LORE COMPENDIUM
ECLIPSE

The Heavens Above

The Empyrean Plane is less a geographical place than it is a sense of being. It exists beyond the Veil in impossible celestial structures culminating in the Watchtower, an infinite observatory over all Realms beneath it, and home to the Ilyri. It is also the seat of power for the order governing Eclipse: the Tribunal.

Tribunal Arbiters do not rule the mortal realms so much as they determine which events are permitted to unfold. Their divine attunement allows them to perceive consequences before they occur, making them uniquely capable of identifying threats to cosmic balance. To the Ilyri, history is rarely natural as almost any significant event is often the result of deliberate intervention on their part.

No Ilyri is born one. Each and every Arbiter was once a mortal elevated through Ascension, gaining a new form of existence and the ability to cross the Veil directly. The Tribunal has manipulated reality this way since before time itself.

Their interventions are called Corrections, usually subtle alterations to causality. The most extreme Corrections are Silencings, in which a species is erased by severing its existence entirely.

The Convergence changed this certainty. The newly formed Nexus and its Axions exist beyond the Tribunal's ability to fully predict, creating the first phenomenon in Ilyri history whose consequences cannot be reliably predicted.

The Therian Silence

The Therian were among the greatest scientific civilizations the Tribunal had ever observed. They conquered interstellar travel, making distance itself irrelevant. Eventually, they turned their attention to time.

The attempt to build a device capable of traversing chronology threatened the causal order the Tribunal had spent epochs maintaining. Unable to contain the danger through lesser means, Silence was ordered. For this task, they chose Solanthys, an Arbiter who had once possessed the same obsessive hunger for mastery that doomed the Therian. Rather than erase that ambition when he was mortal, the Tribunal had elevated and redirected it.

Solanthys entered the Therian's future and rewrote their history from its root. Generations unraveled, births became undone, and a trillion lives ceased to have ever existed. Their cities remained across a thousand worlds as monuments to hubris. The Therian had not been destroyed — they never happened.

The Tribunal considered the matter finished. Solanthys did not.

He remembered one particular Therian scientist at the heart of the forbidden project and began wondering whether the Therian were truly destroyed to protect cosmic balance, or because their ambition threatened the Tribunal's authority. He has never voiced the question.

Now, something within the Nexus evokes the same feeling he experienced during the Silence. Uncertainty, doubt, and perhaps guilt invade his thoughts. He has kept it hidden from the Tribunal, and from himself.

Solanthys, Divine Justiciar

Solanthys still believes the Tribunal's balance must be enforced, but every Correction reminds him that he was once the very kind of threat they destroy. He was spared for reasons the Tribunal has never explained, and he cannot reconcile that mercy with the judgment he delivers upon others.

His greatest critic is Valerius, an Arbiter senior to Solanthys who believes the Tribunal's patience allowed the Therian crisis to grow. He now demands immediate Correction of the Nexus and everything within it. To Valerius, hesitation is simply another form of the weakness that permitted the Therian to become a threat in the first place.

Valerius has not moved against him. Yet. Solanthys cannot tell whether the Tribunal is simply waiting or quietly judging whether his doubt warrants a Correction of its own. Meanwhile, the Nexus is being watched more closely than anything since the Therian. For the first time, its foresight cannot fully reach what lies ahead, and the Shapers possess powers approaching those of the Arbiters themselves. Whether they are potential instruments of balance or the next threat to be erased remains undecided.

Solanthys has begun to hope, secretly, that he will not be forced to make that judgment twice.