Dark silhouette of the clearing

The dark silhouette of the clearing is a being met in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World") at the Clearing of the broken statue. A hummingbird told the Inran guide Fauna that after a mage did something there, a dark human shape appeared and seven people died at once. Asked again, the bird described no hair, eyes or other feature, only a black human shape.¹²

The encounter

The band itself later saw the being: a human silhouette that reflected no light, as though a piece of reality were missing. Fainter shadows rose into the air from where the bodies lay and came towards them; the bodies themselves did not rise. The darkness was not an absence of light or a black hole that drinks light, but a void taken out of existence.³⁴⁵⁶

The band fled, Fauna in horse form carrying the head consul Orpi and one of them taking the head of the dead mage, which came away like dry twigs. The shadows seemed aware of them but did not give chase; one by one they joined the distant silhouette, and with each joining the body it had come from twitched. One who watched the joining was overcome by despair and a tightness of the heart, and the weight on his head lifted only when the shadow turned away.^789101112

Spoiler: What it left behindRevealSpoils: Yeni Dünya #15 · Say what you have read

When the silhouette vanished, a wave spread out and destroyed every living, organic thing nearby, leaving bone-dry barren ground, and the black stones of the statue became clear white stones like salt.¹³¹⁴

Nature

The being is a Voidborn, though the band had not yet learned that name, and the shadow creatures of the clearing were no ordinary shadows.¹⁵¹⁶

Scholars hold that Void beings take up physical space while not truly existing in themselves, that merely looking at one brings pain to the living, and that those who see them feel in their hearts that they do not belong to this world. Voidborn are among the rarest beings scholars struggle to understand; no scholar in the history of Teneris has gathered enough knowledge of them to draw sound conclusions.¹⁷