Theodric was very concerned about Valendor, the Night Warden had only said two words before jumping into his shadow without explanation. And he could still feel Valendor’s fear and dread hammering against his soul as if he himself were the source of the haywire emotions.

“Um, Professor?” Kira asked tentatively. “Are you ok? You’ve been pale and your eyes are going crazy all day. Is something wrong?”

Theodric’s heart clenched in his chest, cold sweat soaked his robes as he came to, slumped in his seat. Eyes darting, he saw Barkly and his fellow passengers of the school’s airship, including Kira and most of the other Professors, all stared at him worriedly in a circle.

“It’s nothing, I’m just airsick,” Theodric finally managed.

Barkly sent a concerned pulse down the bond. Gesturing to Morvax outside the window, who was flying near the airship. Suggesting strongly that they should leave and go back without the others.

“No Barkly, thanks but I’m fine,” Theodric insisted, as more chills zapped his body. “Valendor is the one that needs our help,”

“But I don’t think we can do anything for him at the moment,”

The Tree Wraith whined sadly.

“I’m sure Valendor will be fine,” Theodric’s teeth clattered. “I hope,”

…

Valendor was most definitely not fine.

The Lord of Night desperately tried to recall any knowledge of the war from the vast archive of collective experiences up to two thousand years ago and…well he did get some faint hints of war floating about sparsely, but nothing on the scale of what Theodric had described, and none were first-hand witnesses to the fight.

Only when he concentrated on what he wanted to find, was there were lots of deaths by sickness, old age, disturbing amounts of suicide, but none died by blade or spell. The only instance of war existing, was the loom of the inevitable, causing the stress that drove the aforementioned deaths.

There was no wonder the Lord of Night missed it.

Frustrated he went the extreme route, quickly consuming all the other donuts, leaving Theodric’s alone of course, the Lord of Night stripped the energy from them and gathered as much of the surrounding shadows around himself, aiming for the great abyss of darkness below, and shot towards the Night Kingdom like a live ballistic missile.

Ripping his way through the abyss of shadow, Void Leviathans in his way scattered, as the Lord of Night plummeted through the great expanse of nothingness. Orbs of blue light were whisked into his slipstream, left whizzing in his wake.

His eyes narrowed as he zeroed in on the gargantuan green dome in the distance, only visible to the Lord of Night whose senses and eyesight exploded in clarity, growing exponentially the deeper and closer he got within his domain. He really did hate the mortal realms, his sight was always restricted greatly, and he felt blind and suppressed all the time.

Not bothering to slow down, he thunked head first into the thick gel-like exterior of the sky, which halted the Lord of Night dead in his tracks a quarter of the way in. He took a moment to appreciate his astoundingly effective anti-anything-but-souls-barrier, which had nicely grown in size and thickness as intended.

Squeezing and wriggling through the gel-like layer, the Lord of Night finally popped out the otherside, immediately shadow shifting to his archive of the dead.

The Ancestral Memorials was a huge black and gold sprawling circular structure that jutted out of a cliffside made of dark purple stone. Eight black spires clawed at the sky around a taller central tower, thrumming with power from the gold formations carved into their sides, powering a giant pale blue invocation array spinning like a halo above the centre structure, bright enough to act as the sun in a sunless realm.

The same colour as the orbs of souls, which all floated toward the black and gold fortress, all drawn in like lost ships to a lighthouse, in which the Lord of Night found to be quite an accurate metaphor. The trickle of souls flowed into the Ancestral Memorial through huge floor to ceiling windows imbued with the same green formations as the sky, only allowing passage to the dead.

The halo-like array’s blue tinted glow illuminated the rest of the hexagonal cyclic structure, obsidian walls painted with protective runes, glowing gold in vine-like patterns branching and connecting across the entire fortress, made to be impenetrable and only accessible to the Lord of Night.

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Who entered through one of the windows as the archive possessed no doors and had no need of them either. He was greeted by an enormous rotating formation composed of dozens of complex arrays that dominated the space underneath the high ceilings of an atrium within the heart of the fortress.

Powered and controlled by rows and rows of embedded gold in the pattern of runes, on massive rings wrapped along the circular space, rotating along the walls. The topmost ring nearest the ceiling attracted the trickles of souls spread out in the room, and combined into a swirling vortex matching the rotational speed of multiple lower rings and their projected arrays.

The glowing whirlpool funneled past a pink lower layer of the array and onto a purple array another layer down. The Lord of Night paused in his frenzy to sense the pink mana array emitting a steady stream of mana on the soul held down by the purple array, which the soul absorbed some mana and the rest of the mana beam passed through it.

The negative imprint recorded by another layer of array below, which was passed to and inverted by yet another layer, refined by another layer by cross referencing repeat copies of the soul scan.

Until eventually, the best mana imprint of the soul was transcribed onto an open pitch black tome, laid flat on a raised altar with only a single page standing vertically straight as the two arrays above, one supplying the Lord of Night’s special mana infused with his power, the other embossing the standalone page with gold runes: the complete summary of their life lived.

Of course that’s assuming the soul was complete and did not have chunks bitten off by Ebonic energy. Face screwed in anger in place of panic at the reminder of the massive loss of knowledge.

The Lord of Night turned around, sensing a familiar presence. A magnificent creature manifested itself in a swirl of blue feathers and fur, taking the form of a mix between an owl and a bat, deep blue feathers crowning its long bat ears and covering its face like a half-mask. Making them stand out against the paler blue sheen of the rest of its body feathers, beautiful marine blue with gold highlighted wings ended with sharp obsidian claws protruding from the radiale, just like the larger, sharper claws it planted firmly on the black tiled floor.

Like its master, shadows curled into deep, black piercing eyes, twin abysses of cunning intelligence. The owlbat gave a low hoot in greeting.

“Greetings Lord, it has been a while, how was your sky project?” Her voice smooth and sonorous.

“Indeed Ravshika, the sky works well and my hardwork is a success,” The Lord of Night, tilted his head at the manifestation of the Ancestral Memorial. “Unfortunately I cannot rest for there is a new crisis I must attend to,”

“My congratulations for your sky sire,” Ravshika bowed her feathered head gracefully. “Master requires rest urgently, is there anything your servant can do to help with the problem?”

Signaling his loyal aide to follow, the Lord of Night strode through the gold embossed halls of the obsidian fortress. “Quite astute Ravshika, however I am no longer in a position to be able to sit idly,”

They reached the room below the heart of the fortress, an unassuming large hole in the centre of the room was on the ground, unremarkable except for gold embellishments around the edge and a similarly decorated monolith in the centre of the hole rose out of it and connected with the ceiling.

Walking closer, the rows and rows of endless shelves of thick black tomes lined the walls of the hole, identical to the one on the altar from the previous hall, only differing in their contents. The deep hole seemed to be bottomless, but the Lord of Night knew better. He had borne witness from the very beginning after all.

The Lord of Night had filled his companion in on the way, the owlbat’s expression resembling her Lord’s the more she got up to speed. The ancient beings jumped into the hole without a second thought, slowing down around midway through the section containing the last two thousand years, according to the monolith.

Both of them floated to a stop next to the monolith’s large runes indicating the start of the last two thousand years. The Lord of Night peered upward and guesstimated about three million soul records or so, give or take a few hundred, and his heart sank in dismay.

Three million deaths across all the realms in two thousand years was like an average of one thousand five hundred deaths in a year.

Which sounds like a lot, but considering that it was over eight realms, okay maybe seven realms since no mortal lived in the Night Kingdom, that number was still too ridiculously small to be statistically feasible. Even if there were no Demon Wars.

Which was evident in the pitiful thinness of recent tomes of the dead, each one detailing the lives of all who died that year, with the year proudly written in gold runes on the spine. In which some of the writing was squished since the book was too thin to write the year on normally.

The Lord of Night grimaced at the ugly sight that confirmed his greatest fears. Then huffed irritably at how he had overlooked this glaring problem, which had now come to bite him in the backside. Worry gnawed at him at every waking second.

Ravshika hung her fluffy head low in shame and anxiety. Her long ears similarly planted flat behind her head.

“My Lord, does this mean the Ebonblight had consumed all those missing souls?” The owlbat shivered fretfully. “The magnitude of that much soul power…is the Ebonblight Cataclysm going to occur again?”

“If it were, it would’ve been too late already, the realms would’ve been overrun by Ebonic filth and rot,” The Lord of night mumbled grimly, unsure. “Yet the mortal realms seemed relatively fine aside from the Demon Wars,”

“This servant has failed you, my Lord,” Ravshika hung her head again. “She should have warned you when she noticed the anomalies in death rate,”

The Lord of Night turned his head sadly. “No, we are both to blame, I had ordered you not to disturb my work except in an emergency,” His antlers lost their usual shine. “But you could not have known the size of the mortal population enough to judge the severity of the magnitude of missing souls.” They only know the death rate by number of souls arrived, not the birth rate or the actual death itself.

A moment of uneasy silence passed between them, for if the Ebonblight were not completely to blame for the disappearance of souls, the biggest question was:

What is?

The Lord of Night had a feeling that he would not come to like the answer.