4.13.9 Aetherial

For ages amidst the shifting weave of time's supernal tapestry, the stars have remained a mystery to mortalkind, decorating the heavens in a stately canvas of flickering pinpricks and iridescent motes. Alone, even a single star in the vast unknowable exists as a source of eternal fascination for astronomer and everyman alike - a window into time, life, memory, a story woven into the cosmos, a kindling spark of hope, speculation, and dreams of lost worlds innumerable.

Clusters of these lost stories combine to form the Mejevsavelnel - a mere twelve constellations representing ancient legend and embellished myth formed of oral tradition and belief-made-real. In truth, there are far more than these simple dozen, each an epic fable in its own right. 

Some who walk the earth feel an inexplicable bond with one or more of these venerable tales - and these we name Aetherial. The first of these to rouse this empathetic bond in the modern era was Valorie Aresti - cast out of time by the confluence of Aechros where she found her anchor in a memory of Veithadros, the Hopeful.

Wrought as an assemblage of constellar-memory formed through a deep and profound empathy with the sagas of old, Aetherials form a connection with legend, a common wellspring of folklore and mythos to fuel their celestial invocations. Both blessing and curse, to bear the touch of the Mejevsavelnel is to become a true conduit of the heavens and a child of the stars. Their form is one of midnight-dark skin and brilliant white eyes, a statuesque form of sidereal dignity, their very flesh imbued with the light of the cosmos to shift in eddying enigma about their bodies. 

Casting aside their mundane form, the Aetherial arises through heavenspace into their true, empyreal self, flesh becoming firmament in a fusion of these tales birthed of death then life then memory reforged anew. Awakening the empathetic bond with the cosmos is not unlike a sensation of falling through time, uncentred but carried along on the currents of memory. As the Aetherial anchors themselves, the Mejevsavelnel bathes them in starlight to complete their apotheosis, and they become ready to channel their power.