As told by Preceptor Seluvis
He does not look up from his desk as you approach. The air in the tower is cold, smelling of old parchment and Starlight Shards. Finally, he sighs—a long, performative exhalation of pure disdain—and adjusts his wide-brimmed hat before fixing you with a glare through his mask.
"Oh, it's you again. The provincial Tarnished. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a dullard of your standing would come scratching at my door, begging for scraps of wisdom.
You wish to know of the stars? Hmph. I imagine your little mind conjures up pretty twinkling lights, like the ornaments the Golden Order sycophants hang from their trees. How... quaint. How utterly wrong.
Sit, if you must. And try not to touch anything.
First, discard your childish notions. The stars are not mere celestial decorations. They are life. They are the amber of the cosmos, brimming with a vitality that your meager intellect can scarcely comprehend.
You see, in the days before the Erdtree choked the sky with its gold, the astrologers of the mountaintops—ancestors to the Carians—knew the truth. Glintstone, that precious resource you likely hoard like a magpie, is the amber of the cosmos. It contains the residual life of ancient stars. When we sorcerers cast our spells, we are not pulling rabbits from hats; we are channeling the life force of the universe itself.
Now, pay attention, for this concerns my mistress, Lady Ranni.
The stars govern the fate of the Carian Royal Family. They are the gears of our destiny. But, as you may have heard—assuming you listen to anything other than the sound of your own sword swinging—General Radahn, the Starscourge, arrested their cycles.
He conquered the stars, freezing them in the sky. A brutish display of gravity magic, certainly, but effective. By halting the stars, he halted the fate of the Carians. He halted Lady Ranni’s path.
That is why the stars must move again. Not for the sake of a pretty night sky, but because stagnation is the death of ambition.
There are those, of course, who sought to gaze too deeply. Master Azur, Master Lusat... brilliant men, once. They peered into the Primeval Current, the dark abyss where the stars are born.
And what did they find? They found that the stars are not always benevolent guides. They are cold. Distant. And to witness the current is to be broken by it. They became... mineral. Statues of glintstone, their minds lost to the infinite void.
A pity. One must maintain control over one's puppets—even if the puppet is one's own mind. I, of course, have no intention of making such a clumsy error.
And then... there are the things that fall.
Not all stars are content to hang in the void. Some crash down to our lands. You call them meteors; we know them as beasts. The Fallingstar Beasts, the Astels... they are "malformed" stars. Creatures of the void that mimic life in the most grotesque fashion.
They are living proof that the cosmos is not a friendly place, provincial. It is a place of darkness, rock, and gravity.
Seluvis waves a hand dismissively, turning back to his potions.
"That is quite enough tuition for one day. My time is far too valuable to be spent educating a stray dog on astrophysics.
If you are quite finished gaping, I have a task for you. Take this potion. Find the woman, Nepheli Loux. Ensure she drinks it. Do this, and perhaps—perhaps—I will consider you useful enough to tolerate."