The sky had not seen the sun in weeks.
Not truly.
A dense, unrelenting shroud of ash blanketed the heavens—an endless ceiling of soot and shadow that made day indistinguishable from night. It clung to the stratosphere like judgment rendered in dust, casting the world below into perpetual twilight. In Nondicci, time was kept not by the turning of the sun, but by the soft pulse of leyline crystals embedded in ceilings and walls—artificial rhythms replacing the celestial.
Elsewhere across the continent, the consequences had begun to take root.
The rain, when it came, came poisoned.
Twice in the past five months, clouds heavy with ash had wept their burden upon the land. The first rainfall had scorched crops and filled open cisterns with a film of oily black. The second left lesions on skin and blistered the bark of trees. Farmers who hadn't already fled saw their fields wilt overnight—leaves dissolving into pulp, roots blackened by acidic saturation. Entire ecosystems, once vibrant, had withered in silence.
The water cycle itself had fractured. Without sunlight, the glaciers had slowed their melt. Rivers fed by mountain caps dwindled to thin silver threads, then to nothing. Deltas cracked like old parchment. Fishing villages that once drew life from flowing waters were now dry-banked, abandoned.
Only the rivers born beneath glaciers laced with geothermal veins remained—those that bled heat from the deep bones of the world. They became sacred lifelines, and soon, battlegrounds.
Famine had begun its slow, inevitable crawl across the land.
Reports filtered in through Liam's communication web—entire towns rationing moldy grain; nobles hoarding water beneath fractured estates; warlords demanding tribute in food from villages that had none left to give. The caravans that once danced across the heartland were now escorted by armored convoys—if they ran at all.
And worse still, something had awakened.
The creatures of the night—once bound to shadows and superstition, to folklore and moonless corners of the world—had grown bold.
They no longer feared the sun, because there was no sun to fear.
No light to burn them. No warmth to hold them at bay. Only a dim, ashen world ripe with confusion and exhaustion. Scouts and traders brought word of settlements wiped clean in the course of a night—no signs of struggle, only silence, bones, and claw marks on stone. In the far north, a mountain watchtower had ceased all transmissions. When a retrieval squad was sent, they found only the tower's foundations—and a trail of blood that led to a fissure too deep to see the bottom.
In the jungles of Seravax, entire wildlife populations had vanished. No birds. No insects. Just the eerie, constant hum of movement—heard, but never seen. In the broken city of Vareth, reports spoke of figures moving through the mist with eyes like molten glass, whispering prayers in dead languages.
And in the cracks between it all, something older stirred. Hungrier.
In the Council chamber beneath Nondicci, the mood had shifted from planning to vigilance. Armed escorts now accompanied all surface expeditions. AISAR had rewritten its patrol algorithms three times in the last month, responding to patterns that defied logic. Even Layla had begun sleeping with a spell-knife beneath her cot.
"Darkness breeds hunger," Archmage Lorien Quavek had said, studying a melted compass that now spun only counter-clockwise. "And hunger breeds monsters."
Belore Bart had doubled the watch at the sunshaft gates, sealing the upper tunnels with layered barricades and seismic-triggered traps. Liam had begun redesigning surface drones to carry UV emitters—repurposed from farming lights—and started experiments with light-based warding fields.
Still, the message spreading across the last outposts was clear: help was not coming. Too many were cut off. Too many already gone.
This was not a new age of heroes.
This was an age of endurance.
And in it, the creatures of the night would flourish.