As all good legends do, the Aereni story begins with a hero, an elf slave named Aeren Kriaddal. Aeren served a powerful giant shaman for the greater part of his life. Eventually earning the mighty creature’s trust, Aeren was allowed to observe and even aid in the giant’s most potent rituals. Through this participation, he learned to cast simple spells.
One day, Aeren was ordered by his master to retrieve the day’s sacrifices for the ritual. Kept in a small pen near the giant’s house, these sacrifices typically consisted of livestock or captured wild animals. This day, however, Aeren opened the door to the large pen and found that it contained only a single small figure: an unconscious female elf. In a numb daze, Aeren took the elf slowly back to his master’s abode. His conditioning was too thorough for him to do anything else, and on some level, he doubted his master meant to slaughter his fellow elf simply for his magic.
Aeren’s assumption was wrong.
The giant shaman plunged a knife—a weapon the size of a large sword in an elf’s hands—into the elf, spilling her blood to power a potent magical ritual. Horror struck Aeren just as cruelly.
The magic released by the sacrificial ritual was more potent than any Aeren had seen his master perform before. Despite his shock at the death of the sacrifice, the portion of his mind fascinated with magic took note of the power released by the sacrifice of an elf (as opposed to that of a mere beast). But the betrayal of his trust in the giant seeded a new thought into Aeren’s mind: revolt.
Aeren began to carefully and slowly build a secret contingent of like-minded slaves, including a few who were eager pupils of the magic Aeren could teach. From these unpromising beginnings, the revolution nurtured the seeds of magical lore, and slowly expanded it with each passing year. Eventually, the elves began magical experiments of their own. The slaves at first recorded their trials and successes on pilfered scraps of parchment and leather, but the thefts were too risky—the giants might find them out. Instead, they found that their own blood was an ideal ink, and the bones of their own dead served as a perfect record of their findings. The giants suspected nothing.
Aeren never forgot the power unleashed by the sacrifice of one of their own race, and he conducted his own secret experiments apart from those of his conspirators, always seeking to unleash the power of blood. He had no desire to sacrifice his own people for any reason, but he felt that he was close to recognizing some key element.
Aeren’s giant master felt the same way. Many more elves passed across the giant shaman’s sacrificial altar, but to no greater effect. Those who were sacrificed wailed in their chains if conscious, asking for release, or fought wildly to avoid the drugs that would render them mutely accepting of the giant shaman’s sacrifi cial knife.
With a fl ash of intuition, Aeren finally recognized the missing element one day after a particularly vicious sacrifice. Each victim was unwilling. Even when unconscious or drugged, the slaves’ souls cried out for life, not death. Aeren’s insight fi red him with steely determination. In the wake of his hard-won knowledge, it was finally time to initiate the elves’ escape from Xen’drik.
Aeren shared his theories on the power of sacrifice with the trusted core of his secret movement. With this precious knowledge, they hatched a daring plan for the elves to escape the captivity of the giants. But secrecy, even among the elf slaves, was vital, lest betrayal ruin all their years of hidden labor. Of all the thousands of elves held in captivity, Aeren selected only one hundred others to share the magical knowledge necessary to free the elves, as well as the exact time of the escape.
When the appointed day of freedom came, Aeren walked into his master’s chambers. All across Xen’drik, his cohort of conspirators did the same. They all spoke the final words of a terrible ritual, prepared in advance over many months. The ritual was powered by the sacrifi ce of all the collected elf heroes. In that instant, all these participating elves, scattered across the continent in key locations, gave up their lives.
Mighty detonations of power were born flaming into the world. Giant citadels fell, towns were expunged of their giant populations—and elves everywhere saw the signal. Led by agents of Aeren and his inner circle, the elf slaves slipped away in the tumult.
During the Flight of the Slaves, as the elves call their exodus, a powerful, mysterious elf cleared the way for the fleeing elves of Xen’drik, diverting giant patrols, guiding lost groups of elves, and even obliterating obstacles (giant or otherwise) in displays of blazing power. Upon arriving at the coast, the freed slaves discovered a journal, prepared by Aeren and placed within a platinum urn. Carried to the shore by an unwitting messenger, the journal documented the ritual that resulted in the great sacrifice of the elf heroes, as well as Aeren’s notes on the rite the elves eventually came to call the Ritual of Undying.