When Elias looked through the violet haze of the sphere, the ruins of the observatory vanished. In their place stood a towering structure of glass and steel, bathed in a blinding, natural gold. He saw people laughing, their skin bronzed and healthy. He saw green things—vast, waving oceans of emerald leaves that he had only ever seen in tattered picture books.

In the center of the ruins, a man stood blinking at the brightness. He didn't know who he was or how he had gotten there. He only knew that for the first time in his life, his shadow was sharp, black, and perfectly clear.

He didn't hesitate. He smashed the sphere against the stone floor.

He cleared the dust to reveal a sphere of obsidian. It was cold—impossibly cold—and it felt as though it were pulling the heat from his very fingertips. But as he touched it, the sphere began to pulse. It didn't glow with the amber warmth of the mining crystals. Instead, it emitted a violet, shimmering radiance that seemed to cast "darker" shadows than the surrounding gloom. This was "Dark Light."

Elias was a scavenger, a "Lamp-Lighter" who risked the suffocating outer wastes to find forgotten caches of old-world illumination. One evening, while digging through the ruins of a subterranean observatory, his shovel struck something that didn't feel like stone or lead.

When the dust settled, the sky above the Gray was no longer gray. It was a piercing, infinite blue. The sun, forgotten for centuries, poured down a warmth that felt like a physical weight.

According to the legends of the old world, Dark Light was the inverse of the sun. It didn't reveal the world as it was; it revealed the world as it could be.