Since the first day the Hel'Saries had stepped foot on this island, Devias had meticulously recorded everything that he came across, be it celebrations, social rituals, histories, conspiracies, races, social norms, magic, the supernatural, the concept of the veil, the agencies that related to it -- everything. All the while keeping his influence on the world as small as possible, which wasn't too hard to do. But in over 2 years he had never encountered anything that had affected him or his cousin in such magnitude as the recent events that had been dubbed as the 'Long Night'.
He had heard retellings of how a handful of people discovered an academy in the woods that housed an entrapped entity that called itself the Veil. These people had decided to release the entity, and the following Samhain, where magic became the most active, the sky began to act unusually. It was stuck on a permanent night, all communications to the outside world ceased and he had heard that the island was trapped in a barrier that made people wrap around to the opposite side if they approached its borders.
To one who has studied the history of the Void Walkers, Devias had his guesses on what was happening as anecdotal stories of ancestral mages mirrored the happenings that, in hindsight, heralded the disappearance of an entire archipelago. However he couldn't deny that these incidents were coincidental at best. Further investigation on the matter using devices to measure certain arcane energies in the island further buried the possibility due to the lack of void-related energies.
As the night dragged on to what would have been the afternoon, his cousin began complaining of unusual aches in her body, and a few minutes later she had collapsed. He took her to the school nurse, where he had cut his palm on a crafting knife Lorencia had in her pocket. His blood was a lot darker than it should have been. Usually he could see the visage of the void through it, but there was nothing. It was as if he was disconnected.
This began to concern him greatly as Lorencia, being a Realm Master, meant that she had a stronger connection to the void than the average Walker, and if his guess was right, if they were disconnected from the void, then Lorencia would have felt the effects much sooner than he would. Was that the reason she had collapsed so suddenly?
Explaining the situation to the nurse, he was told to take her to the hospital, and so he did, using a portal he summoned that felt weaker. There, they tried to put her into stasis, however the Void Walker's nature prevented the spell from working on her, and so Devias had to look for other methods. The first one he tried was to simply attempt to open a portal back to their home dimension, but the portal couldn't form. Something was blocking it from accessing points outside the island. He had tried different spots of the island to come to this conclusion, and all worked fine.
Lorencia came to a few hours later, reportedly feeling light-headed. Her eyes were dim but the liveliness she radiated was as bright as ever. Within a few minutes she was on her feet again. The doctor said that she had to stay in the hospital to be monitored, and upon urging from both him and Devias, Lorencia begrudgingly agreed. While there, they talked about what was happening. The doctor kept them up to date on the situation with the long night, nothing much had been reported.
The next day on the afternoon, the Hel'Saries received an invitation to the park from an unknown sender. Everyone got it. Devias couldn't bring himself to leave his cousin on what could be her deathbed if things continued as it did. Luckily, a student from the academy agreed to keep him informed of what was happening. The summary was worthy of notice.
The 'Veil' which was released from a recently-rediscovered Dark Crystal Academy explained that it had enacted changes to protect the island and the magic it harbors from magical degradation that would have destroyed magic by putting the whole island in a pocket dimension. While this was fascinating, Devias couldn't help but scowl. After all, his cousin was at risk of dying for being disconnected from the void. At the same time, he began to feel feverish. He was feeling the effects of the disconnect now.
It was a sickening ordeal, one that lasted for two more days. Lorencia fell into a coma before that time. Devias had tried to open her Realm with the key she made for him, however he could see that the Realm was shrinking slowly, but steadily. He had hoped that isolated place would slow down the degradation, however it was not enough. When word got out that Lorencia was ill, a number of her friends had come to give her well wishes, and she had always managed to keep her optimism up. It was hard to look at for Devias. He could see the concern in her friends' eyes getting greater and greater until came the time when she just blacked out.
Devias had the luck of not having to fall so quickly. The worse he felt was his body aching and the lightheadedness Lorencia felt on the first day.
On the day that everything went to relative normality, Devias awoke to a shattering sound and a sharp pain on his chest followed by something hot trickling guided by gravity. The pendant on his necklace, which was the key Lorencia made that allowed him to open her Realm at his leisure, had shattered violently, sending shards of crystalline material into his skin.
But the pain was dulled by the sight that met his eyes. In the room was a doctor, a nurse, three of Lorencia's friends who volunteered to help look after her, and then there was Lorencia herself, floating above the hospital bed, trapped in a sphere of black that looked more like a 2-dimensional backdrop that followed a viewer's eyes. Devias could see a very familiar sight on that backdrop. He could see dark purple clouds within the black, drifting lazily along. It was the void. For a moment he looked at his chest, and the same thing could be seen on his blood.
The utterances of unease from the others in the room caused him to look up once more. The sphere was growing and pulsating in an unstable manner. He didn't know what the sphere itself was, but he wouldn't dare risk the lives of the people in the room. When the doctor tried to reach out and touch the sphere, Devias firmly warned him not to.
Perhaps Devias scared Lorencia by the sudden boom of his voice, or whoever was in control of the sphere since as soon as he said it, the sphere began to grow erratically. He urged the others to leave the room as quickly as they could while he himself used his magic to create a void barrier around the room in an attempt to contain the sphere. But it was overpowered. The sphere continued to grow, engulfing parts of the ceiling and the floor of the room. And then suddenly, the sphere collapsed within a blink of an eye. Everything within it disappeared. The walls, ceiling, floor, furniture and equipment that partially intersected the sphere were cleaved neatly and smoothly away. Those that were engulfed simply left no trace.