Profiles in History: Emperor Kellin II and the Nali Valind

The fall of the Seaborne Empire of Yalain may have had its origin in a conspiracy between a man named Cashtal Ronain, one of the last of the Haebrous, and the Nali Valind, a high official of the Yalaini Northern Church.

Cashtal Ronain married the Princess Alhallie, the daughter of the Emperor Caerlin II, and at that time changed his family name to Realaidain. On the death of Caerlin II, Alhallie became Empress and took the royal name of Cellaurai. Around this time, the Nali Valind began a reformation of the Northern Church. The Yalaini (and the nearly extinct Haebrous) venerated the Light in its manifestations as the sun and the stars, but the Falatacot and their pupils the Dericost venerated the earth and its autochthones the Old Ones, whose descendants we call Slithis. Valind tightened the rules of the Church, persecuted those she found to be wanting in devotion, and compelled the Order of Hieromancers to swear to the rule of Nali Athanas or leave the Order.

Shortly thereafter, as the Empyreans measured time, the Empress Cellauri vanished. Some said that she had been traveling into the north to confer with Valind, but the official statement was that she had gone into Dericost in search of a gromnatross that supposedly had been seen there. After eighteen months of fruitless searching, Cellauri was given up for dead and her husband Cashtal was named Emperor. He took the imperial name of Kellin II.

Consolidating her power, Valind caused Kellin to convert to the Northern Church. She declared the Adjanites to be heretics, worshippers of the earth instead of the stars. She had them slaughtered in Ithaenc Cathedral and burnt their leader, Lady Kathendi, at the stake. (The Dericost Sand-King Anadil believed that she did this because she coveted the Shard of the Herald, the sixth of the crystals imprisoning Bael'Zharon.) The Northern troops who had carried out the massacre returned to the north and sought the blessing of the gromnatross Aurlanaa upon their actions; instead, Aurlanaa slew them all and departed from Auberean. This should have been a warning to Valind, but was not.

Kellin and Valind between them now had matters under firm control. The only factor on which Kellin could not depend was the mage Asheron.

Asheron, the only survivor of the confrontation between the Yalaini Council and Bael'Zharon, had already lived longer than most Yalaini, and Valind suspected that Falatacot magic had granted him his long life. (This was, in essence, true.) Asheron had studied the art of planar magic, and he and his student Delacim had opened portals between many points on Auberean and even between Auberean and other worlds.

Now Asheron and his students opened a portal to a world for which no name is recorded, the world that harbored the Olthoi, the Grievvers, and the many types of fungi that made up their ecosystem. Delacim was killed, and Asheron closed the portal; but Kellin, urged on by Delacim's envious brother Gaerlan, demanded that it be opened again. This time the Olthoi found the portal and poured into Auberean, Workers and Soldiers and at least one Queen, along with Grievvers, and carrying the spores of their world's fungal life on their bodies. The Yalaini could not combat the Olthoi; for some reason these powerful warriors and mages could not prevail against the insects either by spellcraft or by weaponry. The Olthoi overran Auberean, and the last of the Yalaini escaped by skyship to Dereth. Kellin and Valind took care to include themselves among the few survivors. Even there they were pursued by the Olthoi, until Asheron cast the Sundering portal and transported all the surviving Yalaini --- including Kellin and Valind --- into portalspace.