Zephyrians

The people of Ether. By their own legend they were born from the Sun itself, made to preserve balance and protect the life that would one day fill the world.

What sustained them was not a god or a craft they invented but the realm itself — Ether's Flame, showing through the Burning Tree. The Tree gave, and they received.

Their own working, the transfer craft the Gift is written in, is the same motion turned outward: giving what you hold to someone who does not hold it. The verse of it reads half-familiar to a Zephyrian, a cadence from home rather than a spell learned.

Their nature

Zephyrians are generally peaceful, compassionate and deeply respectful of life. They believe every living creature, however small, contributes something to the world's balance, and their society grew up without the violence and territorial struggles of younger civilisations. There has never been a war within Ether.

They are not defenceless, and their kindness should never be mistaken for weakness.

Their feathers are tied directly to their life force. A Healer gives them away to save a life; a Defender loses one when a Bonded dies.

The Three Paths

Zephyrians traditionally follow one of three paths:

• Healers, who heal by sacrificing their feathers.
• Defenders, who Bond with someone outside their species and protect them for life.
• The Unbound, who teach, build, craft, research and keep Ether running — no less important than the other two.

Education is not a competition. Young Zephyrians travel between the towns around Ayrith during their training, and the experienced are expected to mentor them.

Of Minds

Each Zephyrian has a unique connection to a particular ability, reflected in their eyes and wings: see the Colours of the Gift.

Taara is a Zephyrian of Minds. Emery's was the weather.

The Abbot, calibrating what the party could be used for, noted that a Zephyrian of Minds would be extraordinary material — or extraordinary help.

What became of them

Ether froze in the Great Freeze: the Tree called its people home, the entrances closed behind them, and only Taara is known to have been outside.

The freeze was her own overshot casting of the Gift. She forgot it, and remembers it since session 31.

What survives of them outside Taara is a single orb in Morgantha's Memory Vault — hundreds of Zephyrian memory-fragments compressed together. Not individuals. The collective warmth of what Ether used to feel like, the hum of the Burning Tree, the pulse of her kin, catalogued and filed as one stolen keepsake.

Strahd

He knew them, and spoke in session 14 as though their history was significant — "I have not seen a Zephyrian in a very long time."

That was a lie of omission. He had not seen her in a very long time. The history was hers: a marriage, and its erasure by his own casting of the same Zephyrian craft — the part of the book never read, though Taara remembers it since session 31.

What the world remembers

To the outside world the Zephyrians are extinct, if they were ever real. Traces surface now and then: ancient artifacts, forgotten writings, unusual magical objects, stories of winged guardians.

Most people consider them a myth. Some scholars believe Ether never existed. Others claim its people were gods, angels, or spirits sent to protect the world.

Very few know the truth. Fewer still know that somewhere in the world, the last Zephyrian is still alive.

"A life is never insignificant. Even the smallest flame can guide another through the darkness." — an old Zephyrian teaching