'What…' the woman managed after a time, 'what has been freed?'
Pran Chole shook his head. He studied the central mound again. 'I am not sure, but we shall have to do something about it, sooner or later. I suspect we have plenty of time. The creature must now free itself of its tomb, and that has been thoroughly warded. More, there is the T'ol Ara'd's mantle of stone still clothing the barrow.' After a moment, he added. 'But time we shall have.'
'What do you mean?'
'The Gathering has been called. The Ritual of Tellann awaits us, Bonecaster.'
She spat. 'You are all insane. To choose immortality for the sake of a war — madness. I shall defy the call, Bonecaster.'
He nodded. 'Yet the Ritual shall be done. I have spiritwalked into the future, Kilava. I have seen my withered face of two hundred thousand and more years hence. We shall have our eternal war.'
Bitterness filled Kilava's voice. 'My brother will be pleased.'
'Who is your brother?'
'Onos T'oolan, the First Sword.'
Pran Chole turned at this. 'You are the Defier. You slaughtered your clan — your kin-'
'To break the link and thus achieve freedom, yes. Alas, my eldest brother's skills more than matched mine. Yet now we are both free, though what I celebrate, Onos T'oolan curses.' She wrapped her arms around herself, and Pran Chole saw upon her layers and layers of pain. Hers was a freedom he did not envy. She spoke again. 'This city, then. Who built it.'
'K'Chain Che'Malle.'
'I know the name, but little else of them.'
Pran Chole nodded. 'We shall, I expect, learn.'
II
Continents of Korelri and Jacuruku, in the Time of Dying 119,736 years before Burn's Sleep (three years after the Fall of the Crippled God)
The Fall had shattered a continent. Forests had burned, the firestorms lighting the horizons in every direction, bathing crimson the heaving ash-filled clouds blanketing the sky. The conflagration had seemed unending, world-devouring, weeks into months, and through it all could be heard the screams of a god.
Pain gave birth to rage. Rage, to poison, an infection sparing no-one.
Scattered survivors remained, reduced to savagery, wandering a landscape pocked with huge craters now filled with murky, lifeless water, the sky churning endlessly above them. Kinship had been dismembered, love had proved a burden too costly to carry. They ate what they could, often each other, and scanned the ravaged world around them with rapacious intent.
One figure walked this landscape alone. Wrapped in rotting rags, he was of average height, his features blunt and unprepossessing. There was a dark cast to his face, a heavy inflexibility in his eyes. He walked as if gathering suffering unto himself, unmindful of its vast weight; walked as if incapable of yielding, of denying the gifts of his own spirit.
In the distance, ragged bands eyed the figure as he strode, step by step, across what was left of the continent that would one day be called Korelri. Hunger might have driven them closer, but there were no fools left among the survivors of the Fall, and so they maintained a watchful distance, curiosity dulled by fear. For the man was an ancient god, and he walked among them.
Beyond the suffering he absorbed, K'rul would have willingly embraced their broken souls, yet he had fed — was feeding — on the blood spilled onto this land, and the truth was this: the power born of that would be needed.
In K'rul's wake, men and women killed men, killed women, killed children. Dark slaughter was the river the Elder God rode.
Elder Gods embodied a host of harsh unpleasantries.
The foreign god had been torn apart in his descent to earth. He had come down in pieces, in streaks of flame. His pain was fire, screams and thunder, a voice that had been heard by half the world. Pain, and outrage. And, K'rul reflected, grief. It would be a long time before the foreign god could begin to reclaim the remaining fragments of its life, and so begin to unveil its nature. K'rul feared that day's arrival. From such a shattering could only come madness.
The summoners were dead. Destroyed by what they had called down upon them. There was no point in hating them, no need to conjure up images of what they in truth deserved by way of punishment. They had, after all, been desperate. Desperate enough to part the fabric of chaos, to open a way into an alien, remote realm; to then lure a curious god of that realm closer, ever closer to the trap they had prepared. The summoners sought power.
All to destroy one man.
The Elder God had crossed the ruined continent, had looked upon the still-living flesh of the Fallen God, had seen the unearthly maggots that crawled forth from that rotting, endlessly pulsing meat and broken bone. Had seen what those maggots flowered into. Even now, as he reached the battered shoreline of Jacuruku, the ancient sister continent to Korelri, they wheeled above him on their broad, black wings. Sensing the power within him, they were hungry for its taste.
