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.