------------- Sentinel

For the coming of the night, a lone sentinel watched.  It would be here soon.  The blackness, the darkest fears of all living creatures would soon be realized.  Dyvynarth had learned too well the lesson of the shadows.  His fear of darkness had been well founded.  He had seen his master slaughtered by one of their kind.  He had looked into the true face of annihilation, and what had saved him then, he still didn't know.  But he had spent every day of his life since then preparing for the coming of the night.

Lolth had started it, or so he had come to believe.  But now, with Her destroyed forever, they were still coming.  In those last days, during the Lolth Incursion in Dragaard and in the desperate plot to overthrow Matron Mother Belabra in the Splinter Kingdom and prevent her from reclaiming the Avatar of Lolth, they had all seen them.  Lolth, through the Matron Mother, has contacted them, had invited them to come through the veil between their realm and this one.  They were to be Her distraction, Her army of invasion, Her retribution against the surfacers.  She had no idea what She was letting loose.  The Silver Gryphon had fought one of the shadows, and had even managed to kill one of their minions, a dragon sized insectoid monstrosity that had been foreseen by the Paratech Devral.  But Dyvynarth could not imagine what a swarming army of thousands, even millions of those creatures would be like.

The prophecies had been read.  The Avatar's had been warned.  Soon, too soon, the darkness would come.  Something else was bringing them on.  Some other force of destruction had entered the picture, and it was accelerating The Shadows' timeline.  And Dyvynarth had begun to hear frightening rumors from all corners of the globe.  A monastery of The Hidden had been destroyed up north, a band of genetically altered Neo-Ogres had been raiding near Gryphonmyr, and the architects of darkness had been carefully maneuvering Atheae and the Holy Symballan Empire in a collision course to all out war.  All these things had the taint of The Shadows about them.  So while the duties of leadership had fallen on the Elysium Priestess in the war to come, Dyvynarth Summersett, Radiancemaster and Paladine of Seker, had been relegated to watching the borders of the Empire.  Not all of those borders were drawn on a map.  The most dangerous one to watch was that between light and darkness, where The Shadows scheme.

------------- Credits

------------- Thanks and please comment.