Sargonnas saw them all as he looked up from the bottom of the Abyss, in his eyes the fire of black opals. Saw them all and laughed, his laughter the croaking of scavenging birds.
Below tenebral and Que-Tana and vespertile he waited.
Below Firebrand, and below the depths of the opals.
Below darkness itself, below vision and imagining and somewhere even below belief.
And the tunnels under the Vingaards were known as his Veins.
Let Firebrand gather his stones, the dark god thought. Let there be ten, eleven, twelve, but let there be thirteen finally.
Firebrand is fodder, is kindling. But his one eye is my light upon history.
He is like all mortals, all of them caught in their cravings for power or vengeance, or love or recognition or simple respect or something-anything-to lull the pain of their serious wounds.
It does not matter what they want, for it all amounts to the same thing.
Sargonnas reclined on a swirl of dark air in the center of the Abyss. He laughed again, the smell of ordure and smoke and blood rising from deep within the laughter and mingling smell with sight and sound, until even the things that fluttered about him in the Abyss recoiled mindlessly from the stench and the noise.
Their desires change from day to day, Sargonnas thought, and often grow larger and darker.
Why, now Firebrand imagines that godhood lies in the heart of a simple stone. He even believes there is space in the heavens for his stars.
Sargonnas's laughter faded to a glittering red smile. Firebrand, he concluded, is no more than a spyglass. For years, I have watched the world through his eye, known the history he knows. And indeed, it is valuable. But it is not yet enough.
Out of a whirlpool of blackness, Sargonnas sighed. Three thousand years was a long time, even for a god. Three thousand years, in which the only mortal voices he had heard were those like that of Firebrand- those with the foolhardiness or the greed or the anger to call upon him. There had been a dozen or so, perhaps. A mad mage from Neraka, who fancied himself to be the god Chemosh, wearing the skull mask and the hood that hid his terribly mortal anger that he would have to die.
A traitorous Solamnic Knight, who had slain both his children and still found no harbor for his anger.
A cleric or two, or perhaps even more than that.
Between them, the times were fitful, fragmented.
Sargonnas had forgotten most of the visitants, for they were inconsequential-little men who trusted in nothing until it became unbearable, then trusted in Sargonnas.
Who betrayed them as quickly, as readily as he could, according to their weaknesses. Who reopened the wounds that had brought them to call on him in the first place, and let them watch as the old wound festered and spread and devoured them like fire or acid or vengeance.
Firebrand was the most recent, though not the most distinguished. Nonetheless, if things came to pass as Sargonnas had foreseen and planned, the Namer of the Que-Tana would be the last of the visitants. Any day now the dark gods would return to Krynn.
For along with the self-styled king of the Que-Tana…
There was the worm.
Under the surface of Ansalon the dale worm Tellus slept, dreaming of light and movement and terrible arousal.
Back in the Age of Dreams, when the dark gods fell into the deepest of banishments, the door to the bright world was sealed after them. All of them-Morgion and Hiddukel and Sargonnas and the Dark Queen Takhisis-spun and tumbled in confusion down into the depths of the Abyss, where falling ceased to be falling, because like everything else around them, it, too, had become nothing. They rested on nothing, there in the center of nothing, and they thought long thoughts of exile.
At their banishment, Tellus, who had hovered at the edge of awakening, had trembled once beneath the surface of the world and settled back into a sleep of nearly three millennia.
A sleep that was about to end. And when the dark gods flooded the world, only one of them would know its peoples. Only one would have… a history with him. And to him all worshipers would flock. For the dale worm was power, but the eyes in the crown were knowledge.
Consort of Darkness no longer, he would be Darkness itself.
Sargonnas closed his predator's eye, a rumble of contentment rising from his throat as the ground above him trembled. Slowly he remembered once again his triumph, for exile in the Abyss led even a god to repeat his thoughts.
The device, he thought, was set millennia ago… by Huma himself. How sweet and ingenious! But its intricacy hides a simple magic.
When its time comes, it will rouse the worm. Nothing more than that.
And the worm, awakened, will rush toward the surface beneath which it has slept since the Age of Dreams, tearing open the continent from Palanthas to Port Balifor.
The Cataclysm come again, it will be, and it will be our portal into the world.
Quickly Sargonnas rose in the Abyss like a vulture on a thermal wind, wheeling slowly over a battlefield as a wounded bird for water.
He wheeled over history, circling and remembering. I thank my fortune for that fool the Scorpion, he thought. Just one more visitant who thought-as every visitant thinks-that he could make the gods do his bidding.
When his thoughts first reached in my direction, I returned with them as a small voice in the recesses of his imaginings, as I do, sooner or later, to all of them.
It took me years to convince him that my voice was a part of his thinking.
And when I did, the rest was easy. Again Sargonnas laughed, and the earth trembled in grim accordance.
"What was that?" Gileandos asked nervously, leaping away from the wall as though it were molten metal.
"Perhaps," Bayard replied apprehensively, "it is the promised Rending."
"Well," Gileandos announced, turning quickly and striding back into the shadows, toward the way up and the castle and the light. His footsteps echoed down the corridor and stopped.
Nobody was following.
Instead, the rest of them-Andrew and Robert, Bayard and Enid, Marigold, Raphael, and Brandon-stood in a circle, pondering the creature beside them, the quake above and below and around them.
Whatever the creature was, it was as black and impenetrable as onyx.
"It's like… the thing is as big as the castle," Enid whispered, slipping her arm around Bayard. "Or even the Vingaard River."
At Bayard's other side, Sir Brandon nodded.
"Right you are, m'lady," he said, "and I for one would rather not chance a tangle with it."
"How about… a stroll around it, Brandon?" Bayard asked, his face unreadable, turned away from the torchlight.
Behind them, Gileandos whimpered in the darkness.
Brandon stood there silently for some time. His face, too, was obscured, but from the tilt of his shoulders, you could tell he was reluctant, that Solamnic honor wrestled with good sense in his faculties. Finally he nodded.
"Around it, it is, if you say so, Sir Bayard. Though I find it hard to think of it as a stroll."
He took a tentative step forward into the corridor beyond them.
"Not so quickly, Brandon," Sir Robert protested, chivalrously hoisting Marigold's bag of food to his shoulders, where he tied the cords securely in a knapsack of sorts. "Whatever the creature is beside us, the way in front of us bears closer inspection before you wade blithely into it."
"Sir Robert is right, Brandon," Bayard admitted. "What is more, we shall need your stout back to carry me along. After all, it will just be the two of us from this point on."
After Bayard's words sank in, it was Enid di Caela's turn to protest.
"I know there's something all knightly and manly in this, Bayard Brightblade," she said. "I also know that I'm not supposed to understand. You'll say I don't understand, and you'll leave it at that. But I cannot stand here and let you get yourself killed for a posture."