In a time past memory, the goddess Takhisis, Queen of Darkness, laid in the southern end of the valley a foundation stone, rescued from the blasted temple of the Kingpriest of Istar. The foundation stone began to grow, drawing upon the evil in the world to give it life: The stone grew into a temple, vast and awful; a temple of magnificent, hideous darkness.
Takhisis planned to use this temple to return to the world from which she’d been driven by Huma Dragonbane, but her way was blocked by love and self-sacrifice. Nevertheless she had great power, and she launched a war upon the world that came near to destroying it. Her evil commanders, like a pack of wild dogs, fell to fighting among themselves. A band of heroes rose up. Looking into their hearts, they found the power to thwart her, defeat her, and cast her down. Her temple at Neraka was destroyed, blasted apart in her rage at her downfall.
The temple’s walls exploded and rained down from the skies on that terrible day, huge black boulders that crushed the city of Neraka. Cleansing fires destroyed the buildings of the cursed city, burned down its markets and its slave pens, its numerous guard houses, filling its twisted, mazelike streets with ash.
Over fifty years later, no trace of the original city remained.
The splinters of the temple’s bones littered the floor of the southern portion of the valley of Neraka. The ash had long since blown away. Nothing would grow in this part of the valley. All sign of life had long been covered up by the swirling sands.
Only the black boulders, remnants of the temple, remained in the valley. They were an awful sight, and even Talon Leader Magit, gazing upon them for the first time, wondered privately if his decision to ride into this part of the valley had been a smart one. He could have taken the long route around, but that would have added two days to his travel, and he was late as it was, having spent a few extra nights with a new whore who had arrived at his favorite bawdyhouse. He needed to make up time, and he’d chosen as his shortcut this route through the southern end of the valley.
Perhaps due to the force of the explosion, the black rock that had formed the outer walls of the temple had taken on a crystalline structure. Jutting up from the sand, the boulders were not craggy, not lumpy. They were smooth-sided, with sharply defined planes culminating in faceted points. Imagine black quartz crystals jutting up from gray sand, some four times the height of a man. Such a man could see his reflection in those glossy black planes, a reflection that was distorted, twisted, yet completely recognizable as being a reflection of himself.
These men had willingly joined up with the army of the Knights of Takhisis, tempted by the promises of loot and slaves won in battle, by their own delight in killing and bullying, by their hatred of elves or kender or dwarves or anyone different from themselves. These men, long since hardened against every good feeling, looked into the shining black plane of the crystals and were appalled by the faces that looked back. For on those faces they could see their mouths opening to sing the terrible song.
Most looked and shuddered and quickly averted their gaze.
Galdar took care not to look. At first sight of the black crystals rising from the ground, he had lowered his eyes, and he kept them lowered out of reverence and respect. Call it superstition, as Ernst Magit most certainly would. The gods themselves were not m this valley. Galdar knew that to be impossible; the gods had been driven from Krynn more than thirty years ago. But the ghosts of the gods lingered here, of that Galdar was certain.
Ernst Magit looked at his reflection in the rocks, and simply because he shrank from it inwardly, he forced himself to stare at It until he had stared it down.
“I will not be cowed by the sight of my own shadow!” he said with a meaningful glance at Galdar. Magit had only recently thought up this bovine humor. He considered it extremely funny and highly original, and he lost no opportunity to use it. “Cowed. Do you get it, minotaur?” Ernst Magit laughed.
The death song swept up the man’s laughter and gave it melody and tone—dark, off key, discordant, opposing the rhythm of the other voices of the song. The sound was so horrible that Magit was shaken. He coughed, swallowed his laughter, much to the relief of his men.
“You have brought us here, Talon Leader,” said Galdar. “We have seen that this part of the valley is uninhabited, that no force of Solamnics hides here, prepared to sweep down on us. We may proceed toward our objective safe in the knowledge that we have nothing from the land of the living to fear from this direction. Let us now leave this place, and swiftly. Let us turn back and make our report.”
The horses had entered the southern valley with such reluctance that in some cases their riders had been forced to dismount again and cover their eyes and guide them, as if from a burning building. Both man and beast were clearly eager to be gone. The horses edged their way back toward the road by which they’d arrived, their riders sidling along with them.
Ernst Magit wanted to leave this place as much as any of them. It was for precisely that reason that he decided they would stay. He was a coward at heart. He knew he was a coward. All his life, he’d done deeds to prove to himself that he wasn’t. Nothing truly heroic. Magit avoided danger when at all possible, one reason he was riding patrol duty and not joining with the other Knights of Neraka to lay siege to the Solamnic-controlled city of Sanction. He undertook to perform cheap, petty actions and deeds that involved no risk to himself but that would prove to himself and to his men he wasn’t afraid. A deed such as spending the night in this cursed valley.
Magit made a show of squinting up at the sky, which was a pale and unwholesome yellow, a peculiar shade, such as none of the Knights had ever before seen.
“It is now twilight,” he announced sententiously. “I do not want to find myself benighted in the mountains. We will make camp here and ride out in the morning.”
The Knights stared at their commander incredulously, appalled. The wind had ceased to blow. The song no longer sang in their hearts. Silence settled over the valley, a silence that was at first a welcome change but that they were growing to loathe the longer it lasted. The silence weighed on them, oppressed them, mothered them. None spoke. They waited for their commander to tell them he’d been playing a little joke on them.
Talon Leader Magit dismounted his horse. “We will set up camp here. Pitch my command tent near the tallest of those monoliths. Galdar, you’re in charged of setting up camp. I trust you can handle that simple task?”
His words seemed unnaturally loud, his voice shrill and raucous. A breath of air, cold and sharp, hissed through the valley, swept the sand into dust devils that swirled across the barren ground and whispered away.
“You are making a mistake, sir,” said Galdar in a soft undertone, to disturb the silence as little as possible. “We are not wanted here.”
“Who does not want us, Galdar?” Talon Leader Magit sneered. “These rocks?” He slapped the side of a black crystal monolith. “Ha! What a thick-skulled, superstitious cow!” Magit’s voice hardened. “You men. Dismount and begin setting up camp. That is an order.”
Ernst Magit stretched his limbs, making a show of being relaxed. He bent double at the waist, did a few limbering exercises.
The Knights, sullen and unhappy, did as he commanded. They unpacked their saddle rolls, began setting up the small, two-man tents carried by half the patrol. The others unpacked food and water.
The tents were a failure. No amount of hammering could drive the iron spikes into the hard ground. Every blow of the hammer reverberated among the mountains, came back to them amplified a hundred times, until it seemed as if the mountains were hammering on them.
Galdar threw down his mallet, which he had been awkwardly wielding with his remaining hand.