Ella looked at the entrance to the city, wondering when Miria, Sallia, and her friends would return home.

It had been almost two months now. She was starting to get a little worried. Surely they would have come back by now? Why weren’t they returning?

She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down.

They were fine.

Miria and Sallia were two of the strongest girls she had ever seen. When their parents had disappeared after the Orukthyri attack, she had raised them as if they were her own daughters. She hadn’t raised them to be weak. She had taught them everything she knew about adventuring. She had given them every single tool she possibly could to let them live during their journeys in the wastes. Miria had one of the most absurd attunements she had ever seen, and Sallia was probably the best swordsman in the city once her absurdly strong body was taken into account.

She had even given Miria her good luck charm, the carving of an eight-legged pet that used to be popular before the dawn of the black sun.

They had every single tool they could possibly need to survive in the wasteland.

She wasn’t sure where Miria and her friends were right now. She didn’t know exactly what adventures they were having.

But in her heart of hearts, she knew that they would be fine.

They had to be.

* * *

Anise’s parents had a bad feeling in their hearts.

It had started out small, but it was growing bigger every day.

It had been four months since Anise and her friends had left Silver City to journey to the surface. The two of them weren’t entirely happy with Anise’s decision, but at the same time, they understood Anise’s dream.

It was to become a super-witch.

Even though Anise had long grown out of the phase where she loudly proclaimed her dream of becoming a super witch to everyone whenever she had the opportunity to, it hadn’t changed Anise’s underlying hopes and dreams. Even if Anise tended to get embarrassed when one mentioned the word ‘super-witch’ to her these days, she still loved spellcasting more than almost anything else in the world.

Unfortunately, Anise was held back by her low spellcasting essence pool and lack of spells.

They had no idea if there was a ‘cure’ for lack of spellcasting essence on the surface. It would probably be very hard to find, even if it did exist. But at the very least, Anise could find old spells, study them, and pursue her dreams that way.

But it had been four months since they journeyed to the surface, and the two were getting very worried.

They should have come back by now.

After three months, Felix’s mother, Ella, and Anise’s parents had all received deposits of gold that Miria and Sallia had left behind before leaving. It had been enough to take care of the two for several years, if they lived frugally.

But it couldn’t replace the growing, gnawing fear in their stomachs. At first, it had been easy to pretend that something had just come up during the journey. Perhaps Anise and her friends had gotten lost and were searching for the tunnel entrance to Silver City again. Or maybe they had gotten misdirected, and entered a different city somehow - after all, plenty of cities in the underdark had entrances that led to the surface. Otherwise it would have made it harder to ship metals out of the underdark and back to the cities of the old Orthan.

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However, as the months continued to pass by, even the hope that Anise and her friends would return soon was starting to fade away.

Even though they still hoped that Anise would be fine, and that their little girl would come back with stories of her amazing adventures with her friends and her magic if they just waited a little longer…

They were starting to accept the truth.

Anise was never coming home. And not only would they never know how their little girl died, they would probably never even see her corpse.

All that was left was the empty void in their hearts where their precious little girl had once been.

* * *

Time passed.

In a certain room in a ruined palace, the corpses of three girls, one boy, a dragon, and a Palanthyrre that had been trapped in a cage slowly reorganized themselves into a new set of defenders for a portal.

There were no signs of any other adventurers successfully making their way into the room.

Years slipped by, and the encroachment of the black sun became worse and worse over time. The progress that the black sun was making also seemed to accelerate with each passing year - first, all life on the surface died off. Then, adventurers who tried to make their way to the surface started dying off almost immediately upon exposure to the black sun.

Trade between cities became more and more difficult to accomplish. Apparently, the tunnels between cities simply weren’t as well shielded as the cities themselves. This posed increasingly noticeable problems for traveling merchants, as they started to get sick anytime they tried to move from one city to another. Similarly, people started to get sick even if they only spent a few hours picking mushrooms in the mushroom caverns, making it harder to acquire food.

Even the city that had acquired the healing cube started to struggle to maintain its population as it became harder to harvest food safely.

Then, the core parts of the cities started to become less safe as well.

People in the cities started to get sick. Adventurers who had retired from the surface recognized the symptoms of the buildup from exposure to the black sun.

This was when panic started to truly set in. The black sun was not present in the underdark, and people were still getting sick from it, even if they hid in their homes. Combined with the increasing difficulty of harvesting food, things started to become truly dire for the surviving Orthanoids. Some people stayed in their homes, hoping that whatever had gone wrong with their cities would fix itself before they perished, while some people desperately dove deeper and deeper into the caves in hopes that it would keep them safe.

It didn’t.

About ten years after Miria and her friends died, most of the Orthanoid population, as well as most of the planet, had gone extinct from the myriad problems caused by the encroachment of the black sun.

At least, the native life of the planet had mostly disappeared.

However, the planet wasn’t devoid of all life. Strange things started to happen on the planet, although almost nothing was left to witness it.

Rocks started to come alive, opening their newborn eyes and beholding a world devoid of pink plants or native life.

The corpses of Orthanoids started to split apart and animate themselves, as bones, blood, muscles, and sinews grew life of their own and left the bodies of their former owners.

Finally, as new life sprung up in the rotting carcass of what had once been a proud Tier 5 world, something woke up.

Far above the continent filled with newborn life, a single, black sun floated in the center of the ring-shaped world.

At least, those who were unaware of what it truly was might believe it was a black sun.

However, for the first time since arriving in this world, the black sun sleepily opened its eye and blinked.

It beheld the ruined, dying world beneath its gaze. The laws of reality surrounding this planet had basically been replaced with the laws of its home dimension. And it couldn’t sense any other life in this dimension, meaning that there was no point in spreading further into the vast reaches of space.

Then, it blinked once more, and disappeared.