Empty Hunger

Colourless. Timeless. Empty.

All who reside with Aetolia reside within the unfelt grasp of the Void, its toothless jaws dug deep into the dimensional interstitium, where emptiness manifests upon the edges and corners of intersecting realms upon the Planar Spiral. Not a plane unto itself, the Void abides instead as the lightless empty between those places, a cosmic crevasse from which there is little to no chance of return upon being consigned to its unfeeling stretch. Simultaneously leagues wide and thin as a shadow, it runs through the manifold of Creation and presses against every realm sunk within it, an unspoken promise of endless, enigmatic endings of space and time. Though planar scholars agree upon this, there is one collective that disputes these assertions as mere mechanics of a greater structure: the Sentaari.

Within their quiet monastery, laden with the heavy airs of occult pursuits and the shameless rejection of the legacy of their forebears, the Sentaari instead posture that the Void gives meaning to existence, and tranquil perfection can be found in the embrace and emulation of the Void’s extensive nothingness. Masters of their old-yet-new philosophies maintain that walking this Path requires an unflinching approach to that boundary, even as the abyss of nothingness leaves the mortal mind with little to occupy itself – a fact that often results in the invention of concept, sensation, and phantom where none truly exist.

It was with this understanding at the front of their minds that the foremost occultists and ritualists of that nullifying not-space gathered together in their hallowed halls and enacted an esoteric ritual known as the Narrowing. Driven by recent visions glimpsed within that terrible, maddening place, the Sentaari sought to illuminate the Dark beyond Dark and delve into the mysteries of those things consigned to its otherwise unreached crannies, fixated in particular upon the caverns and mirrored grottoes that continued to manifest as collective symbols in their viewings. Led by Preceptor Morraine Rook, the fated band conducted their ritual business before the monastery’s meditation pond, with Dhani the Inured, a practised Voidseer in her own right, casting patterns into the waters to lure the gaze of an unseen eye. Even as she worked, her compatriots stood by with chains of darkened steel, driven by raw force of will and the solemn belief that physical bindings still held some sway over that which drifts within the vast cosmic empty of the Void. Eventually, the pond tightened into unnatural stillness. A single dim eye formed upon its reflective surface – and then another, and then more yet still. Soon, pairs of unblinking eyes gathered upon the surface in a deliberate formation, watching with neither ripple nor sound.

The Sentaari did not flee.

Instead, they cast their chains into the basin and held strong. Link after link fed downward into impossible depth as the water darkened around them, and the metallic coils trembled, then drew taut, the runes along their length beginning to glow with an unsettling light. A quiet pull settled behind the sternum of those gathered as Void attunement streamed outward. What began as probing sharpened into purpose, a wise spear thrust into the unknown, a bid to tear aside the veil of mystery.

The chains snapped taut, and the light intensified. The pond dimpled inward as metal hummed under immense strain, stretched between the monastery and an Unseen Elsewhere. Silence gathered, attentive rather than empty. Distance compressed. Shadows faltered and withdrew. Leylines hummed out of alignment. The darkness between places thinned, and something vast drew near without form or outline. Recognition passed through space. Temperature evened into unnatural neutrality. Reality tightened in hesitant increments that never fully settled. The pressure stabilised into a held tension, as though an absence had gained weight and chosen to remain.

Then came the fracture.

A scream split the air as Brother Thich Yuril bolted from the bell tower and hurled himself into the trees below. Even as Morraine urged vigilance and focus, space contracted around an unseen threshold. Angles felt wrong. Distances refused to settle.

Stillness returned, but it was no longer clean.

Without further warning, space collapsed inward, splicing itself into a pocket realm. The Heartwood shuddered as portions of the monastery fell to the Void, stone and sanctum vanishing soundlessly – a fitting funeral for a legacy abandoned in pursuit of deeper, more esoteric truths. At the ritual’s centre, the pond twisted, and paths folded even as trees froze mid-sway. The meadow buckled into fractured ground, and the bell tower – once a crowning achievement of the now fractured monastery – was replaced by naught but bare space, leaving neither ruin nor echo. The Sentaari, united in purpose, pressed into the beyond, for they had forced the Void betwixt planes to answer – and answer it had. In the wake of the Narrowing, the Sentaari monks found that the meditation pond no longer reflected as it once had. Its surface lay dark and inert, a blank stretch of enigmatic nonexistence – as if Creation itself had fled, leaving the ruin of unrealised space in its wake.

Through that unresponsive ‘water’, however, a passage into a smaller cavern revealed itself, its dimensions intimate and exacting, with a low and gently arched ceiling. At its centre, a ring of inscribed stone sat partially submerged in dark, motionless water, covered in subtle yet impossibly precise markings. The pooled waters reflected no light beyond a faint inner glow, and even sound seemed reluctant to travel near its surface. Faint currents stirred beneath without breaking it, as though something immense churned underfoot. Throughout the chamber, the temperature remained perfectly even, and dust refused to settle on any surface. Here, the former monks began to understand that their path had shifted. At this pool, they learned to deepen their connection with the Void through a more sensory approach. Unlike Voidgazing, which casts structured patterns outward in overt evocation of the Void’s nothingness, this new practice required surrender, demanding the stillness of stone. Perception, no longer projected outward, instead thinned and widened, allowing them to receive impressions that pressed inward from the boundless nothing betwixt planes.

In that mirroring of emptiness, they changed. No longer mere postulants at the water’s proverbial edge, they instead cast their consciousness and senses adrift within the vastness of those lightless reaches, taking proverbial steps along the seams of the Planar Spiral. With the new focal point of this mysterious pool, the Sentaari beheld the ruins of an ancient, unrecorded civilisation, cast adrift there amid the silent graveyard of cosmic nothingness. Psychic impressions, seared into a land upturned from Primal bindings and flung into the Void, came to some of them, allowing them glimpses of the civilisation’s strange peoples in eras uncharted – their prosperity, their toil, and their ruin all the same moments of disastrous nullwork. Those dead memories, frozen in the stasis of horrifying cataclysm, were as real as visions and visitations, the ashes of recollection consigned to the doom of hubris. In those fleeting flashes, the Sentaari gleaned the history of this unknown empire’s downfall: tampering with the Void through grand ritual, and all the hostile mania that had gripped the terrified populace in their final moments. Though some claimed intent and sentience lurked there in the Void, the Grand Library instead posits that only psychic traces remained, vivid and strong enough to seem intentional or responsive.

In the weeks to follow, the Sentaari, blood-daubed with mystic sigils and clear-eyed with purpose, gathered once more by the pond of their sundered Monastery. Warded and bearing three scrying stones, they passed through the silent threshold and descended into the grotto within the Void. There, within still waters that reflected no light but their own faint inner glow, they laid to rest tablets inscribed with three names gleaned from their extrasensory practices. Each name was then invoked in turn, woven through Cultivation, Telepathy, and Oneiromancy to expand their sight beyond mortal seam: S’zaarukh, Arl’shom, and Xal’draxen. Within the Void pool, darkness tightened and sensation slipped sideways. Attunement, familiar and earned, swiftly fled like fine strands that rapidly formed a silhouette that should not exist. Though the Grand Library classifies it as an occult hallucination, reports indicate that the silhouette resembled a humanoid salamander, its dimensions paradoxically forged from a raw understanding of nothingness. To further support our rebuke of this preposterous account, present claims detail communion with disembodied voices within the null chamber, bidding the Sentaari to act against the silhouette with cryptic hints. Despite the improbability of the above events, disturbance reports throughout the Ashen Grove were later filed with our geographical experts, as well as rumours and gossip regarding a bracelet sealed to the earth by incomprehensible magics – a relic initially discovered by the Inured herself.

Though the Grand Library expresses immense incredulity regarding the events recorded throughout the latter half of this account, it endeavours to record it for posterity’s sake alone. Witnesses detail an unholy resurrection through stray energies at the impossible edges of the Void and the mental acuity of the involved ritualists, driving them to lay to rest the abomination welcomed by their unwise practises as a price for their delving into things that should not be. Upon tapping into the bracelet’s magic, the Sentaari crossed into the greater ruins of Drax’endra and found further evidence of the catastrophe that had spelt its dire end. Frozen in stasis and held forever as an exhibit of horror and hubris, those people caught up in whatever mysterious, Voidtouched end had met their people stood as still as statues, preserved in a place beyond space, in a moment forever beyond the reach of time and decay. Restored to motion but clearly maddened by captive torment, some of these people emerged from torpor with violent intent, forcing the occultists of the fallen monastery to put them down with swift and unfeeling brutality. There at the heart of that twisted ruin beyond Primal space, they confronted the tormented echo of S’zaarukh, who supposedly wore the mangled flesh of Thich Yuril. Unable to harm him initially, the nullworkers joined forces to unravel the mad seer’s wards and then vanquished him with their collective prowess, leaving no corpse beyond to treat in the ways savage Duirani oft do.

Silence followed, not empty but attentive. A subtle undercurrent moved through Xal’draxen. What had been a hostile depth now settled into equilibrium, and the wordless impressions of a dead empire brushed against those present as the final ebb of a people long extinguished. Much was uncovered in the depths of Drax’endra in the wake of the Sentaari’s outlandish victory, yet far more remains veiled beneath its patient dark. Xal’draxen did not seal them within it in a tomb beyond stars and light – instead, it yielded in acceptance, granting them a sanctum somewhere on the border of Primal space and the empty Void, an abyssal enclave that answered to none but the Sentaari.

~~~~~

Summary: Through a Void-manipulating rite, the Sentaari delved into the deeper mysteries of their empty fascination. In the expanse of darkness, they uncovered the fate of a lost people and their ruined empire, and laid to rest the psychic echoes of their dying torment. With those memories vanquished, the remaining land has become the new Sentaari guildhall.

Penned by my hand on Tisday, the 2nd of Sapiarch, in the year 18 AC.