“Whispers of the Deep Manaethereal…Ohh What a Day”
as told by Gorlen
[The tavern’s din dims as Gorlen, short in stature but tall in tales, climbs onto his favorite barrel-stool at the hearthside. The gnome adjusts his shopkeeper’s apron—still dusty with powdered silverleaf—and clears his throat with a sip of blackberry mead.]
“Ahem. Right then. You think you’ve seen everything this side of the Crystalmere? Pfft. You’ve bartered for cursed relics, dodged debt-collecting devils, maybe even walked the Ethereal Plane with your mage-friends and their shiny boots. But have you ever heard the mana sing? I have. And I didn’t find it in a wizard’s tower, nor some star-bound ritual. No. I found it by mistake—because I was trying to sell cheese.”
[He lets the crowd settle into disbelief before continuing, smugly.]
Once, long ago—or maybe it was last week, time gets funny where I was—I glimpsed the veil between here and there. Not the Ethereal, no no, that misty transit realm’s but the porch swing to a house you should never walk into. I’m talkin’ about the Manaethereal—a plane stitched from pure, unrefined mana, pulsing like the heart of creation itself."
“They say it shadows the Ethereal Plane like a mirage atop a mirror, but it’s deeper—thicker. The air there hums, sings, screams sometimes, with the voices of spells unborn and thoughts unfinished. In the Manaethereal, you don’t cast spells, they cast you. Wild surges crawl up your skin, and if you’re lucky, they leave you enlightened. If not? Well, I met a fellow who sneezed and became a constellation.”
The audience chuckles nervously.
“Let me explain. I’m a merchant, not some wand-waggler. I sell the unusual—mirrors that whisper, fishhooks that catch lies, that sort of thing. I was brokering a deal with a Shimmering Barterspirit—ghastly thing with a pearl for a face and wings made of scrolls. We were arguing over the price of a jar of ethereal-preserved gorgon butter when I stepped one toe too far into its realm. That’s when I felt it—the snap of reality unraveling like a badly-stitched sock.”
“What I tumbled into wasn’t the Ethereal Plane. No, this was denser… alive. The air crackled. Threads of magic drifted like pollen, glowing blue and violet. You don’t walk in the Manaethereal, you float, pushed by your own intent and the pulse of something much deeper.”
[He holds up a brass orb—its surface swirling with flickers of light, not reflections but living glyphs.]
“I found this there. A manasphere. Self-spinning, thought-reactive. Doesn’t work on this side quite the same—nearly ignited my entire inventory of scented scrolls when I tried to appraise it. I only escaped thanks to a trade I made with a creature called an Echoform—a being made entirely of recycled spell energy. It took my name in trade. My real name. I’m Gorlen now, and that’ll have to do.”
[He leans forward, voice low and smoky.]
“But that’s just the edge of the Manaethereal. Beyond the shimmering veil lies the Deep Manaethereal—a place so saturated with raw magic that reality itself pulses. There, in a storm of crystal vines and radiant currents, floats the Auric Tangle, said to be the root of all mana on every plane. Some say it’s a thought left unfinished by the gods. Others? That it’s the beginning of a new Weave, one that would make the current one look like a child’s kite string.”
“And now, the seams are weakening. In V’Ral, spells surge for no reason, minor enchantments birth echoes, and even my wares are misbehaving. Something from the Deep is bleeding into our world—and if I know anything, it’s that uncontrolled mana never shows up just to say hello.”
[He raises his tankard solemnly.]
“So, if any of you brave, curious, or mad souls want to venture there… I have maps. Poorly drawn, but enchanted. I have relics. Dangerous, but curious. And most importantly, I have stories. But you’ll have to bring the courage—and maybe a cleric or two.”
It was morning, working off a hangover from the previous night—not the kind you write about in travel songs or bottle in a sun-essence vial—but the soft kind, the sort that steals into alley cracks and warms the stone just enough to coax a sigh out of your bones. I was perched on my shop’s stoop, pipe in hand, watching the steam curl off a nearby bakery cart and waiting for the street to remember it was alive.
Then she stepped through.
Not from the city gates, no, gods no. She shimmered out of the base of the Obelisk, that old slab of nonsense the locals paint on festival days but never really notice… Gorlen chuckles enjoying calling the Obelisk an old slab. The air around it hummed a bit that morning, subtle—like a string plucked underwater. The obelisk didn’t split. It sighed. And there she was.
Amarwyn.
I knew her the way you know your own shadow—unspoken, immediate. She had her mother’s stillness, her grace. Elisha could silence a forest just by walking through it, and this one—this girl—she carried that same weight. Not heavy like sorrow. Heavy like a blooming truth. Her hair glinted like dew on morning grass, and I swear to all the planes, the cobblestones beneath her grew moss as she passed.
I didn’t move. Didn’t dare. Just puffed slow on the pipe and watched, like I was seeing a story the gods forgot to finish.
She didn’t see me—not truly. Oh, her eyes flicked past, pausing for a moment. And for a heartbeat, just maybe, there was a flicker of something ancient in her gaze. Recognition? A memory not her own? I couldn’t tell.
You see, she doesn’t know I’m her great uncle. And she mustn’t, not yet.
Too many threads wind through Elisha’s lineage, too many promises kept with ink made of favors and blood. I’ve been in hiding longer than she’s drawn breath, wrapped in false names and safer silences. I wasn’t ready to reveal myself to anyone just yet.
But there she was, like the dawn being born in front of me.
She stayed one night. Slept by the old shrine—grandpa’s shrine. She didn’t speak to anyone save a beggar who thanked her for warmth, though he swore she never touched him.
Next morning? Gone. Eastward. Toward the Sylvaeren Reach, if I’m any judge of a blooming path.
And me? I’m still here. Pipe’s a little colder. Heart’s a little heavier. Maybe I should’ve said something. Maybe I will, if she ever returns. But for now, I watch the obelisk and wonder what part of her mother she’ll discover first—the magic… or the burden."
Amarwyn
Race: Half-Elf / Half-Plant (Divine-Blooded)
Class: Mage/Cleric (Nature and Magic Domains)
Origin: Daughter of Elisha (Demigoddess of Magic and Hunt) and Lathander (God of Dawn and Renewal)
Current Location: Unknown; last seen departing V’Ral
Age: Ageless in appearance (appears as a youthful adult)
Background:
Born under the first convergence of the twin stars Naeril and Sol’tereth, Amarwyn entered the planes not through birth, but as a radiant bloom within the Calyx of Awakening, a sacred locus deep in the Plane of Radiance, nurtured by her mother Elisha’s soul-magic and kissed by Lathander’s first light. Her body is as much vine and blossom as it is blood and bone—her veins carry glowing mana instead of crimson, and when she sleeps, wildflowers bloom in her footprints.
Though her divine father gifted her with boundless vitality and joy, it was Elisha’s legacy that took deepest root in her spirit: the huntress’s quiet focus, the arcane intuition, and the primal communion with growing things. She walks as both guardian and mystery—an avatar of rebirth, arcane resonance, and wild renewal.
Her first steps into the Material Plane were not accidental. Propelled by a pulse from the Obelisk buried beneath the planet’s ancient foundation—a relic that hums with planar convergence—Amarwyn emerged from a portal, barefoot and dew-laced, into the early dawn streets of the city. She said nothing at first, only paused to breathe deeply, as if tasting the soul of the world.
She stayed a single night in the city, quietly seated outside an old shrine near Gorlen’s shop, speaking little but leaving behind a trail of glowing moss along the stonework. Locals whispered about the “Flower-Walker,” the girl with starlight eyes who wept softly when she saw how disconnected the trees in V’Ral had become from their root-sisters across the planes.
But before sunrise, she was gone.
Her destination: the Sylvaeren Reach—an ancient and majestic forest veiled from most maps, hidden by enchantments older than mortal kingdoms. The elves call it Arvandisthil, or “the Living Memory.” It is said that every tree there is sentient, every flower a spell yet unspoken, and every beast a guardian chosen by primal spirits. The Reach is a sanctuary of wandering spirits, awakened groves, and manaethereal is so strong that the mana ripples visibly in the air like heat on stone.
Some say Amarwyn now wanders its emerald paths, learning from druidic circles and wild arcana, listening for a deeper calling from her mother’s bloodline. Others claim she seeks the Heartbloom, a mythical seed that, when planted, could regrow a dying world—or awaken a god yet unborn.
A few days later. Golen in the Drunkin Ogre, is seen mumbling to a whispy blue ghost that by some accounts if viewed at the right angle, sounds a little like Arg’s description.
“You ask where she went, do you?”
Heh. You think she’d linger long in the brick-and-candle stink of a city? Nay. She left V’Ral as quiet as sunrise, off to a place most folk couldn’t find even with a map made by a god drunk on truth. She went to the Sylvaeren Reach. And, fool that I am, I followed—just far enough to know she was safe, I had to be sure. And just far enough to remember why none of us should ever walk its paths lightly.”
“The Reach is old. Older than scrolls. Older than Elven memory, and that’s saying something. It’s not a forest, not really. It’s… the memory of one. The trees don’t grow; they remember growing. Roots don’t seek water—they follow whispers. And mana? Mana doesn’t flow—it lives. It watches.”
“Legends say the Reach was seeded from the last breath of a god of growth, or maybe the tear of the Deep-manaethereal itself after some cosmic heartbreak. Who can say? What I do know is that it guards itself. You don’t find the Reach; the Reach finds you—if it wants to.”
“I got in, mind you. Still have a few tricks left in these gnarled fingers, plus a favor owed from a bark-skinned dryad named Mossa who once tried to rob me. Long story. Anyway, I followed her trail—Amarwyn’s, I mean. It wasn’t hard. The plants parted for her, not out of fear, but reverence. Vines moved just enough to offer her shade. Flowers bloomed when she passed. Even the wind bent to keep from tousling her hair.”
“I caught sight of her once—just once—before the canopy swallowed her whole. She was standing in a glade where the air shimmered like spun glass, eyes closed, palms open. You could feel the Reach breathing with her. She wasn’t just in that forest. She was becoming part of it.”
“There’s a place deep inside the Reach called the Weaveheart Glade. No one’s seen it since the Age of Spires, not even the druids who treat the forest like their grandmother’s diary. Some say the last Goddess of Growth herself passed through it during her ascension. Others say it’s where mana dreams. I say it’s where Amarwyn was always meant to go.”
“I didn’t stay. You don’t overstay in Sylvaeren Reach. Every step further in asks something from you. Time, memory, maybe a secret you didn’t want to give up. Me? I’d already given enough. But I left something for her—a book with a single inlaid crest, etched in star adamantine, and mana-gold, etched with the sigil of our bloodline. Buried it near a spring that sang her name in a language older than breath.”
“She’ll find it, one day. When she’s ready.”
Gorlen leans back, pipe ember glowing, lost in a rare silence.
“She’s not just her mother’s daughter. She’s the next stanza of a song none of us have heard all the way through. And gods help anyone who tries to silence it.”
Across the distant reaches of the sphere, the mists beneath the Autaria Dynasty stirs.
Within the shadowed rim of the Autaria Dynasty’s furthest dominions—beyond the war-hewn basalt roads of Dareth’Myr and the scorched glass plains of Kelvaris—rests a forgotten caldera swaddled in mist. This place is Emberlight Hollow, untouched by conquest, unmarked on imperial charts, and alive in ways few lands dare to be.
Here, the veil between realms thins. Magic flows gently, not like a torrent but like breath—slow, natural, aware. The trees bear mirrored leaves. The streams sing to those who listen. And the mana pulses with a rhythmic cadence long absent from the wider world.
For centuries, Emberlight Hollow has remained still—its druids and planar geomancers merely tending to balance, preserving harmony against the ever-gnawing ambitions of fire-throned kings and vault-born wizards. Even the fall of the Autaria Conclave of Flame, with all its planar tampering and celestial arrogance, brought only a faint sigh to the Hollow.
But now, something moves.
The Veilwardens have felt it first—a subtle turbulence across the mana threads beneath the roots of the Heartpine Circle. Spells require gentler tongues to speak. The moonflowers bloom one night early. The stars above the Hollow realign as if bracing for something long promised and long delayed.
The Eldertree Atheren—who has not spoken aloud in a generation—opened a single eye last week and whispered, “The Bloom stirs.”
None know what it means.
The druids convene. The Emberlight Accord, a council only gathered in ages of convergence, has been called. Old banners of the Elemental Compacts are unearthed. Rites meant to awaken sleeping groves and commune with future echoes are performed by firelight and crystal song.
They do not speak of names. They do not guess at faces. They do not presume fate.
They only know that magic is shifting, and something ancient has begun to root itself once again into the world. Whether it be salvation, consequence, or reckoning—they cannot yet say.
But the Hollow listens. And it waits.
