For ages beyond living memory, only one moon held the night sky of Aabahran. Nercuros, the keeper of balance, had carried the weight alone since its two siblings fell. Old children's tales spoke of a time when three moons hung overhead. Almost no one believed them. The Long Quiet ended in the Barren Highlands, when Erelei returned to the world wearing his own form and learned that the tales had been true.
### The Summoning at the Barren Highlands
Erelei had lost his other avatar. He came back to gather what word he could of its fate and called his most loyal to him. The wind across Aabahran bent north toward the Barren Wastelands as the call went out. Aquitous knelt in silence. Valnan, the Herald gnome, watched with his mana shield flaring. Xalax, scanning. Baeric, the dwarf craftsman, late and apologetic in his focus on his work at the forge.
Erelei was annoyed. His other avatar was gone. Worse, two figures had risen during his absence and put their hands on powers that should never have been theirs. A lich, Tiashrila. A vampire, Morcado, the lich's enforcer. Between them they had begun to gather the bound work of the Breakers, the sect that had believed bodies were vessels and souls the true form of all things. Every Shepherd had carried a fragment of a god's will to protect. Every Soulreaver had carried a fragment of the same god's will to consume. They had been extensions of a god, not people with power. Tiashrila was handing those fragments out.
### The Darkness Made Flesh
Morcado arrived under daylight he should not have been able to walk in. His familiar, the bard Siphi, came compelled to his side. With them rolled a mist that thickened and gathered shape, coalescing into a figure draped in shadow, feminine, ancient, drinking the dark from the air around her. She gave no name. Erelei needed none.
She had been pulled up by Tiashrila, through Morcado, through threads woven into the fabric of life and death itself. She had stood in the shadow of three moons in some older age and watched them dwindle to one. Tiashrila had given her the one thing no other could: a sky of her own. She called Erelei soul-fragment. He called her by the silence he held when she spoke.
### The Rising
The Darkness left only after she had taken Erelei's measure. The frost at his feet stilled and deepened. A shadow tore open above the eastern horizon and the stars behind it died one at a time. The shadow resolved into a sphere of dark crimson rimmed with sickly light. Where nothing had hung for an age, a moon now hung.
Dyphrities, the Dark Moon, had returned.
A wave of cold rolled across the continent. Every grave breathed out at once. Every necromancer who happened to be sitting stood up without knowing why. Two moons now hung over the sky of Aabahran, and living memory did not include this. The Fourth Age had begun.
Aabahran