Under Black Stars is a side story set within the Skyrose Multiverse, taking place over a decade after the end of Inferno. This story is based on the lore and worldbuilding of the Skyrose universe, but does not interact with it, as it is separate from other stories in the main timeline.

More than a decade after an army of demons tried to destroy Earth, Annika lives with her foster father, Jack Hawthorne, who has raised her as his own despite the circumstances that brought them together. For years, they have both searched for answers to an unanswerable question: Where did Annika come from? Jack has taught her many of his mystical secrets, but even he does not know everything.

The two have a long road ahead of them, and some questions are best left unanswered…

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Far from the bounds of the cosmos, in between the stars and deeper down in a place so few can find, there sits a realm cast in eternal gloom. The backdrop of the universe, a rift between all other places. There have been less than a hundred people to ever set foot there, since the birth of this reality. It has gone by many names, the Void, the Shadow Realm, but most know it was the Everdark. It is the abstract, the place where all things in the material world are deigned to elude. There, the cracks and little forgotten places throughout reality tend to vanish, and fall through a distance without measure. Often, these are physical fragments of other worlds, which eventually "smooth out" and diffuse into their new environment, giving way to forests eternally in bloom and oceans without a floor.

But other times, life slips through the cracks.

Across human history and even further, dating back to the earliest times in which there were living things that could reasonably called intelligent, a small fraction of the already small population that finds this place can draw power on it. When something with a soul enters the Everdark, one of two things can happen. Often, the strange energy that constitutes it "denies" their presence. In this case, they slowly lose themselves in a delirious miasma, as their soul erodes and they become a hollow creature of madness. But the rare few who are "welcomed" by the Everdark feel a presence in their soul, taking a small sliver and replacing it with that magnificent darkness. These people, few as they are, have no academic name to classify themselves, but they can learn to bend the shadows as sorcery.

To find such a person is a rare sight indeed, and the Everdark is a fickle thing. There may very well only be one or two of them alive at this very moment, if even that many...