Through the Primeweald

When the stranger next crosses into Meliora, the realm is in its darkest hour, and Aurelius greets them with a plain proposal: together they are going to kill a witch. Abigail herself confronts them at a portal before Twilight Peak, recognises Aurelius the time traveller and names the newcomer a little spark, not of this world. She calls down destruction from the sky and vanishes, and the pair must make for the mountain on foot while she is weakened by the effort.

Their refuge is a warren that once belonged to a clever witch, a proper sanctum that the Umbra-touched darklings cannot enter. From there Aurelius, who has glimpsed the grim end of this timeline on his travels, guides the stranger, and portals back to the warren awaken as the land is cleared. Through the forest the stranger hears echoes, fragments of the past in which Abigail's voice still argues for the choice that doomed her.

Across the Primeweald lie element cores, wells of concentrated power that grant new magic to whoever takes hold of them. The stranger claims the core of fire in a burned ravine, climbs the tower of Storm Eye Lake above a hidden city for the core of lightning, and wins the Core of the Arcane beyond a swamp where a civil troll ferries wizards on his back. The Unlit, the darklings and the Acolytes of Umbra contest every step.

Fleeing a gloom-tainted giant troll on a railcart into the shadow of Twilight Peak, the stranger finds a core unlike any Aurelius has seen. It holds arcane energy honed against Umbra, the element that will come to be called radiance.

"I think, in her fumbling, she has created a new element." — Aurelius

The road leads underground, through the darkling tunnels of the Underhollow, into a vast necropolis, a drained cistern turned black market and a ruined prison beneath the elven city. Aurelius shudders to think what the old necromancer could have done had he seized such a burial ground. Abigail's voice follows them in the dark, and Aurelius can no longer tell whether it is her echo or the whispering of Umbra.

Beyond lies the Rend, the chasm where Twilight Peak was split eons ago to steal its heart of fire, now festering with Umbra and pierced by portals onto the Umbral Plane. At the top of the trail, past the last stand of the Unlit, rises the grand palace of Sun's Cradle. What happened within its walls belongs to another page of this chronicle.