Ysolveth is a Starborn, one of the elven tenders who live inside the titan-glass stars and keep their cores burning, and Ysolveth has stopped keeping the rule that makes a tender worth trusting. For something over sixty-seven years, Ysolveth has been moving two stars on purpose.
The order's whole discipline is neutrality. A tender guides a wayward star back to its appointed course and rekindles it when its light fails, and a tender takes no part in the affairs of the world below, because the work depends on the stars holding their proper places and a tender who began choosing where they should go would be a danger past reckoning. Ysolveth does exactly that. Working from within the orbs as any tender does, Ysolveth has been easing two stars off their courses and toward each other, toward a single point of convergence fixed above one place on the ground: the Nysanna foothill where the Velthari keep their watch-tower, the city outsiders call the City of Stars.
The order knows the shape of this failure because it happened once before, at the largest scale there is. Koras, sole tender of the sun, broke the same neutrality to serve Bryn, the sun's awakened spirit, and held the Sunless Vigil for five centuries to draw a Xaphkiel's corruption out of the solar core and keep the light alive. Koras is revered for it. Ysolveth's break runs the other way. Where Koras broke neutrality to save the light entrusted to him, Ysolveth breaks it to bend two lights toward an end no one sanctioned and no one else can read. By the order's own reckoning that is the graver crime, and the order has begun to watch Ysolveth, quietly and from a distance, the way the cautious watch a thing they are not yet certain they can stop.
The Velthari below chart the two stars' approach to the day and have sealed away what they found, because their entire trade rests on the stars meaning nothing by their motion. They are right that something means it. They have no idea it is a person, that the person has a name, or that the same hand thinning the sky over their heads is the reason their instruments read so clean. Ysolveth has never been seen from the ground and has sent it no word.
When the two are one, the ground below will have somewhere to look up to. I am not hiding it. I am aiming it. — Ysolveth, in the one sending the order has intercepted, undated
What the convergence is for, Ysolveth has not said and the order has not worked out. Two titan-glass stars brought to a single point above one fixed spot on the Material Plane is not a thing the cosmology has a name for. It is being built slowly, it is being built deliberately, and for the last ten years it has been building faster.
Game mechanics
What Ysolveth ultimately intends is left open for the table. None of the following is canon; they are the live possibilities a GM can choose among or hold in reserve. The convergence completing is the campaign clock. Head Watcher Sevet's ledgers (see City of Stars) show it accelerating, and the rate is the GM's to set.
- A lens. Two converged cores focus their light on one ground-point; what that focused star-light is meant to do to Ilthenvar, or to something beneath it, is the question.
- A door. The convergence is thinning the veil between earth and sky to the point of a passage, either to bring something down or to send something up.
- A waking. Bryn woke when the Ezz Rift gave the sun a spirit; Ysolveth may be trying to force a second waking in a star, or in the pair together, by some means the order never imagined.
- A devotion or a defiance. The act may be worship of something the order does not name, or a deliberate repudiation of the neutrality doctrine itself, the convergence built as proof that a tender can choose.
Do not tie Ysolveth's purpose to any settled faction or cult; the point is that no one below, and no one in the order, yet knows. The Velthari layer is firm: their public lore stays at "someone is doing this, we cannot say who or why." This entity is the only place Ysolveth is named.