There have been two great exoduses in the history of the Kelari. More than a thousand years ago, we departed the forests of Tavril, leaving behind our short-sighted cousins within the High Elves, and sought a land all our own. Our intent was to find a new home where we would be able to pursue any path, any power, that we wished, without the puppets of Tavril trying to tell us nay.

What we found were jungle isles ripe with potent energies. No one had tamed these isles, and the very jungle lived and breathed as an ancient, terrible thing of immense power. The records of the ancients describe the way it undulated and trembled with their steps. It could sense that its new masters had come.

With the yoke of our creator cast off, we were prepared to mold a world of our own design.

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For more than fifteen-hundred years we flourished within the jungles, but then, everything changed. The prisons of the dragons began to stir, and the ocean became a tumult of fury, assaulting our shores. As the sea dashed our boats and coastal settlements to pieces with the indiscriminate fury of an impertinent child, our temples were assaulted from within by spirits bloated with the corrupt power of the cults.

Their power spilled over, and corrupted our most powerful magical sites. It took root within the other spirits that gathered within their walls, and its dark touch wound its way into the very cores of their beings, turning them irrevocably into wild beings of limitless malevolence.

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Many Kelari embraced these new spirits as their masters, but I, Anthousa Mona, High Priestess of the Kelari Isles, would not have it. So, it happened that a second great exodus was necessary for our people, but this time we were not leaving in pursuit of an ideal. Instead, we were fleeing, and leaving everything behind us.

The sea passage had the cadence of drowned sailors’ most tormented dreams. We were assaulted daily by storms and twisted abominations of the deep. Many of the spirits still in our power were consumed by those threats, expending pacts of great power just to keep us alive. Even with that, we lost more than half our number.

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But it finally happened that we came to the shores of Freemarch and its curiously orangish people. Few had ever dealt with these humans before. Our contact with outsiders was limited at best. Many did not accept us. The dull grey eyes of the farmers of Freemarch gazed at us with slack-jawed fear and revulsion.

It was not until the Defiants came to us and extended a hand that the violence of the farmers subsided. I was amazed the way that the extended hand of Orphiel Farwind and Asha Catari was enough to transmogrify fear into curiosity. Though the Bahmi muttered discontent with their brutish lips, we were to be harbored.

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Now, it falls on us to reform and rebuild. Our isles are still out there, though they may be battered and choked with unbound spirits and betrayers. Our path among the Defiants will guide us back to Kelari, and by the spirits, we will wrench it from their hands and take back what is ours.