Watcher

The Watchers were an extremely mysterious sentient species that existed during the Nascent Era and the First Age of Man on the plane of Waking Materia.

Low in number and reclusive in the extreme, few records of the Watchers existed even in the First Age—let alone what remains after the Deluge—that they were considered to be a false rumour even then, and are virtually unknown now. They bore a striking similarity to the ape-like Ong and Baraka, with muscular, lanky builds and covered in pitch-black fur, however the major differences were they also possessed huge, feathered, raven-black wings and a bizarre, golden eye colour. Indeed, most sightings of the Watchers in Antediluvian times were of them flying high in the stratosphere on clear days, visible at that distance due to their enormous wing spans and dark colouration.

Records of Antediluvian humanoids being visited by these creatures, or communicating with them in any way, were the subject of strong skepticism, often dismissed as attempts by charlatans and tin-pot oracles to gain attention.

What little writing remains of the Watchers is often penned by clergy of Tallari-Anaviri-Irallat, the Duskscape Regent of Knowledge and First Age God-Ambassador of the Tiam-Anzu. This may imply some connection between the Watchers and the Great Inceptine, although her clergy wrote on many things so it may merely be coincidence.

Fate

Lichlord Nir was, in a sense, a temporal architect. It was her fervent belief that the universe is born, grows, withers and dies in cycles (a process called Entropy), and furthermore that the actions of its residents speed and slow this process. Her interplanar scouts detected the rapid progression of an indigenous Materian species called the Watchers, whose sprouting enlightenment would move the clock forward to a tragically early universal demise.

The Empire of New Rozsa snuffed out the peaceful Watchers without difficulty, and its mostly well-liked God-Empress began the project of building a world perfectly calibrated to be technologically and spiritually comfortable, but “gentle on the universal clock”. The already obscure race would become next to unheard-of in the following decades.