No jailer in history understood their prisoner’s strengths, weaknesses, or abilities better than Emily Jane Pitchiner. She was the only child of Lord Pitchiner, the Golden Age hero who had become the scourge of a thousand galaxies, known as Pitch Black the Nightmare King, and she knew what a valiant and doting father he once was. She knew the tenderness that had once emanated from him. And she knew that in one hand he still held the remains of her childhood portrait in a miniature cameo. Emily Jane clung to the small, desperate hope that he could someday be restored to his former gallant self.

For generations, her father’s Nightmare soldiers had huddled in ragtag groups without their leader, but in time they set about on Nightmare missions that were becoming increasingly more organized and effective. The world seemed to be unraveling, and there was fear in the air. The Nightmare soldiers fed off fear; this made them more daring and powerful. Fear is always a tonic to the wicked. It is dark and stealthy and can travel like no other feeling. Even in his isolation, Pitch could feel this fear.

Pitch’s prison was unlike any that had ever been, and it was in the most unlikely of places: underneath the village of Santoff Claussen. So much of the Guardians’ history originated from this enchanted settlement, and though it had been a place of refuge for magical thinking and innovation, it was by accidental design the perfect place to contain evil.

It had been Ombric Shalazar, when he was a young wizard, who had discovered a strange, parched meteor crater at the edge of the European wildlands. The crater’s surface was coated with the densest metallic ore he had ever seen, and being the last living citizen of Atlantis, he had seen many things no other being since had laid eyes upon.

In the center of this crater grew a tiny sapling. Tempered by the fires of the cosmos, this tree would soon grow into the towering heart of the village Ombric founded, Santoff Claussen. Its branches, trunk, and roots could transform in density and shape at Ombric’s command. Chairs, doors, entire rooms would take shape inside its massive trunk. Ombric called the tree Big Root, and from within this living tree-house, Ombric studied until he was the last of the all-powerful wizards. In time he brought to his town of Santoff Claussen other like-minded men, women, and creatures, and finally, the Guardians themselves. First North and Katherine, who became his pupils. Then Bunnymund, who had knowledge beyond even Ombric’s. And Queen Toothiana, and lastly, Sanderson Mansnoozie.

The creature called Nightlight had been in their company from the very beginning. He was the only one who understood Pitch’s one weakness—that his villainous heart still had a glimmer of humanity—but this knowledge put Nightlight in constant peril. Pitch hated this weakness, but even more, he hated that Nightlight used it again and again to defeat him.

Being encased in a dungeon beneath the birth city of his enemies was for Pitch a humiliation too loathsome to bear. And Big Root lived up to its name admirably. When Pitch was buried beneath the earth of the tree, its deep, sprawling roots braided into an elaborate, inescapable series of buttresses, and walls that fused with the metallic rock left by the meteor. This rock had given the tree its otherworldly power. In the passing centuries Ombric had learned that the meteor was made of what is called “dark matter,” the only element in the universe that Pitch could not breach or break.

And so Pitch lay there in complete isolation. Weakened, silent, weary but waiting.

Nightlight. Jack Frost. Whatever name the boy had. Pitch would soon get his revenge upon him. He had set his plan in motion. It was a plan he had nurtured for decades. And now it was ready to be let loose.