A Generation Later

A generation after the stranger's first visit, war came to Meliora again, not from goblin tunnels this time but from the grave. Legions of undead marched at the will of a single dark mage, a necromancer whose mastery over death undid the natural order. Every warrior, mage and assassin who fell before him rose again to fight in his ranks.

Among those who stood against him was Abigail, an elf of Sun's Cradle, raised between the sheer walls of the Rend. She argued that force alone would never win such a war, and that only a power able to defy death, rather than fall to it, could turn the tide. Walking the catacombs of her people, she dreaded the day their own dead would rise at the enemy's call.

At last Abigail found what she sought: a magic like nothing the world had ever seen, reaching into the Umbral Plane. She knew the risk and chose it anyway, resolving to become its conduit and to bear the price herself, whatever it might be.

"But whatever awaits, it cannot be grimmer than the enemy at our door." — Abigail

Her ritual, begun at a stone portal deep in the forest, helped bring the war of the dead to an end, but it let something else into Meliora. What she had invited in was Umbra, a darkness from beyond the world, and in time she became one with it. Those she had saved grew afraid of the power she now carried, and all of Meliora, as she would bitterly say, forsook her for her deeds.

In the years that followed, Umbra spread through the Primeweald as gloom. Abigail's own people were claimed and remade into the Unlit, wooden-limbed drones of Umbra, and they overran the forest. To the trolls of the swamps, those last few summers were nothing but witching business.