The Great Freeze

The last event in Ether's known history, roughly eight hundred years ago. The Burning Tree went dark, Ether froze, and its gates closed with every Zephyrian inside. Only Taara is known to have been outside.

As it looked

The warmth that sustained the Zephyrians drained out of the Tree. As it went, the Tree called its people home, and every Zephyrian alive was drawn back to Ether. Then the realm's entrances closed, trapping them inside, and when it settled Ether looked like a graveyard.

Taara had come home to rest and found the hum of Ether thinning. Touching the Tree gave her a vision of cold-sigils carved beneath its roots. She stepped outside the barrier to clear her head; behind her the flames dimmed to nothing, and the entrance would not open for her again. She waited at the barrier for two months, then left, and spent eight centuries hunting whoever had placed the sigils. Her own telling is in Taara's backstory.

What really happened

Ether was never attacked and never cursed. The freeze was Taara's own casting of the craft recorded in the Gift, worked in reverse at scale: the Burning Tree named as the giving vessel, Ether's Flame named as the thing to move, and Ashenwood named as the receiver. She did it to put the flame beyond Strahd's reach; why, and in what order, is on Ether's Flame.

The casting overshot. She asked to move the flame and the spell took everything, the way the verse warns: the bough shaken for an apple gives the wasps and windfall too. The freeze is what any body does when the heart is taken out. She was locked outside because the spell spares its asker.

The cold-sigils are the remainder the casting left on the Tree. Nobody placed them, and Taara forgot them along with the casting.

The Zephyrians are not dead. A heartless body in cold is not a corpse, it is preservation: they are frozen, not killed.

The seams in her memory

Her player-written backstory stays word for word true as her memory of events. Where it shows the truth through:

• "Grieving the recent death of a bonding" is the residue of the Erasure. The bonding was her marriage. Her mind filed the unnamed grief under the nearest familiar shape.
• The vision at the Tree, the discovery of the sigils, the horror of finding them: this is the shape her edited memory gave her own act.
• The barrier sealing "to protect her" is the spell's rule showing through. Nothing is asked of the asker.

Since

• Session 30. The crossing took Ether, frozen, into the Shadowfell (Ether's Flame, The crossing).
• Session 31. The flame went back into the Tree, and Taara's memories came back, the casting included (Ether's Reignition). Whether the Zephyrians wake, and what wakes after eight hundred years frozen, is open: the hope and the horror both.