We must at this point divert our attention from the West and look to the East of the Breach.
We recall that, at the time of the Battle of the Storm Spire, the Katolean army was led by Viren, who had usurped the title of King of Katolis, and by his daughter Claudia, who despite her very young age was a dark magician of impressive skill. Obviously the poems exaggerate, when they say that "Claudia, black her hair and black her heart, with a single terrible blow killed two thousand and one hundred of the strongest elves, pride of Lux Aurea [...] she then killed ten dragons: useless was their breath of fire, because at her side she had the gods of war, and before her rode Death."
However unreliable, such texts give us an idea of the fame enjoyed by the daughter of Viren. In addition, she was the only one of the invading coalition leaders not to be killed or captured following the battle. It is not surprising, therefore, that from the very beginning one of the priorities of the rulers of Xadia was to send teams of soldiers and magicians to search for her. To give an idea, suffice it to say that the bounty on his head came in 1243 to be worth one hundred golden rotl: the equivalent of a tenth of the annual revenue of Lux Aurea. Despite this incredible expenditure of force, however, no trace of Claudia was found, and eventually the searches ceased. All but one.
King Ezran had contributed to the operations too, periodically sending his best men to scour Xadia. In particular, he had assigned to this task Corvus, the best tracker of his army as well as man of absolute trust, whose services had been useful to him more than once during the period of the Virenian usurpation.
Then, however, war broke out with Neolandia, and at court the matter fell into the background. This did not stop the tireless Corvus: For years, he explored Xadia far and wide, from the sands of the midnight desert to the mountains of Umbertor. He was the first man in over a thousand years to visit the ruins of Elarion and to reach Cape Tidebound, the far eastern edge of the continent.
Corvus's journey lasted ten years: he returned to Katolis only in 1249, without having found Claudia. The fate of the Dark Princess of Katolis would have remained a mystery for several years ahead. However, Corvus's mission was not a complete failure. During those ten years, he had visited dozens of Elven cities and hundreds of villages: most elves had never seen a human before, and Corvus was able to gain their trust, contributing decisively to reducing the prejudices that most Elves still had against humans.
He also collected an impressive amount of information, which he would have then transcribed and published in the book "Xadian Itinerary", an absolute masterpiece of geographical literature. Knowledge was not the only thing he brought back from Xadia: forced by a particularly harsh winter to remain for months in a Skywing village on Mount Ebran, Corvus had bonded with a young local elf who had since decided to follow him on his travels and whom he married when he returned to Katolis. Since Corvus obtained a title of nobility from King Ezran in 1250 as a reward for his services, this union gave rise to one of the most important houses in the history of the Empire.
The descendants of Corvus and Dusis (or, by her full name, Krivia-Mivari-Dusinira) would have greatly influenced Katolean politics in the following centuries: the most famous of them was Herane, Imperial Chancellor during the Troubled Period and grey eminence behind the rise to power of Ezran IV. But all this would have happened only many, many years later, when both Ezran and Corvus were long dead.
