped the Humans pull themselves back up out of barbarism.