Ithkari

"We have Seen your life, Elinor, and you shall have a daughter who becomes a champion against evil, but in all Seen futures, you do not survive to see her achievements. I am sorry."

— An ithkari who has Seen a mother's future

Heralds of What is to Come

Born under the weight of tomorrow, their eyes ever turned toward the future, but never with clarity of certainty; the Ithkari do not see the past, for it is lost to them in the haze of times, its echoes muffled and distant. Their gift, or perhaps their curse, is the unrelenting vision of what is yet to come - of worlds yet to be, of ruins yet to fall, of lives yet to be lived. Their foresight is not confined to a day, a year or a century. Some Ithkari have fragments of the next hour, others glimpse far-flung futures stretching thousands of years into the unknown. These visions are not clear prophecies but cryptic flashes, fleeting and fragmented, like broken shards of a mirror.
At any moment, an Ithkari may be gripped by a vision - often without warning. The ground may tremble beneath them, the air heavy with the scent of an unknown place, and the world will bend and twist, offering glimpses of a future that might be. Their eyes cloud over, their expressions distant, as they perceive decisions, choices, the rise and fall of kingdoms, the lives of individuals who will never know they were witnessed.
Yet, no Ithkari can ever truly understand their visions. They are always a step ahead of their own understanding, catching only flashes and impressions. A figure in the distance who may be important, but their face is obscured. A great flood that will come in ten years, but they can only feel its weight, not the details of how or why. They have glimpsed the end of a great war, but they do not know what spark will ignite it. These visions could be of tomorrow's sunset or of a thousand lifetimes hence. They do not know which are certain and which are false, for the future is ever-changing, slipping like sand through their fingers. Even with the combined strength of hundreds of Ithkari, their visions may still be too weak or fragmented to focus and gain a greater understanding.

Seers of What May Never Arrive

They are not like those who read the stars or decipher ancient texts. They are not prophets with clear words, but rather those who see through the mist, catching fleeting glimpses of a future that never stands still. It is said that an Ithkari's mind never rests, always reaching forward into the unknown, searching for the next glimpse of what is to come. This constant tension between knowing and not knowing, between seeing too much and understanding too little, can make the Ithkari appear distant, cold, even unfeeling to those who do not understand them. They live in a realm of possibility, a realm of endless what-ifs, where every vision begs the question of what else may come to pass instead.
Their appearance is barely different to that of an average human, their skin tanned and their hair bright with pale eyes laden with ghosts of the future.
They are a people on the edge of the unknown, living in the shadow of what will come. And in that shadow, they search for meaning, for connection, and perhaps for a future that is theirs to shape, if they can ever truly grasp it.