Starseer Elyndor

They call him Starseer because he learned to read what others only admired. Elyndor stands at the edge of the Aether Crown’s fractured plazas with a quill in one hand and a stabilizer rod in the other, translating heaven into architecture. Where earlier masters inscribed manifestos, he writes repairs—lines of runes that turn panic into procedure, grief into gravity that keeps the isles from drifting apart.

Echoes.
The night the Prism Star returned, Skyreach’s instruments sang like struck crystal. Old equations, long sullen, began to behave if you treated them gently. Elyndor took that as a vow, not a victory. He stepped into leadership of the Luminari Order with a scholar’s humility and a builder’s urgency: open the observatories, but post wardens at every door; invite the apprentices to watch the sky, then teach them how to carry a fire blanket.

Inside the Crown, two tempers knot around the same ambition. Preservationists want the Spires to endure exactly as memory holds them; reality-shapers want to use the Prism’s new angles to redraw the rules. Elyndor walks between them with the patience of a clockmaker. To Torren Vox—stern, exacting, a friend turned wary—he grants the final word on portal seals and containment sigils. To Aetheria—brilliant, impulsive, a comet with opinions—he grants supervised rooms and a time limit; when her prisms begin to hum too loud, he arrives with tea, questions, and a bucket of sand. The Order calls this “Elyndor’s Law”: no experiment continues past the moment you cannot explain it to the nearest apprentice.

He gathers small victories and stacks them carefully. Nalia Skyborn’s song-maps re-tune a sagging skybridge; Elyndor notes the pitch in his ledger and writes a procedure any journeyman could follow. A Star-Serpent emerges from eclipse and coils around an observatory dome; Elyndor kneels, not to worship, but to listen for weather in its scales. When two Aetherwings are sighted phasing across a broken channel, he sketches the wake they leave behind and realizes it is not a scar but a seam—something that can be stitched.

The wider world does not permit total concentration. Vaelorien watches the Spires with salt-cold eyes, remembering drowned arrogance; Elyndor answers with open ledgers and unadorned apologies—records of what is taken, what is returned, what is merely borrowed under an oath to bring it back. Duskfall’s Whispering Bloom prefers the places where light thins; Elyndor counters with lanterns that dim respectfully rather than flare, making shadow choose between hiding and conversation. Thar Zûl’s Embercore experiments send heat-shocks through the high air; he calibrates alarms to sing when distant magma roars, so the libraries can brace their shelves before the tremor arrives.

He is not a general, yet the Spires steadily feel commanded: struts mended, lifts re-charmed, apprentices trained to tie themselves to rail and to one another when the isles creak in the dusk wind. On quiet evenings he walks the lower stacks where Glimmerdrakes flit, leaving afterimages like notes on staff paper. He hums the pattern back to them until it settles into a maintenance rhythm the whole isle learns to keep.

Elyndor’s private fear is the same as his public task: that Skyreach will mistake rekindling for return. He teaches his students to draw the towers as they are, not as songs remember. Starlight still obeys courage, he tells them, but it obeys geometry first—so do the geometry well, and let courage be what keeps your hand steady when the final line must be drawn in a shaking room.

He keeps three objects on his desk. An astrolabe with one gear removed—“There’s always a missing tooth,” he jokes, to remind himself that systems fail the way people do: unevenly. A strip of bark signed by a druid of Galdrowen, traded for star-charts when trust was newly possible. And a simple hourglass whose sand he refuses to enchant. Each day he upturns it and works until the last grain falls. When apprentices ask why he doesn’t slow time, Elyndor smiles. “Limits are where craft lives,” he says. “We are not here to conquer light. We are here to learn how to live with it.”

So the Order learns. And the Aether Crown, though still fragile, sings again—not with triumph, but with tuned intent. That is Starseer Elyndor’s gift: the restraint that makes wonder safe, and the wonder that makes restraint worth keeping.