Adventurer’s Information
“Something happened that we cannot explain. At the end of the Great War, over seven hundred years ago, magic disappeared. Our best minds have attempted to discern the reasons, but so far we have only speculation. One day, wizards simply lost their abilities. Witches could no longer curse anyone. More bemusing was that many of the inhabitants of Uteria faded away…the elves, the trolls, and even the little boggarts. And now they are back. It will take a smarter man than me to figure out how or why.”—Norburt the Storyteller, elder of Smithville
Little is known or understood about the Disappearance among the common folk, but one thing is for sure: something happened that changed Uteria for over seven centuries. I have gone back through the books of lore kept in the Tower from the old days, and little more is mentioned, save that the tide of war was changed by a miracle. Being one who dislikes the idea of miracles, I was determined to discover more. The council sanctioned a trip to Ferryport, where I was hoping to find representatives of other races who might have more clues. While here, I have talked to the Anarvari and the Kaelvari elves, both of whom have their own take on the matter. The dwarves seem unconcerned about where the old denizens of Uteria had gone, but are rather more concerned with why they are back, pestering them in their cities to the East.
Based on what I was told by several of the Kaelvari elves, it seems that something “shifted,” as they call it, and that they became disconnected from our world, while still remaining present…a contradiction, to be sure, but I believe they mean to say they were as ghosts, watching the world, but unable to interfere. They describe watching our world pass through time, as if in a quickly moving dream, unnoticed. There were other areas that were open to the Navirim, the Dream World, and there, they encountered the Unvari, or dark fey. And yet in other places it was as if the world was of its own, untouched by either other world. And there the elves could rest. Deep in the Kaelnor forest, the Kaelvari elves continued their life, and as long as they stayed away from the forest’s edges, along with the darker parts of the forest to the west, they were able to live in peace.
Still some traveled the broader world, watching the dream-like happenings as Uteria moved on, fighting back the nausea that these blurred places caused, or literally fighting the creatures of the Navirim as they spawned from rifts between worlds. Now that they have Shifted back into our world, they say that time for them moved much slower during the Disappearance, with only three hundreds years, or one generation having passed for them.
The Anavari elves retreated back into the canyons of the far western Wildelands, caught between a myriad of rifts to the Navirim and the wyveres who live among the cliffs of the canyons.
They both describe then a subtle shift, almost as when you realize you are in a dream and start to wake. And within a short decade, the rifts to the Navirim faded and the world of Uteria came into focus.
The trials of the Disappearance not forgotten, they now face a world that had begun to believe they were nothing more than legend.
Malynn Andros, Mage of the Tower