While Beral lived almost half a millenium before the events surrounding the Sandalphon Affair, it is almost universally agreed that his magnum opus was integral in the way events played out. He was born during the reign of the first Septarch, in 145, under the name of Beral Murad. He lived for most of his brief life in the Oncillian capitol of Galdanis as something of hermit in the Icebound Quarter. In addition to writing, he had a passion for gliding - so much so that he was quoted as saying that if he were to die, he wanted to do it in the skies.

During his relatively brief life, Beral is credited with having written over thirty books, several hundred poems and a myriad of short stories. Of this corpus, only one survived the Aetherist purge of his works. The book was written under the title The Eye of Argon. According to the prophet, "the book is the story of a young man's quest to find what it means to be a man, which turns into a quest for love and power when he meets the blind yet beautiful shrine maden who is guarding the ancient, evil artifact: the Eye of Argon."

Within ten years of its publication, scholars had already noticed that the novel had accurately predicted several major political events. Beral adamantly denied that his book had any sort of prophetic content, however, it is generally considered that he lost that argument when it was discovered that his description of Ziphna's quest to restore the temple of Argon was an exact parallel of the death of the first Septarch and the fantastically improbably ascension of Septarch Naurent I. He eventually gave up the argument, but remained bitter until he - in what is widely viewed as a hidden prophecy regarding Jukat Oncillia's famous tactic - was mowed down at the age of 35 by a rampaging herd of arwhal while gliding at the Cerulean Banks. The book was posthumously renamed to the Prophecies of Beral.

In terms of the Sandalphon Affair, Beral's predictions of the dissappearance of the Basilica of Ysithmir and the formation of the Aberrations, in the curse of the wizard marmot episode, were widely seen and discussed at the time. The relationship that he predicted between these events and the general Thin Aether phenomenon drastically increased the size and credibility of the Naturalist movement. The riots which resulted from the Universal Church of Gilded Dagon's announcement of this link are also thought to have extended the Little War for another thirty years.

However, not all of Beral's statements were understood until much later. The role that the Aetherists and the Oversight Committee played in the formation of the Thin Aether were not realized until well after the Gravitopolis War had exacerbated the phenomenon to the point that the Sandalphon were able to fully cross over at the penultimate Festival of All Stars. Later historians have, of course, discovered the link in Beral's work and using it been able to shed a great deal of light on the entire period of our history.

The accuracy of Beral's prophecies garnered him religious significance as well. Many religions of the time either adapted or downright copied large sections of the Prophecies of Beral. The most famous borrowing is the one that occurs in the Iron Codex, which was originally taken from Beral's description of the Sandalphon: "the first builders / the first diggers / who breached the sky / and saw the stars". Most religions that borrowed from Beral's work named the prophet to a position of honor, the most notable being his deification by the High Beneficent Toth of the Universal Church of Gilded Dagon. Some sections of the Aetherist holy texts are also known to be adapted from the Prophecies. Judging from writing styles and subject matter, many scholars have theorized that far larger sections of the Aetherist texts may have been borrowed from Beral's work, and that this may in fact be the reason for the Aetherists' purge of most of corpus. For this, and other obvious reasons, the Aetherists have never acknowledged Beral as a prophet or the parts of his work they borrowed.

—Gwydion Vadeki