The Massacre at Inaendlen and the events surrounding it was one of the bloodiest drow raids on Silur, and one of the most catastrophic debacles of the Silurite Army.

As in many Silurite villages at the time, Inaendlen's population had a large number of children: eight under the age of 20, and many other elves who were less than a century old. This was because children lived in the countryside before moving into cities when they were older. All eight of the children died.

Timeline

• 16.4, 6:00. Silurite caver scouts spot a large drow raiding force atop lizards moving into an upper cave network with numerous tunnels leading to the surface. Caver platoon center sends warning to the surface.
• 16.4, 9:30. The White Oak Rangers' 3rd Company, garrisoned nearby, marches into the region where the drow are likely to exit.
• 16.4, 14:00. The drow set up camp: one foot-unit secures the lizards, while the rest walks up through the tunnels.
• 16.4, 18:00. Raiding party surfaces from unguarded tunnel into Tunneneiam Jungle. March through the night.
• 17.4, 6:30. The drow find an empty two-story hunter's cabin and make camp in it, destroying paintings and small statuettes.
• 17.4, 16:00. Rangers find the tunnel where the drow exited, set a squad to fortify a position on the adjacent hillock and begin following their tracks, relying mostly on wolves and guesses because of the dense jungle.
• 17.4, 18:30. Drow leave the hunting cabin.
• 18.4, 3:30. Drow arrive at the village of Inaendlen. Commit massacre.
• 18.4, 4:30. Drow depart Inaendlen, backtracking their steps initially to confuse pursuers.
• 18.4, 7:30. Militia from Invale arrive at Inaendlen.
• 18.4, 8:00. At daybreak, drow stop on the mossy shore of a stream. Treat their one wounded and rest under the shade of broad leaves for the day.
• 18.4, 10:15. Rangers discover the hunting cabin where the drow spent the previous day.
• 18.4, 10:30. Ranger hawks and lookouts spot smoke on the horizon; the entire company gathers to march towards the village.
• 18.4, 16:30. Rangers reach Inaendlen. 1st Platoon remains to protect the village until reinforcements from Invendien arrives, while the 2nd Platoon goes after the raiders with the mission to keep track of them.
• 18.4, 18:15. A Ranger wolf spots a drow sentry and rushes towards him, but is stabbed as it leaps. A second wolf, rushing to its aid, is shot before it can spot its aggressors. The Rangers realize that, in their exhausted state, they cannot go forward and attack the rested drow in the night; they decide to make camp and then follow the raiders, either catching up to them during the day or keeping sight of them until the rest of the company catches up.
• 18.4, 18:45. The drow depart their encampent. The priestess leaves behind a large, illusory web spanning between two desiccated trees with the leering face of Lolth in its center.
• 19.4, 7:00. The drow, atypically, return to the same tunnel from which they emerged. Use grenades and an attack by storm to kill the unaware Ranger force guarding it, then enter. The priestess leaves another sign of Lolth in the stone above the entrance. The group then makes camp again some distance into the tunnel, both to rest and in the hope of perhaps ambushing a precipitated pursuit (they know their pursuers do not have overwhelming force, because they did not attack a day earlier).
• 19.4, 10:00. 6th Platoon, Seventeenth Reserve Regiment from the city of Invendlen arrives on scene, the first of four platoons which were called up to secure the village and its surroundings, and two dozen marked tunnel openings. Ranger 1st Platoon sets off after 2nd Platoon, hoping to catch up to it and finish off the drow.
• 19.4, 12:30. Two cavers, attempting to scout out the drow guarding the lizards, are blown up by a pre-placed mine. Knowing their cover is blown, and fearing being hunted down by the drow, the rest of the caver unit packs up and leaves, assuming that the drow will be caught by the large caver forces currently deployed under Bao-Mou and under the Archaen, but fail to communicate back to the surface before doing so. Due to moving, they fail to answer any communications thereafter.
• 19.4, 16:30. 2nd Platoon arrives at the tunnel exit, finding the charred-out remains of the Ranger outpost they'd left behind. They set up a perimeter, and communicate back with company headquarters, asking for the rest of the rangers to catch up, and asking Itrurion to alert the cavers that the raiders would be attempting to leave soon, and asking whether a pincer maneuver underground - with the Rangers pursuing, and the cavers blocking- was a possibility. However, Itrurion's exhausted soldiers will not manage to catch up that night, fearing potential ambushes, and there is no response from the cavers.
• 19.4, 19:45. 1st Platoon makes camp two hours away from 2nd Platoon's location, fearing the drow - whose location is now completely unknown - might be ambushing them, or have fled somewhere else. They make a guarded camp, and send scouts to make sure the hunting cabin is empty.
• 19.4, 18:00. The 2nd Platoon's 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th Squads enter the tunnel, hoping to catch up with the exhausted drow and that the supposedly alerted cavers can pinch them from the other side, knowing that pursuit will be near-impossible if the drow get to their mounts.
• 19.4, 19:30. The pursuing force of Rangers is ambushed; the commanding officer is shot immediately, while the mage is incapacitated by the priestess, then shot. Rounds from a heavy machine gun and explosive knock out most of the Ranger column, and a tense firefight ensues; the Rangers can see little and have no experience in tunnel fighting and are roundly defeated. Parts of the rear, after being pummeled by the priestess's lightning and auditory stun spells, manage to retreat; the rest is wiped out up to two prisoners, whom the drow take with them.
• 19.4, 21:30. The drow force mount their lizards and move out, eventually reaching Zann'Elth without facing any more resistance and with one prisoner.

The Intervention of 3rd White Oak Ranger Company

The 3rd Company, White Oak Ranger Regiment, was assigned to the 2nd Corps and had the mission of protecting central Silur - in recent times, this task was exclusively to pursue and ideally preempt drow raiding forces from Zann'Elth, an extremely elusive foe which popped up rarely, but which was apprehended even more rarely. So far, over six decades of deployment, the company had once come into contact with drow, but never killed an enemy in action.

Early on the 16th of Makling, news came to corps headquarters by gem relay from a caver unit deployed in the upper tunnels below the company's assigned region that a drow force had been spotted, and that it would likely emerge one to two days away from them. Major Itrurion, a front-line veteran native to the region, was determined to catch the drow before they did any harm this time. He immediately formed up his troops - 100 Rangers, experienced soldiers wielding semi-automatic or automatic rifles all, the pride of the army - and marched them out. In densely wooded areas, which they would navigate throughout these events, the Rangers marched in two single-file columns, one for each platoon, with a few scouts thrown in front and to the sides. The war-wolves, all tied to the two mages, marched in three groups: one between the columns, and two groups spread out alongside and in front of the scouts. Hawks were likewise deployed above, but due to the dense foliage their use was limited.

The Rangers finally uncovered the tunnel where the drow had exited after two days of arduous marching, mostly by a process of elimination. The cavers had indicated a general area; investigation by small units thrown ahead of the main force, and where possible by hawks, of all the known tunnels in the region finally yielded results. After prodding the tunnel's surroundings and going a short distance into it, Itrurion ordered five men from 2nd Platoon's 3rd Company to set up a fortified position - with the mages' help to erect camouflaged natural walls - on a hillock next to the tunnel, on the off chance that the drow would attempt to reuse it when returning back down. He did not set more men to defending the tunnel, because he expected to catch the drow on the surface, and because drow raiders almost never used the same tunnels to go back down.

They tracked the drow through the night, hoping to prevent the worst. Again they used spread-out searching tactics to find traces of the drow; the wolves' noses proved invaluable. Towards the early afternoon, one group of soldiers - following a hawk's spotting - checked out a nobles' hunting cabin, and found it vandalized; the drow had rested here, probably no earlier than the previous day. But almost simultaneously, other hawks spotted columns of smoke rising from the horizon. The company immediately began marching towards the smoke, gathering up its spread-out soldiers as it went to finally arrive at Inaendlen in good order, in the late afternoon of the day of the massacre.

Most of the survivors had fled along a footpath to the village of Invale, whose small militia - composed out of the guards of House Imm's Hunt Master - had responded immediately, finding a devastated village. The Rangers quickly secured the area and began piecing together the scene: the drow had attacked from the south, throwing fire grenades which had burnt down several huts - including the two-hut complex of the druid, built onto a great oak - and utilized a machine gun position on a small hill to cover their advance and mow down any villagers that entered its sights. Many houses were pockmarked by large holes, and smaller holes left by the drow's hand-held weapons. The two roads leading out of the village were strewn with a few face-down corpses of elves who had tried to flee. But the most grisly scene was towards the northern end of the village: there, the villagers had been holding a celebration. The druid had died trying to defend them, while the machine-gun and more grenades had torn apart the gentle marble pergolas and fountains, leaving the beautiful place a charred, stinking mess. When Major Itrurion saw the body of a young girl, who had clearly been held up against the statue of a nymph and then cut open from chest to neck such that she now rested with her golden hair bathing in the bloodied water, he fell to his knees.

He ordered the 2nd Platoon, despite its exhaustion, to pursue the drow and stick to them as well as they could. He would follow the next day, with the recuperated forces of 1st Platoon, to wipe out the fleeing drow, as soon as reinforcements from the city of Invendien arrived to secure the area, protecting the nearby villages. So the Rangers set off again, on forced march, watching the backs of their comrades in front of them from fear of stumbling and falling over from exhaustion. As the sun began setting, one of the wolves running ahead of the column - his eyes linked to the platoon's mage by magic - spotted a drow sentry, growled, and launched itself at him. But the drow ducked and cut the wolf down. A second wolf nearby was shot before the mage could see anything; but the entire platoon heard the gunshot ringing out through the forest, not that far away.

Knowing their weak state and the drow's fresh one, and that the drow were not a small force given what they had done to the village, the platoon leader - Captain Inanella, a veteran high elf who had served in various elite units including the cavers - decided to stop for the night. Fighting the drow in a defensive position at night was not a good idea; they would rest, and continue pursuing in the morning. They did so, and easily found the drow campsite; they had stayed under dense trees alongside a gently flowing river. There were bloodied bandages near a tree; at least one of them was wounded. But what most of the tired, scared soldiers saw was a horrid effigy, a dense silver web that seemed to have been created by drawing out the life force of the two trees it was suspended from, with a large spider with a leering elf face in its center. The mage waved away the spell, but the strange wooden structure it left behind, which broadly echoed the web and the face's shape, was even more eerie.

The platoon continued their pursuit, and - given the drow's heading - guessed early on that they were headed back to the tunnel they had come out of. In the afternoon, the elves - once again exhausted by a long forced march, carrying their heavy packs and weapons - reached the tunnel, to the sight of five of their companions dead and a face of Lolth carved in rock above the gaping darkness of the tunnel. The elves set up a perimeter and Captain Inanella talked to the major, trying to gain information. How far away was 1st Platoon? Too far, the reinforcements had taken time to come and they would not reach them before nightfall. Could the cavers be informed that the drow had reentered the tunnels, and that a pinching maneuver between them and the Rangers should be attempted? Yes, replied the major, though he did not receive any response from the cavers.

Knowing that the drow were tired, that they were wounded, and that they would likely get away, Inanella made the fateful decision to go after them. The cavers had to be down there, near the lizards, and the drow would be on their back foot - and her underground experience would be enough, or at least it would inspire confidence among her own soldiers. She also knew the drow could not have overwhelming forces, because they had not attacked her platoon the previous night when they knew the Rangers were nearby. She left one squad up top to guard the entrance and guide the reinforcements in once they arrived, and set off into the darkness, straight past the leering face of Lolth.

The Rangers made careful progress, having trouble navigating the tunnel - though they did have darkvision, they saw approximate shapes in grey, much worse than the crisp image a drow would see. To the would-be pursuers' surprise, the drow had anticipated their pursuit, and prepared an ambush. Captain Inanella was suddenly hit by several shots fired from the darkness ahead; the mage was incapacitated magically, then similarly shot down. A large-caliber machine gun opened fire, sending rays of fire that hammered into the column; fragmentation and fire grenades exploded in their midst; and smaller weapons also opened fire. Bullets ricocheted off the rocks everywhere, small fragments crumbled down the walls. Rays of red lightning shot out from somewhere above at the units in the rear, then there was an impossibly loud thunderclab which caused the elves' ears to ring and stunned the few defenders who had attempted to put up a resistance. Those who could, fled; those who survived, having thrown themselves between large boulders in the opening moments, were shot down when they tried raising their heads over their cover to fire at their unseen, deadly precise enemy.

In the dark events of the Inaendlen Massacre, 56 civilians (19 of them under 80 years of age), two cavers, and 32 Rangers lost their lives. Not a single drow was killed or captured to account for these vile deeds. All but two of the Rangers lost in the tunnel ambush were confirmed killed in action, while the fate awaiting the prisoners was undoubtedly worse than death. When Major Itrurion finally reached the tunnel, he had it collapsed and walled shut, and a shrine was set up on the hillock for the dead Rangers and cavers.

The Massacre was a major factor in military reforms which improved channels of communication, saw soldiers deployed at home be finally given out modern weapons, and which saw a major upscale in the deployment of surface and underground troops to counter drow raids.