The Blinding Aurora
The last night of the siege
By the sixty-first year of the Ashen War, Mythos had been reduced to a ring of defended districts around the captured observatory. Morthraxanor began widening the Black Gate so that his entire dominion could cross at once. Destroying the observatory would have collapsed the gate into the city and killed everyone still inside it.
Elirion chose a more dangerous answer. He entered the observatory and channelled the First Light through its celestial lenses. Zaldor wrapped the city in layered darkness, giving the light a boundary and shielding the mortal districts from its full force. Their powers were not opposites fighting each other; they were the two halves of the same seal.
The sky that burned without fire
When the seal closed, night became white from horizon to horizon. Every demon still bound to the gate was drawn back through it, and Morthraxanor lost the physical form he had built in the mortal world. Soldiers across three kingdoms were temporarily blinded, glass melted in the upper towers of Mythos and coloured bands remained in the sky for seven days.
The aurora still returns faintly when the Veil is under strain. It is remembered as a victory, but not a clean miracle: Elirion was gravely weakened, Zaldor carried the gate’s darkness within his mantle for years and Mythos never fully rebuilt the districts around the observatory.