Prester

Prester is the world that serves as the principal setting of the anime series Last Exile.

The world of Prester (Prestale in the original Japanese) is divided up into two lands - Anatoray and Disith - and the only way of reaching one from the other is to cross the Grand Stream, an ever-present hurricane that connects the two lands high in the skies.

Disith is all but completely undescribed within the series - all that is truly known of it is that due to a rapidly falling temperature akin to an ice age, its people are attempting to evacuate to Anatoray.

It is Anatoray that serves as the primary setting of Last Exile. It is a monarchy, and its citizens have few complaints of its leadership. It is an arid, mountainous land well into its Industrial Revolution - steel and steam engines are common. Though it is plagued by drought, it is thus able to survive due to relatively well-developed water purification technology - though most settle for potable but obviously dirty groundwater. However, First Water (the purest available in Anatoray, what modern society would call common filtered drinking water) is still not beyond the means of most - they simply treat it as an extravagant commodity.

Also, due to the presence of an intriguing ore known as Claudia, it is currently experiencing a in the form of heavier-than-air craft know as Vanships. As Anatoray's mountainous terrain is too dynamic for rail transport, these have become quite prevalent. Gas-lit beacons dot the landscape, and aerial refueling stations extend the range of Vanships across the land.

As the series starts, it is difficult to understand how the two lands of Anatoray and Disith can only be traveled between by flying high into the sky, entering the Grand Stream, and flying through a bottle-like hurricane out to the other side. In the last episode, when the great vessel Exile is finally found and used to dissipate the Grand Stream, we see that the planet itself is actually two smaller planets joined together into an hourglass shape, with each world facing the other. Once the skies are clear, anyone standing on the surface of either land can look up and faintly see the landscape of the other.

This is what the phrase written on the book at the beginning of every episode means:

λαστ εξιλε
ιν τηε βοττλε

"last exile in the bottle"

The phrase is written in Greek letters, like all other text in the series, and refers to the fact that Prester is a world shaped like a bottle, or an hourglass. It has a narrow portion in the very middle, which is filled with the Grand Stream until the last episode, and it widens out at either end, and these ends contain the miniature planets that come to be called Anatoray and Disith.

The only time Prester is truly shown in this form is on the last episode when the cast looks out from the deck of Exile and sees Prester from outer space. Up until that point, the writers and art directors of the series (GONZO) had been playfully toying with revealing that fact by spreading the hourglass shape all over the series on various maps, icons, artwork, and royal emblems.

In the series, during the 11th episode, the character Alister uses a sextant to plot her position according to the stars. This is when she utters the phrase, "The stars have become unreliable." She is referring to the slow, spinning motion that the enormous hourglass-shaped world of Prester is making in the heavens, giving the stars an erratic pattern across the sky when viewed from Anatoray.

History

Several hundred years before the anime series takes place, a colony ship named Exile carried the first colonists from Earth to Prester. Upon arrival and disembarking its passengers, it sealed itself in a cocoon, traveled to the bottleneck, and created the Grand Stream. It was programmed, if reactivated, to begin continually travelling back and forth between Earth and Prester, but until that time it was sealed away.

The organization called "The Guild," who presumably created Exile, had control of the weather and seasons on Prester, so they took over the sky (controlling it from their enormous airships), while the passengers began a new life on the ground. The Guild had four ruling families: the Eraclea family, the Dagobert family, the Hamilton family, and the Bassianus family. There were a few people infused with a special gene that made them the "Key to Exile."
Each family was trusted with a short poem, called a "Mysterion." If all four Mysterion were spoken to someone who had the Key gene, and was within a mile of Exile, Exile would be released. Presumably, this was only to be used in case they needed to return to Earth for any reason.

Life went on peacefully for several hundred years. The Guild used Exile to control the weather and keep the peace. Though both countries were cut off from each other and only the Guild had the power to travel between the two, flocks of rainbirds began finding paths of relatively calm air through the Grand Stream that allowed them to cross.

Ten years before the anime takes place, Delphine Eraclea, the head of one of the Guild families, grew power-hungry and began killing off the members of the other three families, so she could assume control over the Guild. Only a few members escaped, and among them were the Keys to Exile.
What Delphine Eraclea didn't understand was that without a Key to control Exile, the weather controller would malfunction. And the temperature on the Disith side began to cool down, and Anatoray began to heat up. But Delphine had become Maestro, and she did not care about that.

Disith was starting to freeze over, and its people realized that if they stayed there they were doomed. Then, Disith's leaders noticed that the flocks of rainbirds could travel between the two countries by finding small channels of calm air inside the Grand Stream, and they built a ship of their own and followed the birds through. But the people of Anatoray, who did not understand the Disith plight, did not allow Disith to colonize there. Disith's leaders, desperate, considered declaring war on Anatoray.

But the war was almost averted when a sect of the Anatoray government reconsidered. They dispatched four young vanship pilots, Hamilcar Valca, George Head, Alex Row and Alex's fiancé Euris, to bear a message of peace to Disith, and offer a compromise. They dared to take two vanships through the dreaded Grand Stream, using the same rainbird pattern.

But Maestro Delphine, who found the idea of a Disith-Anatoray alliance incompatible with her supremacy, decided to step in. Once the vanships were into the Grand Stream, she intercepted their route with her much larger Guild battleship, disrupting air flow and physically knocking the vanships around, sweeping them up in the current. Hamilcar, George and Euris were killed, but Alex Row managed to escape, catching a glimpse at the Exile, and the Maestro.

Disith never received the message of peace, and so they assumed that Anatoray had not reconsidered. They declared war on Anatoray. The ones in Anatoray who had reconsidered assumed that Disith had not, and so there were no options.

Delphine decided to step in and "help." She used the incredible technology of the Guild to create special warships for each country to use. But, fearing that the two countries might rise up against her, she made a special addendum to the ships: Each one would be powered by a special "Claudia Unit" located within the body of the ship. This Claudia unit would be unbreakable, and manned by several Guild soldiers, who with the push of a button could detach the unit from the ship, sending the Claudia unit (and the Guild soldiers inside it) up to safety, while sending the country's ship and its crew tumbling down to doom. This was primarily done if a ship was being shot down, but it could also be done if Delphine commanded it via radio.

And the war began, with the Guild carefully supervising.

Then, a resistance movement began. Alex Row stole an Anatoray warship, managed to recapture its Claudia unit, and converted it into a battleship, naming it the Silvana. He outfitted it with armor-piercing cannons that were capable of attacking a Guild warship, and recruited a small crew of mechanics and pilots that would help him fight the Guild. One of his recruits happened to be Sophia Forrester, the daughter of Anatoray's Emperor, who understood the threat that the Guild posed to the world. They learned that there was still one remaining person with the Key gene, a little girl from the Hamilton family named Alvis, and they developed a plan to rescue Alvis from Delphine, bring her into the Grand Stream where Exile was waiting, use Alvis to reawaken Exile, and destroy the Guild's power.

Ten years after that is when the anime takes place (see the Last Exile page for more details).

Once Exile was reactivated by Alvis, it dispersed the Grand Stream forever, restored the weather patterns to both countries (thus saving Prester's ecosystem on both sides) and began its pre-programmed behavior by continually travelling back and forth between the Earth and Prester.

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