Viperhand - Douglas Niles [134]
And it pierced that skin, slicing a deep wound into Domin-cus, though the cleric still lived. Hoxitl thrust his bloody hand into the wound, grasping the Bishou's heart as he had taken thousands of hearts before, ready to pull it forth and offer it to the gaping maw of the statue Zaltec.
But this time, when his hand met the Bishou's flesh, the two gods came together with a force that overwhelmed the cleric's mortal powers.
Behind and far, far above Hoxitl, unseen in the rain but heard by them all, the top of Mount Zatal exploded.
From the chronicles of Colon:
At last the gods converge, and in their meeting, they tear the world asunder.
In the temple of Qptal, I feel the powers come together. Zaltec and Helm clash as the cleric of one tears the1 heart from the cleric of the other. Such a sacrifice must forever change the face of the land.
And even Qptal through the harbinger of his couatl, meets Zaltec, as Chitikas gives his life to the Darkfyre. The feathered snake is a meal even hungry Zaltec cannot digest.
Below them all, but rising fast, Lolth seethes now with the passion of her vengeance. She explodes into this world through the Darkfyre, laying her punishment upon her children, the drow.
And the gaming board is swept of its pieces.
EBB AND FLOW
Gultec wandered far from the jungles of Tulom-Itzi, crossing the lands of the Payit, the Kultakans, the Pezelacs. Always he moved toward Nexal.
Sometimes he walked as a man, visiting the peoples he passed among, learning of their fear. In all these lands, he found a deep foreboding, a great and dire anticipation of terrible things to come.
Other times he soared as a bird, or skulked within the mighty jaguar body that still gave him so much pleasure. He found, in his meandering course, several deep, lush valleys where he had thought lay only desert. Much to his surprise, several of these valleys contained ripe meadows of mayz. No one had planted it there, he knew, for this was deepest wilderness. Yet he remembered this abundance of food, enough for many people, as he pressed onward through the wilds of Maztica.
His course steady, his own courage unfailing, he finally reached the shores of Nexal's lakes.
And here he witnessed the source of the True World's terror.
Halloran sensed Erixitl's arms around him, and he clung to her with all the strength of his mindless terror. Around them the world came to pieces. Chaos reigned.
He didn't wonder why they weren't burned to ashes immediately. He saw fire in the form of red, liquid rock, exploding upward and outward in a wave of certain death. But that wave washed around them, and he knew only that Erix was in his arms, that the two of them were together, and it seemed certain they would die that way.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Hal tried to block out the nightmare around them, but he could not. Still he saw glowing crimson liquid splashing, he saw the summit of the huge mountain as it crumbled and collapsed around them. Rain poured into the cavern, creating a hissing inferno of steam, shattering rock and boiling away the instant it reached the ground.
Slowly the horrors around him seemed to fade, and he knew only that he held the woman he loved. He loved her more than he had ever thought he could love, and he desperately wanted to soothe the trembling he could feel in her body.
"Are you… alive?" asked Erix some time later. He wondered at first whether he had dreamed her voice.
"I… don't know," he replied honestly. "I think so, but I don't know how."
"I do," she replied, still dreamily nuzzling her face into the hollow of his neck. "It is the will of Qotal."
Halloran looked around them at the inferno of flame and molten rock and explosive gases. For the first time, he realized that they hadn't remained immobile during the eruption. Instead, they floated with the force of the blast, riding gently in the shelter of the…
What did protect them? He noticed that they watched the