“I am a god,” Artek said. “And we refuse to go quietly.”
Now one of the soldiers spoke Zal. “We can give you freedom from your affliction—a cure. Cooperate, and let us learn from you. You need not die here with the rest of your people.” A pause. “A god is all-powerful, and you are not.”
“No,” said Artek. “A god is sacrifice.” He staggered to his feet, as he had not been capable in years. He spat one final curse at his enemy: “Sha. Et. Nath.”
You. Are. Dust.
And then he broke the world.
He channeled energy from the Source until, like a dam of kindling before a river, his body disintegrated. The earth trembled and cracked. The seas rose. Fire rained from the sky, poisoning the canyon, mutating its plants and animals, turning the western sands to glass. That first
Gate below Zal Fel spasmed, the great artery of the Source hemorrhaging and bringing forth demons in unprecedented numbers.
The Cataclysm. Not an error born of hubris, but the last gasp of resistance before ruin.
New gods with ancient eyes remade the world in their image, with their strange machines and a city of pale stone. Language, technology, tradition—even hope itself—were all but lost.
With the destruction of Artek’s body, for the first time in fifteen thousand years, Naxal was stranded without a host, unable to leave this world behind. Weakened but not defeated,somewhere deep in the canyon, it waited. Fine tendrils reached across the Scar, touching the minds of anyone sensitive enough, collecting all the despair, sorrow, fear, pain, hunger, sickness—and wrath—of a shattered world. Naxal fed on that for centuries. It called. It burned. It demanded blood.
Some remained who still believed. They lived in hiding, always searching, waiting for the day their prayers would be answered.
They had not prayed for peace.
Reality pitched and whirled around Jacen. Shadows swept past him, caught on cosmic winds, and that chorus of a thousand voices throbbed through his head. They spiraled around an impossibly dense and complex knot at the center of everything. It waseverything, and it was nothing. An infinite void. A demon star, devouring the light.
It was also a door, and it needed only to be opened.
I see.Neri’s voice was so faint, Jacen strained to hear him.They say when I’m with them . . . I’ll see everything. I’ll understand.
Jacen had become suddenly, painfully aware of his own mortality. He needed to get back, escape before the overwhelming presence snapped his sanity like a twig.
He could not use his human tongue, so he spoke in the language of demons. One question. A shout into that omnipotent shadow.
WHAT ARE YOU?
In answer, he received just three words:
WE . . . ARE . . . ALL
And Jacen awoke.
32
PROPHECY
YSIRA
Dinner that evening was served in a dusty, torchlit banquet hall. Neri sat in a place of honor, Ysira at his side.
The denizens of the Shrouded City brought food and drink to share, mingling and laughing together. A pair of Telu women played a flute and drum, accompanied by a Dalish fiddler. Soon enough, people even began to dance. The promise of change sparked the air, a herald of great things to come. To Ysira, it felt as good as her first lungful of fresh air after she’d crawled out of the Firstborn’s mass grave. She wanted to revel in it. But Neri, it seemed, could not.
“You should eat more,” Ysira told him.
He looked up from his plate with an expression just short of alarmed.
Oh.She’d done it again. Speaking to him like a mother. She sounded likehermother.
“I’m fine.” Neri looked back at his food. He picked at the corn, squash, and green chiles as though they were live cockroaches.
