In Drow society, men and women alike had heard a certain legend—
When you died, Mother would descend beside you. It would be a silent moment, on a dark and bitterly cold night.
When the halo of the Nabon Time Pillar climbed to its summit and dissolved into orange ripples, the flickering blue and purple lights of the Underdark would quietly vanish, as though extinguished by a breeze.
Then the darkness lurking in the corners would spill through the city's streets, swallowing even the faint glow reflected by the spores above the mushroom fields.
The people who lived in this dark subterranean world called it the [Silent Hour].
As a long-lived race that still remembered its own history, the Drow Elves had regarded it as both the beginning and the end of each day, from the moment they first ventured underground to the present.
But only those with older memories—memories reaching back to life on the surface, the ancestors of the Drow—knew the truth: broadly speaking, the [Silent Hour] did not truly mark the boundary between days.
On the surface, beneath the alternating brilliance of the blazing sun and bright moon, it had another name, one far more familiar to most people.
[6:41 p.m.]
And in the Spider Silk Matron Mother's memories, she had once questioned those numbers:
"They aren't a round number, nor is there any direct connection between them. What meaning did Mother give these numbers that made her designate them as the [Silent Hour]?"
The answer became the first lesson she learned at the Spider Academy: "Precisely because they mean nothing, they can be designated as the [Silent Hour]."
That was how the priestess teaching her at the time had answered.
"Mother has never liked orderly things. If we, her children, didn't need a standard by which