Interlude
Elsewhere...
For a thousand years, the Seal held.
Even within the confines of his prison, his thoughts slowed and made sluggish by the magic that held him, he felt it. The Seal, the barrier between the Realm of Shadows and the world of light, was a bright spark in his awareness. It tasted of copper and natron, and prickled along his nerves like the atmosphere before a storm.
For most of those first thousand years, he slept (if one could call it such), suspended in a dream of darkness without end. At indistinct intervals, he was pulled, half-aware, from his uneasy slumber. Each time, the knowledge that something was probing the magic, testing it, rang through his mind like a warning bell. It burned him, this certainty that there were those, on both sides of the Seal, pecking away at the magic. Seeking to breach the barrier.
The probes were tentative at first, barely waking him. Over time, like a trickle of water gradually wearing away at a mighty dam, the testing began to have an effect. Slowly, so slowly that it escaped his notice at first, the Seal weakened.
It took another millennium, but minute cracks formed. New pressures, from within and without, caused them to grow. Eventually, the least of the Realm's denizens found a way to wriggle and squeeze their tendrils through the cracks, extending their influence into the world on the other side of the barrier. They were little more than frail echoes of the Shadows, dependent upon the one who summoned them to anchor them to the light, but their very existence in that other realm damaged the barrier even further.
More time passed. The Seal still held -- barely. Great tremors shook his prison now and then, becoming stronger as his awareness reassembled and the barrier thinned. Webbed with cracks that glowed with a dark anti-light, shining brighter as the magic was torn asunder, the barrier began to fail.
He could feel the press of the Shadows against the Seal now. For four millennia, the Seal had held them, separate from the world of mankind -- and from him. Soon, the Seal would shatter, the dam break --
He shivered in his slumber, within his failing prison. The barrier would fall. The Shadows would be free.
Another piece of the Puzzle locked into place.
And the barrier trembled...