Authored by First Keeper May'riina Shri'isstra / Edited by First Keeper Sydney Harrow ' AR 161 ' During Andunor's Second Illithid War '
Preface: As the first scholar that I know of making these historical accounts of the first Illithid sighting since the Cataclysm I have decided to numerically reference these distinct events as "The Illithid Wars." These events have not escalated into an all-out conflict, but in the grander scheme we are, in fact, at war with the Mind Flayer's of Izlude's Torment. We have always been.
It is late into AR 126. Andunor is just over twenty years of age, still fledgling, still settling in, and the Noble Houses Freth and Claddath are fortifying their respective districts with increasing numbers of soldiers by the week.
In this Era: Arakh, Son of Mog, administrates the Claddath's Sharps under the watchful militaristic gaze of his Iron Order of Elven Death. Meanwhile in the Devil's Table it is House Xal'rae that dominates the council under Freth.
House Freth begins deploying troops outside their Devil's Table. House Claddath notices swiftly and escalates with their own maneuvers into adjacent territories.
The city is tense. The Hubmaster doubles the Peacekeeper presence in the Wheel and Hub. Civil war is imminent.
Arakh's scouts report that skirmishes break out as territorial boundaries press together. The friction of the arms race sparks off and escalates the cold war as tiny clashes break out in the surrounding regions of Andunor.
Approximately a month into the budding conflict an Iron Order scout brings to Arakh a troubling report. Arakh cannot believe it, and personally assembles a company of his best and brightest to investigate.
The Iron Order finds that the waters of the flood have receded, and Udos Dro'xun's carcass washes up out of it. Arakh's war-party arrives to see Houses Freth and Claddath in pitched battle in the ruins of the old city. Both Noble forces all but annihilated each other and the remaining survivors teleported to their respected Houses.
Arakh's company continues to prowl the ruin; the conflict they had witnessed was not the whole of the scout's report. Soon enough their worse suspicions are confirmed: two flesh and blood Illithid bodies are discovered to have died in the fighting.
This is the first Mind Flayer sighting since the Cataclysm: since the sudden and terrifying demise of Udos Dro'xun, Urblexis Grond, and Pit Town. The discovery is horrifying. Word and panic spreads through Andunor like wildfire.
The Devil's Table council dispatches Rauvlin Barrith and a Svirfneblin by name of Saphira Blackstone to the ruined city the following tencycle, intent to not be outdone by Arakh's Sharps. There they spot a significant Illithid escalation within the city as dozens of the Flayers prowl through its remains looking for salvage or survivors.
Caught unprepared and loosely scattered throughout Udos Dro'xun the Illithid are unable to mount a significant defense and are cut down piece by piece until Rauvlin's force arrives at the old clock tower. There, at the tower, powerful Illithid are constructing an apparatus of unknown magnitude around the clock.
Sage Blackstone realizes she is far out of her league in understanding the perverse alien threat and orders the destruction of the tower and all connected paraphernalia.
Arakh dispatches his own force again, this time with the Cataclysm/Flayer Wars veteran Magister Uat Auvryviir and the then-Sharpswizard and new Xun'viir Princess May'riina Shri'isstra, down into the ruins to investigate the report of the clock tower for himself. Seventeen Flayer bodies are yet to be recovered by the Hive, and Uat confirms the worst: they are the same breed he recalls from the old Vault colony Izlude's Torment.
The two mages were unable to determine what the Illithid had planned at the clock tower. Saphira's destruction of it was total.
In preparing for the long trek back to Andunor the Sharps force moved from corpse to corpse to destroy the brains of the fallen Flayers before they were recovered. They were interrupted by something incredible and terrifying in equal measure.
Hairs rose on necks, tingles traveled up spines, and static discharge blanketed the area all but for a second. In a rippling burst of pure psionic energy, the Elder Brain itself arrived in a projection so potent it distorted the space around it.
Uat and May'riina's force descended on it without mercy. Psionic projections are invincible, but somehow at the time they were able to overwhelm the Brain's capacity to process the number of factors it was dealing with and the projection collapsed.
Author's Note: It is now known that the Brain in Izlude's Torment at the time was very young, and still comparatively is, as the previous Elder Brain is thought to have died in the flood. Had the projection been one of a full-grown Elder Brain it may very well be the case that myself and everyone with me would have been slaughtered.
When the Brain's projection, something already incredibly rare, buckled and imploded, its banishment left behind something even more unlikely. Impossible even. Raw psychic energy, known until then to be something utterly noumenal, coalesced into a physical object. Uat and May'riina collected this crystalline shard into a lead box and returned to Andunor where much discussion was held on what to do with it.
Uat departed the city, for his own business, leaving Sharpswizard May'riina with the shard.
May'riina, yet budding in her psionic studies, eventually fashioned a full containment cell for what ultimately became dubbed as the Mind-Shard (see PSI - Mind Shard, The currently residing in the Restricted Shelf at the time of this writing).
Soon after her invention was wrought, the Illithid vanished from their scouting missions and retreated to the immediate vicinity of Izlude's Torment for the next thirty-five years.