“Farewell, Beldyn,” he murmured.
*****
The people of Istar also saw the hammer coming. It was a mountain of burning rock, and their screams were the cries of the damned. Some tried to run; others turned toward the flaming ruins of the Great Temple and fell to their knees; still others pointed and stared as the sky began to rain stone and fire.
Balls of molten rock the size of houses fell onto marketplaces, mansions, gardens, churches. In moments, huge swaths of the city became raging infernos. One smashed the Hammerhall, killing every knight within its walls; another sheared off the top of the broken Tower of High Sorcery, sending its bloody-fingered turrets crashing into the street. Many pelted the Temple, turning the wreckage to slag, then melting the slag down to a hole in the earth.
That was before the full force of the hammer struck, and the entire Lordcity disappeared from the face of the world.
Those who had fled early on, when the quakes first began, saw the burning mountain as it struck, pulverizing the Temple and driving the rest of Istar deep into the ground. Seconds late, came the deathly sound—a noise unlike any heard on Krynn before or since. It was like thunder and screaming and dragons breathing fire, all of these combined, and then a thousand times louder. With the wall of sound came another wall of hot air, powerful enough to flatten trees and blow apart castles. It picked up men and women and hurled them like kernels of grain. A few survived being hurled through the air, and these fell to the earth howling, and clutching at their heads as blood poured from their eyes and ears.
A heartbeat later, a shock wave split the air. Huge chasms ripped through the earth, and entire hills fell into their depths. Beautiful Lake Istar boiled in an instant, becoming a huge geyser that flung burning ships half a mile high. The steam swept over the cities clinging to its shores—Odacera, Kautilya, island-bound Calah, even Chidell—cooking alive anyone it breathed upon. Moments later the cities themselves crumbled from the shock, then burned with the flames that billowed from the Lordcity’s grave. In the space of a minute, the heartland of Istar, and the half-million souls who lived there, became nothing but ash.
But the death and destruction did not end there.
There were fault lines beneath Istar, undiscovered cracks deep beneath the earth, unknown even to the dwarves. For all the ages of Krynn they had lain dormant, but the hammer weakened them, and one by one they opened up. The land—from the northern ocean to the Sea of Shifting Sands, from the Taoli foothills to the easternmost rim of Falthana and Seldjuk—shattered. Great shelves of rock splintered and gave way, tumbling into chasms a thousand feet deep. The sea, no longer held in check by coastline, rushed in to fill the void. Its waters poured over what had once been rich farms and vineyards, lush jungles, harsh deserts. Mist rose in great plumes, that were visible all over Ansalon. Millions died, were crushed, or drowned. By the time the day was done, more than three-fourths of the Holy Empire of Istar lay forever lost beneath the waves.
Even on the realm’s fringes, in those places the sea didn’t claim, destruction still ravaged the land. Thousands more perished as quakes and fires consumed all the many cities—Micah, Yerasa, Pesaro, Tucuri. In Govinna, half the buildings crashed down into the River Edessa, clogging its flow; the rest became a deathtrap of burning timbers and crushed rock. Showers of broken sandstone buried the ruins of Losarcum, finally placing that long-dead city in its grave. Lattakay’s white arches fell, as did the jeweled halls of Karthay.
Nor did the destruction stop at Istar’s borders. The upheavals rippled across the land, leaving nowhere untouched. The empire of Ergoth, also fault-ridden, broke away from the mainland, the Sirrion Sea flowing in as it fractured into jagged islands. In the south, the lands between Kharolis and the isles of Icereach rose up, draining the oceans away to lay bare the sea floor, where whales and sea serpents lay gasping in the silt. The waters receded from the great port of Tarsis, draining its harbor and miring its fabled, white-winged ships in muck. New jagged peaks thrust up amid the Khalkists, and the southern fiefs of Solamnia followed Istar beneath the waves, giving birth to a new, inland sea. Fortresses and towers and crude huts all disappeared. Forests and plains and mountain ranges burned. A pall of smoke, steam, and dust blotted out the sun.
And in Xak Tsaroth…
*****
To his surprise, Cathan felt no fear.
He had faced death before … had, come to think of it, died before … and each time, there had been some kind of terror. Now, though, as he stood on the island and watched the distant smoke rise from Istar, he did not quail or shiver. All he felt was sorrow, at what had been lost. What could have been.
And could be again.
Opening his pouch, he pulled out the Peripas. They made a faint, musical sound as he held them up, and they flashed with light even though the pall hid the sun. There would never be another Istar, but the Disks remained. One day, a true church of the gods must rise again. That was why Paladine had bidden him bring them here. He had no idea how anyone would ever find them in the leavings of the coming disaster, but he knew someone would, some day. His faith told him so.
He heard screams from the city now: men and women and children knowing these were their last moments on Krynn. The better part of an hour had passed since the flash of flame rose beyond the Eastwalls, signaling the strike of the burning hammer. The shock waves still hadn’t come here—for the Lordcity was far away—but it would soon enough. Cathan looked back one last time at Xak Tsaroth, at the beauty that would be lost forever… then, holding the Disks close to his breast, he turned to gaze eastward once more.
The mountains trembled, and broke apart.
The temples shuddered, and fell.
Then the blast struck.
The noise was incredible, even hearing it from so far away. It slammed into Cathan, flattening him back against the headless statue, leaving no other sound but the ringing of absent bells. The statue cracked at the waist, and its upper half tumbled away from him, splashing into the water. He felt a series of terrible crashes and knew Xak Tsaroth was dying—domes collapsing, colonnades cracking, its very walls toppling, crushing those atop and beneath.
He didn’t watch. He didn’t want to see. Instead he kept his eyes on the lake, waiting for the sign, the cue to act. He’d seen it in the vision, just as he’d seen every moment that had happened since he left the Shinarite church this morning. Still, he felt no fear. He raised the Disks, pressing them to his lips.
“Palado, mas pirhtas calsud,” murmured. “Adolas brigim paripud, e me anomud du tas rigo iudjn donbulas. Sifat.”
Paladine, welcome my soul. Forgive the evils I have wrought, and take me to thy kingdom beyond the stars. So be it.
The faults that made the New Sea stretched far to the south. One, a deep underground cleft, ran right under Xak Tsaroth. Now, with a loud crack that nearly knocked Cathan off the spire, the ground buckled. Behind him, a great fissure opened and the dry tumbled in. Buildings spilled down the sides, exploding with blood and debris. A great gout of green dust billowed up.
Deafened by the blast, Cathan kept watching the water; and waiting… waiting …
There.
It started as a rippling on the lake’s surface, but quickly grew into something much greater, a swirling eddy that opened like some fell beast’s maw into a whirlpool. The bed of the lake had broken, and the water was draining out, pouring into the bottomless gulf, smothering those who yet breathed The level of the lake dropped almost instantaneously, laying bare its shores. White-foaming waves crested as the current dragged everything toward the vortex. Cathan stared into the yawning, hungry hole, and nodded to himself. Then he drew back his hand and flung the Peripas in.
The throw was perfect. The Disks glinted once, then disappeared into the mouth of the abyss.
Without knowing he was doing it. Cathan delved into his pouch again. Cold stung his fingers, sending daggers of pain slicing up his arm as he touched Fistandantilus’s spellbook; he almost snatched his
hand away. But instead he tightened his grip and pulled out the tome. This had been in the vision too—for some reason, the god wanted him to obey the Dark One, and hurl the book after the Disks. It was foolish to do so, but he followed the vision anyway, slinging the book away. It spun lazily as it arced up, then dove down into the maw of the depths.
Another great crack, and the palace and the temple of Paladine dropped out of sight. With a groan, the earth closed over it. And now his island was trembling, the stone shifting mushily under his feet like sand. Sheets of rock broke away, sliding into the receding water. Cathan wearily pushed away from the statue, staggering to the island’s edge.
And jumped.
The water was frigid. It spun him around in circles, clogged his lungs and choked him as it dragged him toward its center. He stared into the center of the whirlpool that had taken the Disks, and the book, and now wanted him. The eddies swung him around and around, nearer with every pass. He shut his eyes.
I’m sorry, Blossom, he thought. I won’t be coming home.
Then he was falling… falling… platinum wings rose to meet him, bearing him away.
Epilogue
FOURTHMONTH, 3 A.C.
The tales were right, after all: the water was red. Bron had first heard of it a year ago, in an inn near Solanthus—a rough, crowded alehouse where the beer tasted like piss and someone took a knife in the gut almost every night. There were many taverns like it in Ansalon these days: places where folk could gather and trade stories of the world’s many woes. It had been a skinny, brown-skinned man who’d spoken of the red waters—a man with beads in his beard, marking him as Seldjuki by birth.
“I sailed it myself,” he’d said, taking a grim pull from a mug of something that smelled like lamp oil. “Not through the middle, mind—only madmen go that way, and they don’t come out again. But you don’t have to get out far from shore to see it, plain as the burning mountain. Red as blood… they say that’s what it is, the blood of drowned Istar.”
The others in the tavern had scoffed at him, or glared. More than a few had cursed the Kingpriest, and all of the damned Istarans—then the talk had turned to the gods, and it grew worse. The things men said these days would have gotten them arrested for blasphemy in an eyeblink, just a few years ago. Now, everyone hated the gods, dark and light alike.
Bron had listened to the people’s vituperations, his grip on his tankard tight, but he’d done nothing to stop the grumbling. He was one—the other knights had long since scattered—and they were many, bolstered by drink and anger. He’d learned, in the months after the Cataclysm, not to try to defend Paladine against the masses.
It was the same all over. Men reviled Beldinas as much as they’d once adored him, calling him Fumofiro—Doombringer— instead of his old epithets, but their hatred for the gods was much worse. Where was Paladine now? With cities in ruins, forests burned to ashes, new seas where land had been, and new land where seas had roiled… with all the plague and drought and famine rampant… with brother turning against brother the world over, where were the gods?
There could be only one answer, in the people’s minds. The gods had turned their backs on Krynn.
Bron didn’t believe that, but neither did he say so. He’d discarded his armor long ago, to eliminate all evidence of his former life. He’d seen more than one village where the corpses of priests swung from trees while ravens dug at their eyes. He’d seen churches ransacked and pillaged. He’d come to one town in time to find a band of screaming men and women dragging three bodies through the streets—bodies wearing the white surcoats of the Divine Hammer. He’d watched the mob cheer as they threw the corpses on a raging pyre, to burn as the Hammer itself had once burned evildoers. He’d watched them spit on the flames.
And he’d done nothing to stop them. That was why he was still alive.
There were plenty of tales these days, and while many were true—Bron had seen firsthand that Tarsis was land-locked now—many more rang false. But Bron had heard of the red waters again and again. In Palanthas, now Ansalon’s grandest port, every inn buzzed with talk of it. And so, after lingering in the west for two whole years, Bron had resolved at last to see for himself.
It had been a hard journey, for flesh and spirit alike. The world had become a dangerous place since the Cataclysm. Maps were all but useless; most of the old cities were gone, much of the terrain changed. Folk were suspicious of outsiders, and offered no hospitality. Bandits waited to prey on lone travelers, and goblins and ogres and even worse things had returned to the land. The winter, in particular, had been horrendous: Bron had been forced to hole up in a cave in the Khalkists for nearly four months, before emerging half-starved in the spring, into a homeland he no longer knew—an empire that was dead. He’d passed the bones of Micah—a city of ghosts now, its fabled glass towers nothing more than glittering dust—and found the Tears of Mishakal pounded flat. He’d crossed the Sea of Shifting Sands, now a morass of muck from near-constant rain and hail. And finally, this morning, he’d heard it for the first time: the distant roar of the ocean.
It was a strange sound in a place where farms and vineyards had once stretched for countless leagues, and horror gnawed deeper into his belly the closer he got. When he first saw gulls wheeling overhead, the truth hit him fully for the first time: the land of his birth, the land he’d sworn to protect from evil, was gone forever. The empire, the church, the knighthood—all vanished in one terrible day. He’d stopped, standing very still with his head bowed, and hadn’t moved for more than an hour.
He’d come this far, though, and in the end he’d had to go farther. His heart filled with dread, he’d walked the last mile, climbed a grassy hill… and stopped when it ended, suddenly, in a jagged cliff overlooking the sea.
The water that stretched out before him was the usual gray-blue near the shore, and for a long way out. But the cliff was high, and Bron’s eyes were still sharp with youth. The change in color, a league or so out, was obvious. The water wasn’t rusty, or the ruddy brown of clay, as he’d expected to see; it was bright, ghastly crimson. It was the Blood Sea of Istar.
Looking out upon it, Bron thought of the other tales he’d heard, in Palanthas and elsewhere. The crimson waters were unquiet, the mariners said, heaving and foaming as if stirred by some leviathan below. The skies above were darkened a sickly brown—dust still choked Ansalon’s skies, and there hadn’t been a blue sky in years—and dotted with the seething green-black of stormclouds. The tempest had hung over the Sea ever since the Cataclysm, and beneath it a great maelstrom swirled. No ship could escape the maelstrom, once caught in its pull. Demons danced in the waves, waiting to swallow the souls of those who drowned there.
Bron had seen many things in the last three years. He’d watched Xak Tsaroth collapse into the earth from the safe distance of only a mile away. He’d found whole towns laid waste by disease, bodies lying black in the streets. He’d watched men murder each other for a scrap of food, or for no reason at all. But none of it compared to this. He sank to his knees, buried his face in his hands, and sobbed.
“Paladine,” he wept “Oh, my god, forgive us for what we have done…”
He didn’t sense the three men stealing up behind him… didn’t hear the scuff of their footsteps on the dusty ground … didn’t see the cudgels in their hands. By the time he noticed, it was too late; they swarmed in his tear-blurred vision, already on top of him. He turned, reaching for Ebonbane—the sword was the one thing he’d kept from before the Cataclysm—and started to rise. But they were too close: he’d only half-drawn the blade when the leader, a scraggly youth whose blue eyes were dark with hate, brought his club down on Bron’s wrist.
Bone snapped. Pain bloomed. Bron fell, screaming. He never saw the second man’s face; only the club as it caught him under the chin, driving his teeth through his tongue. Blood flooded his mouth as his head snapped back, then darkness swarmed over his vision. He slumped, stunned, onto his side.
He felt a tug
as one of them took Ebonbane from him, then another stole his purse. Dimly, he saw legs moving, and heard voices that sounded like they were coming from the bottom of a pit. Something wet and sticky hit his face. Spit.
“Bloody god-lover,” snarled one. “You heard him praying, didn’t you, Tarlo?”
A foot struck his side, bringing new pain. “Damn sure I did. Knew he was one o’ them the moment I saw the bastard.”
Bron understood, then, dimly. He’d passed by a small village early this morning—the sort of place where desperate men gathered to protect themselves from other desperate men. These three had followed him, probably hoping to rob him, and he’d been so intent on what lay ahead, he hadn’t noticed them. He cursed himself for not noticing them. He was a trained knight—or had been, anyway—and a gaggle of peasants had gotten the best of him.
“Only a few silvers and coppers,” said a third voice, thick with disgust. Bron guessed it was the boy who’d broken his arm. “What do we do with him now?”
“Toss him over the cliff,” growled the first. “Damned god-lovers don’t deserve any better.”
Rough hands seized his shoulders, shoved him forward. Panic flared in his mind, and he struggled to fight back, but his body refused to respond. The pain paralyzed him, and consciousness was draining away.
“Hold on,” said the one named Tarlo. “Look at this.”
They stopped, and dropped him on the ground again, on his back. His wrist-bones ground together, nearly making him pass out, but he fought through the pain. Bile burned in his throat as he fought to keep his eyes in focus.
They were gathered in a knot. In the middle, a scar-faced balding man—Tarlo—held Ebonbane. “This ain’t no ordinary Scata’s blade, Uvar,” he said.
“It’s a fine weapon,” agreed the leader, a huge Dravinish brute who smelled like ripe cheese. He took it from Tarlo, turned it to catch the dim sunlight “A nobleman’s weapon.”
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