III. Echoes from Beyond

More than five centuries passed after the Upheaval before Eldareth received its first clear warning that dangers beyond its known planes might eventually reach the world.

By then, much of Eldareth had rebuilt. New nations had risen in place of fallen powers, the altered ley network had been extensively mapped, and planar scholarship had advanced considerably. Travel beyond the Material Plane was better understood, though even the most established academies recognized how little they knew of realms beyond those already charted.

That understanding changed when a crystalline vessel descended over the Greyspires of Vel'Nathar.

The vessel, later identified as Ithis Veyra, came down near Lake Morren and shattered on impact. Its translucent crystalline hull bore little resemblance to the skyships of Eldareth, and much of what remained within the wreck could not immediately be identified or operated.

A small number of passengers survived.

They called themselves Naerids, a planefaring people whose appearance was as unfamiliar as their vessel. Their bodies possessed a faint luminous quality, with pale skin that caught light in subtle blue, violet, and silver hues. They communicated primarily through thought, conveying speech, images, memories, and emotion directly from one mind to another.

The first people to reach the wreck were monks from nearby Rimecliff Monastery. They recovered the injured survivors and carried them back to the monastery, where attempts were made to treat wounds for which local healers had little precedent.

As communication became possible, the monks learned that Ithis Veyra had not arrived in Eldareth as part of a planned journey.

The Naerids had been fleeing.

Their people had traveled between distant worlds and planes for generations. In the years before the crash, routes they had long considered safe had become increasingly dangerous. They described disturbances affecting planar boundaries, regions they could no longer cross, and creatures or intelligences unlike those encountered during their earlier journeys.

Much of what they had witnessed did not fit easily within Eldarethian cosmology. Their memories contained places for which the monks had no names and forms of life that could be conveyed more easily through shared impressions than ordinary description.

The Naerids did not claim to understand the cause of everything they had encountered. What concerned them was the scale of the disturbance. It was not confined to a single plane or route, and they had seen no indication that it was ending.

Their warning carried particular weight in a world still shaped by the consequences of the Upheaval. Eldareth had already experienced widespread planar instability following the fracture of the Mythal, but the Naerids were describing events occurring far beyond the planes familiar to Eldarethian scholars.

The survivors could provide only limited answers. Their condition continued to deteriorate after the crash, and it became increasingly clear that they would not live long enough to rebuild what had been lost.

They instead turned their remaining time toward preserving what they could.

The monks of Rimecliff became their closest students. The Naerids taught them the principles behind their psionic abilities, their methods of mental communication, and what they understood of the dangers they had encountered. Some of this knowledge could be recorded normally, while other concepts required direct psionic instruction before they could be understood at all.

The Naerids also attempted something far more consequential.

With their own people near extinction, they transferred portions of their psionic essence into the monks who had sheltered them. The process was dangerous, and not everyone who underwent it survived. Those who did were permanently altered.

These survivors became the first Venthari.

The change proved hereditary. Their descendants were born with the same psionic potential, and the disciplines developed at Rimecliff combined the mental practices of the old monastery with what the Naerids had taught them. In the generations that followed, these traditions developed into the Way of the Celestine.

The Naerids also entrusted the monks with the Celestine Obelisk, a crystalline structure recovered from Ithis Veyra. They treated it as an object of considerable importance, though the explanation they left behind was incomplete. Its precise function remained unclear, but enough was understood for the Venthari to preserve it rather than dismantle it in search of answers.

The Obelisk became one of the most important surviving links between the Venthari and the people whose final act had created them.

News of the crash eventually spread beyond the Greyspires. Scholars traveled to Lake Morren and Rimecliff to study fragments of Ithis Veyra, compare Naerid accounts with existing planar research, and examine materials unlike anything produced in Eldareth.

The warning traveled farther still.

The arrival of the Naerids provided no clear date for an attack and no enemy against which armies could immediately prepare. What it established was that the disturbances witnessed after the Upheaval were not the limit of what existed beyond Eldareth's known planes.

The surviving Naerids had crossed worlds and realms that Eldarethian scholars had never charted. Something they encountered there had been dangerous enough to drive them from those routes, destroy most of their people, and eventually send Ithis Veyra crashing into the Greyspires.

The Venthari would preserve that warning long after the last Naerid had died.