It was a night like all the ones before. Velvety black, the perfect sky was bright with thousands of stars. Two moons hung, globular and pale, high over the city of Hakarth. Occasionally, the distant whistle and rumble of one of the city’s many trains could be heard, piercing the hush that had descended with the sun.

That was all Aron Hart could hear of Hakarth.

Any other sounds coming from the city were swallowed up by the roar of the falls. It was a glossy ribbon of silver in the night, carving through the walls of the Cloud Abyss. Occasionally stopped along its path by some great boulder or outcropping in the eroded strata of the mountains, it sent arcs of white foam into the night. They vanished into the white fog that forever gripped the ravine through which the river Gilda snaked.

“What is causing rifts in the Astral Plane?” Aron asked aloud, staring hard at the falls. “Don’t you wonder?”

She had tucked her arms around her knees, holding them in place against her chest. Dressed warmly for the unforgiving night in the mountains, she nonetheless had spread a blanket around her shoulders. Beside her, Jayce was shaking his head.

“It seems obvious that it must be the erowist,” he said. Despite having spent so little time working in the mines, he had a gaunt, malnourished look to him. It was something many of the necromancers shared. Merigold Lee had not, perhaps because she had never stepped foot in the mines at all.

The two, Aron Hart and Jayce Erline, were not alone. There was a survey team behind them on the ridge above the Cloud Abyss, largely settled in for the night. Two well-equipped Elementals sat at opposite corners of the small encampment, keeping watch. The rest of the team and their escort manned the equipment that they had brought from the city to detect erowist activity in the mountains. A good number of them were mounting telescopes on brass stands near the edge of the ravine to look out over the mountains – the erowist were much easier to spot at night than during the day due to their natural luminescence.

Aron had let the sounds of work and murmured conversation fill the space between her and Jayce for a moment. It was comforting, a familiar sound that filled her working hours no matter the time of day.

“The erowist are the obvious answer,” she agreed after a time. “But you told me the deity-class erowist vanished after The Rift here was sealed. Merigold told me she used her contract to force the erowist back to the Astral Plane. It’s thus a reasonable assertion that the erowist can travel between planes with or without rifts. They must appear for some other reason.”

“We might never know,” Jayce said with a shrug, looking interestedly at one of the machines that had begun to beep softly. He stood up to go to it, leaving Aron alone.

For a long time, she continued to stare down into the Cloud Abyss, enjoying the night. Not procrastinating, but simply existing, for a moment.

“We’ll find out,” she promised to no one in particular. “One way or another.”