The Reveliths

One of the greatest creations attributed to Corellan Latherian are the Reveliths, or Dreamstones. For thousands of years they allowed travel over distance between the many realms and Demi-planes considered as a whole to constitute the Feywild. The decision by the Court of Seasons to permanently disable the Reveliths effectively ended the Church of Light's crusade by cutting them off from materiel and reinforcements from Prime.

Navigation in the Feywild
Travel throughout the Feywild was never as simple as charting a straight line from point to point, since the geographical relationship between two destinations is as changeable as the weather. Indeed, geography in this world can be aptly compared to meteorology in many respects; some broad logic can be discerned in its inconstancy, but predicting the behaviour of a system so complex is possible only locally and on a short timeframe.

'The mill is at the end of this road' is a solid and predictable assertion, while 'there is a lake three days journey east of here' is found to be mostly trustworthy direction; two separate journeys may cover more or less distance and the landmarks along the way seem to appear and disappear at random. Travellers in this world will find that any distance beyond a few days manifests a rapidly growing degree of uncertainty, resulting in those embarking on journeys more than a week becoming hopelessly lost nearly half the time.

Natives to this realm travel seldom if possible, or with no fixed destination in mind. It was the elves of old who coined the phrase The Road of Songs, conveying their belief and practice that travel could be predictable only for so long as a song could be sung. For great journeys (such as between the Spheres of Seasons songs which lasted for months must have been composed.

Reveliths and Dreaming
It has often been said that travel in the Feywild is much like travel in dreams; places appear and disappear, distances seem to stretch or compress, things we search for can be lost and things unlooked for can be found, all seemingly without an internal logic. It can be insurmountably disconcerting for non-natives. Among the Dwarves of the Magisterium the current model describes the larger plane of the Feywild as being comprised of a series of smaller interconnected and dynamic Demi-planes. Largest among these are the Spheres of Seasons, but uncounted smaller ones exist, often nested within each other and each subject to largely its own rules and reason (one Dwarven Theoretical Arcanist claimed with perfect conviction that a discreet Demi-plane had manifested in one of her pantry cupboards wherein complex philosophical discourse was convened among a parliament of mice)

Among the elves tradition refers to these Demi-planes as Ereth'mir, roughly 'Dreams Shared' while the Reveliths are called Mirlani and used them to transit from one Ereth'mir to another without traversing the spaces between.

While the methods of their construction are lost to time (even among the elves, it seems), legend draws a connection between the Reveliths and the ubiquitous miststhat fill the world. (The mists are said to be the vaporized remains of the Sea of Mirrors and have some sort of (inexplicable) condensing effect on the magic of the moon.) From the mists, it is said, the stones harnessed the powers of the dreamworld to temporarily connect distant locations for the purposes of travel and communication

Stories of their historical function abound, and while many of the native elves would have more information about the practicalities of their use, concrete data are lacking but for a handful of sometimes fanciful depictions: First, that use of the stones required one to sleep in proximity to it; Second, the stones summoned the mists somehow; Third, that each use of the stones unleashed a creature of nightmare (literally Shadar'goth, nightmare in Elvish) at the location of departure; and Fourth, that an order of dedicated monks and druids, called The Revenant Brotherhood tended to every known revelith in order to maintain them, to guide travellers and most importantly, to destroy the unleashed Nightmares when they emerged.

The Revenant Brotherhood
Now little more than a historical footnote, The Brotherhood were the guardians and caretakers of the Reveliths. Dedicated to a natural balance that is at once ecological and metaphysical, they were ubiquitous, powerful and universally respected in the millennia since their formation.

Membership in the order was almost entirely comprised of the native elves, though there are records of most of the other native folk serving in the brotherhood in isolated cases. A unique species arose in the Feywild called The Kalashtar, whose connection to the world of dreams was considered singular and un-paralleled, as well as a great advantage to the Brotherhood.

Contemporary accounts of Revenant Brothers describe a dwindling cadre of wandering mendicants. Their decline in numbers and prestige can be attributed to The Severance, though individual members are reported to remain fierce and deadly when opposed.

The Severance
The permanent disabling of the entire system of reveliths throughout this world must have been an act of greatest desperation for the elven forces. Indeed the advancing crusaders were on the verge of toppling each of the four Lords of Seasons when the elves took the fateful step, dividing the Church forces, demolishing their supply lines and instantly (and permanently) cutting them off from any communication or reinforcement from Prime.

Consequences for the elves were as dire, if not moreso; though their empire was divided and routes of travel and supply broken, the destruction of the reveliths severed the ability of every elf to dream. The severance is know among elves as A'mirielle tor, 'The End of Dreams', and while it's not clear whether this consequence was foreseen or a tragic side-effect, the results were profound. Within months of the severance, every native elf began to rapidly descend into madness. The decline was precipitous; victims devolved into gibbering husks of themselves; they lost almost any semblance of intelligence but for bestial cunning, became paranoid, antisocial and violent. They were called the dreamless (Q'mir in elvish), or reavers more colloquially, they scattered from elven settlements into the deepest and most remote corners of the world, where they survive still either in solitude or sometimes in small packs that hunt anything and anyone unlucky enough to stumble into their territory. It's estimated that nine of every ten native elves was lost over the next two years, what must have seemed the blink of an eye for a people who can live for ten centuries.

This decimation might have been the death knell of Elven pre-eminence in this world, but for the discovery of a latent talent shared among elves to replace their dreams with a trance-like meditation. Since that discovery it seems there have been no new additions to the hordes of Q'mir.