Eldritch¶
"The Eldritch hate: Kalari and Kalari priests that locked them away. Sancturi gods and other Einar which are just an offshoot of the Kalari and responsible for the death of their patron Tamariel. Devils and Demons that are ethereal destroyers." — campaign notes on the Eldritch (S147)
The Eldritch were the foremost masters of Ethereal magic in the Age of Titans, the chosen servants of the High God Tamariel, and the people the gods struck down to make room for the Elves. Bound by covenants that could not be broken, they could not be killed outright, so their spirits were shattered into soulcruxes and scattered across the planes. In the Fifth Age a few have pieced themselves together, most of them mad, and some have carved out kingdoms where "all other races live in servitude."
Nature and magic¶
The newest cosmology holds the Eldritch to be "ascended Primordial Elementals," beings "of immense psychic power that left most of their elemental nature and form behind." With the Elementals they are "the only true natives of Terrun."
Their art is Elder Magic, the Ethereal magic whose practitioners "often consider this the only true magic and that all other magic is a weak derivative of it." The Eldritch favoured the patient, prepared spellcraft of the Magus, "the most popular form of spellcraft for the Eldritch before their fall," whose spells "excel in degrees of complexity beyond the imagination of many other types of Spellcraft"; among mortal casters, only the most disciplined magi cast spells "that can rival Eldritch and Draconic spell complexity." The Druids "were originally an order of Eldritch which had developed their own form of Spellcraft separate from the other Eldritch Magi," and theirs is one of the few Eldritch disciplines that survived the fall, spread to the younger races.
An Eldritch holds its power through covenant, like a god or an Ascendant. "The Eldritch have Covenants with the Throne of Law and Astral Shards. These cannot not be broken by any known means." Their souls reincarnate quickly, in "a matter of months," which made them nearly impossible to exterminate by ordinary war.
Society¶
Eldritch surnames are built from caste and clan, "in order of power/honor/deference." A prefix of Nar marks a member of the ArchConclave, "the Eldritch ruling body of Magi"; Vaj a battle magus or renowned magus; Xal a commander, general or governor; Nae a knight, watchman, warrior or soldier; Ral a builder, creator or worker. No prefix means casteless: "either a child, low-magic commoner, outcast or infirm/retired." The ArchConclave was headed in ancient times by Three Grand Sages, of whom Phaendar Nar'Vizerai was one. At least one Eldritch, Quorvain, "left the council" because he "felt that the rabble of the world were capable of self-governance."
History¶
In the Age of Titans, Ethereal magic "became a prevalent form of magic during this age and its most prolific practitioners were the Eldritch, who were the chosen of the High God Tamariel." They were "the Keepers assigned by the Elder Gods," and when the Dwarrow were rediscovered in the deep, the Eldritch were tasked with subjugating them under the law that exiled elementals from the Material Plane. The Eldritch-Dwarrow Wars that followed "raged for 1000s of years."
Then the gods turned. The Eldritch were "still aligned with the Elder Gods and too powerful for the Younger God's liking," and the younger gods "now wished to replace the Eldritch... with the more easily managed Elves," whose Divine and Arcane magics were "more limited, and more controllable." A civil war broke out among the Eldritch between Old God loyalists and Younger God sympathizers; the loyalists won, and were isolated. The early dwarves, armed with Dwarrow technology, "used the Dwarrow technology with great efficiency to wipe out the now isolated Eldritch." Demonologists call this the Eldritch Succession Wars, "where the Younger Gods and their allies were exterminating the Eldritch and replacing them with Elves," and note that "the Succession War was not just about killing Eldritch physically, but destroying or imprisoning their souls as well." The first verified Demons were encountered during it. By the end of the Age of Demons "Eldritch and many other Ethereal Magic users lost favor with the Gods and were driven extinct."
The newest cosmology reads the quarrel differently: the Eldritch were "allied with the Einar during the Primordial War," and "their relations soured after the construction of the Throne of Law, which redirected the energies of Terrun into a new Astral Realm under the control of the Einar. The Eldritch resisted this transition as the betrayal and direct theft of their greatest source of power that it was."
Imprisonment and the soulcruxes¶
Because their covenants could not be broken, "when defeated by the younger gods, they were imprisoned. Generally, their spirits were shattered and split into pieces which where then forged into holy Kalari Relics and sent to various locations. This was very effective and very very few Eldritch have escaped their prisons." These relics are the soulcruxes, also called soul anchors; an Eldritch may have eight or twelve, and must gather enough of them to take physical form. "It turns out that the Kalari only kept the soulcruxes of the most benevolent and potentially useful Eldritch as holy relics. The remainder were scattered and buried across the material and astral planes." The Kalari also built at least one "ancient Eldritch Prison." A soulcrux may be "a flat warm black metallic triangle," a golden thurible, a granite brazier; one found in a Sancturi temple was "one of the 12."
The sources agree that something worse than imprisonment befell most of them. "It appear at least on the surface that something permanent happened to the majority of Eldritch souls," a disparity between the known population and the souls that remain, which some scholars lay to demons built by the Einar "to permanently dispose of Eldritch souls," and others to migration to other worlds.
The Fifth Age¶
"Only a small number of the Eldritch are free. Their Soulcruxes (prisons) were extraordinarily well hidden and piecing together enough for an Eldritch to take form has proven difficult." Some "exist as Eldritch ghosts, with but a shadow of their power (which by mortal standards is still considerable)." Those who have returned fall into kinds: Eldritch Horrors, "corrupted and possessed Eldritch," which the Archdemon Asmodeus covets as "uber powerful minions with astral connections"; Ragers, "half-mad, ego driven Eldritch seeking to restore/revenge themselves by force"; and the Eldritch proper, who "seek a more nuanced ascension" and "have banded together into a few separate factions." Of these the Vizerai, around Phaendar and Allannia Vaj'zaelin, are the best described; Luiranar Xal'Vanala, the Stag Giant, "frees all his brothers and sisters with no grand plans or schemes for them." "The vast majority of Eldritch are insane after many millennia of confinement."
Their fragments move through the world as relics. The Brotherhood of the Sun, a society of Kalari relic hunters, is "heavily infiltrated" by Eldritch agents "looking for Eldritch soul anchors," alongside Asmodean and Sancturi ones. A soulcrux fragment released by a stolen witch talisman "immediately latched onto" the mercenary who broke it, and now wears him. A Cthul Elder Brain has schemed "to use an Eldritch as a host." A "handful of Eldritch have set themselves up as gods, complete with a functional priesthood," and Eldritch are counted a kind of demi-god beside the Astral and the Fae.
After the Redemption, when Mithis was removed from the world, the Eldritch rose among the major powers. "The Eldritch Kingdoms -- several competing Eldritch kingdoms ruled by Witch-Kings and Witch-Queens (as called by outsiders). They still search in vain for their Soulcruxes. The number of Eldritch are small but all other races live in servitude to these. These tend to be city-state like kingdoms." Phaendar's kingdom lies "to the far West, on the shores of the Amarin Channel," where a tribe of Wood Elves worships him as a living god.
Relations with demons¶
The Eldritch and the Demons are entangled in every theory of the latter's origin. Some hold that the Eldritch "were invited as allies or created by the Eldritch," others "that the Eldritch transformed themselves into Demons so as to avoid soul death and to be an eternal scourge upon their enemies." The newest cosmology offers that "Demons are the negative energy half of Eldritch, which the Eldritch released in revenge for their displacement and imprisonment," noting that "Demons and Eldritch share no animosity and have been seen to avoid one another." The Uk'Zarai history gives one act plainly: after the fall of the Elder Gods, "a few of the Eldritch devised a plan to achieve revenge against the Younger Gods and the Uk'Zarai," studied Fel magic for thousands of years, and built the Elda'Primu, the Spiritfire Orb, which turned the Uk'Zarai into the first Demons. The demons it made "went about exacting their revenge on the Eldritch." Yet the Eldritch themselves count "Devils and Demons that are ethereal destroyers" among their three hatreds.
Gap
No source describes what an Eldritch looks like in its own form, how long one lives between reincarnations, or where their cities stood before the fall. The Great Library at Altendon holds an Eldritch book in an ancient script, but its contents are not given.