King Aleron Thorne, the Waymaker

At the height of its glory, Japhaia was a living jewel, crowning the plains of the Shade realm. A city that hummed with unbridled industrial invention and barely tamed magic. The Kingdom of Illeva was, by this time, prosperous, confident, and hungry to explore realms beyond its shores and skies. There was an excitement in the air when a team of illevan engineers and akati artificers began to crack the code of using leylines and the Veil as highways between realms. A new era was dawning!

But something kept dawn from breaking into morning.

The Gifted Prince

Things were often ruthless in the Five Halls of the Court. Daggers whispered louder than decrees, and loyalties shifted like sails in the wind. Aleron Thorne was never expected to rule. King Varon’s second wife, Serentha Thorne, was a beautiful drow, a minor priestess of Ancev, and Aleron was her second son and sixth in line for the throne.

He was raised with a choice: become a diplomat or pick up a trade, and thus he entered the Tower of Diables under the guidance of Zhurdroc the Black Mage. As a child, Aleron was quiet, observant, and unnervingly patient. Naturally gifted at dark arcana, languages, and patterns, his mentors assumed he would become a wardcrafter, but what he became was more. He became obsessed with the edges of elements, with the boundaries between realms, places, and states of being.

At the edge of one hundred years old, he left the city and wandered the Kingdom on foot for nearly six decades, sleeping beside leystones, listening to faultlines in the Veil, sketching strange fractal runes into flat stones. His peers mocked him, despite his royal status. But those who traveled with him noticed how roads shortened, coincidences thickened, and the people of the lands celebrated his arrival.

When asked what he was doing, he simply said; “The world is folded wrong.”

The Tsieach Frames

After his decade of wandering, Aleron returned to Japhaia and presented his findings to his father, who, to mollify his son’s passion and keep him in the city after the death of three other heirs to a hive of Shadowwraiths, gave him a substantial laboratory in the Deep Spires and significant funds to continue the research.

Still, Aleron did not care for the politics, which he deemed childish, and remained largely untouched by the fact that he was now third in line for the throne. He gathered the Tsieach Conclave, the group of illevan engineer-supremes led by his younger brother Daron Thorne and Raegel of House Vana’s group of akatian artificers and high mages, and set to work.

It was in this laboratory that the Nine Frames first appeared. Immense arcane arches, each aligned to a unique leyline and inscribed with an Alaic runic sequence that could fold distance across domestically across any realm. It was Aleron’s life’s work.

With a final incantation, the tethering magitech mechanism called the Heartlock Array breathed life into the first proto-Portals: the Tsieach Frame. The Heartlock binds the gate to the leyline itself, creating a controllable and temporary rift in the Veil to another point on the same leyline.

But this was not the end of the line, or success. The Conclave sought perfection, and so they continued their work without interruption. There were accidents, of course. Instances of people disappearing, torn asunder between two portals, or just plain vanishing. But over the next couple of months, the Tsieach became more stable and ready for public deployment.

It was a brilliant feat of engineering and arcane artificing, and Aleron Thorne, along with Daron and Raegel were hailed as the greatest visionaries who ever lived. Pioneers of the future of all realms.

Becoming King of Illeva

Aleron never intended to become King, he saw politics as beneath the mind that sought to reshape reality itself. But as is often the case, the throne did not come to him through ambition but by the inevitable course of a royal life.

After his return to Japhaia, tragedy continued to stalk the royal line. His father, already weary and hollowed by grief, passed away unexpectedly. With no one else of royal blood and capability remaining, the burden fell to Aleron.

He resisted, publicly and fiercely, but the Kingdom was on the brink of either glory or doom. The Portals had destabilized the balance of power, and Illeva needed both a visionary and a sovereign. There were those among the Akati in the Faerie realm that grumbled, wanting the credit for the Portals to go to Raegel as they so heavily depended on the Veil and the gifts granted by their goddess Ayursha.

Aleron cared little for the bickering and realized that by becoming King, he could at least for a time quell the growing animosity. His reign was brilliant, marked by great invention and expansion, the rise of the Interrealm Accord, the Collapse of the Eighth Seal, and the first Incursion of Mera’s Vale by akatian insurgents.

Legacy

Aleron ruled for 360 years, a very brief time for a race whose lifespan measures on average 1000 years. Under his reign, the Illevan monarchy entered a time of stability and unexpected diplomacy. The Portals provided the first permanent links to tradeposts in Avaleen and Faerie, which provided a golden era of trade of both goods and knowledge.

For generations, despite the escalating battles that would become the Shadow Wars, the Portals remained open. Commerce surged. Cities rose.

But over time, the use of the Portals began to strain the Veil. The more they were used, the more it seemed to thin. The warnings came too late. Perhaps it was a good thing that King Aleron Thorne succumbed to an increasingly withdrawn mind so that he did not have to witness his greatest invention causing the greatest tragedy the world had ever seen.