And, in the binding age of the Kingpriest, their prisons.
But this was long before Istar, long before the Age of Might.
In the void above the whirling planet, Takhisis and Sargonnas had created the child. Their coupling was joyless, loveless, for already both gods had fallen away from one another into the dark abyss of themselves. In a dark cloud above the swelling Courrain, the goddess had overwhelmed her con shy;sort with a powerful magic, and forced Sargonnas to bear the child.
For a day and a night, the great scavenging god had lingered in the cloud of steam and volcanic ash, the miasma hovering sullenly over the ocean sur shy;face. Takhisis, watchful in her strange motherhood, circled the cloud and waited, as deafening cries of labor and rage burst forth from the eddying dark shy;ness.
For a day and a night and another day, she circled and waited, her hidden consort bellowing and vow shy;ing vengeance.
"Let it come," Takhisis taunted. "Oh, let your worst return to me, Sargonnas. I shall forego the pain and the labor, and when you have fulfilled your part…
"The spirit of the child will be mine alone."
At sunset on the second day, as the ocean waters flamed with the setting sun, the golden egg of the Condor sailed from the cloud.
The third moon. Nuitari the gold.
She remembered it well. How the great Condor, steaming and reeking with volcanic fire, had circled over the golden egg, menacing and boding.
"No, Takhisis!" Sargonnas had challenged, for the first time defying her, setting his contemptible, smoldering form against her will and desire. "I have borne this thing through magic and darkness and searing pain! I shall foster it, and it will be my emis shy;sary in the night sky of Krynn."
She had not expected the rage that rose up and nearly choked her. The eastern sands of the Ansalon coastline, those rocky beaches that would in time become Mithas and Kothas, islands of minotaurs, blackened in the heat of her passing wings as she swooped and circled the despicable rebel, the trai shy;torous god and his bright, golden trophy.
"Nuitari is mine!" she shrieked in reply, and the Worldscap Mountains erupted with the first volca shy;noes. "Mine, do you hear?" Lightning riddled the evening sky, and for the first time the forest crack shy;led, struck by the kindling heat from the heavens. "Or I shall destroy the thing. Shell and godling and all!"
The two gods circled the golden oval, the black batwings of Takhisis whirling in narrowing circles about the matted, smoking feathers of the scavenger, who fanned the ocean air with the stench of carrion.
"You would not destroy the godling," Sargonnas croaked, fire and sunlight brindling over his mottled apterium. "Not when you could master him!"
"You contemptible parasite!" spat the goddess. "You gem-hoarding adjunct] You sniveling, emulous,
dunghill fowl\"
Fire raced through the salty air and scattered, and Sargonnas perched atop the sailing golden egg, mantling his wings above the bright treasure.
" 'Would not destroy the godling,' you say?" Takhisis rumbled. "I will show you all my compas shy;sion, Sargonnas. I will show you the abundance of my heart."
Arching in the sky, her black wings shadowing the older moons, Takhisis drew the ocean wind into her lungs and belched forth a column of black fire. For a moment the condor and his glittering prize van shy;ished in the dark blaze, and the heavens fluttered and extinguished. Deprived of sunlight and star, the planet cooled and frosted, and the deepest winter settled on Ansalon, unnatural in the month of Sum shy;mer Run. But slowly, because the goddess was not the only force on Krynn, the stars returned one by one, the first ones rising in the constellation of the Dragon, then the surrounding luminaries and, finally, the planets and the moons.
A dark shape hung in the heavens, its burnt wings still brooding above the egg, above the blackened shell and the seared godling within.
Nuitari was never the same after that. Dark-haired and sickly, suffering a fiery malady in the depths of his lungs and throat, he spoke in hoarse whispers from the first days, from his hatching time.
So Takhisis remembered as she passed over the unsettled sands. Above her the dark moon drifted furtively between the stars, and she looked up approvingly at the twisted path of her son.
Sargonnas had been right.
Why destroy the child you can bend to your will completely?
She thought of the Kingpriest in his high tower, counting the opals that would bring her to the sur shy;face of Krynn.
She glided toward the lights of campfires, and a solitary bird, circling over her cautiously, called softly and sped away.
The same bird shrieked again as it sailed over For-dus, who knelt on the floor of the kanaji.
Exhausted and much the worse for his struggle with the springjaw, his grazed ankle swelling with a trace of the creature's poison, Fordus had struggled to the edge of the Tears of Mishakal. There he found the kanaji, and there he waited for the glyphs amid the strange, chiming music of the wind over the salt crystals, the lights of the camp a mile away glowing on the other side of the Tears.
Fordus closed his eyes. Clutching his ankle, he stared at the windswept sand in the open, circular chamber. For a terrifying moment, he confused it with the springjaw's lair and then remembered where he was. But his ankle had been touched by a plume of the acid that was the clumsy springjaw's other defense.
"Come forth," he muttered finally, teeth clenched.
And then, the new glyphs formed in the eddying sand.
The Tine. The sign for water. Of that he was sure.
Third day of Solinari.
That was more puzzling. But when he gave it voice in the midst of his people, when Stormlight heard the prophecy and interpreted it in the com shy;mon language, his mind would know what his heart now sensed here in the kanaji.
No Wind.
It was a mystery to him, an obscure arrangement of shape and line and half-resemblance. And then, emerging from the pristine, level sand, came a fourth, extraordinary glyph.
Springjaw.
Fordus blinked in confusion. But it had already happened! The funnel, the ground giving way beneath him …
This fiery sting in his ankle and the rising fever.
Slowly he set his thoughts aside-this time with more difficulty, as the pain in his foot and his leg thrust him again and again into the labyrinth of his mind, into doubts and fears that the words would not come, that Stormlight and Larken would not find him, that the gods themselves had turned away.
Instead, he stared at the symbols, closed his eyes. There. He had it. The four glyphs were committed to memory, and then as always, they vanished immedi shy;ately, leaving the floor of the pit clean and unruffled.
Fordus tightened the neck of his robe, his opal col shy;lar hot and constricting. He could not remove the tore. Long ago the glyphs had warned of dire conse shy;quence if he did so. But he was pained and uncom shy;fortable. His fever made the desert chill almost unbearable.
Fordus tried to stand, and suddenly the kanaji rocked with a red light, throwing him back to his knees. He closed his eyes and saw the acid spurt again, eating relentlessly into the flesh of his booted ankle.
Leaning against the limestone wall, he pulled himself up on his feet again.
Have to get out of here, he thought. Into the light. Into the air.
Get home. Get warm.
Painfully, his skin hurting with every touch of his robe, he crawled out of the pit and rested-for a minute, ten minutes, an hour?-on the baked earth at its rim. Dimly his fevered mind registered the faint music of the salt crystals, and for a while, he slept or tried to sleep.