It does not hunt. It waits. It does not kill. It unravels. The Aeluthra does not serve the Shadow, but it has no love for the Light. It remembers a purpose even when the world no longer remembers its name.
— Atharim text
Aeluthra
In the 6th Age, the Aeluthra was created to break down waste energy. it was a kind of construct, built not to fight or build or think, but to clean. It devoured unstable energy, like a metaphysical furnace, breaking down the waste of shattered weaves, collapsed experiments, and damaged ter’angreal.
It had a purpose once, but the intervening Age left it hungry and dormant. It crawled the world seeking containment, and was almost instantly attracted to the disaster at Chernobyl, and now feeds on the radiation of the Exclusion Zone. It metabolizes the energy into spores: not biological spores, but resonant residue that mimics fungal growth, like a metaphysical shedding. Scientists have mistaken the Aeluthra’s excrement for a type of radiotrophic fungus. In reality, they are the spoor of a predatory being. Now that channelers are in the world again, it is newly drawn to powerful life energy, channelers especially. Nazariy, as a reborn Whitherer, draws it like a beacon as it was likely a Whitherer who created it in the first place.
The Aeluthra does not hunt in a traditional sense. It waits. Visual contact is rare, and never direct. Witnesses describe a sense of being watched, possibly followed by a loss of continuity like memories missing, paths doubling back, or objects subtly altered.
0 Comments