Svirlido

The founders of this place, then still a young race, were Githzerai in service to the Nawirrûs Covenant. In the Creation War (1486 DE - 8777 DE), it grew to be a city state, supplying the war effort on distant worlds and training those that liked to use their mind and or limbs in physical combat. Svirlido's architecture came to look like a vast monastery with great garden mazes and places of contemplation.

Svirlido fell in the First Suellk Invasion (135 HE - 150 HE). After the Suellk, an empire led by mind flayers, had taken control, the city was depopulated, becoming a military outpost with a large Dromite garrison. The guarded one the largest treasuries of Suellk's elder brain and worked the great platinum mines beneath the city. Their precious ore served as input to the famed angelic implements with their platinum heads, weapons that proved very effective in the fight against the hordes of the Demon Spawn War.

In the Incarsabec Rebellion (1531 HE - 1544 HE), Svirlido was one of the first cities cleansed of mind flayers and just about every other sentient, except the dromites. Legend has it, their salvation came from them having a hive mind, protection against the psychic viruses and psychic storms beginning to ravage the lands of Ghífthauk. Even with this boon, they were still in danger. The dromites fled into the subterranean reaches beneath the city, building down into the mines, establishing their own civilization outside the watch of Suellk's mind flayers.

About 200 years after the Incarsabec Rebellion, the Dromites began to explore the surface; the threat of a psychic storm was still around, just not as frequent. Svirlido's people salvaged the ruins of the Githyanki and Githzerai. They found the rotting hulks of several Suellk voidships and a working Silver Mirror. This teleportation device was the same one used by the githzerai and githyanki rebels, escaping the Suellk Empire and the mind-eating storms they had created.

The testing of the Silver Mirror led to the disappearance of dozens. They stepped in and were gone. Our best tied to reach out to them, but failed to find their mental signature. Nobody was forced to be a tester. The lure of a "disappearance payout", saving one's family from debt, was enough to get many to test out something that many thought was a hungry being. Nobody had seen or heard from the githyanki or the githzerai, they stepped in too, and were never heard from again.

As Lukoon would have it, someone got lucky, figured out how to work the illithid device. The Silver Mirror is tuned in by using sound, notes plotting to points on star maps.

Its a shame so many were lost for nothing.

- from a speech at the Svirlido Ethics Committee - "Silver Mirror Testing"

In 1176, a trading mission was sent through the Silver Mirror to the Asteraoth System. In lands long scouted and explored, they made contact with the Giff League. The outcome of this trade deal was the means for the BSA to fly their first skyship.