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Автор Джеймс Айлингтон

Tal’kamar, sickened but choosing to believe that everything he did would ultimately be undone, agreed. He changed his name to Aarkein Devaed and followed El’s instructions to create the Columns, a weapon that ultimately leveled Dareci and killed everyone living there.

This horrific act split the Venerate, many of them refusing to believe that El had truly asked Tal’kamar to perform it.

Hundreds of years passed as the Darecians, despite their incredibly advanced weaponry, were slowly driven from the Shining Lands. Many of the Venerate returned to assist Tal’kamar, finally accepting that he had been acting at El’s behest. However, Andrael in particular remained unconvinced, having suspected even before Dareci’s destruction that the “El” the Venerate were serving had been lying all along—and was quite possibly Shammaeloth himself.

As Andrael continued to research the consequences of what El was trying to achieve, he came to believe that it was the Venerate’s unnatural ability to manipulate kan that was at the root of the Darklands’ connection to their own world—a cause, as well as an effect, of the rift between realities. He eventually concluded that if that breach was widened by the Darecians as El wished, it could pose an extraordinary danger: one which, should El then be allowed to reach it, could potentially unleash the full misery of the Darklands upon the world.

Determining that the only solution was to close the rift entirely—and that the only way to do so was to eliminate the aberrant connections to the Darklands that were holding it open—Andrael reluctantly set about creating a weapon that could kill the Venerate.

To this end, he finally succeeded in making the blade Licanius.

Despite Andrael’s warnings and the new threat that Licanius posed, the remaining Venerate continued to follow El’s instructions to push the Darecians to Andarra; there, the surviving descendants of Tal’kamar’s near genocide created Deilannis, a great city with the Jha’vett at its heart.

Tal’kamar, upon hearing that the Jha’vett was complete, forged ahead of the Venerate’s army in order to sneak into Deilannis and travel back in time, believing that his doing so could end the war quickly and prevent further bloodshed. However, this only caused the Darecians, forewarned of his approach, to panic and attempt to use the Jha’vett themselves.

The result was a dire miscalculation by the Darecians, their use of Shackles reacting with the Jha’vett to strip them of their natural resistance to kan, turning them into beings of nearly pure Essence. Only Tal’kamar’s decision to save them by sending them to Res Kartha allowed them to survive; effectively imprisoned there, they would eventually become known as the Lyth.

Tal’kamar himself then attempted to activate the Jha’vett, discovering too late that it had been damaged. After the ensuing explosion, a young man calling himself Davian appeared, claiming to be a friend of Tal’kamar’s from an inevitable future. Davian accused Tal’kamar of willfully ignoring the evils he had perpetrated and avoiding taking responsibility for his actions, warning him that nothing in the past could ever be changed—including the death of Elliavia.