Eltensia

Eltensia is a gothic plane, defined by twisting woods, ancient elementals, and a particularly fraught relationship with death.

Eltensia is the setting for Blood Like Rivers.

More Details
Eltensia has several notable traits. The first is that Eltensia's underworld is a physical place, and one that connects to the realm of the living in several distinct locations. As a result, if not vigilantly guarded, any particularly determined and powerful dead person can restore themselves to life. This led to a nearly thousand year period, when the afterlife was left effectively unattended, where endlessly reviving Liches ruled the plane.

Time also doesn't flow at a linear and expected rate on Eltensia; a dozen years can go by on other planes while nearly a thousand passes on Eltensia. This is not steady, however, and during other points in time, Eltensians can experience comparable amounts of time as other planes might. They never experience time faster than that, however.

History
A precise timeline of Eltensia is difficult due to the time flow, but constructing a rough history is more doable.

Thousands of years ago on Eltensia, the plane was ruled by dragons, who bestowed upon their most loyal followers the ability to wield arcane magic. The dragons were cruel, however, and dominated the land, forcing the plane itself to bend to their whims. In those days, the forests that now cover Eltensia were entirely absent, so that the dragons could see all living things from the sky.

This state of things could not last. A planeswalker named Alexadros who had spent many years on Eltensia discovered that although many of the servants of the dragons could return from the underworld, there had never been a story of a dragon doing the same thing. He gathered a group of other fellow planeswalkers, including one Hieronymus Scratch, and waged war against the dragons, cutting down many of them during their sleep, and fighting the rest while armed with weapons and armor forged from their fallen compatriots. The dragons were slain, but with them died several of the planeswalkers, including Alexadros. With his dying breath, he begged Scratch to stay, and to look after the plane.

And so Scratch did, taking up arms as the Warden of the Underworld. The dragons passed through the underworld, and continued to fall past its deepest depths, further and further into the plane, until not even their faintest of whispers could be heard. And so the status quo largely remained, for a few hundred years. Scratch put together a group of |Reapers, and tasked them with reclaiming souls who escaped the afterlife. He spoke to the worldsoul itself, and helped Eltensia grow, and twist, and find a comfortable balance. The arcane arts of the dragons slowly faded from the world, into the realm of fiction and legend, scrawled in forgotten tomes and softly uttered by dead wizards in the underworld.

But while Scratch was focused on keeping souls in the afterlife, he forgot to ensure that the living stayed out of it. As fate would have it, a young man named Arcet found himself lost in the deep woods of Eltensia, and ended up stumbling into the underworld. Curious, he ventured deeper and deeper, evading patrolling Reapers and wayward souls. Although Arcet didn't know what he was looking for, he would eventually find it: deep in the furthest recesses of the underworld was a cave with a lake, and as Arcet gazed upon the water, he saw a vision of the future.

Arcet fled the cavern, and the underworld, and brought back to the surface world arcane secrets, gifted to him directly by the long dead dragons. While their reign had seen wizards capable of crawling their way out of the underworld, Arcet was given something different; carving magic sigils into his skin, Arcet removed his flesh, and became the first Lich that Eltensia would ever seen. However, although natural causes were no longer a concern, Arcet's spell put a huge target on his back, as he flew directly in the face of Scratch's designs.

And so he waited. Never fully dropping into the background, but always simply annoying Scratch. And eventually, on top of everything else, the Warden had enough. He put together an army of angels and tasked them, along with the reapers, to take care of the plane, before leaving.

This was the beginning of the end of the long era of peace that Eltensia had experienced for the past few centuries. Within 150 years, Arcet had slaughtered the angels, scattered the reapers, and began to distribute the secrets of unlife among other bold souls. And so began the era of Lichlords, which lasted for nearly a thousand years, until the events of Blood Like Rivers.

Natives

 * Manira was born on Eltensia, during the rule of the Lichlords, and eventually sparked to find the Warden and bring him back.

Other

 * Hieronymus Scratch is an oldwalker who eventually came to act as the Warden of Eltensia, at the behest of an old friend.