The Lady shrieked-a shriek that would echo for a century in the Abyss where she hovered on the dark airless currents of chaos. Takhisis furiously snapped her wings and shut her eyes against the vision unfold shy;ing before her.
Where had this warrior come from? How had he escaped her notice?
She had to know. And so, raging, she looked again at the man certain to thwart her plans to enter the world in a shape that was her own and would hold its boundaries amid the physics of Krynn.
He was a tall Plainsman, with unusual sky-blue, no, sea-blue eyes that stared past the flaming walls of her coveted Istar. His face was windburnt and ruddy, with a thick stubble of red beard unusual among his people. He wore a massive golden tore, inlaid with black glain opals, its ends knobbed and twisted at his throat. The opals. So he was protected.
Takhisis guessed him to be about thirty by the faint lines on his handsome, tanned face, by the fine lacing of silver in his auburn hair.
He stood at the gates of a city in flames.
The Kingpriest's Tower burned gloriously, its sov shy;ereign dead, its swarm of clergy defeated and scat shy;tered like pigs . . .
Except for one. One white-robed figure held his hands aloft in exultation. She could not see the lone cleric's face, but for a moment a hot wind billowed back his sleeves and exposed the red oak leaf tattoo on his left wrist.
Druid. They were always there to vex her.
Then the vision wavered, brushed by the dark wings of another god.
Takhisis whirled in the blackness of the Abyss, her enemy a faint glimmer at the edge of sight.
Already too far away to follow, to punish.
Speed of a god.
But now all of them-the druid, the warrior, the Plainsmen army-faded from view as black fire washed over her vision.
Takhisis shook with another angry scream, but con shy;tinued to watch as the Plainsman moved into her sight again, his eyes still cool and distant. Now he walked through the burning portals of Istar, to seize posses shy;sion of all that lay before him. And beyond him.
From the way he moved, the sweep of his massive hand, Takhisis knew this man had never seen a defeat, never cried one tear in the humiliation of surrender.
And then, in the Dark Lady's vision, the shifting blue of those confident eyes turned and fastened on her, and for the first time since the Dragon Wars, since the Great Lance had banished her to this swirling noth shy;ingness, she felt the claws of fear rake her heart.
Locked in his stare as the scene dissolved, Takhisis spun in a slow circle, realizing that if she could not destroy him in time his rebel armies would lift her hard-wrought chains from all of Ansalon. This Plainsman would destroy her long and tedious work with the Kingpriest of Istar: her quiet, narcotic presence in the cleric's dreams, the controlled feed shy;ing of her plans into his sleeping mind.
The Kingpriest was more powerful than Takhisis had imagined. More learned in lore and godcraft than any mortal in the history of this world. He had barred all the gods from the face of Krynn-all of them, from high Paladine to low Hiddukel, from Zeboim of the seas to the three lunar children. They could return only fitfully, briefly-faint flickerings in rock crystal, in spindrift, at the blazing edge of meteors, or in the latticework of ice.
Then, when the light faded, the meteor cooled or the snow melted, their worldly stay was over, and they returned to Concordant Opposition, to the Ethereal Plane.
To Abthalom, the Abyss, where they shrieked and glided and waited to return.
But the Kingpriest was mortal. He could not last for long beneath the weight of his own momentous spellcraft.
To bind a god is exhausting work, Takhisis thought with a chuckle. They would find him, sooner or later, gibbering in his tower.
Then it would rain fire, and the gods would return.
But if Takhisis had her way, they would return to find her already in power. They would find her fully enthroned amid her darkest minions, and even the gods would bow to her magnificence.
Already, through her insinuations, the Kingpriest had banished the magic-users, the elves, all bards, and every unorthodox scholar. Philanthropists and intellectuals had been stripped of power and riches, then sold into slavery to the mob of priests who swarmed through the Kingpriest's Tower, seeking favors, preferment, and bribes.
The Lucanesti elves, or what was left of them, the Kingpriest had imprisoned in the opal mines beneath the city, where they slaved to gather more of the fabled glain amid the rising rubble and dust of thirty years' labor.
Next to the Kingpriest, theirs was the most impor shy;tant service to her. For the black glain opals were the key to the goddess's intricate plot.
She had tried to enter the glain opal once.
The gem was filled with moisture, a stony blood that would nourish and sustain her indefinitely in hostile Krynn. Godsblood, the Lucanesti miners called it. She could only imagine the power, the havoc. She would be loose upon Krynn, were there a way to inhabit the stone …
So in a thunderstorm Takhisis had tried to enter the gem, but the flat black opacity blocked and scat shy;tered her energy and light. Shrieking in pain and anger, spread to the eight corners of the air in an explosion of fragmented light, the goddess regath-ered, tried again.
Was shattered again.
The stone was impermeable, proof against her priest-bound energies.
But if the smooth, flawless stone were broken . . .
The moisture within it would house her a thou shy;sand years.
Godsblood indeed.
That, too, she would put into the hands of the pli shy;able Kingpriest.
Thirty years in the forming had been Takhisis's plans. Three decades as she drew closer and painfully closer to the moment when disastrous, irretrievable events-Cataclysmic events, she thought, with a sinister smile-would rise amaz shy;ingly out of the Kingpriest's droning, everyday pol shy;icy. It had taken that long to push the city, the continent, the very matter of the world to the edge of a precipice lovely and sheer.
Now she was only five years away, six at most, from that moment when some regular rite or cere shy;mony-a few words changed, along with a power shy;ful magic, and most of all, a fostered, vaunting pride-would collapse the city, the government, the empire, and rend asunder the face of Krynn.
It would be a summoning ritual that would seem harmless and ordinary, perhaps even beneficent to all the clergy by then. But in it, the Kingpriest would chant words that, ten years earlier, he would have found blasphemous, abominable.
He would breathe into the dust of a thousand stones, seeking his dream, his shadow. So that her spirit might move freely in the world long denied her, he would shape her a body from the watery glain dust. And she would be home-on the throne of Krynn, as Istar fell and the world was renewed in chaos.
But all of this would fail, be grievously delayed at best, if the rebels prospered. There Would be no compliant Kingpriest if this bearded Plainsman ever saw his campaign through.
Perhaps no Cataclysm.
How could she have missed him!
Her dark wings fanned the liquid void of the Abyss. Light rushed at her suddenly, as great gaps in the fabric of her prison plane opened briefly, tanta-lizingly on the bright world that Huma and the gods had denied her, and mountains, seas, and deserts rolled under her cold eye.
"There is great power in knowledge, great free shy;dom," Takhisis whispered to herself. Her dark heart yet full of fear, she composed her vast mind to call forth the broken pieces of the Plainsman's history, for in his past, she thought, lay her best weapons against this horrifying future.
The black wind congealed and wavered, and Takhisis spread her wings and rested on its thrum shy;ming current. Scanning the past, searching for the key to this mystery, she saw … . Nothing. His past had been erased.
Sargonnas again.
Oh, she knew the power behind such veil and vanishment.