At the door, the Kingpriest turned, looking guiltily back into the rooni He whispered a last incantation, waving his hand over the dead Prophet, and the body of his son, now unprotected, hardened, blanched, and crumbled quickly into sand.
"I could not have done otherwise," he declared, to nothing but theidust and his conscience. "He was found in the salnds of tljie desert,/fhe protective tore I had devised around his neck. Sand and opals were the unsteady ground of his prophecy. Now to sand he returns, but his memory ….
Nor will the world remember, Takhisis replied, min shy;gling the remains of Fordus with the whirlwind that rose and vanished through the chamber window. We will veil it all, y0u and I.
We shall decide what history is. Create it…
Or destroy it.
The Kingpriest reeled, as relief and sorrow and secret ambition warred for mastery in his heart.
Now do my bidding.
"But…" began the Kingpriest, but the last wisp of dust spiraled swiftly out the window, leaving a whisper in its wake.
Prepare for the incantation. The one we planned in the first days.
"But it is too soon . . ." began the Kingpriest, and his protest died in his throat.
Be ruled by me, the window murmured, and the chamber settled into unnatural darkness.
* * * * *
The Prophet was vanquished.
In a chaotic swirl above the Kingpriest's Tower, a faint, reptilian outline coalescing and dissolving in the whirling sand, Takhisis watched and laughed.
Now the Cataclysm was inevitable. Now the world would begin again in chaos; the gods would be readmitted.
And she would await them all.
From her stronghold she could seize them as they tried to enter the plane. Oh, yes, they would all come-good and neutral and evil alike-but her clergy would be there before them, her way estab shy;lished, and the blandishments of their followers would fall on deaf ears.
The age to come would be hers entirely, and last for thousands of years.
All that remained was the Kingpriest's ritual, the binding of her spirit in the glain opals, the gods-blood stones. Then her stay would be permanent.
Never again would she be driven from-Krynn.
How long yet would she wait? A year, perhaps two. The elven miners brought forth an abundance of gems from the dark.
From a dark far deeper than they imagined, Takhi shy;sis thought, and chuckled as her whirlwind moved through the cloudy Istarian sky.
But thoughts of the Lucanesti brought her back to StormlightyThe last of the rebel triad.
She wpmd see to that elf. If only out of thoroughness.
With a shriek, the whirlwind dove into the streets of the city.
* * * * *
The elf reeled and stumbled in the wind. Full of gravel and sand, it encircled him, whirling him about, smothering him in a harsh and stinging flood.
In the heart of the wind, Takhisis swirled and laughed.
Swept along by the bizarre sandstorm, the elf gasped and choked as the salt rushed into his nostrils, down his throat, into his eyes until, blinded, he groped his way across the Tower yards, looking for shelter, for covering, for the lee side to the pummeling wind.
Takhisis laughed again, more harshly as the pitiful creature tried to raise his lucerna against the gritty blast.
His hands clutched stone, mortar. With great effort, he pulled himself against the Tower wall as the wind Shrieked and battered.
Like a fly in a gale he was. Like a straw in a whirl shy;wind.
So fare all who vie with the power of a god.
Takhisis watched contentedly, her low purr rum shy;bling in the air like thunder over Istar as the elf encrusted with sand and stone.
I have vitrified him, she thought. Only a moment more…
Then, from somewhere far below her, imbed shy;ded in the depths of rock and water and earth, arose a murmur, a cry of a thousand voices so deep and remote that only a god's hearing could discern it.
The miners! Takhisis shrieked and hurled hysteri shy;cally against the ancient stone of the tower, sand and salt rattling against the windows. Then with a strange and urgent sighing, she settled on the cobbled streets of Istar, pouring like sand through the cracks of the stones in a sudden and frantic descent to the depths of the earth. The goddess was air and fire, salt and sand and glittering dark light, and as she poured through the crevasses~of the undercity, she forgot her victory, the dead reheL chieftain and his broken, abandoned bard, and the\ elf translated into crusted, dried stone.
* * * * *
Deep in the tunnels beneath the city, Spinel knew that something had changed-that for a moment, and perhaps only for a moment, the chains of the Lucanesti were loosened ever so slightly.
The old elf crouched in the lamplight and whis shy;pered the last of his directions to Tourmalin. The younger elf turned away, and raced with a handful of followers down the deepest incline.
They would leave the mines collapsed in their wake, burying the fabled opals under a hundred foot of rock. It would be decades before anyone-human or elf or even dwarf-could mine them again.
Tourmalin had cleared the rubble of a hundred cave-ins. She knew how the stones fell, how a slip shy;ping shelf of rock, an ill-guided pick, or a miner's spell might collapse the whole spindly arrangement of tunnel and winze and shortwall until the ground above them shuddered as the planet fell in on itself.
Jargoon, younger still, and a band of reckless younglings, would set pick and adze to the new beams supporting five of the six adits to the opal mines.
One lasfentrance would remain, and the Lucanesti would use it, overpower their guards by sheer number.
Then would be the fresh light of moon and stars, and breezes the likes of which Spinel barely remem shy;bered, and the smell of cedar and open water.
With a wakened resolve that bordered on hope, the old elf rose and made for the last of the adits.
Sifting through the layers of shivering stone, a dark sand tumbling through the porous volcanic rock, Takhisis growled and muttered.
The-least likely of saboteurs. A fossil of an elf and his cringing people.
Wluie-her eyes had been elsewhere, her powers diyerted:
The dark salts settled in a lightless chamber, then rose in an eddy of underground-wind, rattling eerily against the porous rock, sifting and stirring through the subterranean blackness.
The opals were lost to her now, the mines caved in and closed to her slaves and minions.
There was enough of the glain dust to bring her into the world. Not in the form and the strength she would like, and perhaps not for the thousand years she had yearned for and craved.
But fifty years. Perhaps a hundred. Enough to punish all those who had foiled her.
It would be enough.
But meanwhile the Lucanesti would pay for the time she would lose. Pay dearly and in kind, with the time they had remaining.
* * * * *
Gasping for air in the collapsing tunnels, Spinel led a handful of the Lucanesti, mainly children, toward a wavering light-the last of the entrances, supported and protected by the young elf Jargoon.
The amber torchlight was soft, almost silky/ through his lowered lucerna, and the children daneed at the edge of his vision, their dark robes flickering like blades of translucent fire.
Somewhere below, Spinel prayed, Tourmalin was guiding the rest of the elves-the most skillful sappers and miners-toward thejsame entrance, the same faint source of light and air. Breathing a last hopeful petition to Branchala, the old elf followed the dodging, visionary light through the winding and crumbling corridors.