Celestar

**Celestar** is Aerb's single moon.

## Appearance from Aerb

Celestar somewhat resembles Earth's moon, but with no craters; instead, it is covered in geometric lines that converge on a pink spot around where the Sea of Tranquility would be (i.e. the middle of the upper right quadrant.) It appears mostly milky white, although there's some greenery visible, as well as rivers and lakes. The geometric designs are described as "criss-crossing and curling", obviously intentional but without clear purpose.

It's possible to study the surface of Celestar with telescopes, which reveals that the surface appears to be abandoned and unchanging.

Like other celestial objects, Celestar appears in the same position in the sky no matter where you are on Aerb.

It casts moonlight on Aerb at night, accompanied by the light of Aerb's multicoloured stars, brighter than it is at night on Earth, although of course clouds and other cover can negate this. Whatever is wrong with the projection layer in Nightsmoke causes both sun and moon to "set" as you approach, leaving only the stars.

It's unclear whether Celestar has gravity that effects Aerb; Aerb does have tides, which roughly match those on Earth, but they appear to be caused by an entirely different mechanism and do not line up with Celestar's movements.

It's never stated whether Celestar has phases. It's admittedly never described as having phases, or being partially in shadow. However, Juniper refers to "fish that exploded if the light of a full moon touched them" existing on Aerb, and Invreizenn uses "a moon" (i.e. a lunar month, presumably) as a unit of time, which might be taken as references to a lunar cycle. Raven also uses the phrase "once in a blue moon" at one point, although there's no indication it has the same etymology on Aerb.

## Surface

Celestar's surface was entirely sculpted to elven tastes, even those areas that weren't in regular use. Mechanisms were known to have been set up to maintain that perfection as long as possible. This appeared to have been successful; by all appearances it was pristine and fully livable, merely abandoned. The magic that invelops Celestar will slowly repair any damage or alteration, and will slowly kill or place in suspended animation any living thing.

Aerb appears as a "ball of muted colors" thanks to the layer of spatial warping between the two, which elves compared to "a round jewel in the sky".

### Pink Spot

The pink spot is where all the "lines" marking the surface of Celestar visibly converge, large enough to be visible with the naked eye from Aerb. It is believed to have had something to do with the cataclysm that wiped out the inhabitants.

In fact, the pink spot contains a citadel, inhabited by a council of seven (or possibly more) identical archwizards. Their perfection magic protects their citadel from harm, and can be wielded as a weapon of immense power against any imperfect creature, even elves. They are invariably hostile to outsiders. They seem to have some sort of giant death ray under construction targeting Aerb, with an associated power-build up detectable from Aerb's surface.

## Location

Celestar is 240 thousand miles from Aerb. It's closer than the stars are, although Aerb's tiny "stars" are much closer than ours; there's a great deal of visible parallax in the stars when travelling between Aerb and Celestar.

There's a layer of spatial warping between Aerb and Celestar, which allows it to appear in the same point in the sky from anywhere on Aerb. Travelling from Celestar to Aerb appears to take you to a random point in Aerb's sky when you pass through this layer.

Teleportation keys don't work to reach Aerb from Celestar, although this isn't widely known (and may never have been tested before Juniper attempted it.)

## History

### Earth

Juniper concieved Celestar as "this permanent monument to what the elves had lost, stark and clear for everyone to see, every single night …", as well as an attempted improvement in storytelling terms on Earth's moon.

### Pre-Imperial

According to elven accounts, Celestar predates Aerb, which mysteriously appeared in their sky one day. It took thousands of years for them to eventually launch the first expeditions to Aerb after it's appearance.

Elves migrated from Celestar in five distinct "waves", each of which is traditionally classed as a different mortal species, despite their common heritage.

#### Star Elves

The first wave of elven colonists attempted to colonize Aerb's "stars" before settling on Aerb. Exactly why is unclear, but it seems to have involved a shortage of living space. These "star elves" are known for being the most bloodthirsty, proud, and rigid of the elves - in other words, the most archetypal and stereotypical of the lot.

#### Moon Elves

At some point, there was a civil war on Celestar regarding self-modification and "proliferation of forms". The fundemantalist side lost, with survivors escaping to Aerb via now-excluded methods of teleportation. Their descendents became known as the "moon elves", and generally remain hardliners on the issue.

The era that followed this civil war on Celestar, where variant forms proliferated, is known as the Flourishing Era.

#### Dark Elves

It's unclear how the dark elves originated and moved to Aerb, beyond originating in the Flourishing Era. It is clear that they adapted themselves to living underground and in extreme cold, including a more friendly disposition, omnivorous human-like teeth, and a complete immunity to poison. At some point they moved to the frozen Gelid Depths of the sea, a place entirely uninhabited by other mortals. They eventually made contact with surface-dwellers in 4 FE.

#### Wood Elves

The wood elves were, like the moon elves, the losers of a civil war who fled to Aerb. Specifically, they were the faction who fought for a view of perfection centered on the past, while the victors fought for a view centered on the future. They have isolationist communities that focus on ritual, tradition, and a nature-focused lifestyle based in an idealized imaginary past.

#### Partite/Cataclysm Elves

The final wave of migration from Celestar was known as the partite elves or the cataclysm elves. It occurred shortly before life on Celestar ended. They were generally more varied and individualistic in both body and mind than previous waves of elves, although equally dedicated to their personal ideas of perfection.

They were generally willing to talk about what had happened, but just as clueless about the nature of the cataclysm as anyone else. Shortly before the final doom of Celestar, a philosophy which claimed that Elven history was trending towards a final peak of perfection and apotheosis became very popular there. The leading theory by the time of the Third Empire was that this philosophy most likely had something to do with the disaster.

The last of the cataclysm elves left in 121 BE, fleeing their world's mysterious demise.

#### The Doom of Celestar

In fact, a unique form of elven magic that stemmed from their philosophy of perfection was, indeed, the cause of the cataclysm. This magic, channeled by seven archwizards of enormous power in what would become Celestar's infamous pink spot, trapped the entire moon in perfect stillness. Their powers were excluded to Celestar. The wizards did not intend their "perfect" world to be dead, and have spent the following centuries attempting to correct the flaw in their design, as well as possibly building a giant moon laser.

### Imperial Era

By the modern day, Celestar was considered completely dead. Over the years, many costly expeditions had been made, but several high-profile expeditions were known to have been mysteriously lost and presumed dead.

Little was known about what had caused Celestar's doom, although the leading theory was that it had something to do with the Singularity-esque philosophy that had become popular shortly before disaster, presumably involving some sort of elven magic, and it was known that the Pink Spot was related to the disaster in some way.

### Worth the Candle

Juniper immediately recognized Celestar as his creation, but Amaryllis dismissed this as "residual knowledge".

When Amaryllis told Juniper about the exclusion zones that were potentially "fixable", he recieved a cryptic quest relating to Celestar among the other "Slayer of Horrors" exclusion-zone sub-quests:

> ***Finger of the Sun*** - When the elves broke Celestar, there were a small few who continued on with their research. The product of their effort brought nothing but pain.
>
>

When he visited Speculator Masters, he learned that Celestar had recently begun "thrumming with renewed power", among other possible threats to the world.

Juniper briefly visited Celestar under the compulsion of Gold Magic, stashing his gold there, and accidentally leaving a mile-long scar where he crash-landed. He repeatedly discussed the possibility of taking care of "whatever’s happening on the pink spot on Celestar", along with the other potentially feasible Slayer of Horrors missions, in exchange for bounties, with Amaryllis eventually negotiating a potential bounty of 25 million obols from the elves.

### Alternate Futures

In the *A Cypress Waits* timeline, Celestar fired a spectacularly powerful beam at Aerb around 543 FE. The beam was so powerful that it threatened to boil the oceans, and killed more people than any event since Uther's day. It was stopped only when Amaryllis used rune magic to attack the beam's source with an immensely powerful antimatter bomb, causing debris from Celestar to rain down across Aerb.

At some point in the timeline of The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition, expeditions to Celestar encountered the council of wizards in the pink spot, were attacked by them, and determined that their perfection magic was excluded to Celestar - the first confirmed pre-Utherian exclusion.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Aerb only had one moon, but it was a huge, ripe, beautiful thing. It didn’t have much in the way of color, but against the backdrop of the multi-colored skies, that might have been a bit much. It was laced through with geometric lines, criss-crossing and curling, ordered in a way that was both obvious and unobvious, clearly the product of design but without the intent quite clear. There was green, in places, trees and fields, and blue in other places, rivers and lakes, but for the most part it was off-white, a very pale milky color, with a point of pink, where something terrible had happened. - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 And the moon … the moon had no blemishes on it, no familiar craters, but it was laced through with geometric lines that all seemed to terminate in a point of pinkish light where the Sea of Tranquility would have been.

“Celestar,” I breathed. Once the home of the elves, before they’d been forced to flee. *This world has elves.*

“Residual knowledge?” asked Amaryllis.

I wanted to say that it wasn’t, to protest that Celestar had been my idea, this permanent monument to what the elves had lost, stark and clear for everyone to see, every single night … - Chapter 8: Diamond and Iron
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 And that was more or less what was known. Telescopes showed no signs of life on Celestar, no evidence that there was anyone still living there, and strangely, no growth of the plants or trees, no change to the sculpted environments of the elves, no decay or erosion. Very few people or organizations had the resources necessary to get to space, and expeditions to Celestar were rare, especially after a number of high-profile missions there were inexplicably lost. Who or what was causing those (presumed) deaths was unknown. It was, all in all, a spooky place to be. - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 (Can I talk, for a moment, about how fucking dumb it was that Aerb had tides? Both the Sun, Celestar, and the stars were in the same apparent position no matter where you were on Aerb, so even if there *were* gravitation from those sources, it wouldn’t have caused anything that was much like tides on Earth (in theory, the sun’s gravity should have pulled everything to the east at dawn, then everything to the west at dusk), and anyhow, the tides were hexal, meaning low tide happened at the same time no matter where you were on Aerb. So then where the fuck was all that water going or coming from? There were even spring tides and neap tides, caused, on Earth, by whether the sun and moon were working in concert or in opposition, but on Aerb … who fucking knew. Every day, 1020 liters of water were displaced, and there were a whole bunch of complex theories about how it was happening or why, but the tides went in and the tides went out, and no one could explain it.) - Chapter 145: Freshman
5. ↑ lit by the glow of Celestar and the multi-colored stars that hung above Aerb [...] I reformed the Anyblade into a ring and took a last look at the penitentiary. It was spectacular under the light of Celestar and the multicolored stars. - Chapter 62: Drift
6. ↑ Celestar and the multi-colored stars seemed to provide more illumination than on Earth, but that didn’t help me much when there was cloud cover. - Chapter 218: A Grueling Calm
7. ↑ It was still dark near Parsmont (naturally, since Aerb didn’t have timezones) but clouds obscured the multicolored stars and Celestar, meaning that our only light was from a lantern that Fenn had set down on the grass. - Chapter 66: The Long Night
8. ↑ Before I could though, the lights in the room flickered off. The sun had long since set, which left us in only the light of the multicolored stars, and somewhere far overhead, Celestar, but that wasn’t enough to see by, not with our eyes uncalibrated to the darkness. - Chapter 84: The Party Line
9. ↑ The lack of sunlight does not happen at a hard edge, but rather, upon entrance into the zone, the sun appears to ‘set’, growing lower on the horizon as the perimeter is crossed. By the time the city is reached, there are only stars in the sky, with the moon being as absent as the sun. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 50: Nightsmoke
10. ↑ Aerb had big towers that no one had an explanation for. It had rivers that sometimes ran backwards, fish that exploded if the light of a full moon touched them, metals that turned soft like putty when you sang to them, billions of tiny little things to seek out and understand, to soak in and enjoy. - Chapter 214: Glass Houses
11. ↑ “When did your blindness to me start?” I asked Invreizen. “When did the gods first notice it?”

“Not long ago,” he replied. “No more than a moon, though it wasn’t obvious, at first.” - Chapter 222: Clerical Errors
12. ↑ “Dealing with the aftermath is rarely pretty,” said Raven. “Uther always hated it. It was often possible to kill everyone involved, common that we fought enemies that were truly beyond reform or redemption, but every once in a blue moon we were mired in complicated moral situations, or places where there were no easy solutions.” - Chapter 162: Deus Ex
13. ↑ Celestar had been perfectly manicured, back when it had been widely inhabited. The exact history of Celestar was unclear, and was thought to stretch back far before the creation (or instantiation) of Aerb itself. Elves hadn’t turned every inch of Celestar over to productive use, but they *had* ensured that everything followed the aesthetic of perfection, and set everything up so that it could last for lifetimes, never needing maintenance or upkeep. There was a derisive term used in worldbuilding circles, ‘Ragnarok Proofing’ that referred to imaginary civilizations that made things to last long after the civilization itself was gone, usually for no clear reason. It was mostly as a method of creating zones of adventure for players. In the case of the elves, ensuring that their structures and gardens could withstand an apocalypse was a part of their warped mindset, above and beyond all the cultural considerations. The hundreds of years since Celestar’s calamity had left everything virtually unchanged: it looked shockingly liveable, aside from the damage I’d done on my arrival. [...] From there, I flew, hovering into what must have been an office, its books still intact on the shelves, chair halfway out from behind it. Everything was pristine, like I had just come into the office of someone who had stepped out for coffee and would be back in a few minutes. - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 The magic that envelops Celestar enforces perfection upon the moon. Trees and plants do not grow. Air hangs stagnant. Erosion does not occur. For six hundred years, the planet has stayed static, save for the bright pink spot that marks the location where the elven wizards worked their magic. Damage to the surface of the moon, or even its interior, will reverse itself given time. The flaw in this perfection seems to largely be in the sheer scope of it, especially the stillness, which does not appear to have been intended by the arch wizards. Left alone too long, the creeping perfection of Celestar will kill most things, or in some cases, put them into a state of suspended animation when they can be integrated with the ideals of perfection.

The pink spot on Celestar’s surface marks the enclave of elven wizards, who number at least seven. Their magic is the power of perfection, though the exact details are unknown. Against imperfect creatures, which includes even elves themselves, it can be used as a weapon, and perfection protects their citadel from harm. Remote viewing of their operations has shown that, curiously, all seven wizards work in sync with each other. Due to the philosophy of perfection, all appear identical, and through their magic, it is possible that this similarity descends down to their core.

- Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 55: Celestar
15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 From space, Aerb was a ball of muted colors, and I flew toward it as fast as I could, trying to be mindful of acceleration this time. In theory, I could speed directly toward it, wait until I was halfway there, then start putting force in the opposite direction, but that would be inefficient, since still magic meant I could slow down faster than I could speed up. I also had no idea where on Aerb I would end up: the ‘ball’ was really the boundary layer where space got fucky, and in theory, a photon hitting that boundary could end up anywhere on the hex (if Aerb even had photons). A star was the same distance from any point on Aerb itself.

Space warped around me as I crashed through the layer, and when the land below me was decidedly not the Isle of Poran or the sea that surrounded it, I tried using the teleportation key again, focusing in on the point where my segmented worldline had a large cluster. - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 The elves claim that Celestar has its own history distinct from that of Aerb, and that Aerb “appeared” one day as a round jewel in the sky. That said, there were thousands of years between elven accounts of the appearance of Aerb and the first successful attempts at traveling there, and the history of Celestar is considered suspect, as much of it was written by those who emigrated from it. - Chapter 1: History
17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 The pink spot that marks Celestar’s surface is, from recent expeditions, known to be home to the remaining archwizards responsible for the calamity on the moon. Brief contact has been made with them, which turned hostile. They are presumed to be engaged in attempts to reverse the imperfections of their design, though the magical power they wield is enormous, and their professed hatred toward imperfection has led them to strike out at anyone landing on the moon’s surface. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 55: Celestar
18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Fifteen years in, Celestar had fired a beam of enormous power at Aerb, enough that it might have boiled the oceans if it had lasted long enough. It represented the single largest loss of life since the Wandering Blight. A week later, the beam was stopped when ten thousand pounds of antimatter were dropped directly adjacent to the beam’s source. The ejecta from that explosion landed all over Aerb, causing even more damage and death, but the threat was dealt with. Amaryllis apologized for that solution, which used a combination of high-powered, high-tech magnetic containment and an overlooked part of rune magic, because she was fairly certain that it would have been excluded as soon as anyone tried it. She also didn’t give the full specification for it; it was a state secret at the highest level, and she didn’t want it in the Library where someone could find it. - Chapter 132: Uskine Nervedah
19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Aside from that, there’s the giant laser thing that the lunatics on Celestar are apparently building, but who knows what that actually *is,* and when they’ll be done - Chapter 224: We're Here, We're Deer, Get Used to It
20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 “The world settled down, eventually, at great cost, and the exclusions have helped with more than one of our collective problems in the time since, but …” He stopped and stared at me. “Things have been heating back up.”

“Which powers?” asked Amaryllis. “How recently?”

Masters turned to look at her. She was still fully armored, which meant she gave even less away than usual. “The Void Beast has started moving again, the Outer Reaches are no longer dormant, the Infinite Library is down to five years, Celestar is thrumming with renewed power, a raiding party from the Other Side crashed against the Gates of Leron three weeks ago, and there’s reportedly something new that has the minions of the hells living in abject fear.” - Chapter 109: The Veil of the World
21. ↑ “Celestar,” I replied.

“We might have to bail,” Amaryllis replied after a brief pause. “It’s too total of a loss and too far to go. Beyond which, there are threats up there.”

“Yes,” I replied. “I think I can make it back in time. Two hundred forty thousand miles, that’s a lot, but once I’m out of the atmosphere I should be able to pour on the acceleration. I’m already breaking the sound barrier when moving through air, this would remove friction from the equation.” - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
22. ↑ (It probably comes as no surprise that the multi-colored stars that dotted Aerb’s night sky worked differently than stars did back on Earth. Aerbian stars weren’t stars at all, they were enormous balls with skins as thin as a Christmas ornaments which drifted around very, very slowly out past Celestar. Every once in a while one would pop, and more rarely, one would plummet down to Aerb, through the complicated dimensional fuckery that allowed a static sky to be overhead a tessellating Aerb, and usually it would cause a humanitarian disaster of some kind, if it was unfortunate enough to land anywhere near where people lived. The starstuff was harvested for a few specialty uses, and everyone else tried to pick up the more metaphorical pieces.) - Chapter 163: Level Heads
23. ↑ The multicolored stars were moving around me. They weren’t actually stars, not like we had back on Earth, they were giant, hollow, glowing shells, and close enough that there was some parallax. They were all out past Celestar, but still near enough, and with enough variation in distance, that constellations were warping. I was stunned by it. I hadn’t expected traveling through space to *actually* feel like traveling through space. - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
24. ↑ Space warped around me. Aerb was flat and infinitely tesselating, with the sky having the same appearance no matter where you were, barring some variations on what they called the projection layer. To make that even the least bit coherent, Aerb needed to be folded up, and the light coming from the sun, moon, and stars needed to be essentially straight with respect to the surface of the plane. It was a four-dimensional mess, and I just trusted in the image of the moon ahead of me, trying to ignore the way things were curving away from (or toward) me, all that upper dimensional stuff not entirely important. So long as I was looking at the moon, light was following a path from it to me, and though it might not be where it appeared to be, I had no better way to navigate, no way to untangle how the light was being fucked with. - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
25. ↑ I pulled out the teleportation key, pinpointed Poran, and tried to use it, but to no avail: we’d known that it didn’t work across planes, but hadn’t had any evidence one way or another whether it would work out in space or on Celestar. - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
26. ↑ “The moon sucks,” I said, staring up at it. [...] I was left staring at the moon, and thinking what I would put up there instead. - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 27.2 Celestar has too long a history to recount here, and from the records and stories kept by the elves, predates Aerb itself. Once home to the elves, Celestar has had five successive waves of emigration, with the last of them occurring in 121 BE as the elves fled the calamity. Travel to and from Celestar is one of the most difficult journeys that can be taken, even including some forms of inter-planar travel, and especially in the modern day when various forms of transportation have been excluded.

The exclusion on Celestar appears to have been related to matters of elven philosophy and an attempt to achieve the apotheosis of perfection. In this, they appear to have succeeded, with a new type of magic developed by their philosophers and perfected by their wizards.

- Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 55: Celestar
28. ↑ There had been five distinct waves of elven migration from Celestar, each of which was considered a different species. - Chapter 19: Montage!
29. ↑ === Elf (Star) ===
Star elves were the first wave of elven immigrants from Celestar, though as their name suggests, they had originally meant to colonize the stars around Aerb before finding them inhospitable. They are characterized as being the most bloodthirsty of the elves, difficult to conduct diplomacy with, incredibly proud, and very much set in their ways, even more so than the other elves. The story of their emigration from Celestar is complicated and largely lost to history, but appears to stem from a lack of adequate living space. - Worth the Candle: A Brief Description of Aerb - Chapter 8: Mortal Species
30. ↑ === Elf (Moon) ===
Moon elves were the second wave of immigrants from Celestar, coming to Aerb directly through then-new (and then-unexcluded) teleportation methods. In this case, the proximate cause of emigration was a bloody civil war whose topic was the proliferation of variant forms, fundamentally a disagreement over the nature of perfection, as many elven disagreements are. Moon elves were on the losing fundamentalist side, and the descendants of the second wave remained, to large extent, hardliners. - Worth the Candle: A Brief Description of Aerb - Chapter 8: Mortal Species
31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 31.2 === Elf (Dark) ===
Dark elves are nominally the third wave of immigrants, though their own history is largely lost to time. It is theorized that during the Flourishing Era which followed the schism that the moon elves came from, a band of elves adapted themselves to a more perfect form suitable to living underground in complete cold. Their transfer to Aerb is likewise shrouded in mystery due to gaps in the historical record, but they were found living in the Gelid Depths circa 4 FE, with scattered sightings prior to that. They are noted for their teeth, which are flattened and human-like, and their general goodly nature in comparison to their counterparts. The majority of the dark elf population still lives within the Gelid Depths.

###

- Worth the Candle: A Brief Description of Aerb - Chapter 8: Mortal Species
32. ↑ I had learned from *The Book of Blood* how he had survived the poison; apparently a general immunity to poison was one of the dark elf’s primary traits. - Chapter 125: The Remnants of the Past
33. ↑ === Elf (Wood) ===
Wood elves mark the fourth wave of immigration from Celestar, and the last prior to the cataclysm that permanently scarred their moon. Similarly to the moon elves, the wood elves were on the losing side of an ideological debate, this one primarily centered on whether the struggle for perfection (not the term they would use) should be oriented toward the past or the future. The wood elves, largely possessed by a desire to return to a time and society that never really existed, immigrated to Aerb and established nature-oriented ideal communities, isolationist beyond all reason. Wood elves put a lot of stock in ritual and ceremony. - Worth the Candle: A Brief Description of Aerb - Chapter 8: Mortal Species
34. ↑ 34.0 34.1 34.2 34.3 It was hard to learn much from the partite elves of the fifth wave of migration, those who had left Celestar immediately before the cataclysm. It wasn’t that they weren’t willing to talk, the problem was that hardly anyone knew what, exactly, had happened. The leading theory had to do with a school of philosophical thought that had enjoyed some popularity at the time. In essence, the philosophers had posited that there was a great upward bend to elven history, that perfection was, by steps, increasing with every passing century, if imperfectly, and that this rise in perfection was happening faster and faster. The past was less perfect, and thus deserving of scorn, but the future was where true perfection lay, apotheosis for the elves, and for Celestar. As philosophers were wont to do, they turned these philosophical musings into plans for concrete action: it was the duty of every elf to hasten the apotheosis of perfection along. - Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
35. ↑ 35.0 35.1 35.2 35.3 === Elf (Partite/Cataclysm) ===
Though the exact cause of the cataclysm that scoured Celestar is not precisely known, it is widely believed that it was caused by some sort of magic that the elves there were doing. The final wave of elven immigration immediately preceded the cataclysm, and was much more varied than the other waves. Partite elves come in a much wider variety of skin color and body shape, though they still tend to have the pointy ears characteristic of elves, along with being tall and lithe. Partite elves, as a general rule, place a lot of importance on personal perfection, but they’re much less invested in any elven society. Some mistake them for being free thinkers, which is simply not the case; they are as rigid and carnivorous as their cousins, but simply more independent as a rule. - Worth the Candle: A Brief Description of Aerb - Chapter 8: Mortal Species
36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 Formerly believed to have been a mundane cataclysm, the Celestar Exclusion Zone (CSEZ) has now been confirmed to be a pre-Utherian exclusion. The CSEZ covers the entirety of the moon Celestar. Anything placed upon the moon will revert to a ‘perfect’ position. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 55: Celestar
37. ↑ “Aerb is dying,” I said.

“Well *that’s* a leap,” said Fenn. “Celestar, now there’s a place that died, if you need context for world death.” - - Chapter 19: Montage!
38. ↑ ◼ ***The Slayer of Horrors (0/13)***:

[...]

□ ***Finger of the Sun*** - When the elves broke Celestar, there were a small few who continued on with their research. The product of their effort brought nothing but pain. - Chapter 75: Stats for Nerds
39. ↑ Chapter 212: Spilled Ink
40. ↑ “I think it’s looking for a precise obol figure,” I said. “What’s the value of the ones that I could, in theory, kill with only a few moments’ notice? That means Rove, the fleshsmiths, the Guardian, possibly whatever’s happening on the pink spot on Celestar, and maybe Pai Shep.”

[...]

“Twenty million for destroying whatever destroyed Celestar, but you would have to bring back proof, and payment wouldn’t be through the Empire, it would be through the elves. I’m not confident that we would be able to actually get payment. Is that enough?” - Chapter 220: Doecent
41. ↑ “We have a firmer offer for Celestar ... Twenty-five million for Celestar, ten million for Rove,” said Amaryllis. “The former comes through ongoing discussion with the elves, which would probably go better if I felt like I were able to negotiate in terms of in-kind exchanges, rather than just money. - Chapter 221: Targets of Opportunity