Dark Elves?

Sand Elves in my world have very dark gray skin. They live in the sunny dessert of Dawoda.
They have the typical pointy ears, but quite short. Their lose is fairly plat and theh doesn't have
very big eyes. These features have evolved to protect against sand.

Meet Sheolzaahr, the Dreaded Nimbus, and his harem.

In my writing dark elves vary in skin color. Those who haven’t been to sunlight are milky pale,
but they tan very dark with sunlight. Very tribal but can be just as diverse moral wise as
humans. Generally worship a chaotic spider goddess though and have giant spiders as
household pets/hunting pets.

Sundered Universe
I don't have elves, but I can make a similar comparison with the Arbiters and Xekrofex.
Arbiters are a race of sentient machines. They want to mechanize every terrain they see, and
all their planets are metal. Even the cores of these worlds were replaced with machines.
Although they don't want to mechanize every living thing, they will attack a planet and drive its
inhabitants away just so they can mechanize it.
Xekrofex are the more evil variants of the Arbiters. Not only do they want to mechanize terrain,
they want to mechanize living things too. As a result, they look more biological than the
Arbiters' very blocky and geometric shapes.
Both of these races frequently butt heads, and occasionally they'll "re-mechanize" worlds
they've stolen from each other. For example, if the Xekrofex steal a mechanized world from
the Arbiters, they'll replace all the Arbiter technology with Xekrofex technology.

The goroesi were created by the aelvar (ancestors of the modern high elves) during the 2nd
age, to serve as skilled craftsmen, artists and creators of magico-mechanical things. Sort of a
caste of specialists to handle the magic/delicate/artistic side (rather than the gross physical
things handled by the dwarven and goblin servant races). Never many in number, they formed
insular communities mostly in underground workshop cities.
After Moon's Fall destroyed the aelvar empire and the Second Sundering split the continent,
the goroesi vanished from Noefran history. They were thought to be mere legends or (if real),
extinct. Recently, a few of them popped up in odd places, although they couldn't tell why (since
they were taken from their homes at a very young age). Other groups have been encountered
near the World-Edge Mountains in Soefra, where some believe their ancestors were taken
after the Second Sundering. A group of them does exist in Noefra--they escaped Moon's Fall by
surrendering themselves to the Broken Concept of Causality and being ejected from space-
time until the last 100 years or so; their home is buried under the ruined landscape of Moon
Fall Vengeance.
Physically, the goroesi are shorter, a bit more "built" (and tend to show more musculature)
than other elves, but still have the grace inherent in the race. Cultures vary. The southern ones
worship a spider-devil and the Dancer in the Dark, and have a matriarchal culture. The
northern ones place great value on artistry, worship the Archon of Time, and are ruled by
seers.

Well the "dark elves" in my world are just regular elves, and it is going with the more
anime/manga version of "dark elves" -- aka just elves with dark skin.
My setting is a fantasy western, and so the elves are actually split into numerous (Only three
remaining) tribes, and are culturally like Native Americans. They worship nature spirits and
have a subtle grasp of wild magic, though nothing too crazy (besides shamans and spellborn).
They are not evil or sadistic or anything like that

The Dark Elves in the world of Vincere are Highborne refugees who fled their nation of
Rosakur through Amon Pass into the Blackwald, a dark forest in the human kingdom of Agria.
When the Blood God Ng’Gall shattered Auroris, one of the effects was the release of dark
energy from the Amon Mountains onto the Blackwald, corrupting every living thing there,
becoming the Twilight Forest. The Highborne who had taken refuge there were no exception,
and became the first Dark Elves.
The Dark Elves, of course, serve the Darkness, and employ many of the same tactics as their
former brethren, the Highborne, and their relatives the High Elves, only instead of performing
their magics with the holy power of the Light, they call upon the Darkness instead.
Their skin retains the Highborne’s iridescent white, only with a deep blue tint permeating their
skin. Dark Elves’ hair are usually darker shades, with the more white and golden shades being
quickly filtered out after their turn to the Darkness; additionally, you can sometimes see small
tendrils of dark energy moving inward towards the iris from the edges of a Dark Elf’s eye. Their
voices tend to be deeper, and have somewhat of an echo to them, resulting from reverberance
within their throats when their muscles tighten up.

The Shyaman tribe, the only group left of the once great Mensyniad Empire, used to be a set of
grey-skinned, pointy-eared elves with a tendency toward dark magic. They were incredinly
advanced in both magic and technology, their magitech second to none at the time.
But then a war happened, then a cibil war, then the humans they helped raise a few centuries
before, invaded their territories and killed all but a few hundred of them. The survivors
huddled together and tried to slowly rebuild their civikisation for a few decades, but then a
mad god called Nefest came and enslaved them. He tampered with their magic, and made it
stronger. The resulting change in appearance turned them dark shades of blue and purple.
Now they live in the dark forest, a place where their magic can be experimented with, and they
can learn to use more and more types of it, so one day, they could escape Nefest's hold.
Elves in Forbidden Colors self-organized themselves into a caste
system generations ago. No one is born into a particular caste, but
most parents encourage their children to spend their adolescent years
living as 'interns' among the other castes to expand their horizons and
find their own path. Whenever the elves have colonized a new world,
they consider it an essential to bring along members of every caste to
further their individual ways of life.
Wood elves have forsaken technology and taken up a low-technology
(but not an pure survivalist) lifestyle. They practice being 'one with
nature' and living off the land. They are masters of farming, animal
husbandry, and nature magic. They also provide food for the rest of
elven society. When elves decide to colonize a world that needs
terraforming, the wood elf caste spearheads the effort to tame the
land, seas, and air on the side of magic so it can be made
agriculturally viable. A small percentage of wood elf caste take their
nature living to an extreme and go hardcore survivalist, becoming
hermits or living in pairs or groups of no greater than three to five
individuals. These "wild elves" may forsake all other contact,
disappearing into the wilderness (planetside or deep space) for
decades or centuries at a time, almost forgetting how to speak or
interact with other people.
High elves take to a modern existence driven by science and aided by
magic (but never superseded by it). The high elf castes take on the
role of military defense of the elven nation, as well as light and heavy
industry, interstellar trade, and all other things technological. They
deal with non-elves more than any other caste. They are the caste
that supports all the others and holds the elven nation together.
Grey elves turn to magical study, religion, and philosophy as ends unto
themselves. Most live some kind of monastic existence or maintain all
the schools of the magic arts, all the temples, and all the museums
and archives to preserve the people's collective history. Other grey
elves choose to wander and seek new knowledge, new species and
cultures to study, or simply to gather information for information's
sake.
Unique among the castes are the sea elves who develop magical
methods of manipulating their bodies to survive in a foreign
environment. The first aquatics sought an underwater existence in pre-
interstellar times so they could understand the very different lives and
worldviews of the intelligent water creatures that inhabited the elf
homeworld's oceans. Over time, the sea elf caste expanded to include
living in extreme-heat zones sich as calderas, areas of extreme cold
such as polar regions, zero-gravity environments, hard vacuum
worlds, other planes of existence, and so on. Each one of these is
effectively their own sub-caste, but politically and socially they are
regarded as a single caste.
Dark elves were once a caste like the others who had chosen to live an
underground existence. In pre-interstellar times they were the caste
who supplied the other elves with fossil fuels, metals, and gemstones;
they also operated most of the quarries from which the most treasured
of the ancestral cities and citadels of the homeworld were constructed.
A few generations after the elves acquired starflight, two thirds of all
dark elves rose up in a rebellion against the government whom they
saw as marginalizing and scheming to erase the obsolete dark elf caste
from existence. The dark elves lost, stole several starships and
manufactured more, then went into self-exile. The remaining one third
of dark elves continued to be loyal to the nation and took on the name
of deep elves to separate themselves from the traitors.
Skin color, hair color, and eye color are distributed broadly among all
the castes--a grey elf caste member could have pale skin, and a high
elf caste member could have grey skin. Some phenotypes do occur
more commonly in some castes than others, but this is an accident of
inheritance from when elfkind was still a young race. Eugenics and
genetic manipulation to "customize" offspring is an abhorrent practice
to most elves, not least because of the actions of the dark elf rebels:
while the first generations of free "drow" had representatives of all but
the rarest of phenotype combinations,the new leadership of the drow
rebels took steps to ensure that within ten generations, all drow would
be uniformly light-haired (silver or pure white), and predominately
having black, violet, or deep blue skin. Individuals and progeny who
failed to conform were offered few choices: whether genetic "therapy",
forced sterilization, or worse. Tens of generations have passed since
then, and the odd "throwback" of a mutation still appears in the drow
population from time to time reminding them of their origins, but
 these individuals are universally reviled, abused, and eventually put
down.

Mith-Sharorr is a colonialistic and imperialistic society, with some huge middle-age european vibes.
(Instead of making the evil guys be “exotic”, I prefered to rely -visuals-wise- on something way more
widespread). It’s a teological society that follows a homebrew goddess, Vyrthae. Vyrthae is an
entity with a demonic vibe to her, lawful evil to the core, who has a rose-motif to her.
 The Goddess holds Mith-Sharorr as her most loved belonging. It is the only nation that respects
her as a goddess, and her main objective is to make it prosper. Thus, she has made sure people
within the society keep peace and prosper together, instead of fighting against each other. A united
nation is much more powerful.
 The power always relies on the imperial family, the Demithrae, which got appointed when Mith-
Sharorr got established by Vyrthae herself. The Demithrae have some fiendish blood in them
(because Vyrthae is fiendish), and they act as the voice and will of the goddess. Vyrthae has a soul-
link with this family, and she can do nasty things to those not following her vows. But following them
has kept Mith-Sharorr prosper and the Demithrae as the main family, so only rarely some protest
against it
 The society is heavily divided between nobles and peasants. In fact, peasants are prohibited
from using magic (and the only magic allowed in Mith-Sharorr is divine, coming from Vyrthae
herself). There’s an Inquisition that regularly hunts down magic users.
 The Demithrae blood is only passed through the women in the line (and it is visually visible,
as their eyes are different). This stirred the conception that nobles only keep their purity if
the mother is of noble origin, which -over time- has tilted the balance on women being the
ones in power. Men are often relied as a way for families to make deals between each other,
and occupy lesser roles, as they have been regarded as less capable of leadership. It’s not
as stupidly tilted as in lolthian societies however, but there’s a stigma attached to it.
 Noble families gain favour by asisting Mith-Sharorr’s growth. This is done by
either participating in the clergy, the Inquisition, in creating new colonies or keeping
control of them, and participating in wars. Familiy leaders appoint their descendants into
these positions, and they are rewarded when they do a good job.

(More Areel. Have I mentioned they really like stupidly extra armor? Areel was an outlier in this
society as he was the Patron Regent of the Deneld, one of the Mith-Sharian noble families. He
desperately sought to get his sibling back, since -being a male- he couldn’t produce noble offspring.)
 Fighting between noble families is heavily prohibited and discouraged, and Vyrthae is quick to
remove a family that -instead of trying to please her by helping Mith-Sharorr’s expansion- tries to
attack other families.
 Finally, Mith-Sharorr itself is a city located in the deepest caverns registered. The area around the
city is incredibly sterile, and they rely heavily on surface colonies to keep the main city supplied
and fed. This is the main motivation for colonizing other territories.
It’s still fairly evil, but it leaves a huge margin to writing people inside it as people. Mith-Sharian
nobles have a reason to support the system, they have a great deal of respect and esteem for their
peers and hold collaboration as one of their main values. Most of them are indoctrinated into this
system and rarely ever get to see much outside of it, so most of them don’t find anything wrong.

Peasants get education too, albeit pretty limited. They attend temples for it, and most of what they’re
taught is surrounding their religion and the core values. Writing and reading isn’t taught, to ensure
they cannot easily communicate or even learn magic. The disparity between the nobles having full
access to magic vs the peasants having only their physical strenght keeps revolutions at bay,
although there have been some exceptions.
And still, that’s really just one nation between many. Mith-Sharorr is regarded as the exception
within my setting, and most drow are in more neutral or even good-aligned societies. Hell, there’s
even democracy in some of them!