Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [7]
How different was the perspective of that night when viewed from the realms of the gods themselves!
Zaltec had grown tremendously, and the power of the convulsion had allowed him to insert his physical presence into the prime plane. This presence manifested itself in the stone statue that now towered over ruined Nexal. His most faithful followers, those who had taken the vow of the Viperhand, he had bound to him forever by transforming their very bodies into creatures of death and war.
Qotal, the, was a powerful deity who had been driven from Maztica by the growth of his brother Zaltec’s power. Serene and aloof, he remained distant from the world of humans, worshiped by some few of them, forgotten or ignored by most. But the Night of Wailing had created a crack in the barrier formed by Zaltec’s faithful. Now Qotal moved toward the world, and people terrified by the specter of Zaltec’s destruction cried and pleaded for his return.
Helm, the god of the legionnaires, had been all but driven from Maztica by the brute power of his foe. Though he had worshipers in Maztica among the legionnaires who survived, no cleric of that vigilant god remained to guide them. So they blundered blindly, while Helm’s power retreated across the sea, to the palaces and temples along the Sword Coast, at the heart of his faith. But the god viewed his withdrawal as a minor setback; someday soon, borne by the hearts and will of his followers, he would return.
Yet a fourth deity, a dark goddess of venomous evil, poured her power into the convulsion. She was Lolth, and her vengeance exploded first toward her servants, the drow elves.
But she did not slay the elves. Instead, she perverted their clean forms into beasts of chaos and corruption and allowed them to live and to suffer. Her vengeance would not end there-she would set her creatures, her driders, free upon the world, where they would wreak further havoc.
To do so, they would need tools. This need brought Lolth’s power once again to the world as she sought the proper materials to make tools for her driders. She probed the dark spaces, the smoldering caverns beneath the surface of the earth, in search of her goal.
Far from Nexal she found that which she needed, in the forms of insects-thousands of small, red ants. Her power entered the nest where the creatures huddled, dismayed by the chaos stirring the world above. The might of Lolth surrounded them and took them in her smoky grip.
The nest area expanded, growing quickly from a small den into a vast subterranean cavern. Rock melted away and
dirt flowed like water, until a huge cavern gaped in the earth.
The ants, however, in their thousands, look no notice of the change. For they had grown along with the nest. They stared at each other, their multifaceted eyes glittering in the dim light. They huddled and twitched, all unknowing.
But now, each was more than six feet long.
From the chronicles of Coton:
Now the Waning is past, and I commence the tale of the Reawakening.
I depart Nexal on the Might of Wailing, as do so many others-all, in fact, who would live and remain human. But the force of the convulsion tears me from my people. While the mass of the Nexala flee southward, my own path compels me to the north and east.
My vow of silence, symbol of my pledge as patriarch of Qotal, entraps me, prevents me from speaking with those I see. At the same time, my white robe protects me. Now that Zaltec has shown himself, through the wracking of the True World, as the monster that he truly is. the worship of Qotal, the Plumed Father, flowers among the people again.
It is beyond the city where I receive the first sign of the Plumed Father’s blessing, in the form of a black, snorting beast.
This is not a beast of the Viperhand, transformed by the gods’ vengeance on this night