[Daeut]

The tides of Fate can be merciless, sweeping away the guilty and innocent without particular care. Time trudges ever forward, and the Time Lord Xarxes had ensured that by securing the ebb in Helheim's favor. Few battles throughout history have had the power to determine the course of an entire continent so definitively; the battle of Damocles ended in decisive victory for Dawnstone and its allies, and thusly sealed the trajectory of Meranthe as a whole. The paradigm of the world was reversing.

In the aftermath, a gargantuan Spire of eternite and orchicalcum erected in the middle of Aphros, heightening in mass and scale with each day. Emerging from a chasm that followed into a bottomless Abyss, the cracks between the waking world and something else began to sink large swaths of the city in a surreal suspension of Reality.

With every day of its rapid and unprecedented growth, the Spire's psychic broadcast rendered much of the immediate populace sleepless and fatigued. Some woke up without their memories. Others reported oneiric portents of the city's destruction, while more reported a future ahead of it--unwritten into the script of Fate and synthesizing into the ineffable. Constituents nearest to the Spire purported many other anomalies, such as phasing through their doors, or rooms inside homes adjoining and looping into themselves paradoxically. The weather appeared to flux wildly throughout the day, changing seasons in the span of hours. The flowery of windowsills and garths wilted in real time, or sprouted in reverse.

As the months passed, the effects only magnified and spread outward to encompass the city's entirety.

The previously light-led world order was steadily coming to an abrupt conclusion, and the shadows marched to bring about the beginning of its end.

By Oracular decree, the peripheral villages and towns of Aphros had been ordered to evacuate and contract inside the city. Many left their homes in mass exodus, confused by the uncertainty and mystery as they teetered on the precipice of total annihilation. A great pall of dread and despair infected the popular gestalt as death seemed all but imminent.

Yet appearances are anything if not deceptive.

Reality can--and often does--prove stranger than fiction.

The Age of Light neared its close, but those that made it had still a Story to Tell.



The Age of Twilight was upon them.

Objective: ?̵̨̞̼͈̙̞̫̋̅̆̑̕ͅ?̷̢̢̞̞̖̯̱̟͗̆̆̄͝?̶̛̮͓̤͋̃̎͜