Slate is a moon that once orbited Earth but disappeared around 100,000 years ago. It is not known what early humans called it, but it is assumed the name would translate into "black moon" today, since the moon appeared black in the daytime skies. In some ancient hieroglyphics and cave drawings, scenes depicting a sky with two satellites have been discovered--one white (Luna) and one black (Slate).

Slate is an uninhabitable rock with a lava core and an atmosphere of very high temperatures. What little atmosphere there is is composed mostly of methane and nitrogen. There is no biological diversity on Slate. It has a rugged terrain composed primarily of slate rock, ash and dust. A sample of the dust on Slate brought to Earth would smell sulphuric, like gun powder. The skies on Slate burn red from horizon to horizon and are cloudless, although hazy.

When in orbit, Slate’s distance from Earth was nearly half that of Luna, and its circumference is roughly half Luna's. Due to its orbital pattern, only one side of Slate faced Earth. It loomed large in Earth's skies--in appearance it was larger than Luna due to its proximity. By day Slate appeared as a black hole in Earth’s sky, featureless and without even texture. By night it was appeared as little more than a large void where stars should be.

Effects on Earth of Dual Moons
Earth and Luna are sometimes called “Twin Planets,” but Slate was merely a moon. Still, its existence ravaged the surface of Earth. The separation of Pangaea, once thought to have occurred over a span of billions of years, might have only taken a million, with two moons’ gravitational pulls tugging at the Earth’s crust.

The surface of Earth was nothing if not tumultuous in those days: storms of the like we have never seen raged across every degree, every hemisphere. Gigantic tsunamis raged every coast, miles inland, making virtually all coastal areas uninhabitable. The Earth would have rumbled with earthquakes almost constantly, and the grinding of the tectonic plates would have reshaped the Earth's surface almost much more rapidly than anything modern humans are accustomed to. Volcanoes would have erupted frequently, and there would have been a many times more volcanoes then as now. And all of this due to the proximity and power of the tiny black moon.

Magical Properties
Sensibly, no life could exist on Slate, because the building blocks of life do not exist there. But in actuality there is life on Slate, a race of prehistoric creatures which in all practicality appear to be the mythological beasts known as dragons. They are perhaps the very source of the Earthly mythology that concerns them. They are large, ranging from roughly the size of a large mammal and up to the size of some of the larger carnivorous dinosaurs. Most are winged and, impossibly, have the power of flight.

Slate is a battery of sorts, a power cell, in which resides a charge of energy that doesn’t exist naturally on Earth. When in orbit, some of this energy was shared with Earth, and it was through this energy—which is what makes the Wash possible today—that magic was enabled. The dragons’ power of flight is dependent upon this energy, as is their unnatural intelligence and many other seemingly impossible attributes.

It is understood that the dragons of Slate commonly communicate with humans on Earth using telepathy, often in the form of dreams, and utilize those connections to enable nefarious deeds and actions. There is an account of one such person, who, in a dream-like state, spoke at length of dragons and Slate, things this person of no consequence could not possibly have known about. This person told the story of Abit, a young human from time immemorial, who witnessed first-hand the vanquishing of Slate and the demise of dragons on Earth. It should also be noted that this person spoke at times during this interview with an unknown dialect which is speculated to have been that of early humans, a language now lost for a hundred thousand years or more.

From Abit’s account, we understand that there was once a great wizard named Esca the Moor, and that using a spell of unknown origin, this wizard performed what might be the greatest feat in human history: he made an entire moon disappear from existence. Slate vanished without a trace and with no remaining proof of its one-time existence. The skies of Slate, once dominated by the face of Earth, now were only black, seen through a dull crimson smoky haze, with no stars or heavenly objects at all visible. As much as the sight of Earth in the sky disgusted the dragons, its disappearance caused even outrage.

Abit’s account answers many unknowns about the process the Moor used, and also relates the dramatic occurrence itself, in which the moon was drawn inexorably toward the Earth, growing larger and larger in the sky, until he thought that it would collide with Earth and destroy all life. But as great arcs of lightning shot between the two and a deafening (Abit was deaf for the rest of his life after this event), thunderous booming sounded all around them, and the air around him crackled with visible energy which lifted him off the ground, the black moon vanished. Abit would go on to proclaim his belief that, in appearance, the black moon had been drawn into the Earth.

It is believed by the Pallium that that is exactly what happened, that Slate was drawn down and into Earth. We speculate as to Slate’s exact location often, and the majority opinion is that, though in Abit’s account there he lived in a tropical jungle-like area, in present day the location of the event must be at the mouth of the Cave of Dreams, which now resides far to the north near the magnetic North Pole itself. It is entirely possible, with the many millennia which has passed, that the pole has drifted so far as to allow for this. Especially considering the cataclysmic event of that day one hundred thousand years ago, when a moon was wiped from existence.

For humans, the effect of removing Slate was cataclysmic. There were some who had refined their powers so that they lived for many, many years longer than natural life can possibly endure, and these people died rather rapidly once Slate was gone. People had to re-learn how to live. They had to learn to make fire with friction rather than incantations. And the average life span of a human dropped to around forty years.

But there were benefits. Humans began hunting out in the open. They cooked their food rather than eating it raw. They enjoyed sunshine. They no longer had to run exclusively at night and under cover of a canopy of trees. Life, though much shorter, was all the more enjoyable.

For the dragons on Earth, nothing could have been worse than the banishment of Slate. Without magic, dragons no longer could fly or communicate. They could no longer breathe fire. They became little more than dinosaurs themselves, great lizards ripe for killing, for the heart of the dragon—that powerful receptacle of magical energies—could no longer receive its portion of magic. Humans hunted them out and killed them all, crushing to powder what could not be burned, destroying every fragment of their physical existence. Thus, there are no remnants of dragons for science to examine, save those who retreated into the depths of the Earth to escape the vengeful humans, and those dragons may never be found.

The Passageway
Slate’s orbit was slightly elliptical. It never ranged out as far as Luna, but on occasion, at (estimated) 100-year intervals, Slate did pass directly over the Earth’s magnetic North Pole (which, as noted, may not have been in the same place then as it is now). On that occasion, the energies of Slate (the Wash) and the magical energies of the Aurora Borealis intermingled, forming a sort of magical passageway between Earth and Slate. It was through this passageway that dragons traveled to Earth, usually only dragons of the wasp mentality, but occasionally moths as well (moths being better suited for colder climes could rule their own domains with little interference from the vastly more-powerful wasps).

It has been estimated that at one time on Earth there were as many as five thousand dragons. The accumulated power with such a number of singularly powerful beasts would have been, in a word, awesome.

From the archives of the Order of the Pallium