Preface

"And the great lord Aarinael looked upon his disgraced servant, Lazael, and spoke: 'O Fallen One, thou hast damned thyself eternally for thy pride and greed, and neither word spoken nor deed promised shalt make amends. Before thou art cast into the black depths, there to suffer for thy sins forever, what final words wouldst thou impart to justify thee?'
So the cursed angel replied unto his former master, as he lay broken at the foot of that great tower, 'Know that I shall again walk this forsaken earth in your spite, when the sins of man unbalance Urêl's scales with their weight, and my herald shall usher in the dusk. Harken unto me! I shall yet cast down the foolish and immoral gods, yea, even you, O Divine King.'
Thus it was spoken; and Lazael was cast verily into that most horrid place where go all things forsaken and shunned, to be crucified and left in agony, in payment for his misdeeds."
—Excerpt from Lament of the Fallen, by scribe L.R. Dovery, circa 539 T.A.

"I ask you, what have we to fear? For is it not written that our fate shall be ruled by the true blood of the King? Know you not that our dynasty shall span a thousand lifetimes, and its glory will be envied by the stars in the sky?"
—Supplication of Latharas Telthurin, before his execution at the hands of his brother Falzaer, circa 4092 T.A.

When I think back to the very first version of my fantasy setting, I am appalled at its simplicity, the narrowness of its scope and the foolishness of its ideas. However, when it finally came time to write out in concrete form all of the stories that have danced ephemerally in my mind over the past several years, what better tale was there to tell than the one that harked back to those very beginnings?

Herald of the Dusk is the tale of a duality: a struggle between two utterly opposed ideas and forces, one of which had its origins in the other. The two driving forces behind this struggle are the very first beings I devised for my setting: the heavenly, righteous deity of light, Aarinael the Divine King, and his former servant, Lazael the Prince of Heaven and Earth, the Damned One, the Fallen Angel. Lazael is my Lucifer; and yet, his fall came about because of the altruism that he practiced, and in his beginning he had no pride or malice.

At the centre of this duality is Ilantar Telthurin, the Ilien who rose from the dust to rule all of elvenkind. In his rise, he set into motion the ancient enmity of Lazael, and even called it upon himself; and it is because of his actions that Lazael's Herald is released into the world, eventually to unite with his master and bring ruin to every empire, returning all to dust.

For he shall usher in the dusk, before the bleak night descendeth into the hearts of mortalkind; and that darkness hath no end, but is eternal unto death.