I. The Far Realm Descends
The Venthari had only begun carrying the warnings of the Naerids beyond the Greyspires when those warnings became real.
For centuries after the Upheaval, Eldareth had lived with an unstable planar order. Scholars studied the changed boundaries between worlds, institutions watched for dangerous crossings, and encounters once considered extraordinary became better understood. The Naerids had warned of something less familiar: disturbances spreading across distant worlds and routes beyond Eldareth's maps, accompanied by growing Far Realm activity that showed no sign of ending.
There was little anyone could do with such a warning at first. The surviving Naerids understood only part of what they had encountered, and they had brought no map showing where an attack might come from or any certainty as to when it would reach Eldareth. The Venthari carried what remained of their knowledge to courts, academies, monasteries, and military councils, urging preparations against threats few outside Rimecliff understood.
Then unfamiliar vessels appeared in the skies.
The first were illithid nautiloids, great organic craft unlike the skyships of Eldareth or the crystalline Ithis Veyra. They appeared above settlements and major population centers with little warning. Reports soon followed of towns falling silent, caravans disappearing, and survivors returning with fractured memories of commands they did not remember obeying.
The earliest attacks were scattered enough to be mistaken for isolated planar disturbances. That changed as illithids began striking populated regions in greater numbers. Their psionic abilities allowed them to disrupt defenders before conventional battle had begun. Soldiers turned upon companions, commanders issued orders they did not remember giving, and civilians were forced into obedience without understanding what had happened to them.
Other aberrations followed as breaches widened. Beholders attacked fortified positions, Grell hunted above roads and damaged settlements, and Neogi moved through conquered territory taking captives for slavery and trade. Tsochars were harder to detect, concealing themselves within living hosts and moving through communities already strained by fear and displacement.
Other creatures had no familiar name. Reports described forms unlike known life, unusual movement, and communication that reached directly into the mind. Accounts differed between regions, but the same creatures and vessels began appearing across lands separated by mountains and seas.
The Venthari recognized elements of what the Naerids had described. Records preserved from Ithis Veyra gave scholars a starting point for understanding the invasion and identifying its source in the Far Realm, a realm outside the conventional planar structure familiar to Eldarethian cosmology.
Those records also made clear that Eldareth was not the first place affected. Before Ithis Veyra ever reached the world, the Naerids had encountered increasing Far Realm activity along routes used safely for generations, with disturbances and attacks appearing around distant worlds and elsewhere across the cosmos.
The relationship between the Incursion and the Upheaval remained disputed. The fracture of the Mythal had been followed by widespread planar instability, and some scholars came to believe that its effects had reached much farther than previously understood. One theory held that the disturbance had drawn attention to Eldareth from beings capable of perceiving such events across distant realms.
Whether the invaders followed that disturbance directly, searched for its source over generations, or encountered Eldareth by other means was never established. By the time the Incursion began, however, they had found routes into the Material Plane.
Among the most powerful entities associated with the Far Realm were beings Eldarethian scholars came to call Great Old Ones. Their relationship with the creatures of the Incursion varied considerably. Some possessed servants or forces directly influenced by them, while many aberrant peoples pursued their own ambitions and had no clear allegiance to any such entity.
Their influence did not always require the Great Old Ones themselves to enter Eldareth. Cults, servants, psychic effects, and breaches could extend their reach far beyond the regions in which they dwelled.
The Venthari quickly became important to the defense. Their inherited psionic abilities and the disciplines developed through the Way of the Celestine gave them experience with mental attacks that most soldiers and spellcasters had never been trained to resist. They helped identify psychic interference, protect vulnerable minds, and teach others how to recognize or resist forms of control used by the invaders.
The Naerid knowledge preserved at Rimecliff also became valuable. Monasteries, military orders, courts, and arcane institutions that had previously regarded the warnings carried by the Venthari as a distant concern now sought whatever records and instruction could be provided.
Even with that knowledge, the first advance moved quickly. Major settlements were particularly vulnerable because dense populations gave illithids large numbers of minds to dominate and provided other invaders with captives or hosts. Some communities came under psychic control before neighboring regions knew they had been attacked, while those that resisted openly faced nautiloids above their defenses and aberrations within their streets.
The invasion did not reach every land at the same time. Some kingdoms received enough warning to reinforce vulnerable settlements and prepare defenses, while others encountered the invaders before they had heard the name Far Realm. Oceans, mountains, and fortified borders offered limited protection against enemies whose routes did not follow the geography of the Material Plane.
Within months, the scattered attacks had become a widespread war. Alliances formed between states and peoples that had previously shared little trust, and resources intended for trade, rivalry, or local defense were redirected toward resisting the Incursion.
As the war continued, the Venthari also turned increasingly toward the Athrakan Obelisk at Rimecliff, more commonly known as the Celestine Obelisk. The Naerids had carried the ancient artifact aboard Ithis Veyra and spent generations studying it before reaching Eldareth, though much of its nature remained unknown.
Research during the Incursion confirmed that Athrakan belonged to a wider network of ancient Obelisks capable of recognizing and answering one another across extraordinary distances. Much of the network's purpose remained beyond the understanding of both Venthari and outside scholars, but Athrakan's sensitivity to severe dimensional disturbances offered a possible means of responding to the growing breaches.
That possibility became critical when an immense breach began to form and Nyxarath, the Eye Beyond the Stars, attempted to cross into Eldareth.
The Venthari activated Athrakan as the crossing progressed. Other Obelisks beyond Eldareth answered its signal, and their combined dimensional resonance returned through the network. The effect destabilized the breach and disrupted the psychic control maintained by many of the invading forces nearby.
The portion of Nyxarath that had crossed into Eldareth was severed as the connection failed. Whether the greater entity was destroyed, wounded, or merely cut off from its Material manifestation remained unknown.
The collapse of the breach broke the momentum of the Incursion. Aberrations and invading forces already within Eldareth still had to be hunted down or contained, and the damage left by the war did not disappear with the closing of the breach. Athrakan had helped end the greatest immediate threat, but many breaches remained open and the wider instability that had troubled Eldareth since the Upheaval was unchanged.
The Incursion permanently changed how Eldareth understood threats and the regions beyond its familiar planar maps. It also brought the Venthari and the Way of the Celestine into far greater contact with the rest of the world, as knowledge once preserved largely within their monasteries became important to the defense of entire nations.