Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable People (section)

== Eldrad Ulthran ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Greatest of Farseers: '''''

The date of birth of Eldrad Ulthran is an event lost to time. Assumed to have been born at most a few thousand years before [[Fall of the Eldar|The Fall]] the ancient [[Farseer]] would have been considered old even as the [[Eldar]] Empire died. There are few (if any) surviving records of his early life, and his memory is fragmented at best.

The loss of memory may have been a result of The Fall breaking his mind, a broken mind would explain many of his later antics, or it could simply be caused by living longer than any other biological eldar. His longevity is assumed to not be natural as an unaltered eldar will live for just under two thousand years and even with the best of post-Fall longevity treatments will struggle to reach five thousand. Eldrad is assumed to be potentially three times the upper limit of known eldar longevity treatments. He is therefore either some sort of mutant or the result of now forgotten and lost medical intervention of the Old Empire. He is long lived but he is not immortal. By the dying of the Dark Millennium his skeleton has crystallized, his face is lined, his eyes grow dim and his hair is white.

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His earliest coherent memories are trying to warn the general populace of the Home Worlds of the Old Empire to their dangerous folly. By that time they were either too far gone to care or skeptical of his claims. He has memories of trying to organize evacuation fleets and calling in the favours and offering favours to the trader captains to help. The names of the captains, the names of their ships and their faces have dimmed and faded with time. It is possible that they were the origins of many of the [[Craftworld|craftworlds]], but now none will know for sure. It was not a time that records survived well.

With his precognitive prowess he felt the shape of something not unlike the Old Empire rising up across the galaxy but not of his kin. A god but a mortal made of gold and gold did not rust.

Every rune cast, every vision from meditation showed that the remnants of the eldar people would in time come to blows with the men of Earth. Without their gods save murderer and trickster his people would lose their wisdom, what little of it they still had. They would declare war upon the men of Earth and great slaughter would be had. Peace would be impossible.

They needed their gods back. Of them the Harlequins sang only one other yet lived and then in captivity and that rescue would always be impossible.

This declaration of impossibility did not sit well with the old Farseer. The eldar people had gone through too much, survived too much, to be driven to either madness or extinction. For one who dealt with the sliding scale of probability and the twisting threads of possibility it is possible that he saw this great wall as a personal insult and his mind started to wander down stranger paths.

Under normal circumstances none of the eldar people would have dreamed of seeking the aid of the lesser races but these were far from normal times.

And so it was that Eldrad found an unlikely ally, himself a relic from a broken empire whose people had been brought low. For the first time that he could remember the old Farseer felt something approaching a sense of family unlikely as that seemed with the great golden eyed giant.

The greatest warriors of the eldar were assembled and it’s most powerful seers and warlocks and the humans, as he learned his new friends were called, did the same. With great effort and a derelict and unstable webway gate they tore the veil of reality asunder and the human exarch “space marines” and the young Phoenix Lords charged into the very depths of Hell in the wake of the giant called Steward.

Of what they saw in that place none would tell Eldrad though of those that returned all now had the eyes of people who had seen too much and could never look away again. And for an instant, just for an instant, as they stepped back into the world of the living there stood the mother of all eldar for the last time and first time in possibly millions of years. Just for an instant in the flesh and all who beheld her in that moment knew new hope for salvation.

Soon arose again the Priesthood of Isha, the daughters of the Mother, Her disciples and from their venerated ranks the one known as Macha rose to prominence and earned herself the honour of being the avatar of her patron in the world of the living. Eldrad recognized the one known as Macha for she was old and also a survivor of the fall but he could not name her or recall her face. He suspected she was distant kin but she did not carry the name of Ulthran, none besides Eldrad in that time did.

The thread of the eldar people was strengthened and as he looked upon and forwards through the skein of fate the thread would be strengthened still further by being interwoven with that of the men of Earth. So it came to pass that the radiant High Priestess of Isha and the Steward were joined as husband and wife to formalize the union of man and eldar and the protection and inclusion of the true eldar people into the Imperium.

But the theft of Isha had insulted the gods and they were out for blood. Eldrad, as the being who had put forth that plan, felt more than a little responsible. Possibly it was this sense of responsibility that made him refuse to suggest to the craftworlders that they run and let the humans die in their place, perhaps it was the knowledge that the gods would never stop hunting them, perhaps it was that he saw this conflict as a trial by fire for their new Imperium or perhaps he was much like his own people now were. They were no longer a ragged band of refugees surviving off of scraps salvaged from a burned down home, they were Eldar once more. The galaxy had bent to their will once and some stupid upstart gods were now challenging them? They were not so weak as to cower now. Eldar and men were building the galaxy anew. Mortal hands and hearts and heads held high and what mortals had wrought no god would tear asunder.

And so it was that eldar blades met the blades of the enemy and Eldrad was aghast to find that the hands that held those daemon blades were not unlike his own. His fallen people, the ones who danced and sang as trillions died and reveled in the debauchery even to the screams of the dying and the damned still lived, if one could even call it living.

It was with heavy heart that the old farseer fled the Gate Worlds of Cadia and Ulthwe and for many a century to come his kin and kind word decried him a coward and a scoundrel. But the flight of Eldrad to Old Earth, although one of desperation, was not one of cowardice and if any emotion at all still beat in that cold grey heart it was wrath.

Eldrad had looked upon the threads of fate as they shifted and saw one thin strand that led to a lasting hope of victory for his peoples. Just one. He needed to be on Old Earth. He didn't know why but the only way for all to survive was for him to be where that hammer was coming down hardest. Even so it was a hard thing to do. Time has weathered their faces and names but he did now have children of his own upon fair Ulthwe. Their names have gone unremembered, their souls never made it to the Infinity Circuit and ever afterwards long past the point when their faces became blurred and forgotten he knew he had left them to die and worse and he cursed himself for it.

It was a maddening time in Imperial Palace. Eldrad's small ship was shot down by the invading forces and it not so much landed in the Imperial Gardens as crashed. Greenskinned brutes occupied by that point the majority of the Earth's surface, great swathes of the population were slain and they didn't look to be slowing down. In truth the forces mustered against basic sanity on Earth put the forces leveled against the home he had abandoned to shame. But this was Old Earth, keystone of a new Imperium, it's walls were so much higher.

To Eldrad's relief the Steward knew of the Crone World Eldar, his own court seer Red Magnus having divined their presence. But Red Magnus was young. Brilliant but young. Eldrad was old and even then in relative youth none were his equal and he was at the center of the storm. The heart of the web where all the strings met, Chaos had hounded him but he was now right where he needed to be and the manic grin on his face and the fire in his eyes was terrible to behold.

Forces were redeployed and moved under cover of darkness and smoke and illusion, slight of hand was played at an insane level, misdirection and the subtle knife between ribs cost the orks and their puppeteers a heavy price as the line was held with one hand and the knife shoved in the back and twisted with the other. The war had just gotten serious, the Crone Worlders were going to have to work for it and come down and fight for themselves if they wanted this victory.

They tried several times to teleport into the Imperial Palace as its shields weakened, a fact that the turned out to be a trap and all their assassins and berserkers were caught in a withering hail of bolter fire. They tried air dropping Kommandoes and Stalkers and Mandrakes only to find that the Harlequins had been loitering in the place for months waiting for them. They tried digging in with great rock crunching maworms and Digga Krewz and stranger things that slipped between the rocks like impossible smoke. They encountered Magnus' daemons. It is probably better not to know what he did to them though they were never seen again.

In the end the Palace would have to be taken the Orky way with a mass charge. Here was where the Beast approached.

For all his cunning Eldrad had only so many pieces on the board and misdirection and prescience could only stretch that so far. The thin red line before the Eternity Gate was thin and he knew it and they knew it and he knew that they knew it and they knew that he knew that they knew it and they savored his desperation.

For all that the Beast approached he could not withdraw soldiers for other fortifications. Every time he was about to do so he felt the thin strand they all hung by snapping. The Beast had to attack the Eternity Gates and he could offer no help to stop it. Thrice he had to hold the Steward back for rushing to the gate to lend his prodigious strength. The Steward was needed right where he was. No one man could direct the forces across an entire planet and Eldrad knew the Steward would be drowned if left to it on his own.

The calls for aid coming from the gate became shouts of defiance as the defenders made their last stand. The Steward was almost in tears, of all the beings in his Imperium few were friends and one was about to die and he was letting it happen. When the transmissions went quiet so did the Steward. Cold and quiet and very, very still.

Sporadic fire could be heard getting closer and the footsteps of doom like war drums or twin hearts getting closer.

When the Beast finally smashed and tore the armored door out of the Throne Room he did not find a selection of cowering generals and fleeing strategists. What he found was an angry Man of Gold cannoning into his face at a flat trajectory like a murder tipped missile.

It was a hard fight. Perhaps the most brutal and savage that there ever was. The Steward was a Man of Gold, a relic from a lost era when men were as gods. Eldrad was a primordial eldar born at the height of their kind and carrying the flame of it like an inferno. But for all that the Beast was The Beast. Empowered by gods too terrible to contemplate and mighty beyond measure. Later tales will tell of how the fight lasted a day and a night but they are almost certainly lies although the old Farseer as he danced and struck had lost all notion of time.

Fists that could break buildings impacted on the Green Menace that responded in turn with blows that could fell baneblades. Had The Beast been able to concentrate on a single target it would all of been over. He was too durable, too strong and for a creature of such mass hellishly fast and seemingly tireless. The Steward was also seemingly incapable of tiring but Eldrad was beginning to weary. Days upon days of constant battle and sifting through fates trying to divine the least awful were taking their toll. He would tire and then he would die and then the Steward would die and then his Imperium would die and his own people right along with it. It seemed as unstoppable as tide and time.

And then the Farseer noticed an out of place thing buried in the Beast's chest. A broken sword blade that must once of been of elegant design.

With the last of his strength the farseer channeled his fire and his lightning into that blade and grasped it in his mind and drove it deep into the Beast's chest and twisted. The Beast collapsed in agony, spasming on the floor as the agony wracked him, and the Steward joined his psychic might with the old farseer. Together, they looked over the Beast as it fell and stared it straight in the eye, twisting the blade until the struggling stopped and all that was left in that monsters chest was broken up charcoal.

Exhausted the farseer fell to his knees. The last thing he saw before the darkness overtook him was the Steward holding the remains of what had once been an angel. The worst of the fighting on Old Earth was well over when Eldrad awoke once more.

The war was far from over, but the back of it had been broken.

Eldrad returned to his people, much to their annoyance. It was a long time before they would forgive him for abandoning them, although those in authority knew his reason well enough.

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'''See Also:''' [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The_Long_Odds|The Long Odds]]