Focus: Rebuilding
Period: The Second Age
Event: The Dawn of the Fall of Ellith
The eta-lieve were scattered, surviving only in a few scattered groups, none more than a dozen. The emsai survived better, but their numbers were never great, and more than half of even this powerful race also perished in the cataclysm caused by the Fel-ulhi's destruction of Change Crystals. The great cities and monuments of the great nations of the world began to crumble and fall under the weight of wind, rain, and vine.
The Gods, lead by Sarra-lum the First God, began to discuss what should be done. The loss of the civilizations and of the products of those civilizations was a great loss, in the eyes of some, while others felt it was best that what was past stay past. Above all, there was a debate of if they should try to replace the lost race, or if the world should be left to destroy the traces of civilization until such time as a new race arises.
Ellith the Ninth, God of Chaos, knew his desire. New races should be brought up from the earth. The natural world changed while remaining the same; it oscillated, the change went nowhere. It was order masked by vibration; it was boring, if left to its natural devices. Ellith spoke his piece, after the other eight, and then the debate continued. Ellith realized that the elder gods would gladly argue on the topic until the next race arose, particularly Va-olam the Eighth and Yros the Fourth. Ellith slipped away from the debate, stating his boredom and requesting to be told if he was requested to speak. Ellith began his project...
He found his template: A race of octopi, fleshy beings with tentacles. They were already clever, for beasts, and could change their form and color at will. This particular race lived in puddles and pools, was a little over a foot in diameter, and peculiarly only had six notable tentacles, the other two having been reduced to feeding aids, transferring frogs and such it caught from the large tentacles to the mouth.
Ellith took these creatures, made them larger, made their muscles capable of supporting weight like the sturdy bones of many beasts, made their typical forms humanoid. He gave them legs, lungs, and a head-like structure with four of the tentacles, whiplike, barbed, and sticky. The other two tentacles were massively long, each as long as the creature stood high. Their mouths were still in their bellies, with the oral tentacles elongated a bit. This new creature stood shorter and stockier than the eta-lieves, stronger but slower and less durable than those tree-men. They were also unkind, selfish. Most of all, they were adaptable. They very nearly hated anything old, preferring what they themselves invented; aside from that, they retained some of the form-shifting and most of the color-changing abilities of the octopi. These new beings were christened Ellith-id, "The Desire of Ellith" in the tongue of the eta-lieves.
The spread, taking the old strongholds of the eta-lieve and largely destroying them, replacing them with new towns. They searched for slaves, finding them among the refugees of the First Age or weaker members of their own race; the slavemasters earned the name "Flayers" among their slaves for their flaying tentacles. The gods were not pleased. They strove to find the root, and did so. When the other eight gods discovered how Ellith had gone behind their back, they were furious and cast the Ninth out. And so there were the eight gods, and the one cast out.
((And for the record, I'm imagining that the gods have whatever gender they feel like at the time. I'm calling them all "him" for convenience more than anything.))