The Rise of the Companion

The Rise of the Companion — in 1444 DR, a second sun descended over Elturel, and it has hung there ever since.

As Elturel tells it: the city's leader was secretly taken over by a lich, who corrupted the minds of the other officials and bent the city toward his dark agenda. When his influence spread beyond the walls and was discovered, an uprising rose — and was hopeless; the people had neither the numbers nor the power. Then Thavius Kreeg — a man of an old Elturgard family from the outlying regions, and a high priest of Torm renowned across the land for the strength of his divination magic — came to the city and summoned the Companion, guided, the story goes, by what Torm's vigilance had revealed to him in prayer. It descended from the sky, its light — death to the undead — broke the lich's grip, and the city was freed.

Nobody knows what the Companion is or how Kreeg summoned it. In the flush of liberation the city raised the hero-paladin Tamal Thent as its first High Overseer, while Kreeg returned quietly to temple duties. Six years later, in 1450 DR, she vanished — her entire caravan, retinue and all, gone without a trace near Boareskr Bridge; the investigation that followed found nothing. The grieving city turned to the man who had saved it once already, and Kreeg was elected High Overseer all but unanimously. He has ruled ever since, steering the city toward the light and building up the Dawnbringers and the Hellriders. Elturel's Dawnbringers speak of the orb as a blessing that "feels like the Morninglord's own regard." Nuts Deep sits at roughly the edge of the Companion's reach — about the limit of where undead can survive near the city.

The heart of this history was told to the party by a Dawnbringers Banneret (S53); the fuller record comes from Elturel's own chronicles.