The Starborn Codex: Final Entry

The Resonance

The commander who marched upon Bloom’s border had come for blood, yes. But more than this, he came because the Radiance Court was already priming its great engine of war, and the Vine Keepers of Bloom would have been the first to feel the tremor of it. Through root and branch and buried thread, the forest spoke the movements of the world, and the Vine Keepers listened. Radiance had researched their prey well. And for what they had planned, they needed Bloom stripped of its senses — unable to feel the approach until it was already at their throat.

But the warning had already slipped its cage. The ravens sent by the High Regent of Shadow had torn through the night sky, one surging toward the tranquil heart of Bloom, the other screaming toward the volcanic peaks of Ember.

When the armies of the Ember Court reached Bloom’s borders, some whispered that they were… different. Unrecognisable, even. They were beautiful, yes – regal and bold and proud. But the warmth was all but gone. The bright, molten glow that had once defined them was extinguished. And the hardened Ember Court that now stood to guard Bloom’s gates was a far cry from the Court of endless solstice festivals, liquid gold and riotous laughter it once was. Radiance’s earlier betrayals had mercilessly punished that public softness out of them. They rode in armoured as though the heavy metal had been hammered directly into their wounds. Their crimson had darkened – now closer to oxidised blood; their helms were no longer swept and crested for splendour – they were brutal, heavy things, forged only to shatter whatever it was they might drive into.

At the tip of the spear as they entered rode Tanwen, High Regent of the Ember Court. The surviving chronicles do not bother to describe her as beautiful. Dense armour hugged her frame, a greatsword rested at her hip, and the ancient gold markings etched into her skin roiled with an intensity matched only by the one lit behind her eyes.

Across the vast stretch of no-man’s-land, glistening, golden figures approached. Even from a mile away, there was no mistaking them. They moved with an arrogant certainty – a lockstep perfection that had often made the common fae outside their Court deeply uncomfortable.

Tanwen did not wait for formalities. "So," her voice cracked through the air. "You still insist on travelling in neat little columns, I see. I had hoped the humiliation might have sparked even a modicum of imagination in you."

The figure anchoring the opposing line – a High Regent judging by the terrifying artistry of his armour (though Ember’s records aggressively refuse to grant him the dignity of such a title) – tilted his head. The gesture dripped with indulgent, mocking pity. "And I had wondered," he returned smoothly, "if you had cowered in your mountains for so long that you actually began to mistake your desperation for… strength?" Another tilt of the head.

It would have been a legendary exchange, fit for tapestries, had the rear line of Radiance’s golden militia not suddenly begun to fall to the ground. One second, the golden ranks stood immaculately. The next, a soldier simply dropped. Then the man beside him. Then three more along the western edges. It is worth noting that there was no grand spectacle to this, and indeed, there was no visible blade. And, perhaps most eerily, there was no sound of impact.

Instead, shadows stretched impossibly long, slipping like oil between golden boots, and a suffocating hush seemed to smother the clattering of armour that, in any other scenario, would have no doubt resounded. Whether the Shadow Court arrived entirely to help, or in part to play, the Archivists cannot be certain.

It was amidst this chaos that a Radiance commander stepped forward, hauling two towering, golden stakes engraved with markings neither the Archivists, nor anyone in witness, could decipher. The commander drove the first stake deep into the earth. The second followed, driven so violently that the sonic boom of the impact rippled out in a visible shockwave across the land before them. Those standing closest swore the metal shrieked, others claimed it rang a flawless and apocalyptic musical note. We record it as both.

"These," the commander bellowed, his voice trembling with euphoric pride, "have been touched by the Starfallen." He began to chant in a tongue so old, many fae in the Realms could not understand it even then. As he continued to chant, across the entirety of the Realms, every scattered fragment of the Starfallen answered what could only be described as a cataclysmic pull. The earth beneath Bloom violently convulsed, ripping ancient trees from their moorings. Oceans away, the Pearl Court watched in horror as the sea reared back in stuttering swells as though some leviathan in its Deep Waters had awakened angered from a deep slumber. Up in the dominion of Sky, the stratospheric currents twisted into unnatural knots, giving birth to localised, screaming hurricanes in a matter of seconds. Even in the mundane, mortal world, the fallout was terrifying. Windows exploded in quiet suburban streets, oceans surged backward only to thrust inward toward cities, and millions of migrating birds broke formation, plummeting from the sky or veering frantically inland in a frenzy of terror.

The High Regent of Ember was the first to realise what the Radiance Court was attempting. She might not have understood the arcane mechanics of it, but the intent itself was clear. Radiance had manufactured a way to use one Starfallen shard to call to others. No need to infiltrate, nor to enter into battle to take the Starfallen fragments. In one fell swoop, Radiance would simply have the fragments gravitate toward each other. Or rather, toward the fragment-imbued stakes that beckoned them.

Eye-witnesses would later write that Tanwen appeared to shed her physical form, becoming a silhouette of burning light as she threw her bare hands around the stakes. The ancient channels carved into the metal flared a blinding white, then a blood red. The intention was never to melt the stakes – of course, they were forged to survive the heat of a dying sun. Instead, the High Regent was forcing the entirety of Ember’s searing heat directly down into the runes, intentionally overfeeding the circuit, trying to detonate any magical attunement before it could lock into place.

The commander called forth his soldiers to attack. Ember, in their staggering numbers, roared and met them before they could reach their High Regent, slamming into the golden line with a savage, desperate joy they would spend the next century denying. The collision was a slaughter. Brilliant light lanced outward like sniper fire, blowing through Ember’s armour joints and tearing through flesh, leaving the battlefield reeking of seared leather, and burning fabric. Ember’s retaliation, however, was far less precise and far more terrible. Flames clung, crawled, and spread, scaling golden shields and coursing over the earth in waves of heat. Around the stakes, the battlefield became an inferno so fierce that the air alone would punish every breath.

Then came the ravens. Only now, they were not a mere omen – they were a plague. The sky above the battle of light, flame and shadow was blotted out by a screeching swarm of black feathers and razor beaks. They dove for the golden ranks, tearing at eyes, ripping at screaming mouths, burying their talons into the slivers of exposed flesh beneath shining helms.

And yet, even with the mounting attack on Radiance; with Ember’s High Regent at the stakes, the apocalyptic trembling of the earth only worsened. In the mortal realm, brick houses vibrated until their foundations cracked. Horses screamed and trampled their fences. Humans woke up screaming, clawing at their ears to stop the crushing feeling of pressure. And the afternoon sky began to turn an unnatural, burnt red.

In the centre of the inferno, Tanwen held on. Her own sentinels waded into the fire, grabbing her shoulders, begging her to let go and trying to drag her to safety. This was in vain. The flesh of her gauntlets cooked and blackened. The golden markings across her throat spun out of control, shining so brightly they blinded those who looked directly at her. Some say her hair ignited into a crown of fire; others claim it turned into pure starlight.

Radiance’s lines were haemorrhaging, bleeding out from Ember’s sheer fury and Shadow’s invisible butchering. Finally, when it became clear they would not triumph in this battle, the Court of Light broke and fell back. It should have been over. Of course, as you know by now, it was not.

The Second Coming

Radiance had seeded other stakes in the forgotten, empty corners of the Realms – in dead valleys, along abandoned coastlines, in the liminal spaces where no particular Court held sway. More stakes. More chanting. And a stubborn, fanatical insistence that the world submit to their authority.

Wherever Radiance made their attempt, Ember were there – warned, and accompanied by, the Shadow Court. Tanwen, however – in a grave condition following her repeated burning at the stakes – did not join the battle again for many nights yet.

The Archivists now take you to the final battle before the Unmaking.

Yet another attempt by Radiance, and another clash among the Courts. On this particular night, it was the highest ranking sentinel among the Ember Court, Malius, who would drive his fire into Radiance’s resonating stakes. He held on for a great deal of time, though he did not live to see the end of this final battle. The Ember archives claim he died on his feet; no other Court corroborates this. But out of respect for a loyalty that transcends politics, the Archivists record it as truth.

At the precise moment it seemed Radiance was gaining ground; that nothing would stop the drawing of the fragments together at last, we are reminded, quite visciously, of the teeth the Bloom Court often keeps kind behind smiles. Those who don't understand Bloom think of its magic as delicate – a gentle greening, the creep of ivy, or the poetic blooming of a rose to ignite joy. They are quite mistaken, if they reduce this Court to petals and niceties. They are the Old Wood, too. The Old Wood that predates Bloom’s modern culture of tenderness. The wild, Old Wood that possesses exactly zero sentimentality. When it woke, the earth ruptured. Roots the size of cathedral pillars erupted from the bedrock, pale and staggering, like the bones of dead titans arrived for revenge. Great, twisted trunks snapped inward from miles away. And the Wood, stalking closer from the outer edges of battle and crushing any fae unfortunate enough to stand in its path, converged to form a suffocating dome of thorn, vine and wood around the fallen Ember sentinel, the Radiance commander, and, now… Creirlys, who slipped cooly down from a large vine, dusted herself off non-chalantly, and looked up to gaze directly into the eyes of the gold-plated fae before her.

Without hesitation, arcs of pure, concentrated light whipped from his blades, designed to instantly cauterise and sever anything they touched, and intending to touch the Regent of Bloom in front of him. Vines rushed to meet the light, blackening into ash, only to instantly split, mutate, and regrow several times thicker. You see, the trees of the Old Wood were not individual plants; they were a singular, ancient and calculating consciousness. Every time the commander burned a path of attempted survival, the forest seemed to slam it shut. Bloom, as ever, was not what it appeared.

On Broken Oaths

Outside that dome of roots, a much quiter, colder execution was taking place. In the midst of the battle between the three Courts entered Kaius, Pearl’s High Regent – a trailing mist at his heels as he walked. It is worth noting that despite their apparent alignment with the Court of Radiance, the Pearl Court – along with the Sky Court – were as yet unseen in the violent clashes that had taken place. Some assumed Kaius came to offer support – some, to offer strategy. What he would say next would shatter both of those expectations. He walked slowly toward the golden commander - now watching the battle from the outskirts – who had once stood in his halls, shared his wine, and offered sweet promises of kindness and compromise.

“Ah, Kaius,” Amadeus crooned – too calmly; too satisfied – for the extent of the destruction around him.

Kaius stepped nearer.
"You broke your word," he whispered.
Deep, pelagic magic began to spool around Kaius’ wrists, before slowly gathering and pooling around the commander’s throat. The temperature of the air around them, despite the light and flame in every direction, drew down to a freezing cold.

The commander opened his mouth – to beg, to argue, to deny, no one will ever truly know. Kaius did not give him the chance to speak. The atmospheric pressure dropped onto his shoulders, and his spine bowed under the weight of an invisible ocean. As his face met the dirt, the High Regent of Pearl gave an agitated roll of his neck, and the Pearl Court finally, wholly, went to war. Pearl never needed to scream to show its fury; only to execute on its promises.

It is worth noting that for any fae of the Pearl Court, let alone its High Regent, to break one’s word is a sin that carries unshakeable dishonour. It must be, then, that the cause the Pearl Regent would willingly make and break his word for, was considered more significant to him than the very substance of his being.

On Family Ties

As for the Shadow Court, the surviving texts degrade into fragments, half-truths and fearful omissions. Because while Creirlys taunted the commander, Pearl commanded his sorcerers, and Ember and Shadow’s warriors fought Radiance’s golden army, at the heart of the battlefield, the storm parted for two men.

One carved from pure light. One draped in absolute dark. Had you seen them from a distance, years before the blood was spilled, you might have seen the resemblance. They shared the same jawline, sharp as a knife’s edge. The same tousled, midnight hair, uncorrupted by Radiance’s signature gold. They even shared the same shade of emerald green eyes – though one pair reflected the light of the battlefield like cut glass, while the other seemed to drink it as though it never touched them at all.

The Regent clad in gold tilted his chin, his mouth curving into a crooked smile. "The High Regent of the Shadow Court," he murmured, stretching the title out so it dripped with a deliberate, toxic mockery. "In the flesh."

The High Regent of Shadow’s gaze did not leave his eyes.

"Father," he acknowledged the man curtly, as though announcing a title rather than a familial tie. The word, for all its notes of proximity, did nothing to bridge the gap between them. The Gold Regent let his eyes crawl over his son. It was not the look of a father greeting his child, nor a warrior sizing up a rival. It was, rather, a look of disdain; of disappointment. Perhaps, somewhere… of regret.

"So," he finally sighed. "This is the gutter you chose to die in."
He flicked his eyes down to the pooling, unnatural darkness swirling around Zavian's boots.
"I had hoped exile might have corrected your... condition.”

“Ah, yes. My unforgivable habit of objecting when innocent people are butchered for ambition.”
In this remark, one could perhaps hear the echoes of a petulant son arguing with a stern father. And perhaps both parties felt a pang of nostalgia at this, after so many years.
Whether they did or not, no such sentiment was recorded.

“Retreat,” a stern tone now, “or you will meet your end like the rest of these sorry, wretched fae.”
“I didn’t think you’d aged so horridly that you were beginning to talk to yourself now?”
A wry smile. A hand up toward the Radiance Regent’s face.
“I almost feel sorry for you,” Zavian half-whispered, tilting his head to study the man before him. Witnesses would go on to say that this particular comment was not laced with the same sardonic edge the Shadow Regent was usually accustomed to.

At that, the very fabric of reality began to warp around them. The sharp lights of the battlefield bent away from Zavian, as though refusing to touch him. The earth beneath the two men began to feel unmoored. Soldiers fighting too close to them suddenly found themselves stumbling, and missing sword swings by inches that felt like miles as their depth perception violently dissolved. The High Regent of Shadow stood perfectly still; one arm raised, his hand moving with precision as he expertly manipulated the matter surrounding them.

"And now," the Radiance Regent continued, crouching to steady himself against the ground, "you draw steel against your own blood."
He paused, letting the silence stretch. "For this."

For this. For what Radiance had deemed ‘freaks of nature’ because they lived wholly out of the light. For the exiles. For the fae and creatures of the Under Realm who had become Zavian’s family. The dark, terrifying thing he had allowed himself to grow into to survive the fall.

Zavian’s chest barely moved as he took a breath. "This," he replied, his voice low, "is far more a family than you or your Court could ever offer. And I will fight for them, fight against you, until I draw final breath."

At this, the man’s posture hitched; a micro-expression of fury flashed across his face and was instantly buried. Instead of offering a response, he allowed the light to give his answer for him. It lashed out faster than the eye could track – a blinding, decapitating arc of solar energy that, had it landed where it was intended, might indeed erase Zavian from existence before he could draw another breath. The man in gold was not so lucky. The searing light skidded past Zavian’s shoulder, violently detonating against a patch of earth that, a second ago, had seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

The Regent snarled and lunged toward his son. He threw a barrage of strikes, each one carrying enough force to blast through a mountain. Every single one of them fractured against the warped, corrupted gravity around Zavian, shattering into useless bursts of golden light. Shadow’s Regent was yet to lay harm upon his father, but Radiance’s High Regent was growing more tired with every blow.

Finally, he planted a gold-clad foot behind him for a final attempt at a catastrophic blow. To the unknowing eye, he simply stumbled and fell as he swung. To those who knew the workings of Shadow, his mind had failed to properly calculate how to successfully move through space at all. Hand and eye had become wholly uncoordinated. He fell hard to the cold, dark soil beneath them.

For the very first time, the flawless veneer of Radiance’s High Regent looked profoundly desperate.
Zavian stared at the man who had sired him. There was no rage left in him. Only a sprawling, cold wasteland where a son's admiration had once lived.

"You should leave me for dead," his father rasped, chest heaving. This wasn’t a threat. In fact, to those in earshot, it sounded much more like a confession – the first sincere sentence the man had spoken in centuries.

Zavian finally moved. Just one step forward.
The darkness inhaled, contracting around them like a dying star.
"Yes," Zavian whispered threateningly. "I should."
He crouched down slowly toward his father; a face once so familiar, now so twisted with hate, agony, despair. He saw himself in him. In his eyes, his jaw, his midnight hair.
But more than this, he saw everything he had refused to become.

The Unmaking

Just as Zavian’s father moved to reach an arm up toward him, the air around them grew wild.
A man descended through the atmosphere as if the screaming gale-force winds had personally escorted him down. Thick bands of solid gold encircled his wrists, spinning so fast they emitted a high, whining screech.
Ilyas, High Regent of the Sky Court.

To the discomfort of the fae of most Courts, though familiar to those of his own, his eyes appeared entirely white – an absolute blankness that was altogether unreadable. Those bleeding on the grass below looked at him and realised that, perhaps, they had spent centuries mistaking the Sky Court’s isolationist silence for pacifism.
Indeed, many believed the Sky Court regarded itself above Court “pettiness”, though loosely aligned with the Radiance Court for convenience, above all else.

Ilyas didn't address the golden ranks of Radiance first, however. It was Zavian, crouching down to address the enemy that had become of his own family, that he bowed his head to as he lowered.

History often hides the ache behind all of Ilyas’ thunder. Long before they were Regents of warring realms, Ilyas and Zavian had been children of the high courts. They had grown up side-by-side: Ilyas, the heir to the clouds, and Zavian, heir to the sun. They were mischief-makers who haunted the palace rafters, and best friends who once promised to rule as brothers. Of course, they had not spoken a word since the day Zavian was cast into the dark. The Sky Court would not allow it. Zavian would not allow it.

Yet, since Ilyas had ascended his throne, the High Halls of Sky had been enchanted with a peculiar magic. When the sun was nearest, the stone glowed white and gold, as they always had; but as the night approached, the Halls now shifted into deep indigo instead.
Some called it flair. Others, closer to the two Regents, however, knew it as a silent signal to a missing friend – a way of keeping the shadows nearby when the world above had tried to erase them.

Ilyas turned his gaze now to the golden army and delivered the crushing, inevitable verdict he had recalculated at his observatory time, and time again.
Possibility after possibility analysed with obsession; and only one final conclusion to be drawn from it all.

"Unfortunately," Ilyas' calm voice echoed across the blasted earth, his eyes still bearing no colour at all, "peace exists in only one singular iteration of the future.”
He turned his lifeless gaze directly to Radiance’s Regent.
“The one where you do not."

Indeed, Ilyas had looked down the many corridors of time. And, in every single reality where the Court of Radiance was allowed to survive this day, the ending was – would only ever be – an apocalyptic end to the Realms and to the mortal world alike.

Ilyas began to raise his hands. The golden cuffs on his wrists accelerated until the friction ignited the air. The wild winds began to concentrate their energy around Sky’s High Regent as his eyes closed shut, circulating furiously until he was untouchable, unmovable – an entity of the elements showing clearly its nature.

Many tried to stop him. Not only those who stood with Radiance, but the High Regent of Shadow, the High Regent of Pearl. Some of Ember’s higher-ranking sentinels.
Any attempt to do so was entirely in vain. The Sky Court had already calculated it all, of course.
All that was left was to watch. And to wait.

The violent thrashing of the Old Forest was the first to quiet. Then the sea.
High above, the spinning cuffs on Ilyas' wrists stilled. The winds came to a stop.
It was as though the Realms finally remembered calm.

The fae of the Court of Radiance did not meet a gruesome end. Though, perhaps it was more terrible than that.
One by one, as the world around them stilled – some trying to run, others simply looking up in fear – the Radiance fae simply… dissipated.
There were no final words. No opportunities for remorse. No squarely won fight.
The Sky Court played with the fates. With time itself. Whatever Ilyas had done, none but him could undo. Even that would be most unlikely.

Such feats, however, are not without their toll on the Sky fae, and such a significant use of time magic is said to deplete their power to very little, if not to nothing at all.
Ilyas, once among the most powerful High Regents of the Realms, had collapsed to the ground immediately after the Unmaking. And the Archivists are not certain his power would ever return in the same way. Indeed, the Sky Court remains steadfastly apart from courtly life enough that there is scarcely any opportunity to assess the matter.

Alas, the Radiance Court met an unkind end.
But the Realms were still once again, and it seemed as though peace was closer than it had ever come before.

The Starfallen Pact

The following morning, the High Council of the five surviving Courts convened beneath a silence so thick that even the concept of grief felt too vulgar, too wrong, to voice aloud. They did not speak like victors, despite the apparent triumph over their common enemy. No. Instead, they sat with the hollow eyes of people who had looked into the darkest abyss. And seen the very worst of it.

When they did speak, they spoke with bite. With fear, even. With concern for their realms, and the mortal ones. What precedent had been set – and was it a precedent they were willing to stand behind? How would they, as the High Council, ensure this would never occur again?

Ultimately, out of exhaustion; out of necessity, they forged the Starfallen Pact.

No Court would ever have agreed to surrender its fragment of the Starfallen. Instead, they conceived of a Veil: a vast unseen barrier, set between the fae and mortal realms, into which a portion of each shard’s living force would be woven. In this way, the fragments remained in the keeping of their Courts, but what was considered excessive power was bound into a shared structure so that no one Court could command with such force alone. In this way, the Courts would ensure that never again would the failures of the fae spill so easily into the human world.

Yet the Veil could not hold forever in a single making. In time, its strength would wane. It thinned, grew weak, and became porous, until what had once stood high and distant began to sink nearer the earth. And so it was that, every hundred years, the Veil fell close enough to require ‘reforging’ — a renewal from the fragments before the boundary between realms could fail entirely.

This Falling of the Veil was, and remains, the most dangerous of times. For as the Veil weakens, the power drawn from the fragments returns to them in greater measure. The Courts, in turn, stand at their most powerful — and their most unstable.
Old rivalries sharpen. Old ambitions stir. And for a brief span, the balance the Veil was made to enforce hangs by its thinnest thread.

And so, limping and bleeding, the Courts survived.
The High Regents smile thinly at one another, bow at the waist, and pen elegantly worded invitations to century galas.
And you, Emissary, find yourself attending a Falling of the Veil soon to come, we can only assume.

We trust you understand what that entails.

The Starborn Codex: Entry VII

The borders of Bloom were never unguarded, but at night they seemed to press inward, as if the grove itself were listening harder. White jasmine climbed thick through the hedges, and the air was heavy with damp earth, crushed mint, and the sweetness of lilies turning rich in the dark. Thorn-vines shifted along the threshold in small, uneasy movements that no wind could quite account for, as if the Gardens themselves continued to change their minds about something.

At the edge of the living boundary stood a man in white and gold, one hand fixed on a young Vine-Keeper’s shoulder, the other holding a golden knife to his throat.

He had chosen well – the man he threatened now was no soldier. He wore Bloom green, unarmoured; and the fine winding marks at his wrists confirmed what he was: one of the Keepers sent to the lower crossings to listen to Bloom’s networks for signs of trouble or trespass. If wards stirred, strange magic touched the vines, or uninvited guests arrived, it was the Vine-Keepers who felt it first and carried warning back to the Court.

The knife was too delicate for the work it had been brought to do. Moonlight ran along its edge, and a bead of blood had gathered where it rested against the Keeper’s skin. The man in gold looked almost at ease – a stark contrast to the trembling body before him.

The branches behind them rustled.

“How predictable,” came a voice from the dark. “Gold, a knife, and someone smaller than you.”

The man smiled before he turned.

“Still playing in the dirt, Zavian?”

The High Regent of Shadow stepped out from the trees without any visible haste, black-clad, empty-handed, moonlight catching the hard line of his cheek and little else. His gaze went first to the knife, then to the hand that held it, and only after that to the man himself.

“Still polishing rot until it shines, Amadeus.” He made the name sound unclean.

A short laugh answered him. “Sentimental as ever, little prince. I’d have thought your father burnt that out of you before he threw you away.”

Zavian’s face did not change.

Amadeus’ smile sharpened, his knife still steady at the Keeper’s neck. He went on.

“Careful, Zavian. Last time you chose the wrong throat to pity, it cost you everything.”

“Everything?” Zavian repeated. He let his gaze travel once over the commander’s goldwork, the bright knife, the polished vanity of him.

“Yes,” he said, with a glance at the commander’s richly worked armour. “I wake each day bereft of gold drapery, ornamental nonsense, and the desperate need to impress furniture. It has marked me deeply.”

Above them, the darkness over the grove stirred. One raven swept across the narrow break in the canopy. Then another. Then three more, rising from different branches and circling higher, black wings cutting soundless turns through the moonlit dark.

Zavian’s gaze followed them upward.

“They say ravens only circle when there is prey nearby.”
His eyes lowered to Amadeus once more.
“Ravens are far smarter than they’re given credit for. Rarely mistaken.”
A step closer.

“Let him go, Amadeus.”

The Radiance Commander tilted his head, the knife still resting at the Vine-Keeper’s throat. “Or?”

“Or,” Zavian lifted one hand, “I let you find out how poorly that question has ended before.”

It was a small movement. No flourish. No visible strain. Only his fingers rising slightly, as though he were reaching for something that had already begun to loosen into his grip.

Amadeus’ expression changed at once. His jaw tightened.

“Parlour tricks,” he said too quickly, trying to muster something like a smile between ragged breaths.

“Mm.” Zavian’s hand did not move now. He tilted his head, eyes locked on the Commander, as though studying the map of the mind before him. “You always did enjoy the suffering of others. Tell me, Amadeus — does your taste survive becoming the entertainment?”

A slight twist of the hand.

Whatever answer Amadeus meant to give died before it found his mouth.

The smile left him first. Then the colour. His eyes widened, not with pain yet, but with the bare, immediate terror of a man who has seen something bearing down on him and understood, too late, that it would not stop. The knife slipped from his hand and vanished into Bloom’s roots.

He remained upright for the length of a breath, staring at Zavian until his knees gave way and he collapsed to the ground, the moonlight glinting on his gold armour.

The Vine-Keeper stumbled back with a ragged sound and clapped a hand to his throat.

“You should go,” Zavian said quietly, still looking at the Commander.
“Are you well enough to make it back?”

“I can’t. My station – I’ll–”

Zavian crossed the distance between them in two swift strides, the Vine-Keeper lunging backward almost instinctively. He caught the Keeper’s jaw and turned it to study the wound in the moonlight. A simple blade wound. No searing scar or burning skin. Nothing he wouldn’t survive.

The Keeper looked at him strangely then, as though the stories he’d heard of the cruel, remorseless High Regent of Shadow had left this part out.

“Mila will accompany you,” Zavian said, already turning away.
“The Shadow Court will take the watch from here.”

Just as he’d finished the sentence, one of the ravens circling above swooped down to Zavian’s shoulder, feathers settling with a quiet rustle.
“See him back to the gates,” Zavian said.
And with that, the raven took flight for the Bloom Court’s entrance, a weary Vine-Keeper in tow.

At Zavian’s feet, Amadeus still knelt in the wet earth, breath broken, fingers digging uselessly into the roots as though Bloom’s borders might return what had just been taken from him. He looked down at him with a calm that was almost worse than hatred.

“All that gold,” he said softly, “and nothing worth preserving.”

Above them, the ravens kept circling until, at some signal no one else in the grove would have known how to read, they broke apart.
One turned east, toward Ember. Another cut inward, toward the heart of Bloom.

It had begun.

The Court of Radiance had turned a corner, and the Courts were about to enter into a war that would tear across the Starborn and mortal realms alike, only to end in pact, erasure, and the uneasy return of peace.

The Starborn Codex: Entry VI

On Roots, Routes and Lines Crossed

If Ember’s silence unsettled the Realms, Bloom’s response would unsettle them even further.

The Court of Bloom had always possessed an intimacy with the living world that others, in their vanity, too often mistook for softness. Root, branch, flower, thorn – these were not merely ornaments, but sharpened instruments of perception. Bloom’s oldest vines wound not only through grove and garden, but beneath roads, along old stone, and through the seams where one Court’s dominion gave way to another.

Through these subterranean veins, Creirlys, the High Regent of Bloom, felt the vibration of a jagged heat at the threshold of every recent incursion within the Realms. It was a clinical brightness — a light that tasted of scorched ozone rather than Ember’s flickering hearth.

The Bloom Court did not issue warnings. First: old wards moved silently into the lower crossings of Ember’s lands. Ancient. Protective.
In a second swift step, the Bloom Court withdrew from all trade with the Court of Radiance.

The declaration was made in the language of season and restoration, rather than defiance. Storehouses were shuttered. Carriages redirected. Requests for Bloom’s herbs, resins, and ritual flowers were answered with courtesy and denied all the same. Purchases long made from Radiance’s workshops – solar-glass, refined goldwork, and ceremonial metals – were likewise returned with no less politeness and no less finality.

This was no small discourtesy.
The move was read, correctly, as a line drawn.
And the Court of Pearl – until now one of Bloom’s closest allies – was the first to begin questioning the consequences.

On Tides and Oath

To the Pearl Court, diplomacy was tide-work: the slow, relentless shaping of consequence. Kaius, the High Regent, found leverage in precise implication, placing silence or careful words where others used threat. In the wake of Bloom’s withdrawal, he sought a private audience with the Court of Radiance.

The records of that exchange remain fractured.
However, this much is preserved: Kaius questioned Radiance’s intent toward Bloom, given their stance — even when dressed in all manner of niceties — had been made clear.

Radiance answered with a calm that bordered on sterile.
They assured the High Regent that Bloom had nothing to fear. No hand would be raised, and no grievance would widen into rupture. These were reasonable words, crafted for those satisfied by the appearance of peace.

Kaius did not thank them.

“Then set it to oath,” he said.

The air in the chamber altered. The Radiance Commander offered a shadow of a smile.
“Such formalities are unnecessary between courts still committed to civility, Kaius.”

“Civility has never yet been improved by fearing witness,” he returned.

A thin pause stretched through the room.
With performance-level patience, Radiance agreed.
They swore an oath — sincere or otherwise — that the Court of Bloom would see no harm by their hand.

The record does not hold details of the remainder of that meeting, but those in witness have recounted that Kaius left the audience a bloodless pale; a strained distance in his demeanour, and a certain rigidity to his presence that was most unusual for a Regent that ruled the shifting currents.

Soon after, a message signed by the High Regent reached Bloom’s borders:
Border-Green. Before sunset. Come alone.


On Friendship and False Alliance

The High Regent of Bloom occupied the Border-Green with the stillness of an ancient monument. While the consciousness of the wood is a gift shared by all her kin, Creirlys stands as its most potent manifestation. Her presence held the humid gravity of a thousand summers, smelling of nectar-heavy jasmine and the intoxicating perfume of crushed lilies. Every root seemed to acknowledge her as the primary frequency of the forest. Indeed, to look upon her was to see the endurance of the land itself — patient, rooted, and utterly sovereign.

She waited for the scent of salt, for the rhythmic pulse of the tide that typically accompanied the High Regent of Pearl.
The air, however, remained stubbornly terrestrial, and an altogether different force waited in the grove instead.

They had arrived before sunset fully died, their guard-contingent large enough to signal a formal shift in diplomacy. Their brilliance caught in the branches in pale, surgical lines.

“Creirlys herself,” a voice observed coldly.
“Your ally keeps… unusual company,” the Radiance Commander smirked.

Whether this was aimed at Creirlys’ trust, her pride, or the wider possibility of misunderstanding, the effect was immediate. Even before Kaius appeared, suspicion had been given just enough shape to live.

Almost by instinct alone, the High Regent of Bloom raised a hedge-wall tall enough to tower over the Court’s highest peaks. The growth was near-instantaneous. Thorn and briar surged from dark earth in a spiralling sweep, weaving themselves into a living barricade so dense that even light was forced to break upon it in splinters. White blossom opened among black thorn as though the land wished, even then, to remind its enemies that beauty and warning are not always separable things.

“You are rather brave to wander into so wild a dominion,” Creirlys said, her voice low and lilting, her hand resting lightly on a newly risen vine. “The Gardens – while gentle, yes – have good use for your light, should they wish to take it.”

Just as the Radiance Commander’s hand shifted toward their hilt, the scent of sun-scorched stone vanished beneath a fragrance that was much more familiar to Creirlys. Comforting, even.
The thick vines in her grip – stained with obsidian sap – shuddered, and their predatory pulse slowed, just a fraction.

Kaius stepped through the briars as if they were silk. A veil of sea-mist clung to his boots, extinguishing the jagged Radiance light wherever he walked and acting as a silent, heavy witness to the tension held within the wood. Two powers occupying the clearing in a vitreous truce.

For a fractured heartbeat, the cool mask of Creirlys’ expression softened.
A single, silent recognition.
The Commander turned toward the High Regent of Pearl with a satisfaction too smooth to be mistaken for chance.

“You are late, High Regent.”
“The tide is rather indifferent to haste, Commander,” Kaius returned, his voice flat, and cold.

Finally, his gaze drifted toward Creirlys.

The look held the crushing weight of centuries, though it was devoid of any of the warmth they had shared since the first era. Instead, Kaius observed Bloom’s Regent with the clinical detachment of a navigator charting a distant, retreating shore.

“Do not waste your reputation here,” he said. The words cut through the grove like a winter gale.
“On the Bloom?” the Commander asked.
“On pettiness,” Kaius corrected. He turned his back on her, a sharp, final motion that left his spine exposed to her thorns.

“The High Regent is impassioned. But an overgrown garden is a poor investment for the Light. Let us leave her to her thickets.”

Radiance did not press further. The Commander signaled a withdrawal, the golden light of their armour retreating into the trees.

Kaius followed. Beneath his sleeve, a silver mark bit into his skin like a ring of ice.
He disappeared into the rising fog, taking the scent of salt, and the memory of safety, with him.

Behind him, the hedge-wall did not fall, but the obsidian sap ceased its rhythmic pulse. The silence left in his wake was a void where centuries of loyalty had once lived.

Across the Realms, the reading remained the same.
The Pearl Court had committed the ultimate treachery. History would record this as the moment a sister-court was abandoned to the dark.

As the gold of Radiance vanished beyond the tree-line, the clearing grew cold.
The threat remained.
It had merely chosen night.

Recovered Fragment

From the Tide-Ledger – Unsealed

He did not make the oath before witness.
This, perhaps, was the point.

The chamber stood below the tidal hall, where the sea entered only as sound and pressure – a slow pulse behind pearlstone walls. No courtiers were present. No attendants. Only a basin of still water set into the floor, black in the low light, and the Regent standing over it with one hand braced against the carved edge as though the stone itself might steady what thought could not.

He had already given his word to Radiance. Marked his allegiance with their cause in that meeting.
Not an oath – Radiance was too arrogant to require it – but word enough that he would have to follow through.

Shame washed over him, though he knew it was a necessary sacrifice – someone would need to control Radiance; Radiance who seemed ever more volatile as the days went on.

Border-Green. Before sunset. Come alone.

It was not the sort of note Kaius was known to write. Too abrupt. Too bare.
There had been no room for elegance, no room for explanation – only warning, location, urgency.
The time Bloom had to act, however, was even scarcer than the words strewn across the parchment, the High Regent surmised.

He had delayed this final meeting longer than prudence allowed.

He looked into the water.
It reflected neither ceiling nor face, only darkness worked through with a faint and shifting silver, as though the seas below were listening.

He closed his eyes once, and with the steadiness of someone choosing a wound, because the alternative is worse – he spoke.

“If by my hand, my silence, my counsel, my false nearness, or my seeming accord, I should risk to bring any harm upon the Court of Bloom—”

The water rose.
It lifted in a narrow column from the basin’s black centre, suspended in perfect, listening stillness.

His throat tightened only then.

“Let the tides go deaf to my call. Let the salt leave my blood and the sea become a stranger. Let me walk the shores of my own kingdom and feel nothing but the dry, hollow wind.”

The silver in the water flashed.
The column collapsed.
Water struck the basin like a blade laid flat.

There are oaths that bind action.
There are oaths that bind truth.
And there are oaths, rarer and more inexorable, that bind consequence directly to the body that speaks them.

This was the third kind.

Kaius opened his eyes and looked down.
A mark had appeared around his wrist: faint as moonlight through water, but unmistakable. A thin ring, luminous beneath the skin, circling once like the memory of a shackle.

He stared at it without surprise.
“So it is,” he murmured, though whether to himself or to the sea, the record does not tell us.

Only then did he look toward the chamber entrance, where the last of the evening light was failing.

He was late.

Not by much.
Not by any measure history would later deem worth the ruin it caused.
But late enough.

Late enough for Radiance to reach Border-Green before him.
Late enough for Bloom’s Regent to find blinding light where she had expected a friend.
Late enough that he would not be able to explain.

He drew his sleeve back over the mark.

For one suspended moment, before he turned toward Border-Green, he allowed himself the smallest cruelty of memory: the recollection of Creirlys looking at him with fondness, before appearances might teach her otherwise.

“Curse me, Creirlys,” he half-whispered.
“Rule your forest and burn my memory, so long as you are still standing to do it.”

And at that he turned, and went to meet the role history would mistake for treachery.

The Starborn Codex: Entry V

On Silence, and the Cost of It

Ember did not accuse.

This is often misunderstood.

They did not summon the Courts to demand justice.
They did not reveal the names they suspected.
They did not lay their dead before the Realms and ask for recompense.

They closed their gates, reforged their wards, and denied access to any outside of their closest circles.

In that restraint, the other Courts read many things.
The fae, by nature, are not inclined toward trust.

Sky read calculation.
Pearl read withdrawal as imbalance.
Bloom, listening first for injury rather than accusation, read grief – rooted deeply enough to grow into something quite different.

The High Regent of Shadow’s instinct for discernment, on the other hand, prevented him from taking Ember’s actions at face value.

For the centuries he had known the Ember High Regent, she had never been one to withdraw.
Ever proud.
Ever the spectacle (whether regarded with admiration or disdain, the Archivists cannot say).
Ever the flame set deliberately in the open.

The Archivists record this not to defend the Ember Court, but to clarify what followed.

Because silence, in an age of power, is never empty.
It is filled by interpretation.

Emissaries were dispatched.
Questions were asked that sounded like concern and landed like scrutiny:
Why the armour?
The tightened borders?
The refusal to convene and discuss?

Ember answered only what was safe to answer:

That there had been an incident.
That it was contained.
That their preparations were precautionary.

The High Regent, still bearing wounds that burned strangely beneath steel, did not take council with the Realms.
She took it with her forge.
And forged answers of a different kind.

The Court whose name would later be erased did not retreat.
Instead, they adapted. Denied Ember’s shard of the Starfallen, and knowing Ember had no way of proving the attempt was theirs in the first place, they turned their doctrine outward.

If unity could not be taken in a single stroke, it would be engineered slowly.

They whispered into Sky’s halls of altitude and oversight.
Into Bloom’s groves of abundance hoarded unfairly.
Into Pearl’s depths of currents disrupted by fire and forge.

Not lies.
Never lies.

Truths, sharpened just enough to wound.

They spoke of imbalance as inevitability.
Of fragments drawn naturally toward one another.
Of what might occur if the combined power of the Starfallen were to ever fall into the hands of a single Court acting in bad faith.

And with this, they asked a question that echoed farther than any blade:

If Ember prepares for war… whom do they expect to fight?

Sky convened councils.
Bloom convened circles.
Pearl sent tides of quiet warning.

The Shadow Court chose silence.
For now.

From the Halls, it appeared that each Court believed itself an observer.
That restraint, mutually held, would prevent escalation.

In truth, each Regent had formed their own reading of the events, and adjusted their conduct accordingly.

Not all actions were visible.

And not all Regents watched from a distance.

Archivists’ Aside — Recovered Fragment

(Uncatalogued. Source disputed.)

They met where fire thins into shadow.
At the liminal threshold where the stone of Ember – usually warm to the touch – cooled beneath the palm, and the dark halls of Shadow caught the amber flicker of flame.

The High Regent of Ember did not wear her armour.
This alone would later be remarked upon.

“You’re trespassing,” she said, her back to him. The heat from the forge made the air between them ripple, turning his silhouette into a jagged, shifting thing.

“The High Council thinks I am home counting shadows, Ember. Let them. I’d rather be here, watching you burn your pride to ash than listening to them measure you for a shroud.”

He took a slow step forward, the darkness of his robes swallowing the orange glow of the embers. “Besides, when they said your borders were closed,” he added, his voice laced with faint amusement, “I assumed there was still an open invitation via the routes the light has not bothered to find. Let alone your…”

A smirk.

“…guards.”

“I didn’t send for you,” she returned, her voice as dry as tinder.

“You didn’t need to.” He flickered his eyes toward the obsidian mirrors that lined the stone walls around them.
“Some signals,” he said, already looking back at her, “reach farther than pride might like.”

For a time, they stood without speaking, the silence punctuated only by the low, rhythmic hiss of the deep-mountain fire.

Two souls who had known one another for centuries, and not stood face to face for just as long.

“They came for it,” Ember said at last, as though naming it cost her less than continuing not to. “And not as allies this time.”

“Radiance,” he said, the name landing like a curse.
It was not a question.

Ember’s jaw tightened. For a moment, the firelight caught the scar that ran from the crown of her shoulder to the hollow of her throat.
It was deep – still a raw, angry red. The kind of wound that should not have been survived.

Shadow’s voice was a low, dangerous rasp. “And when you refused to be aligned?”

His eyes flickered once across the wound.
At the choice beneath it.
He did not need an answer.

“You believe they will try again,” he murmured through clenched teeth.

The answer came quickly.
“I believe they already are.”

Ember exhaled, slow and controlled – the breath of someone who would rather be thought proud than afraid.
“I cannot accuse them,” she said. “Not yet. And not without proof.”
Shadow said nothing, though his jaw tightened visibly.

“And I cannot prepare openly,” Ember added, “without appearing to confirm what they already claim.”
“Doing as much without evidence of their involvement will only strengthen their narrative.”

She finally turned to meet his gaze.
“We need the eyes – the discretion – of the Shadow Court.”

A silence stretched between them. Shadow studied her, the cold logic of the situation settling into place.

He took a step closer, his voice dropping to a dangerous soft.
“You want me to stand by and say nothing while you burn? Do you think me so enamoured with the dark that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel the heat?”
Ember didn't flinch. She met his gaze with a clarity that was almost violent.

“I am asking for your oath,” she said. “And if you betray it–”
“This may surprise you,” he cut in dryly, “but I take no pleasure in watching the Realms speculate on your–”

“Zavian.”

His name cut through the air, stopping him cold. It was a name that felt unfamiliar on her tongue – heavy and ancient, despite being one she had known for half her life. The shadow-smoke at his feet stilled. Whatever crossed his face, he buried at once.

“Your word,” she repeated, her voice a low command. “For the Realms.”

The High Regent of Shadow rolled his neck once, the gesture infuriatingly casual. He looked at her then – really looked at her – and a faint, ghost of a smirk finally pulled at the corner of his mouth.

“Your pride has always been your most expensive habit, Tanwen,” he said, his tone almost light.
“If you insist on being the martyr, allow me one small concession, will you?”

His eyes flickered across the wound one last time.

“I’ll send someone,” he added. “You’ll recognise them. Try not to set them on fire.”

He didn’t wait for her refusal. The shadows in the corners of the chamber simply surged forward, folding over him until the darkness and the man were one and the same.
Then, the darkness thinning slowly, he was gone.

Tanwen stood alone in the heat of her forge. But the air where he had stood was still laced with the soft scent of winter.

And on the stone floor, catching the amber light of the fire, something remained.

The Starborn Codex: Entry IV — Continued

The Fracture of Flame

The Court responsible would later be erased from formal record.

Their name struck from the ledgers.
Their sigils broken.
Their lineage scattered into dust and quiet bloodlines.

This is why many sanctioned histories now speak of five fragments and five Courts, as though the world had always been so tidy. It was not.
There were six.

They were a Court who revered the sun as the purest expression of power.
Who taught that power was proof of worth.
That brilliance was not merely guidance, but mandate.

To them, the Starfallen had not merely been divided – it had been misplaced.

Six fragments, scattered like careless seeds.
Power diluted by distance.
Authority weakened by restraint.

They believed the shards were meant to be gathered.
Unified.
Returned to a single will bright enough to command them.

Their first efforts were not violent.

They sent envoys beneath banners of warmth and shared purpose.
They spoke of balance.
Of inevitability.
Of a future where the Realms would no longer circle one another in suspicion, but stand aligned beneath a single, radiant order.

Most Regents declined.

Ember, in its pride, did not answer at all.

And so the doctrine sharpened.

If the fragments could not be persuaded to unite…
Then they would be proven capable of answering to another.

Their gaze turned to the Court of forge and flame.
To the shard that burned most fiercely in its natural state.
To the power that shaped steel, war, and boundary alike.

They did not announce their intent.
They are far too clever to give any warning.

Instead, they infiltrated.

Scholars first.
Observers.
Those who claimed reverence for the craft.

They mapped the resonance of the forges.
Measured the cadence of the shard’s pulse beneath the mountain.
Listened for what answered when another fragment was brought close.

And then, in a single night – recorded only as fractures in the deep ledgers of Ember’s vaults – the attempt became something more.

What began as influence became incursion.
What began as presence became force.

They did not come in open ranks.
But they did come prepared.

There are gaps in the record here. Pages removed. Names burned away.

The Archivists can say only this with certainty:

Steel was drawn.
Fire answered.
Blood was spilled.
And many were lost.

They did not succeed in taking the shard.
But they came close enough to leave a wound the Court of Ember still carries.

Three sentinels did not rise again.
And Ember’s High Regent, once known to walk unarmoured among her people, was carried from the inner chamber with wounds no salve could swiftly mend.

It was the first time a Regent had bled by the hand of another Court.

From that night onward, Ember changed.

Once known for their pride, splendour, and a courage so open it had never imagined being tested – Ember now learned caution.

Armour was no longer ceremonial.
Wards were no longer symbolic.
Borders were no longer matters of courtesy.

The Court of flame began to prepare not for possibility, but for inevitability.

The other Courts noticed, in time.

They called it severity.
They called it overreach.
They called it unnecessary posturing.

They wondered why Ember no longer removed her armour.
Why its High Regent no longer stood unguarded before friend or emissary – or only very few.
Why the Court of flame remained prepared for battle even in age of supposed peace.

You may wonder why, until this day, Ember do not lay down their shields.

Now, Emissary, you understand it.

The Starborn Codex: Entry III

For a time, it seemed there was peace.

From a distance, the Realms held their shape. Each Court tended its own domain. Each Regent guarded their piece of the Starfallen. Trade moved quietly across the borders. Messengers passed between Courts without incident.

Those of us who kept record from the edges noted the harmony not because anyone declared it, but because nothing had yet begun to pull against it.

Even so, the differences were already there. Not in the Starfallen itself – not in any way that could be cleanly named, at least – but in the language that gathered around it.

Some Regents spoke of their shard as a gift, freely given. Others treated it as something that answered only to discipline, or intent. A few spoke as though the Starfallen rewarded patience above all.

At first, such distinctions appeared harmless. Mere philosophies, perhaps; differences of outlook more than true division. But repeated often enough, belief begins to harden. And where power is concerned, such distinctions seldom remain benign.

The Courts began to weigh one another.
Comparisons surfaced. Then judgments.

And while the Realms still appeared harmonious, the Archivists marked a subtle change in the language of the Courts. Words like balance. Entitlement. Fairness – now spoken with an edge.

Still, there was no war.
Only the growing sense that peace was beginning to feel more like a wish; and, increasingly, that nobody was there to ensure it was granted.

Entry IV — Fragment (Unsealed)

It is difficult to say when the line was first crossed.

No single moment can be named. No one breach that the Realms could later point to and say: there. There was the beginning.

In the years before the war, the Archivists can identify only a sequence of events, each ordinary enough to excuse on its own.

A trace of one Court in a place it had no cause to be.
A ritual watched too closely.
A shard of the Starfallen regarded not with reverence, but with… want.

For a time, such things may be overlooked. But oblivion is a choice, and never a merciful one for long. What is refused in the name of peace, refused in the name of restraint, does not vanish. It gathers. It waits. And in time, it makes itself felt.

So too here.

What the Regents would not see soon became impossible to ignore.

And from then on, harmony belonged only to memory.

The Starborn Codex: Entry II

The Star That Broke the Sky

It did not fall quietly.

The oldest texts claim the heavens split with a sound like a thousand bells shattering at once, light tearing the dark from horizon to horizon. Some thought it the end of their world. Others knew better.

A single star cracked loose from the firmament and plunged toward the earth, burning a path through cloud and ether. When it struck, it did not bury itself. Rather… It burst.

We call it the Starfallen now, though it was never truly a single thing.

In its death, it made many.

Six great fragments tore away from the impact, arcing outwards, each veined with a different breed of power. They streaked across land and sea like meteors that refused to go out, embedding themselves in places the world would never again quite recover from.

Five are named easily in the sanctioned histories:

• In the mountains that would one day blaze with Ember’s forges.

• In the high, wind-scoured peaks that would become Sky’s dominion.

• In ravines the night would not abandon, where Shadow would one day make its halls.

• In gardens and forests so lush they seemed to hum, where Bloom would weave abundance.

• In the deep places, beneath moonlit waves and shifting tides, where Pearl would claim the depths.

The sixth is less often spoken of now. But history, once wounded deeply enough, does not forget cleanly. The scars it left remain in the Realms still.

Around each fragment, the land itself changed.

Fire burned hotter and cleaner in Ember’s domain, gold and steel bending like silk beneath the hammers. In Sky’s reach, the air grew thinner, clearer; thought itself seemed to sharpen. Shadow’s shard bled night into stone, carving hollows where light hesitated, and secrets learned to breathe. Bloom’s fragment fed root and vine until the earth erupted in colour. Pearl’s piece sunk into seabed and shell, and the tides above shifted as though answering a call.

The power did not create the Courts.

The Courts formed because power always demands a shape to live in.

And so, over time, Regents rose around each fragment – chosen by blood, or brilliance, or simple audacity – to tend, guard, and wield what the Starfallen had left behind.

For a time, there was peace.

Or something that looked like it, from far enough away.

The Starborn Codex: Entry I

The Night the Star Fell, and the War That Followed

Archivists’ Note
The Regents do not agree on how this began.

Ask Ember, and they will swear it was destiny.
Ask Bloom, and they will call it tragedy.
Ask Sky, and you will receive a lecture on inevitability.
Pearl will lower their gaze and speak of tides and consequence.
Shadow will smile, and say nothing at all.

We, however, are not permitted the luxury of myth.

We are the Archivists of the Realms.
Our duty is simple, and impossible:

To record what truly was.
Even when the Courts prefer what is beautiful instead.

What follows is the closest thing to truth we can offer about the Starfallen, the war it brought, and the pact that binds every Regent to the Veil you now walk beneath.

Some names have been lost.
Others have been erased on purpose.

But the scars remain, and scars are a kind of record too.