The Starborn are the enigmatic caretakers of the celestial order, dwelling within the stars themselves, the titan-forged orbs of celestial glass that hang above the world, where they tend the magical cores that keep each light burning. They descend, on occasion, to high mountain observatories where the veil between earth and sky grows thin, but the stars are their true home. These elves have taken upon themselves the sacred duty of maintaining the stars' positions and brightness, a task they believe essential to preserving the cosmic balance that keeps darker forces at bay. Their skin has a subtle luminescence that becomes more pronounced under starlight, and their eyes reflect the constellations they tend.
The making
The light in the Starborn is craft, not an inheritance from anything that fell out of the sky. They are elves, made the way all elves were made, from a measure of the elder druids' life pressed into worked matter. The matter, in their case, was a pale stone that holds light and gives it back slowly, quarried from the high cold places where the elder druids set some of their last workings. Ground into the making, it left the Starborn with skin that takes a faint shine and answers to starlight, and eyes that hold the cast of whatever they look on in the dark. The working fixed this and it bred true. They were a high-dwelling, sky-watching people long before any of them ever climbed to tend a celestial core; that duty came after, taken up by choice. Their kinship with the stars is a thing the Starborn do, not a stock they descend from.
Unlike their druidic cousins who immerse themselves in nature's wild passions, the Starborn maintain strict neutrality in worldly affairs. They view existence from a cosmic perspective where individual lives and even civilizations are but brief flickers against the eternal night. This detachment makes them seem cold to other races, but it stems from their burden of maintaining universal harmony rather than any lack of compassion.
The Starborn conduct nightly rituals to guide wayward stars back to their proper courses and rekindle those whose light begins to fade. They believe that should the stars ever fall from their appointed places, chaos would consume all creation.
The best known of the Starborn is Koras, sole tender of the sun, who broke the order's strict neutrality to serve the sun's awakened spirit, Bryn. Koras's five-hundred-year fight to reignite the corrupted solar core, the Sunless Vigil, is the order's own duty carried to its furthest extreme.
A second case runs the other way, and the order treats it as the graver one. Ysolveth, a tender the order has begun to watch, has for some years been easing two titan-glass stars toward a convergence above the Northland city the Velthari call Ilthenvar, working from within the orbs as any tender does but toward an end the order never sanctioned. The Velthari there chart the two stars' drift to the day and read it as nature; they do not know a hand is behind it. Where Koras broke neutrality to serve the light he tended, Ysolveth breaks it to move stars toward a purpose of Ysolveth's own, and by the order's reckoning that is the worse violation.
Aspects
- The stars must maintain their course
- Cosmic neutrality preserves balance