The sun, in its slow march toward the evening horizon, was just now reaching behind the tops of the trees. The light pushed long, grasping shadows out towards William, emphasizing the dark words that his father spoke. Even though it was a coincidence that the story had just reached this point, William still saw the twitching finger branches as proof that he wasn’t the only one listening to Gerard’s words.
“It seems incomprehensible that mere creatures like the Old Masters, even as gifted as they were, could create something like the elder evil,” Gerard went on, drawing William out from under the hypnotic grip of the shadowy claws. “But know that no matter how powerful you think the Old Masters were, they were even more so.”
It had happened during one of their experiments that the Old Masters had been able to open our world to the space beyond space. When they looked out into that open vista they were surprised to discover that, like everything in the land, the stars themselves had spirits.
Spirits possess great power. And the stronger the spirit, the more focus that has been put into it, the more power that spirit will possess. And the stars are among the greatest of these. The Old Masters knew a terrible magic that would bind a spirit to their will, and with this power they opened the space beyond space and stole the very spirits from the distant stars.
But hunger begets hunger, and in their desire for more power they turned to the spirit of an ancient star on the verge of falling into death, for even the stars must die. And so it was that at the exact moment of this star’s fall, the Old Masters reached out and bound its spirit with their magic. However, even as a newborn, the elder evil was stronger than the Old Masters had expected, and it tore free from their grasp and plummeted into the space beyond space, tracking the Old Masters trail back towards their world, our world.
But the elder evil stumbled and came to rest in its cradle rather than the land of the Old Masters. It had taken the Old Masters a long time to track the elder evil down, but they finally had, and now they were prepared to use their magic to capture it and to add its terrible power to their own.
