Gradually he noticed discolorations within the lines, smears of gray on black. The blurs became colors; then the colors became shapes. The lines of the symbol pulled away on all sides to become a window onto another place.
Raidon saw a fog-shrouded tower on a small island. Dozens of scaled, fishlike humanoids burst from the water's edge and stormed the tower. Behind them strode two watery crones who chanted obscenities.
The creatures had an aberrant taint. Raidon wasn't sure how he knew that, but he assumed the knowledge was communicated to him by the Sign. Though the creatures were not aberrations themselves, a portion of their spirit was pledged to something abominable.
The fishfolk sought to overpower several defenders who held the tower. The tower denizens included a sea captain in ostentatious dress, accompanied by four humans in ship-scrounged finery; a woman in a body wrap the color of snow; a man with eyes like blood and a cloak so black it seemed more an aura than clothing; a striking young woman as hazy as a dream; and oddly enough, another scaled humanoid touched with the taint of aberration, who stood with the humans instead of its attacking kin.
The young woman with the hazy outline gasped and disappeared before the attackers landed their first blow.
The assault was fierce.
The captain lost his hat in the initial offensive, but his clicking, whirring sword dispensed death each time its damp tip pierced an attacker's scales. Two of the humans in ragged ship's attire fell in the initial blitz.
The cloaked man uttered what seemed more like a plea than a spell. A massive iron crown coalesced upon the head of one of the crones. The prongs atop writhed in metallic agony, and as if stricken mad, the afflicted hag began slaying her own allies. Fishfolk fell dead as her killing eyes raked them.
The woman in white discharged fire and lightning into the invaders' ranks. Her eyes danced, and she yelled with grim jubilation with every enemy she laid low. She destroyed the remaining crone with a blast of fire.
To Raidon's practiced eye, the attackers had woefully underestimated the depth and strength of the tower defenders. The fight was over.
Yet it wasn't over, not really. For Raidon perceived through the Sign-enabled scrying window that the attackers were pawns of something else, something that had not entered the fight. Lines of association ran like fishing lines away into the sea. The fishfolk and sea hags were mere fingers for an entity greater and more terrible. Something perhaps even aberrant or at least something infected with madness most foul.
What was it? He concentrated on the immaterial lines of connection, trying to follow them from the attackers back to their source. He was aware of Cynosure's attention, sharing his conjured view through the Sign. He understood the construct silently aided him, allowing him to use the Sign in such an extraordinary fashion despite his lack of training in its multifarious functions. With the Sign now part of him, he needed to learn to use it consciously and without aid. But for now, he allowed the golem to guide his disembodied travel along the wispy tendrils across the water, flashing west over miles uncounted.
In ten measured heartbeats, the Sign-generated scrying window framed a seamount surrounded by coral protruding from the sea. The small island appeared in the shape of a fat sickle moon from Raidon's aerial vantage. A salt lagoon filled the open central portion of the island, and rounded, jumbled structures sprawled between dry land and soggy marsh.
Even as the monk tried to identify the strange architecture, his viewpoint flashed into the murky depths. The sun's yellow light turned green, and then, as the descent continued, blue. More of the strange, rounded structures he'd noted on top of the island were jumbled around a yawning cave at the seamount's base. Humanoid figures swam among the drowned structures.
"More fishfolk," Raidon murmured.
Cynosure's voice replied, "They are named kuo-toa."
The viewpoint slowed as it approached the dark cave mouth. Disturbed silt hung in the water, making the cave's already dim interior even more difficult to discern.
Inside, something rested back from the opening on the rocky floor, its shape long and cigar-shaped for the most part, though it was thicker at one end. Striatums ran in parallel lines along the thinner portion of the shape, but the bulblike thickening at the other end was smooth.
The silt and lack of reflected light robbed the scene of meaning. Was the shape on the cave floor a natural jumble of drowned rocks? The lines of association the Sign followed terminated with the unmoving, contoured outcrop. The shape itself was not aberrant, but it contained something whose taint was like a bottomless pit.
Suddenly, the great shape shifted.
Raidon's assumptions flipped. He readjusted his sense of scale and nearly lost his focus in surprise. The shape was no jumble of rocks; it was a colossal squid, one of incredible bulk!
Two spots on each side of the bulk opened, revealing shield-sized eyes gleaming with awareness. It knew it was being observed. Its tapered end suddenly separated into a forest of suckered arms: It writhed, and a blanket of silt billowed to obscure all. But not before Raidon saw the true obscenity, clutched firmly in one tentacle.
It was a black stone, roughly the size of a man's head. To his Sign-enhanced sight, it seemed the stone was a vortex of aberration, sucking and drawing down all of the natural world to a nether space where utter abomination lurked.
Pain seared Raidon's temples, and he jerked his eyes wide.
A breeze pushed the grass across the plain in soothing waves of green. Scents of growing things and clean earth were a welcome balm from the vision that still burned in Raidon's memory: whipping tentacles, boring eyes and a relic whose wrongness was so acute, it constantly tore at the world. And for all that, Raidon had the sense, perhaps imparted by the Sign on his chest, that the relic was perhaps only the tip of a much more horrific truth.
"What did we just see?" Raidon asked the air.
"A kraken. A great kraken named Gethshemeth. It holds an artifact somehow tied to Xxiphu itself. The stone it clutched, did you see it?"
"Yes. Who were those people who fought the kraken's puppets?"
"A good question. Something for us to discover, but their identity is not vital to our interests."
Raidon said, "Very well. How is it the kraken came to possess such a relic?"
"I do not know how such an object has been raised to the surface," mused Cynosure. "Perhaps in the earth movements that followed the Spellplague… But that is mere speculation. Regardless of how it happened, a great kraken possesses a sliver of connection to Xxiphu."
"What does a sea squid, intelligent or not, want with such a thing? Power, I suppose, as all creatures seem to desire, as if control over others will somehow bring them greater satisfaction."
"You are likely correct," said Cynosure with a note of appreciation in its voice. "The kraken's mind surpasses even my own cognizance. But with an artifact of Xxiphu under its control, it will learn to channel more and more strength, and become a force not easily withstood. Its reach might swell past all the bounds of reason."
"Cynosure, you need not be coy. You want me to slay it before it attains its peak of power."
"That is advisable."
Raidon nodded, thinking back on the worst creatures he had eradicated in the name of the Sign in the years before the Spellplague. "Illithids are bad enough. Faerыn should not also have to face aberrant-infused kraken."
"You should know that another outcome is also possible, one even worse than an empowered kraken. If we do not take this relic from the kraken soon, the connection it has to Xxiphu will grow broader and more certain. In a short time, the connection could be sufficient to raise the city whole. Then Toril shall really have something over which to weep."