The Twilight:  It is a topic that I will need to revisit several times before I can even begin to do it justice.  I don’t know that I can ever really succeed.  The Twilight of  Nightfall is like nothing the world of Khumkato has ever seen.  It defies all natural law.  It is intangible, overpowering, sinister, and unstoppable.  And I do not impress easily.

The Twilight is some form of perpetual, creeping night that devours all natural light with which it comes into contact.  It seems to be centered on the towers that the starsisters create in the various parts of Nightfall, most strongly around the towers the sisters themselves occupy.  I would try to say that the towers “generate” the Twilight, but how do you create nothingness?  It is as if there is a massive hole pierced through the daylight, revealing the perpetual nighttime of the darkspace beyond.  In the locations where it is “thickest” (I must find a better word for it) it is just as if you were walking through a cold moonless night, staring up through the murky blackness toward strange constellations, even if you know that only a few miles away, it is a completely warm and sunny day.

Traveling into any one of the cities is an unnerving prospect as one passes through the edges of the Twilight into its heart.  The sky seems to “set” as it would during a normal night, no matter what time of day it is.  The idea of “geographical” night takes some work to adjust to.  If one approaches at night, one can pass entirely inside its borders without ever realizing there was a transition.  

The Twilight is at times beautiful and is always mysterious.  There is something comforting in it–at the beginning at least–the feeling of absolute solitude, privacy, and protection.  Therein lies its greatest danger.  The Twilight is also patient.  It corrupts its victims slowly, so slowly that most do not even know that they are changing.  Animals are warped into disfigured shadows of their former selves.  The only plants that seem to thrive are kinds of moss and lichen alien to Khumkato, some of which grow to be the size of large trees and reproduce at an alarming rate.  The people, too, gradually fade from their normal honey brown skin tone to a pale, sickly white.  Left untreated, their bodies become hunched, lean, and used up.  They come to hate the sun and believe it to be deadly to them.  Their diet changes from healthy foods to the mosses and lichens, and some have even been know to resort to cannibalism.

Only regular participation in the rituals of the Cult of the Starsisters seems to affect the transformation, allowing the people living in the Twilight to maintain a semblance of humanity–those who display the most radical devotion to the sisters seem to suffer the least.

I do not  know whether starsisters are the cause of Twilight or if they simply feed off of it.  Perhaps it is both.  They are extending it, however.  As they use up one husk body after another, they push the boundaries of the Twilight farther and farther by ensconcing husks in smaller towers on the borders of their realm.  More than half the continent now lies in the perpetual darkness of Nightfall, while the starsisters exploit the rest to supply food for the large portions of the population (and their thrall armies) that still depend on human food.  This is a slow way to conquer a world, but the Twilight is irresistible, and immortals can afford to be patient.