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 people who had travelled between distant worlds and planes for generations. Their 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 come to Eldareth deliberately.
The Naerids had been investigating a major dimensional disturbance and growing Far Realm activity along routes their people had travelled safely for generations. Crossings had become unreliable, regions they once knew had grown dangerous, and attacks were being reported around distant worlds and other parts of the cosmos.
Over time, they had come to believe that much of this activity was converging toward the same distant world.
Eldareth.
Ithis Veyra had changed course to reach it and warn its inhabitants. The vessel was attacked before completing the journey and arrived catastrophically damaged, leaving its crew with little chance of surviving the crash.
Much of what the Naerids 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 affecting distant worlds and established routes, 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 preserve everything they knew.
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 lives failing, 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 Athrakan Obelisk, commonly known in Eldareth as the Celestine Obelisk. The artifact had been discovered by the Naerids among the ruins of an unidentified ancient civilization long before Ithis Veyra came to Eldareth, and generations of study had revealed only part of its functions.
Athrakan had been carried aboard Ithis Veyra and treated as an object of considerable importance. The Naerids had learned to use portions of it in their dimensional travels, though much of the information contained within the Obelisk remained beyond even their understanding.
It became one of the most important surviving links between the Venthari and the people whose final actions 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. They had witnessed a growing threat spreading across distant routes and worlds, and believed that threat was drawing ever closer to Eldareth.
The Venthari would preserve that warning long after the last survivor of Ithis Veyra had died.