[ WP ] Tell the story of an adventure in a fantasy world has advanced to become an interstellar civilization , using magic , not technology .

The Sky Temple buzzed with sound and activity, for the Dreamer had found a new world. 
 
 Brave Celeno had been nominated as expedition leader, despite her links to the failed aristocracy. She was tall and clever, blooded by lineage to the vanished elves, and she spoke with a voice that the spirits heard. She chose her Band with care and deliberation: one hundred and sixty-one soldiers, scouts, magi and operators, a nod to the Sacred Geometry that was the basis of her Mastelinean cult. 
 
 The Dreamer, from within his bath of lotus-water delivered the place and situation of this new applicant to the Free Peoples. The Dreamer, chained in gold and copper, spun the first images through his own closed eyes. The world was blue-green and enormous, with thin brown land in strips, and vast fields of shifting algae growth covering its swaying ocean. Two suns shone in its purple sky: one large and red, the other blue, small, distant. 
 
 Windsong hissed from his parted lips, and the Temple filled with a green smell, a life smell. A portal room was prepared in the Honeycomb beneath the temple, and seeded with the thin mathematical lines of copper and iron. Celeno was there, with some few from her Band, to watch it open. The wind that issued was like that the Dreamer had conjured, cold and breathing. 
 
 Celeno nodded to one of her Band, whose hands moved in square gestures. He called a watcher-spirit, all wings and human face, who sped through the vast black sphere and returned in the same instant. It reported a world empty of ghosts, with only the faded smears of animal consciousness staining the soil with memories of hunger. 
 
 The Band was brought together. The equipment was packed, stored within summon-prisms. Wands were prepared, memory skulls, sacred ashes. A newsman was there, with his recording rod, and Celeno spoke a few high, poetic words in aristocratic Common: `` What we do is not brave, but necessary. We will have homes for our hungry refugees, and work for our restless dead. There is nothing to conquer, but much to take.'' 
 
 They stepped through in two long lines, brave Celeno at the head. 
 
 Nothing came back through the portal for three weeks: no words, no scout, no spell, no spirit. 
 
 The next Band was an adventuring squadron: four in number, small and light and heavily armed, like the adventurers who first founded the old, bad Empire. Three operators, armed with fireguns and stun beads, chill sticks and lightning lures, and one full mage-summoner with a contingent of bound spirits and otherplanars. They had proven their worth in years of Revolutionary Army service, and they, too, did not return. 
 
 In desperation, they came again to the Dreamer. They gave him an infusion of poppy-bell and great sage, mixed in a medium of bile from the last of the dead dragons. He slept deep and well, and the pool in the Temple of Sky shimmered with far imagery and strange, vanishing music. Acolytes mopped his sweating brow and watered his twitching eyelids. 
 
 They could not help but notice the algae growing, spreading through his lotus-pool. Though they tried to clear it, it grew still, in thick strings and mats that choked the sacred flowers, killed them and ate their sinking corpses. 
 
 He spoke only once. In the night, in the ocean-dark, the Dreamer's eyes snapped open. A deep voice issued, a voice of far places and subtle treachery: 
 
 `` The elves will not return.'' 
 
 When the Dreamer died, the bells tolled for eight full days. They have not yet found another. 
 
 The colonies will have to rely on themselves, then, for a time.
