High elves teach a group of one hundred Arathor humans magic

Full History

When the Amani threatened to overwhelm Quel'Thalas, the high elves could not protect their kingdom by pride alone. Their magic had made the forests defensible, but the trolls had gathered strength enough to press through decades of hatred. The elves needed an army. To obtain one, they offered a young human kingdom something precious: instruction in arcane magic.

Human tribes had begun to unite under Arathor. They were already warriors, hunters, and builders of towns, but the secret disciplines of elven spellcraft were another matter. The decision to instruct one hundred human students was not made because elves suddenly wished to share their deepest knowledge. It was made because defeat seemed worse than the risk of teaching it.

The selected humans learned in preparation for a common campaign. Those lessons changed the possibilities of their people. A human warrior might live and die without ever seeing magic used except by an enemy; now a limited number of human spellcasters could stand on the same field as the elven masters. The later growth of human magical institutions owed part of its beginning to this emergency bargain.

The students were not an army by themselves. Their importance lay in the combination of trained magic with troops who could hold ground and fight beside them. The alliance was a military and political act as much as an exchange of knowledge. Each side risked something it would have preferred to keep safe.

The united forces confronted the Amani and achieved the victory that shattered the forest trolls' bid to recover Quel'Thalas. Human magic helped turn the tide. The old kingdom of Arathor gained a new standing among its neighbors, while the elves saved the land they had made their refuge. For the trolls, the same event marked another catastrophic loss of territory and lives.

The story survives in the original Warcraft historical books found throughout Azeroth. It is not a reason to invent the personal names, private conversations, or individual fates of all hundred students. The preserved sources establish the scale and consequence of the teaching, not a complete roster of pupils.

The bargain outlasted its makers. Humanity's magical tradition would eventually become a force in wars that neither the elves nor the Amani of the Troll Wars could have foreseen. But the reason that tradition began should not be forgotten: two threatened peoples joined against a third whose own claim to the land was ancient. The One Hundred stand at the meeting of those histories, where the defense of one kingdom became the reshaping of another civilization.