Night Bringers: Dimsfall

“They should not be here,” Crius whispered, his breath catching quietly in his throat as he looked around the crumbling town square. “Death will be upon us all, soon. Just you wait…”

He pulled his cloak even tighter, his eyes locking onto a familiar shadow—also cloaked—detaching itself from the ruins of another place, of which many would never know. The pair didn’t just ride; they glided, extinguishing the faint glow of every nearby street lamp as they drew closer, also taking with them the words he had just uttered, which now fell swiftly upon deaf and dying ears.

For to those who lived within the town limits, the searing glow of the towering lamps was a savior. It didn’t matter that the fuel pumping into those engines were toxic, or that the light itself scorched the very air they breathed, turning their lungs into clumps of bagged coal. Light was a commodity. At any cost, even the inevitable end, was a price they were willing to pay to keep it.

The ground began to lift. Not the muddied dirt, but the soft, dusty frost of a winter that had just materialized out of thin air. Before long, they all would be out of this misery.

Innumerable ice-capped crystals shook loose, moving swiftly from beneath Crius’s feet. He remained unmoving, paralyzed as the last lamp died just overhead.

Snow in Dimsfall always fell upwards, or so the elders once claimed. Today their stories would prove true—here, the snow didn’t just swallow the light, it brought an unnatural breathless hush. Now, charred artic lava poured like gold from the crimson clouds over the dead mining village. Its commoners living at the edge of the cold, jagged rocks, at a place aptly named Widow’s Peak—where the temperatures plummeted and sudden absolute darkness rose up from the slick cobblestones. From the frozen ground, a quiet hiss echoed as the snow started upwards, signaling the final signs of last snow. The artificial warmth had disappeared. The heaters buzzing to a halt, the fireplaces dousing themselves. The world split open—plunging them deeper into a void where the cold dark threatened to consume them whole.

Crius’s son Larkin hailed from Grimsgrove, nearest the salt-piers. He was a Night-Bringer, the last of his kind. Snakesford and Limeburns in his satchel for sale at a place where money couldn’t even buy your life. He rode through the small town of a population hovering just under three-hundred souls and dwindling by the day. The gates were bitten by the taste of a frost they could no longer see, the grass muddied, spirits damp. His skeletal, gray phantom mare—Shimmer stood silent, reverent, ghostly. Her tail huffing triumphantly in the shallow breeze as she waited for what would come next.

A small silver lantern hung from her long neck, unlit.

Specks of dirty snow drifted up from the cracks, brushing past his skin, bleeding the ground dry.

Inside the borders of Dimsfall, the laws of nature appeared just as fractured. Snow no longer fell towards the frozen Earth, it rushed skywards, into the monstrous shadows of an invisible fire. Holding heaven hostage, turning the skies permanent shades of a boiling ashen grey. It was as if the valley itself was rejecting their mere presence, destining itself to doom.

Crius knew Larkin’s arrival would be the end. Light behaved no better when he came to town.

Life drained without his magic. He walked the perimeter of the empty village square holding his own heavy, black lantern. The wick remained cold, damp and completely unlit, from the confines of the murky glass panes, a sickly warm glow bled through—casting long, warped trails that stretched towards him, their light cursed to never guide a path outward.

Paralyzed by the terrible irony of their fate, Crius could only watch. He knew no savior was coming to such a forgotten place. As the cloaked figure drifted through the square, the rising snow ceased to be a simple winter wonder—and became a welcoming shroud of death. Wherever the upward-drifting flakes passed, another weary soul would stop breathing. All their frantic, worldly struggles seizing into silence. One by one, the people who had worshiped the burning lava collapsed, their lives snuffed out as quietly as the lanterns before them. No terrifying screams, no gasping for air, no suffering. Only an absolute, blanketing peace washing over the town until nothing remained but Crius, the shadows, and a city buried in a skyward grave. Their bodies turned to stone.

A shooting chill burred through the bones of all still living, blasting the final set of streetlamps as they shattered, one-by-one, plunging the square into the permanent burning darkness of a long-lost twilight. As the last gasping citizen of Dimsfall fell still, the cloaked figure paused amid the floating debris of the broken city, before slowly turning to face Crius. The heavy fabric of the hood shifting until Crius could finally see his own face looking back at him. His son’s. There was no shock, only a profound, hollow ache where his heart used to be. Crius locked eyes with Larkin through the swirling, quiet snow, a silent understanding passing between them. His heavy gaze cold and absolute as the winter that had just been unleashed, offering no apology for the devastation.

The upward-falling snow began to thin, disappearing into the black void above—until the square was completely empty and the charred arctic lava returned. Crius stood entirely alone among the frozen dead and the shattered ruins of the town. Larkin had done what he came to do. His life had been spared, but as he looked out into the vast, silent wasteland, he realized the truth: surviving was his one true punishment.

Look to the sky, and know that the dead do not disappear forever, mind you—we always knew this—they freeze in the upper atmosphere, forming a floating, silent graveyard. But the heavens cannot hold them indefinitely. When their bodies become too heavy, cascades of freezing, burning black sludge pours down from the sky, raining on the cities in hardening, necrotic stone. This is the charred arctic lava, a permanent, suffocating tomb for the town who so lovingly coveted light.