Eldanarë Haven

"The old forests. The first light." Its luminarite "burns pure. Untouched. No human hands have ever mined it."

Astarion's pitch to Aurelion, "a sanctuary of elven blood and elven light", is flagged by the narrator as "every word a lie wrapped around the smallest shard of truth". Aurelion sails from Luna's harbour by night, and Luna never sees him again.

From the books

Astarion frames the journey to the Haven as a cure. He tells his father that the priests believe the luminarite there, far from the noise and corruption of Luna, may quiet the king's mind and let him hear "the old voices" clearly again. Aurelion takes the idea up as a pilgrimage "to the beginning", and by evening the council has a version of the arrangement it is willing to sign.

To those watching from the harbour, the departure looks like a dignified retreat for a mad king. The sailors who share the deck tell a different story. Aurelion paces the ship tracing walls of luminarite that are not there, speaks to empty crates as though they were courtiers and calls to his dead queen and to Alerion. He promises the sea that they will start over "pure" and free of human hands, shrieks at a servant offering water as an impostor, and scrubs his arms bloody to remove something he believes is impure. By the time the ship reaches open water, his retinue speak of him in hushed voices as a relic and a king in name only.

In The Channeler, a dispatch read in a Lower Sanctum laboratory beneath Luna records that King Aurelion has departed toward Eldanare, that Prince Alerion is dead, and that Astarion Solastis holds Luna in practice, though not yet in sanctified form. The books do not follow the king to the Haven or describe his arrival.