The eagle entered a billowing mass of cloud, diving lazily. The bird’s vast wings caught each gentle updraft, speeding its flight and holding its altitude at the same time. For long minutes, the black and white form slid easily through the encloaking vapor, finally bursting free into the sunny expanse of the southern sky.
Never had Poshtli flown this far south before. The eagle’s body relished the freedom granted by his total mastery of the skies, as hawks, vultures, and lesser eagles-and all other eagles were lesser eagles-dove away from the great bird’s flight.
Yet within that powerful, plumed body, a man’s mind wondered at the changes in the land below. Poshtli saw the new greenery, oases of water surrounded by mayz and berries, where once the brown sands of the House of Tezca ruled supreme.
The sands still existed-indeed, they dominated the landscape-but the precious islands of vitality dotted the True World to the far northern and southern horizons like a series of cosmic footsteps leading away from the devastation that had once been mighty Nexal.
With a human sob, Poshtli remembered his grand city, now reduced to ashes, rubble, and mud. The volcano, Zatal, had finally ceased its convulsions more than a month after its initial eruption. By then, little remained of the once beautiful, vibrantly fertile valley except the wasteland.
And the creatures! Hideous monsters, born in the cataclysmic forces when the god of war claimed his faithful and
made them in his image. Humans branded by the Viperhand, marked as Zaltec’s servants, became beasts the like of which the eagle had never seen before and man’s mind could not have imagined. Never before had these monsters roamed the True World, though Poshtli’s friend Halloran had told him of their existence in other parts of the Realms.
Now they laid claim to all of Nexal. Even more frightening, Poshtli’s aerial observations had showed him that these monsters had formed legions, and now they began to march.
The eagle had soared over the muddy encampments of refugees, many scores of thousands of humans fleeing Nexal, following the verdant islands southward into the desert. The monsters pursued, and the humans fled. Each oasis. with its surrounding food, fed the people for several days, but then, its bounty exhausted, compelled the population to flee farther to the south, away from the press of bestial fangs and talons.
Poshtli observed the struggle from his position of sublime detachment, for he no longer belonged to that earthbound world. Yet he could not totally remove himself, for too long had he been a noble leader of the Nexala.
So now he flew to the south, to see where the path of fertility drew his people. Always his eyes, far keener than any man’s, searched the horizon before him.
And finally he reached the end of his trail.
It appeared as a small mound on the horizon, growing swiftly as the eagle soared closer. It did not lie along the path of greenery, but rather some distance to the east. Soon he recognized it for the shape it was, though how it had come to the desert he could not explain. Higher and higher it towered, seeming to rear upward as he closed.
The structure rose from a flat expanse of barren sand, but around this area the eagle saw other ruins: a low building, partially covered with sand, revealing a few dark, half-obstructed doors and a courtyard consisting of many rows of parallel columns. A smaller pyramid stood nearby, mostly eroded, and he saw square outlines that showed where
other structures had stood.
Over it all loomed the towering pyramid, clean and bright and pristine in its regal beauty As he neared it, Poshtli saw that it was greater than any other such thing in the land, easily reaching twice as high as the now-ruined Great Pyramid in Nexal had stood.
Finally he circled the bright, steep-sided pyramid. Many terraces scored its sides, and steep stairways, of many hundreds of steps, ascended each of the four sides. Bright mosaics marked all of its faces, in colors more brilliant than any he had ever seen before. Sharply outlined, freshly colored, it showed no sign of ruin nor abandonment.
He swooped closer, past the dark, gaping door to the temple consecrated to whichever god the pyramid glorified. Atop the structure itself, the building stood windswept and empty.
It seemed he had found the greatest pyramid in the land, yet it was a temple that still awaited its god.
The Night of Wailing was viewed by the inhabitants of the True World as a monstrous calamity, a disaster visited upon them by vengeful gods. Those humans who had been corrupted by the storm of arcane power-the members of the Cult of the Viperhand, now in the form of ores, ogres, and trolls-cursed and reviled their fate. Those who had survived the violence of that portentous night and had not suffered such a transformation fled in terror, thinking of little more than safety.
How different was the perspective of that night when viewed from the realms of the gods themselves!
Zaltec had grown tremendously, and the power of the convulsion had allowed him to insert his physical presence into the prime plane. This presence manifested itself in the stone statue that now towered over ruined Nexal. His most faithful followers, those who had taken the vow of the Viperhand, he had bound to him forever by transforming their very bodies into creatures of death and war.
Qotal, the, was a powerful deity who had been driven from Maztica by the growth of his brother Zaltec’s power. Serene and aloof, he remained distant from the world of humans, worshiped by some few of them, forgotten or ignored by most. But the Night of Wailing had created a crack in the barrier formed by Zaltec’s faithful. Now Qotal moved toward the world, and people terrified by the specter of Zaltec’s destruction cried and pleaded for his return.
Helm, the god of the legionnaires, had been all but driven from Maztica by the brute power of his foe. Though he had worshipers in Maztica among the legionnaires who survived, no cleric of that vigilant god remained to guide them. So they blundered blindly, while Helm’s power retreated across the sea, to the palaces and temples along the Sword Coast, at the heart of his faith. But the god viewed his withdrawal as a minor setback; someday soon, borne by the hearts and will of his followers, he would return.
Yet a fourth deity, a dark goddess of venomous evil, poured her power into the convulsion. She was Lolth, and her vengeance exploded first toward her servants, the drow elves.
But she did not slay the elves. Instead, she perverted their clean forms into beasts of chaos and corruption and allowed them to live and to suffer. Her vengeance would not end there-she would set her creatures, her driders, free upon the world, where they would wreak further havoc.
To do so, they would need tools. This need brought Lolth’s power once again to the world as she sought the proper materials to make tools for her driders. She probed the dark spaces, the smoldering caverns beneath the surface of the earth, in search of her goal.
Far from Nexal she found that which she needed, in the forms of insects-thousands of small, red ants. Her power entered the nest where the creatures huddled, dismayed by the chaos stirring the world above. The might of Lolth surrounded them and took them in her smoky grip.
The nest area expanded, growing quickly from a small den into a vast subterranean cavern. Rock melted away and dirt flowed like water, until a huge cavern gaped in the earth.
The ants, however, in their thousands, look no notice of the change. For they had grown along with the nest. They stared at each other, their multifaceted eyes glittering in the dim light. They huddled and twitched, all unknowing.
But now, each was more than six feet long.
From the chronicles of Coton:
Now the Waning is past, and I commence the tale of the Reawakening.
I depart Nexal on the Might of Wailing, as do so many others-all, in fact, who would live and remain human. But the force of the convulsion tears me from my people. While the mass of the Nexala flee southward, my own path compels me to the north and east.