title: forgotten
fandom: Guardian
words: ~450
contents: spoilers for the whole series, Dixing-focused, thinly-disguised meta

Summary: The night crept in slowly.


The nights grew ever longer. Just a few breaths at first, unnoticed, little more than an error in the King's almanac. Only when the breaths had stretched to sighs did the rumors start... and even then, the people blamed the clocks and not the sky.

Few remembered the war, and for those who did, it was only a shadow that passed across their face from time to time. The Black-Robed Envoy was a name from legend; the Sky Pillar an empty obelisk without even a legend to explain it. The ending of the war was little more than a footnote in a scholar’s text.

The four Hallows, their purpose forgotten, had long since been relegated to an old storeroom that only the janitors came to see. No one noticed as, one by one, they found their way into pockets and pouches and out of the palace. The Brush was loaned to a scribe who died before returning it, and his family never knew. The Awl was stolen by a maid dismissed from service too soon, too angry to leave empty-handed. The Dial shrank and fell from its case, to be gathered with the dust and thrown out into the world.

For decades, only the Lantern remained.

Eventually, even the days dimmed. Slowly, inexorably, the sky smudged as if with clouds, until all the foreign plants blighted and only the native Dixingren crops would bear at all.

The night crept in so slowly that the Regent assumed it was simply the way of things; all things crumble and die some day. He spread stories of the superiority of Dixingren culture, so that even while the light lingered, his people would celebrate the darkness. They had survived in darkness before.

And then the Lantern finally flickered out, and no day dawned.

[The crystals of the Sky Pillar began to glow with a sickly, haunted light. No one was there to see.]

The Hallows have been stolen! the Regent cried from the empty storeroom, hurrying the guards to find the thief even as the broken Lantern lay hidden in his chambers. A quest would give the people something to focus on until they accepted that their world had changed.

Once the guards left, the Regent gave his most trusted lieutenant a secret mission: to take a wooden chest, unopened, to the Lord of the Guardians in Haixing. Surely they would know what to do (and if not, the Regent would never need to explain).

In the darkness, the last of the Hallows passed out of Dixing.

[As the portal opened in Haixing, a lone figure awoke in the field where he fell ten thousand years ago. No one could tell him why.]