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Archibald Almalastor

Archibald Almalastor was one of the greater Elemenstors of his day. He was a heavy practictioner of the Earth parts of High Elemenstation and thus had a very strong knowledge of geology, geography and things of that nature.

One day, while at his research cabin on the Effervescent Lake, he was visted by the mysterious Dark Master, who introduces himself as Alfred. After a long and fairly uninteresting conversation about ferns, mentioned that nobody really understood the bond that Unsunderer, Harbinger Portent, used to bind The Shield and The Sickle together. Archibald, always one for overly-complicated and obsessive research, quickly started to look into this bond, watched over and urged on by the occasional visit by the Dark Master himself, who also had questions about ferns whenever he appeared.

After years of research, Archibald managed to discover exactly how the bond was put together, much to his pleasure. He did not even think twice in telling this to the Dark Master who, for his own mysterious reason, told the followers of Char Reyarteb about Archibald's studies. Quickly seeing evil possibilities in this research, they attacked and killed Archibald (and framing Perilous Circumstances for the murder), siezing his incredibly detailed research notes, and enacted The Resundering, splitting The Shield and The Sickle once again.

Although a tremendous amount of energy was unleashed, the power of the original sundering could not be matched. The Sickle was torn from The Shield, and the two were seperated by only a few clospecscions. Unforunately, this event of geologic significance left most of the lands very unstable, and this is considered to be the cause of the earthquake of 26,780.

Archibald's research on the geographic and geologic history of Battal through its various eras produced some of the finest maps of any period. It is the set of Almalastor Maps that are reproduced in Battal: Zynthar's Guide to Traversing and Spelunking Regions A-Z, which are considered the definative Battal maps.