Timeline: Late in first era, during the early days of the elf-orc war. About 1400 years before Luvirini's Journey

Some people always seem curious about the "Elven warmage dance" or "shift dance" as it is commonly known among the mages nowadays.

It was indeed my mother who invented it in the early days of the war in a desperate situation. She later told me the story about it.

It happened during one of the first years of the war, after the orcs had unhealed their armies of goblins, bugbears and other fast breeding races, but before we elves got our thrall armies together. So the battlefields saw fights of few dozen or hundreds of true orcs leading and giving the mage support to armies of thousands or tends of thousands of lesser facing groups of dozens or hundreds of of true elves bolstered by things like few dozen summoned elements and demons.

This was bit after the very early days and the big early losses, during the desperate fighting to delay the orcs long enough to get the corresponding huge armies trained.

The battle was slightly larger than average with about five thousand goblinoids led by about hundred orcs against a force of ten war-chanters, thirty blade masters, six portal mages, including my mother, fifteen rangers and ten other specialists trying to delay the enemies long enough for the high command to gather a larger force and teleport it to enemy rear.

The standard method for defense at that time was to divide into battle groups with about two war-chanters and six blade masters and few rangers. The war-chanters would confuse the enemies with their illusions and sound bursts and protect the blade masters who would then run straight into the confused enemy formations and cause major havoc before falling back again. The rangers would try to suppress enemy leaders and mages, forcing them to concentrate on defensive measures instead of doing proactive things.

The rest of the rangers would watch the flanks and similar tasks. The other specialists would handle battlefield evacuation of the wounded, their healing, communication between the groups and to high command and other support tasks.

My mother and the other portal mages mostly summoned demons and compelled them to attack the orcs, as the orcs were more than capable of shielding their forces from direct elemental damage. The demons were sent to fight in the gaps between the front line battle groups to make it harder for the enemies to flank the war-chanters' magic.

The battle was going as planned, with the elven forces falling back slowly and with few casualties when there was suddenly a report by a ranger that one of the enemy regiments of about thousand goblinoids was spotted on far left and could soon either attack the elves in their flank or could bypass them and attack the nearby thrall town inhabited mostly of humans, that the elves were defending.

At that point my mother told the battle master the she would try to delay that regiment long enough for the elves to rearrange their defense. The battle master did not expect the delay to be long, with only one mage against a regiment, but any extra time would be helpful so he hastily started rearranging his battle line to pull lose combat groups to send towards the new threat.