Voidborn

The Voidborn are entities of inexistence, born from the Dark One's hatred of existence. Lacking material form and shape, they are inconceivable and maddening to behold.¹

They are among the rarest beings that scholars struggle to understand. No scholar in the history of Teneris has gathered enough knowledge to draw consistent conclusions about them. The Order of Chain knows more about them than any other organisation, but it is not known for sharing its wisdom generously.²

The Void

The Void is likened to a great cauldron in which all emotions, thoughts and concepts flow freely, detached from time, yet it is not just another plane. The Dark One, a god whose involuntary dreams created everything, created the Void in the same process. The Void is a purer form of those dreams, and so everything that exists in the material world has its counterpart within it.²

Nature

When a being native to the Void breaches the veil of reality and enters the Material Plane, even looking at it is painful for the living. Besides the destruction such beings wreak around them, every fibre of those who see them feels that they do not belong. They are cosmic, incomprehensible creatures that occupy physical space yet are, in essence, non-existent.²

How a Voidborn appears often differs from one onlooker to the next, because each mind interprets differently the gap it opens on entering the material plane. With weaker Voidborn the differences are subtle, but when greater entities of the Void step into existence, even the greatest minds fail to grasp their form.¹

True Voidborn detest existence and avoid interacting with it; to them, existing and bearing a name are things to be feared, and they are often brought into the material plane against their will. They annihilate and corrupt everything they touch and leave no survivors, for every survivor risks defining and perceiving them further. Voidborn take no sides, make no deals and serve no one.¹²

The material world rejects them. Their unstable pseudo-existence makes them ill-suited to the material plane, their presence there is usually short-lived, and existence itself constantly tries to push them back into the Void.¹

Manifestations

The lowest Voidborn are the manifestations, beings unable to rise beyond the concepts they embody; even so, this small leakage into the material plane can have terrifying consequences. Every manifestation takes shape according to the power of the one who summons it, and with the right knowledge and magical power it can be controlled to some degree. The Drought Manifestation and the Wrath Manifestation are two such beings.³

The Stained and the Forgotten

The name "Voidborn" is often misused for beings that have succumbed to Void corruption; even some scholars and members of the Order of Chain make this mistake. Knowledgeable sages and adventurers call these malformed, lost entities, erased from existence, the Forgotten. The Stained are a different case again: beings corrupted by the Void rather than born of it, and jealous of the existence that true Voidborn shun.¹

History

The creation of the Voidborn goes back to the first war against the Dark One, in which they made up much of his armies.¹

In the Third Age, before Victory Day, creatures that came to be known as voidborn began to appear in every corner of the realm, as they had in ages past. The Chain Wardens who watched these events realised that this time powerful beings controlling the voidborn and many other chaotic forces had descended upon Teneris; these dark-winged entities called themselves simply "Heralds". The forces the Heralds gathered were made up of both the living and the voidborn.⁴

Chain Wardens

The Chain Wardens of the Order of Chain defend the very fabric of reality against voidborn monsters. For reasons unknown, they are the only ones able to detect and eliminate the voidborn. A dramatic encounter with a voidborn, a servant of the Dark One, may be what first opens a warden's eyes to the veil and the calling of the chain.⁵⁶

Anchoring Voidborn

Ill-intentioned or mad cultists have devised ways to anchor Voidborn permanently in existence. These methods usually involve void stones, opaque black stones that swallow all light and are cold to the touch. Such stones are common in the altars of the Dark One, and within ten miles of such an altar the Voidborn more easily resist the pull back into the Void.¹

The simplest and most widely known way of bringing a true Voidborn into the material plane is the rite called Shâ’had Ravan Gôl-goloth, the only known method of binding one there without drawing on the Dark One's power. It requires the sacrifice of a nameless infant, takes place at an altar to the Dark One, and leaves heavy Void corruption on whoever performs it. The being it produces takes a loosely humanoid shape and lashes out in pain as the ritualists gaze on it; to contain it, the ritualist must name it and claim it, which leaves an eternal Void corruption, and feed it their own life essence, after which it is bound to them as a servitor. Existence itself wears at a Voidborn summoned this way unless it is bound to a void stone, stays near one, or is linked to its summoner's life.⁷

The Chain Warden Davos of Whitefall recorded the rite in full. By his own account, he and three other members of the Chain entered a shrine where seven corpses lay, each guarded by a Voidborn, and their elven guide fell to madness the moment he saw the shrine for what it was. Davos says he wrote the account to honour the lives spent learning how to destroy the rite, hoping it would reach the Tower of the Chain without falling into the wrong hands.⁸

Voidborn of note

Many scholars believe that Fer’ekh, the Great Worm, is an ancient Voidborn. Its small servant, the Ibn-i Fer’ekh, is one as well.⁹