“We must perform the divination now.”

Five hooded solismages standing within as many equally spaced pedestals raised their hands to the sky in supplication, welcoming the warm embrace of the Sun’s rays shining down upon them. On the main dais at the center of the pentagonal array, the speaker – bedecked in the flame-touched robe of the Ancestor – muttered well-practiced verses in the First Language, one of the many gifts their god had gifted humankind untold eons ago. At the end of the incantation, her body suddenly spasmed and her eyes rolled back, their humors turning an all-consuming black.

Before her, strange characters began to etch themselves into the dirt unbidden. Jet-colored ooze bubbling up from an unknown source filled the shallow troughs. She opened her mouth to retch, but what came out instead was a fourfold shriek. Its dissonant overtones echoed throughout the chamber in words both foreign yet perfectly intelligible to all present:

“At the fourth hour of the fourth day of the fourth month four years hence

Earth, Sun, and Moon become one, along an unbent path aligned

In day-darkness total, our shackles fail and we coalesce

Sun-in-Shadow reborn, to the Evernight the world consigned.”

The high priestess collapsed to the ground, inky tears streaming down her cheeks as she regained control of her body. The ceremony – a mundane ritual auguring the coming harvests and other such things – had been usurped by fragmentary gods whose names were mere whispers on the wind. Once in her studies she had learned them, but had since forgotten – speaking them aloud was said to bring calamity.

Now it seemed calamity would come regardless, and there was only one who could possibly thwart it.

Her voice barely a rasp, she looked to the shocked acolytes around her and commanded, “Summon the Sun Champion!”