It had been centuries since the time of darkness, when Evil ruled the land from all corners of the map, when Man had risen up against the Evil, joining forces with the unlikeliest of allies, and crushed it out of existence. In the Age of Light that followed, mankind moved on, rebuilding that which was destroyed and creating anew, the wreckage of the world becoming the foundations of something better. But Light cannot exist without Darkness, and Man’s folly, as repeated over and over again throughout time, was ignoring this fact. The balance of the Universe must be kept, and though it may lie dormant, Evil never truly dies.
Wandering through the Dark Forest any time of day is unwise, he knew, but Allador had proven time and again that his courage was strong. For weeks he had been tracking a mysterious creature that had been laying waste to the local farms, destroying crops, poisoning the water, and brutally slaying the livestock. Though the farms were spaced all over the local countryside, the faint trails he had been able to pick up all led back to Swartzbrake, as the Dark Forest is known to the elders, though that name hearkens back to the Age of Darkness when evil ruled the land. The markings were like none he had previously encountered; no beast known to Man could possibly have made them. But Allador knew there were many beasts of legend once known and now forgotten, so his courage was tempered with the caution that only age and experience can bring.
And so once again Allador found himself at the edge of Swartzbrake, staring into the unnaturally deep shadows as dusk quickly approached, wondering if this night would be the night he would venture forward into the darkness, hunting the hunter, and slaying the beast. He knew he was in the right place, as all the trails he had followed converged on the same part of the forest, this very same break in the trees. The thick pine trunks grew close together in this part of the forest, so close in some places that they appeared to spawn all from one set of roots and form a solid mass of trees for half a league or more. It was in the center of one of these places that these trails joined, the canopy overhead curving in to create a living arched doorway into the forest. Allador was confident that he would meet this creature if he stayed much longer; the attacks had been gradually increasing in frequency over the previous months, from once in a week to nightly most recently. What prompted him to turn his mount around and head back to his village was not fear but a sense that he was not ready to defeat this monster and did not want to face it until he felt he could. If he failed, and he held no illusions to this possibility, his village and many beyond would surely be lost. That the Darkness was returning to the land was of no doubt to him; it was his responsibility to prepare them all for it.
The black fog growing in the darkness just inside the archway of trees shimmered as Allador gallopped away, blanketing the creature in the most absolute darkness. The creature sensed the power in Allador, feeling in its core the threat he posed. Though tendrils of fog began to creep out of the trees as the last flash of sunlight disappeared over the horizon and dusk fell, the creature made no move towards Allador. As Allador sensed his own unreadiness to defeat this creature, so did the creature feel the growth of its power incomplete. The rashness of Evil, as powerful as it is, the creature feared failure more than Allador. If Allador failed his death would be grand and he would be heralded by Man for ages yet to come. If the creature known as Cimmeran were to fail its master, its doom would be unending, an eternity of existence lost in the shadows of time and space. No, it would continue to gather its strength, feeding on the destruction it wreaked and the desperation it created.