Starsage Galathir

From whence came Teleria and the gods? How can something arise from nothingness, if that is in fact what happened? Sages have pondered this befuddling mystery since ancient times. They say that before the gods and their Dances of Creation there was nothing but a cosmic substrate filled with limitless potential: a Realm of Uncreation. Caused by some unknowable fluctuation, a ripple in the vast ocean, the gods Lumaya and Siroth arose from this Realm, and Danced to fill some of its apparent emptiness. They made worlds to explore and inhabit, and creatures to people them. The empty void of the Realm of Uncreation, an infinite blackness scintillating with sparks of possibility, was left behind and beyond, to buffer and surround the gods’ creations. The genius Elf Galathir, during the Age of Hellfire some seven centuries ago, postulated that the Telerian firmament is a reflection of the Realm of Uncreation. He theorized that the black night sky corresponds to the void of unmoved nothingness, and the shining stars are glowing manifestations of potential worlds. Each one could flare and expand into a realm of its own, given the influence of a god-like will, or some other powerful force. By studying the movements of stars and properties of the night sky, Galathir hoped to discern patterns and laws that governed universal mechanisms of the world and beyond. Galathir traveled to the distant Cloudspire Mountains after reading old scrolls suggesting that the historic Dragonkin had built star-gazing centers there. He found them, and built a massive observatory complex of his own atop a peak of the Mountains of Despair in northern Aravia, renting the land from the Dwarves of Gloomdeep Hold far below. The chill, thin air, and the clear sky far removed from city lights, helped Galathir’s instruments function. Using mirrors, he beamed the image of the night sky through sheets of magically-charged, clear crystal. Starlight striking the crystal sheets reacted with the material to create tiny dots, leaving behind perfect star-charts for him to pore over. An elaborate kinematic mechanism held the marked sheets and swapped them in and out, letting Galathir gaze intensely at one after another in swift succession, like flipping back and forth rapidly between pages in a book. He looked for variations in the location and magnitude of stars. He took readings again and again, day by day, hour by hour. Trying to sift through the endless dots for meaning would have driven a lesser mind mad, and even Galathir’s prodigious intellect strained at the task. By accident, Galathir discovered that shining intense magical illumination through his gigantic archive of chronologically—sorted crystal star sheets created a web of interconnected beams of reflected light. Galathir was convinced there was an arcane symbolism to it, a language of Uncreation expressed in angles and mathematics. Perhaps it was the language of the gods, or even an expression of the first principle that caused the gods themselves to come into being. For decades, the reclusive Starsage persisted. Apprentices sought him, graduated from his tutelage, and were replaced, servants came and went, and gossip slowly spread. Some whispered Galathir was trying to use the stars to traffic with Demons. But he had paid no heed to the lower world for years, and ignored the opinions of the urban Elves whose glittering spires and shining mage-beacons obliterated their view of the night sky. Galathir had indeed begun blending science with the occult — not in connection to Demons, or Anathraad, or any Created thing, but something even older. Galathir grew convinced that he was in contact with primordial spirits dwelling within the Realm of Uncreation. They too were Uncreated, nonexistent, yet possessed a will that could manifest itself in the turning of the stars. Few would dare even theorize such blasphemies; Galathir did not merely theorize but experiment. He created his own, artificial star-plates to try to ‘speak back’ to the Uncreated void, placing them atop his tower and shining light through them into the cold, inscrutable sky. In time he believed he had been taught a ritual, across time and space by beings older than Telerian reality, that could call one of them forth in mental communion. He would share his body with the bodiless potentiality, and drink in its infinite, otherworldly wisdom. Those few he dared share these theories with dismissed them as the delusions of an aged Elf who had deteriorated from dedicated scholar to misguided obsessive, so he gave up once and for all on legitimating his findings. He would forge on alone and pierce the secret heart of the universe. By now nearly all his servants had fled, convinced the rumors of Demon-worship had been right all along — all but one, his last and most fanatical apprentice, a teenage Orc called Mallul. Mallul went on to tell the last terrible chapter of Galathir’s tale when he returned from the desolation that followed, shaken and repentant of his former loyalty. Galathir arranged his crystal plates into a sphere with walls as thick as a castle’s and only a small interior space. He curled up there like an embryo within an eggshell, made of thousands of translucent scales. Mallul attached the last plates, sealing Galathir inside. Surrounding the sphere was an array of Galathir’s mage-lights, the ones he had been using before but now charged to dangerous levels. Pulling the switch and shining the beams into the crystal sphere, bathing Galathir in the geometric rays of his own life’s work, was the last act Mallul performed for his master. The passage of the light through the plates made the eldritch lines appear once again, and within, Galathir was completely immersed in what he believed was the voice of Uncreation. The sphere shone brighter and brighter, somehow brighter even than the combined light being blasted into it, like a fire stoked. The walls shock and Mallul fled, fear for his life breaking through his terrified fascination. He careened and stumbled down the slopes in a mindless panic, and as he did so the Galathir’s observatory collapsed with a long and deafening roar. The Orc turned to see it crumbling, and from it there erupted one last great burst of light that shot into the sky and was gone. Unbeknownst to almost all, Galathir has ever since observed Teleria from the swirling mists of Uncreation, intervening in times and locations of his choosing. Whatever his agenda might be, it is surely beyond the minds of even most immortals to comprehend.