Was he hallucinating?
Uncertainty turned to alarm among the goblins. They pointed and spoke excitedly in their debased tongue. Raidon cocked his head. He couldn't understand their language or why their frightened pointing wasn't at him.
Raidon shifted his stance so he faced the sunrise.
The oddly chill sun was gone. Instead, the horizon was on fire.
Blue fire.
From beyond the horizon's rim, a pillar of azure fire with a fat crown tumbled toward the sky as if intent on piercing heaven's vault itself. The ravening pillar's crown was molten sapphire, and unleashed a fiery catastrophe in its wake.
Raidon gaped with all the rest, his focus lost in the apocalyptic image.
Was it some sort of demonic assault? Or had the monstrosities he hunted-the mind flayers, the aboleths, the beholders, the skinstealers, and all the other deformed and formless hordes-finally combined their efforts to find and ambush him? He fumbled for his amulet, his hands trembling with uncharacteristic haste.
No. It was just as when he'd checked it yesterday. The amulet remained warm to the touch, its image unblemished. Its serenity indicated aberrations were not responsible for the catastrophic skyline. That knowledge offered no comfort in the face of what was the most incredible display of destruction Raidon had ever witnessed.
Raidon let the amulet drop back against his chest, a groan on his lips as he looked to the south. A second fiery pillar clawed up over the jagged edges of the Orsraun Mountains, small in the vast distance. Whatever was happening, more than just the Dragon Coast was caught up in it.
Tanner shuffled sideways, snorting. Some of the goblins dashed toward the edges of the Gulthmere, but most stood rooted, comrades in fear with the caravan guards. All stared in mute incomprehension at the chaos in the east.
A shimmering wall of disrupted air raced over the lip of the horizon and down across the plain toward them. Within that wall, blue flames licked and cavorted. The wall stretched north and south as far as Raidon could see, and reached up too, miles beyond his comprehension.
Wild creatures tried to outrun the advancing wall of fire; bounding jackrabbits, sprinting deer, and a lone wolf stretching its stride in a desperate bid for escape. None could outrace death. The oncoming wall washed over them, burning each to ash.
Bandits and caravaneers alike cried out in a single voice as panic grew. Scrambling, pawing, screaming, they turned west, already running, some falling in their fear, only to be trampled by their companions.
Raidon felt himself reverberate with the mob's panic, but he held himself back, mentally searching for his vaunted focus. If his end was imminent, he didn't want to perish in a moment of failed self-control. He spurred Tanner west. "Run," he murmured into the neighing creature's flicking ear. "Gallop as never before!"
The horse ran. She strained forward, shivering with her effort. She easily overtook the goblins and men fleeing afoot. Next she pulled past the other mounted caravan outriders.
A moment later, the oncoming front enveloped them.
A shrieking gust of air punched Raidon from Tanner's saddle. He saw the horse stumble and go down, but he was already past, spiraling through air-flickering with fiery blue streamers. He twisted his body into the wind, trying to mimic his mid-gallop tumble from the saddle moments earlier.
The bare earth began to steam. The haze hindered Raidon's ability to judge his roll. He fell, out of control. Something hard cracked his left elbow. The snap vibrated through him, and his left arm went as loose as a rag doll's. His training temporarily shielded him from pain, though he already felt signals he couldn't long ignore gathering at the edge of his mind. His roll concluded in a flopping, painful heap. He came to rest in the lee of a larger boulder. The outcrop shielded him from the tornado-like wind.
He blinked into the torrent, trying desperately to comprehend what was occurring all around him. Raidon wondered if he wasn't within the belly of chaos itself. The wind's screech was so loud he was partly deafened. Blood trickled from one of his ears.
A woman lay just beyond the ravine that ran along the road. Raidon recognized her after a moment: the caravan chief. The roadside ravine, like his boulder, offered partial protection from the roaring wind. The woman struggled to rise from where the shock front had tossed her. Blood soaked one side of her face. She saw Raidon behind his boulder and reached.
Then she caught fire and screamed. Blue flame wreathed her in an instant. The eldritch flame burned brightest in her eyes and open mouth. Raidon cried out in sympathy and in fear, but he couldn't hear himself. A nimbus of cobalt flame sprouted from the woman's back as if she unfurled fiery wings, but before Raidon quite understood what he saw, the woman burned away to ash.
Then the pain from his inelegant fall shuddered through him. Tears further clouded his vision, but he recognized the dim shapes of caravan wagons as they tumbled by on each side, blowing and bounding along in twenty-foot hops, spinning and breaking into ever smaller fragments each time they struck the ground. He saw trees too, and horses, men, loose cargo, and goblins, all held in the wind's fierce grip. The boulder he sheltered behind continued to divert the displaced air, but he felt a terrifying force plucking at his garments and exposed skin, as if eager to embrace him once more.
A goblin smacked onto the leading face of Raidon's boulder. Its mouth was open in a soundless scream, for it was aflame like the caravan chief. But the flame wasn't consuming it; instead, the fire seemed to grip the goblin in a form-changing spell, one gone terribly awry.
When the goblin's head came off, Raidon gasped. But when the detached head began to pull itself toward the monk on suddenly elongating, blue-burning hair, Raidon's already tottering mental equilibrium shattered. He bellowed in full-throated alarm. Raidon kicked at the grotesque head. It bit at him, slavering. The tentacle-like hair tried to wind around his leg. But Raidon's kick was true, and the awful, animate body part sailed out into the surge and was gone.
The boulder began to shudder to a new resonance. Raidon squinted. Was it beginning to glow? No, it was losing opacity, and light shone through it. The stone slowly faded from dark, dirty brown to a glasslike consistency. He clutched the boulder desperately. It remained solid, though its new transparency allowed Raidon an unimpeded view directly back toward the shock wave's origin.
The land shuddered and flowed, tossed and lapped, as if water, not solid earth. Crystalline spokes sprouted, their tips slowly revolving as they pushed ever higher until a madman's lattice squatted on the horizon. Even as Raidon's mind tried to grasp the structure's skewed, unsound geometry, the lattice began to evaporate.
Then his boulder sloughed away. The half-elf dived toward the ravine, but a passing streamer of blue fire caught him squarely through his chest, like an arrow fired from a divine bow.
Time's passage slowed to a trickle. Raidon's momentum drained away, and he hung suspended by nothing save fiery pain. Something tugged at his neck. His amulet fell up and away into the sky as the links of its chain flamed blue and melted.
He strained, body and mind, reaching for the glinting stone. He couldn't afford to lose it! It was more than the Symbol of the Cerulean Sign; it was the only tangible effect left to him by his mother. His finger tips brushed its fleeing edge. The normally cerulean blue surrounding the white tree changed, as if infected with the blue fire.
"No!" he yelled into the timeless moment. He saw the amulet, like its chain, begin to flare. A moment later, it dissolved as it fell upward.
Left behind was an image of the symbol surrounded by a roil of insubstantial glyphs. He continued to reach anyway, straining against the temporal pause. If he could just touch the lingering glow of retreating energy, perhaps…
As if responding to his desire, the remnant flared. Its upward trajectory slowed, then reversed. The disembodied symbol slashed back down, striking Raidon's chest. Fire burned through his new coat and consumed it in an instant. The symbol's cerulean blue now fully matched the cobalt blue of the surroundin
g calamity-a subtle change, but enormous for what it implied. Not that Raidon was permitted any more time to think. The insubstantial symbol seared into his body, his mind, and his very soul.
Ali faded to blue, then to nothing.
CHAPTER TWO
Ten Years After the Spellplague The Year of Silent Death (1395 DR) The Depths of the Sea of Fallen Stars
The sea coach veered toward the wall, and then sawed away just as abruptly. The gargantuan nautilus shell shuddered and nearly collided with stone. Braided kelp reins strained as the beast pulling the conveyance through the inky water attempted to shake free of its harness.
Nogah was lightly tethered to the sea coach's deck at the open mouth of the nautilus. To the eyes of a surface dweller she seemed bloated, but no more so than any other member of her amphibious race.
Nogah's finely scaled, webbed hands pulled sharply on the reins that stretched down into the murk. Some of the cords were attached to the whisker-like barbels of the beast pulling the sea coach: a catfish the size of a small whale.
With the reins so attached, Nogah could steer the great fish up, down, left, right, or in any combination of directions. Now she pulled back on all the reins at once, sharply enough to inflict pain.
The creature's great flukes ceased their agitated movement. The fish drifted in the center of the vertical vent, waiting for either food or the next tweak on the reins. In the absolute darkness of the water-filled shaft, Nogah could only dimly make out the outline of the great beast, even with her keen, water-adapted sight. They were already far deeper than her kind were ever meant to descend.
The titanic catfish was rapidly becoming a troublesome liability for her expedition. The fish was not happy about being directed to swim so deep, so far past the bottom of the Sea of fallen Stars, straight down a drowned earth vent whose depth was unfathomed.
But the beast would serve. It had to. Failure was not an option for Nogah. If she failed, her status as a senior whip of the Queen of the Depths and Sea Mother would come into question, and the few kuo-toa who still followed her would reject her aberrant teaching and return to the traditional dogma of the majority. Nogah would become a wanderer, declared heretic by the other whips. She would likely be hunted for sport and possibly vengeance. Nogah had her enemies. They worked even now toward her undoing back in the shallow city of Olleth.
With one hand still grasping the reins, she pulled her pincer-staff from its holster and rapped sharply on the nautilus shell behind her tether post. The mammoth shell's winding interior was large enough to hold pockets of air, capable of serving as living space for six additional kuo-toa, though only she and one junior whip inhabited it. The few who retained enough respect to have accompanied Nogah on her journey of discovery remained in Olleth. She had set them to propagandize the expedition, lest her enemies sink her reputation while she was absent.
Curampah, her junior whip, slithered out of the opening, his bulging, silver-black eyes blinking a question. She had sponsored his study and apprenticeship to the Sea Mother's worship, and he owed her direct service, regardless of his opinion of the expedition's worthiness. This close, the tingle of electric affinity all whips shared danced on her scales.
"Curampah, what ails this beast?" she asked, tiny bubbles escaping upward with each word. "It fed according to its usual schedule, yet it continues to balk."
"Daughter of the Sea," he replied, using the honorific due her, "if I may, you have urged it downward past its span of strength. It grows weary. Even with the protective prayers enclosing us, some hint of the growing pressure beyond leaks inward. Can't you feel it, Nogah? I can, and it wearies me. My dreams are troubled."
Nogah allowed her translucent, inner lids to half close, blurring Curampah's image. It was her conscious look of calculation, useful for cowing subordinates. It made them wonder if she would respond civilly or curse them to a literal, painful death.
The junior whip trod precariously close to disrespect. She knew to what he referred, and to lecture her about it was insolence, should she choose to view it as such. Even with the fortitude provided her by her connection to the Sea Mother, a fortitude that Curampah's fledgling association couldn't hope to match, she sensed the unrelenting grip of the sea. Beyond her magical barrier, it obstinately tried to crush them- catfish, nautilus shell, and scales-in one final spasm.
But she would not sing poison into his blood or cause his heart to explode, which he also knew. She had too few resources to throw away subordinates without greater cause than simply reminding her of unpleasant truths.
Under such conditions, any other senior kuo-toa whip would turn back or find another way downward.
But her tenacity was born of divine decree, or so she chose to believe.
True, no direct communication had occurred between her and the Sea Mother or any of the Sea Mother's exarchs… but what of her dreams? She knew the Sea Mother wanted something of her, something the divine being was somehow unable to articulate directly.
A frightening thought! If something prevented the Sea Mother's clear communication, it must be a dire threat indeed! At least, so Nogah interpreted the signs. Others, untroubled by dreams, declared Nogah unstable.
Despite the risk of being outcast, she persisted in her claims, describing how her visions revealed a taint welling up from a near-bottomless trench, a hole in the earth where none had been before.
And hadn't she been vindicated with the discovery of a newborn vent's existence? And how else could she have predicted its location in the dim, uncharted depths?
Despite her successful predictions, or perhaps because of them, Nogah remained alone in her conviction that the Sea Mother had revealed the cavity for a reason. She was convinced the newly opened vent must be plumbed, and no argument could sway her. The other whips of the Sea Mother told her the cavity was just one more altered feature of the landscape left in the Spellplague's wake a decade earlier. By every estimation, this particular seafloor vent numbered among the least remarkable of the changes wrought by the Weave's collapse. When compared to whole kingdoms erased, continents rearranged, plaguechanged monstrosities, floating motes of water and land, renewed contact with Abeir, and the real threat that the Sea of Fallen Stars would drain completely into the Underdark… yes, this particular vent seemed a minor issue. The kuo-toa were more concerned that even the celestial and infernal realms themselves still fluctuated. The Spellplague had chewed through earth, stone, magic, and planar boundaries as readily as through fallible flesh. Empty, drowned crevices that apparently led nowhere were judged a waste of attention.
Thus, the senior whips decreed Nogah's plan would divert resources that could be better used elsewhere. Threats to the people were always gathering. The Weave's failure, combined with the ongoing realignment of the celestial dominions, put even the Sea Mother at risk!
Nogah growled. As if her current task were not meant to stem just such a threat! Hadn't the Sea Mother directed her on this venture through her strange silences, as if urging Nogah to investigate the mystery? The other whips were blind. Always decisive, Nogah committed to the exploratory dive despite the consensus building against her, and before that consensus solidified into official directive. She used up the last of her favors to gain the use of this fabulous sea coach, its harnessed beast, and a leave from her duties in the city of Olleth.
Now here she was, miles below the seafloor in the vent she'd first glimpsed in dreams. The strange flavor of the water all around her seemed to promise grim consequences to those who failed to heed its warning. The odd scent seemed to go hand in fin with the interference that made communion with the Sea Mother difficult. Nogah took it as further evidence the Sea Mother wanted her here, to investigate that which lay at the shaft's nadir.
Nogah's translucent, third eyelids snapped open. She decreed, "No, we shall push on. Time grows short. The… taint? The… hindrance grows stronger each day we fail to discover its source!"
Curampah merely nodded. Perhaps her junior whip did not
share Nogah's sense of urgency. She guessed Curampah preferred the majority opinion in the kuo-toa ruled city of Olleth. Not that what he thought mattered. The beliefs junior whips harbored in their secret hearts were unimportant. Their duty was only to obey. Curampah would do as she commanded.
Nogah twitched the reins, and the great catfish surged straight downward once more, jolting the coach. The immense nautilus shell descended through a sudden rush of silvery bubbles born in the thrashing wake of the fish's wide tail.
Nogah woke to her name voiced in air. Splinters of the dream faded, the same dream she always had, of the Sea Mother beckoning to her from across a vast gulf of sea-fine particulates and rushing water, warning her, warning…
She lay in her creche within the inmost chamber of the spiral nautilus.
A voice, Curampah's, said again, "Nogah, Daughter of the Sea, wake!"
Blinking toward full awareness, but not yet stirring her limbs, she said, "I am awake. I…" She could still hear the groaning water from her dream. The walls of the shell moaned and vibrated, as if being squeezed. Had they struck the vent wall? Nogah mentally checked the status of all the divine rituals she'd applied to the sea coach.
The subsidiary rituals of maintenance and protection lacing the nautilus's shell were intact. The bubble of air trapped within the coiled corridors of the shell was stable and fresh. The magic that maintained the equilibrium between air and water was firm. She mentally expanded her examination of the ritual prayers underlying the sea coach and was relieved to find the enchantments holding the catfish also remained active. The protective prayers warding off crushing pressure seemed intact, but…
"Mother preserve!" The linchpin charm was half unraveled! The groaning noise was precursor to the nautilus shell's collapse.
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