Aerenal

Aerenal is an island continent located to the southeast of Khorvaire and largely occupied by elves. The elven race made an exodus to Aerenal when the giant civilization of Xen'drik collapsed. Aerenal is its own nation and is overseen by the Undying Court.

Straddling the Thunder Sea and the Dragonreach Sea, the islands of Aerenal lie between the continents of Khorvaire and Argonnessen and roughly at the equator of Eberron.

Aerenal is the ancient island kingdom of the Aereni elves, who take their name from Aeren, a mythical hero said to have freed the elves from the giants of Xen'drik. It is also home to the deathless in the Undying Court. In addition to the Aereni elves, a small group of Tairnadal elves inhabits the northern steppes of Aerenal, though many have since migrated to Valenar. Due to fear of the "walking dead" and the isolationist nature of the Aereni elves, few non-elves ever visit the small continent. While the Aereni despise the creation of undead, the deathless of Aerenal, unlike undead, draw power from positive, rather than negative energy, and are generally good in alignment. A manifest zone of Irian is thought to make the existence of the Undying Court possible. Aerenal is heavily forested, and many exotic plants grow there, such as the soarwood tree, whose wood is used to build airship hulls, and the necromantically charged Covadish plant.

Aerenal is made up of different elven lines. Each line is descended from one of the tribes that followed the prophet Aeren from Xen'drik. Lines are not a single family, but more like a city-state with lots of different families bound together by common history and led by one noble family. The nobles are allowed to be raised as deathless, but membership in a noble house is not hereditary. An elf becomes a noble by what the elf does. Aereni nobles do not even breed among their house; instead, they breed with other members of the line, keeping the noble blood spread throughout the community. Unlike humans, the Aerenal marry only for love. Anyone can become a member of the Undying Court if they become great in life.

The elves have perfected the art of embalming, and some practice this trade in the great cities of Khorvaire. When an elf is prepared for burial, two chronicles of the elf's life are written: one is put into the tomb and the other into the great library in Shae Mordai. The tombs are in catacombs that stretch deep beneath the cities of Aerenal.

Government and Politics

The government of Aerenal is split between two major branches. Secular power is held by the Sibling Kings, a position that must always be held by a brother and sister. These siblings are appointed from the Aereni populace by the Undying Court. If either sibling of the pair dies, the other steps down and allows the Undying Court to choose a new pair of Kings. Currently, the Sibling Kings are Balareth (the brother) and Tezaera (the sister), of the Mendyrian family.

Both religious power and long-term national destiny are controlled by the Undying Court. This court is made up of the deathless, and therefore rule from Shae Mordai, the City of the Dead. The Undying Court is worshiped as a religion by the Aereni, and this belief is powerful enough that the Court's followers produce spellcasting clerics. The court also engages in national planning on a scale of millennia.

History

Elves have called Aerenal home for more than 26,000 years, and for most of that time, the Undying Court has ruled with a benign and guiding hand.
Before then though, the elves were slaves to the giants of Xen'drik. Little is known about this time, as history began to be regularly tracked with their escape from Xen'drik. These tales tell legends of the elves' grand race-defining escape, and are told to all Aereni, and form the foundation of their acceptance and reverence of death and their ancestors.

Aeren's Insight

During the later days of the Age of Giants, after the giant's war with the denizens of Dal Quor, the slaves of Xen'drik rose up against their masters. Elven legend tells of an elf named Aeren, who would come to lead the revolt and destroy the giant civilization once and for all.
Aeren served a mighty shaman, who one day ordered the elf to fetch his master a sacrifice for a ritual. Upon realizing that the sacrifice were to be a young elf girl, and witnessing her death at the hands of the shaman, Aeren came to understand the inherent magic found within the elves themselves - as the magic released by the sacrificial ritual was more potent than any they had seen their master perform before.
Aeren gathered a host of pupils, eager to learn what they had to teach, and these elves soon began conducting magical experiments of their own, away from their master's prying eyes. They soon found that the parchment and leather they stole from their masters to record their findings, were a liability as the giants might find them out. However, they soon discovered that their own blood was an ideal ink, and the bones of their own dead served as perfect records of their experiments. And so they continued, without the giants realizing.
Years passed, and so did many other elven sacrifices, until the day Aeren recognized what they had been missing for so long. The true force of magical power would not come from death, but from life. Sharing this revelations with his peers, Aeren began setting up for a ritual that would free all elves.

The Flight of Slaves

On the appointed day of freedom, Aeren and one hundred of Aeren's chosen stepped into their masters' chambers. They then spoke the final words of a ritual that had been prepared in advance over several months. As the words left their lips they gave up their lives, birthing mighty detonations of power within the giant strongholds, toppling them and upending their civilization. In the aftermath, the elves slipped away. Before the giants could retaliate and unleash horrific arcane magics the dragons of Argonnessen intervened and destroyed giant civilization for good.
The exodus from Xen'dik, which the elves call "The Flight of Slaves", was spearheaded by Aeren's faithful. Once the elves reached the shores they discovered a journal of Aeren's, concealed within a platinum urn. This journal contained the ritual that resulted in the great sacrifice of the elf heroes, as well as Aeren's notes on the rite that would eventually become the Ritual of Undying, or The Rite of Transition.
Conflicting accounts claim that different things happened to Aeren after this. One account claims Aeren, unlike the other heroes, did not truly perish. Instead his soul lingered in Eberron, as the flux of magical energies sustained his existence even as it ended his biological life. Aeren was thus transformed into the first of the Undying. Another claim has Aeren among those who escaped Xen'Drik, yet dying during the journey to what would become Aerenal. After the elves made landfall, Aeren was interred within the island, and the elves named their new home Aerenal, or "Aerens's Rest"

Between Then and Now

In the intervening years between the Flight of the Slaves and the Current Age, the elves were concerned with creating homes for themselves, as many of those who followed Aeren were of different tribes and wanted to seek out their own paths in life. For those who remained on Aerenal, the Undying Court would come to be their cultural touchstone.
The Undying Court appeared some 25,000 years ago, and soon after followed attacks by the dragons of Argonnessen. The first skirmish between the elves and the dragons set a pattern of long periods of peace punctuated by short, devastating battles every few hundred years.
In approximately -9,000 YK, the elves attempted to establish a colony within present-day Valenar. Peaceful coexistence with the Dharkaani could not be maintained and soon the Aereni abandoned the endeavor when yet another clash with the dragons threatened Aerenal.
Circa -2,200 YK the first dragonmarks appeared among the elves of Aerenal. The Mark of Shadow and the Mark of Death appeared at about the same time, and both the elves and dragons quickly understood the significance of the event. House Phiarlan organized around the Mark of Shadow and began turning the abilities provided by the mark into an economic dynasty.
Around -1,600 YK, a green dragon, the Emerald Claw, was found to be colluding with the House of Vol matriarch, Minara Vol, to create a fusion of the species. This led to the birth of Erandis Vol, a half-elf, half-dragon. Out of mutual fear of the power House Vol could one day possess through these half-dragons, the elves and dragons united under the goal of exterminating the half-dragons and House Vol's bloodline along with it. Everyone bearing the Mark of Death was subsequently killed by decree of the Undying Court. With the slaughter of the House of Death and fearing further prosecution of dragonmarks, House Phiarlan left Aerenal and relocated to Khorvaire, where the elves intermingled with humans and helped lay the foundation for the Five Nations. However, this temporary alliance ended the millennia of intermittent warfare between the elves and dragons.

The Last War

Officially, the elves of Aerenal had little do to with The Last War due to their geographical separation from Khorvaire. However, the island nation did send observers to keep eyes on the war, and to ensure that it did not spread beyond the continent's shores. Several of these observers bore witness to some of the war's greatest battles, and on rare occasions took sides, provided they could do so without being identified. This occurred most often in battles involving Karrnath, as the Aereni elves took great offense at the existence of the nation's undead armies and did what they could to aid its enemies. The biggest exception to this rule came in 956 YK, as mercenaries from Aerenal seized lands in southern Cyre and declared the sovereign state of Valenar.

The Undying Court & The Draconic Prophecy

Some say that Aeren's journal contained not only the rituals that would come to shape elven life on Aerenal, but also a dedicated prophecy that Aeren gifted the founders of the island-nation. The myth states that this included a plan for the elves, and that that is one of the purposes of the Undying Court. Aeren's word might be a portion of to the greater Draconic Prophecy, but it may also conflict with it.
Some scholars believe that the dragons know the ultimate plans of the Undying Court, and that those plans are at odds with the Draconic Prophecy. Others, citing that dragons could easily have eradicated the elves if they chose, say that the dragons are molding the elves toward an unknown purposes. Whatever the case, a faction of Argonnessen's dragons has tried for eons to wrest Aeren's prophecy from Aerenal, with no luck, as no outside force has ever been able to forcefully enter Shae Mordai.