Enlightened Ones
General Information
Home: Zeal
Era: 12000 B.C.
Leaders: King Zeal, Queen Zeal
Chrono Trigger
The Enlightened Ones are the people of Zeal, magically empowered, impossibly cultured, and ardently devoted to the highest arts and exploration of human potential. The Enlightened Ones formally became a people after the Sun Stone was located and Zeal was created; the group able to use the power of the artifact took to the sky, and developed a begrudging prejudice against the Earthbound. The Enlightened soon created a culture of their own; they gilded their cities with the colors of silver, white, and gold, and filled them to the brim with knowledge and rumination. Magic became an art to be explored and researched at Kajar, and as magic and the society of Zeal began to fulfill the basic needs of life, some Enlightened Ones took to dreaming for enlightenment at Enhasa. Knowledge and erudition reached a peak that would never again be matched, as the people of Zeal tackled philosophical questions such as the presence of fate and delved into the fundamental composition of the universe.
Their chosen King and Queen governed the Enlightened Ones; the monarchs were magic innates, as were the Gurus of Time, Reason, and Life, who commanded much wisdom in their studies. The byproduct of Enlightened civilization was hubris and blind ambition; they considered the Earthbound subhuman, and had visions of immortality. The pursuit of immortality led the Enlightened Ones to tap into Lavos's power using the Mammon Machine, which would cause the destruction of Zeal by awaking the monster beneath the planet's crust. Though Zeal was totally annihilated, several Enlightened Ones survived the Fall of Zeal and stumbled upon Last Village, the last remaining human settlement. Stripped of power sources to leech magic from and their dwellings in the sky, the Enlightened Ones could no longer maintain prejudice against the Earthbound and mingled with the former cave dwellers. This marked the end the Enlightened Ones and the Earthbound as formal divisions of people.
