He had only a moment to understand his mistake when his foot plunged directly into the gaping, abdominal mouth.
The mouth began to chew. Pain, the worst he'd ever experienced, exploded up his leg. He nearly cried out.
Raidon jerked savagely, trying to retract his foot. The abdominal maw's tentacle-tongue whipped up around his calf, holding him fast. The white teeth within the cavity mashed and clacked and red fluid bubbled and spilled forth. Was that all his blood?
The ghoul's head snapped forward, its real mouth hardly any less horrid than the one trapping the monk's foot. It struck at Raidon's throat.
The monk's rising uppercut smashed teeth and jolted the creature's head away. Raidon wouldn't be overcome so easily.
The creature savagely jerked on his leg with its clutching tentacle, pulling his leg farther into its abdominal cavity. His foot, calf, knee, and lower thigh… how could it be? His whole lower leg was inside the thing, and the questing tentacle began to wrap around his thigh. More reddish fluid spilled forth in thin, steaming rivulets. How could his foot and calf fit inside the gaunt monster? Had it bitten off his lower leg? Queasiness clawed at Raidon's focus.
Agony poured up his nerves, making his arms quiver and his head ring. Would it hurt so abominably if his leg were already unattached? He desperately hoped the ghoul was bigger on the inside than its shape suggested.
The chill on Raidon's chest intensified. Without quite knowing why, he laid his left palm across the symbol blazoned there. A snap and contact was made. Cerulean energy poured into him. It was the energy his amulet once lent him in the presence of aberrations.
A sky blue gleam shone from his body. It seemed the Cerulean Sign etched on his chest was more than a mere tattoo.
It was alive with the old power of his amulet. His touch awakened it.
The symbol emanated the cleansing light he had once been able to invoke from his destroyed amulet. The Sign embodied the purity of the natural world. It was anathema to aberrations.
The ghoul's eyes widened as its horrible, abdominal tongue retracted. The cavity spat Raidon's leg out with such force that he fell to the ground.
His foot remained attached. "Thank Xiang," muttered Raidon. The thing's second mouth was bigger on the inside than the outside. But strips of skin were absent from his extremity, dissolved away as if by acid, revealing red and oozing muscle.
It was the most serious wound Raidon had ever received. But his mind passed over that particular realization to consider what he'd just invoked, unaided.
He had become his amulet. The energy pouring "into" him issued from him. Raidon grasped his focus, visualizing his mind and body again as lines of flashing energy. The glimmer of blue he had earlier observed blazed cerulean at its heart. At its edges, it burned the wilder, darker blue hue of the Spellplague. Had the firestorm he'd survived… had it infused him with his amulet's power? If so, why was its cerulean color contaminated-
The ghoul-thing smashed into him, bearing him to the ground. Raidon blinked away his untimely retrospection too late. The creature's claws and both mouths tore at his flesh. It panted, "I don't like your taste. Maybe you'll taste better dead."
A thumb to the creature's eye and a knee to its side did little to dislodge the ghoul. A crushing elbow directly to the creature's throat cut short its constant, maddening titter. That blow would have killed a mortal man outright.
The ghoul-thing was undead, and its nerves did not communicate messages of pain. Raidon struggled in its grasp, his breath coming quicker. The monk's deep knowledge of how to attack vital areas, like pressure points, joints, and organs, was almost useless against the walking dead.
He squirmed right, trying get out from under the crushing weight, then shucked left, hoping to fake out the creature. The ghoul's tongue-tentacle held the scrabbling monk fast.
Raidon was pinned on his back. The creature's disgusting, abdominal jaws gave it an unholy advantage, and the pain in his leg was slipping more and more into his consciousness, threatening to cripple his ability to seize the initiative. Even as he inched one hand toward the sign on his chest, the ghoul managed to grab his wrist. It quickly snatched his other wrist too. Its claws bit painfully into his palms.
It tittered, "No, you mustn't touch! Hold still, now, while I nibble the skin from your face."
Raidon's focus faltered. Concentrate! Hold onto your calm, or you are lost, he commanded his wavering discipline. But what chance did he have if he could not reach the symbol?
If I have the power of my amulet, what need have I to touch it to trigger it? Wasn't he always in contact with it, since it was part of him?
He concentrated on the cool point above his heart. The symbol of a dead order. The Cerulean Sign. He imagined himself touching it with a tendril of thought. The Sign was a metaphor, an emblem that served as a door, a door Raidon visualized himself swinging wide, revealing wonders beyond…
The Sign on his chest pulsed. Shafts of cerulean light speared heavenward. Where the light touched the aberration, it howled. Pain was no longer beyond its ability to sense.
The ghoul's abdominal tongue retracted, and it writhed and fell away from Raidon. The light from the Sign faded.
The monk staggered to his feet, shaking and bleeding. Zai zi, he was sorely hurt! If he didn't tend to his raw foot and lower calf soon, he'd lose his leg, then soon enough his life.
The ghoul remained prone, writhing and drooling without regard to its environment. Its senses were overloaded, maybe burned out. He'd seen a similar response many times during his decade of abomination hunting. The Sign's mere manifestation affected weaker aberrations just so. The most powerful aberrations were less affected. Lucky these were not the most potent of their kind…
A flicker of movement brought Raidon's attention up and back. The ghoul-thing's two compatriots had ceased their rivalry. They stared at Raidon and the glowing symbol on his chest with calculating and fearful eyes.
Despite their trepidation, they advanced.
They saw the Sign and obviously recognized its potential to eradicate them, but they could also smell his blood. Raidon supposed that smell pierced their sense of self-preservation. For these ghoul-monstrosities, hunger was a drive purer and fiercer than fear.
They charged.
The monk cried, "Husks of abominable hunger, see the Cerulean Sign!" His chest blazed anew with sky blue light. Shafts of radiance flashed like blades from his body to lance the attackers.
One of the ghouls sidestepped the glow, but the other ran headlong into the brilliance. Its eyes shuttered in pain as the purifying radiance dazzled it. It tripped and fell, mewling.
The second ghoul, oblivious of its "brother's" fate, reached him. A claw slipped past Raidon's shielding forearm, slashing directly across the symbol tattooed on his chest.
The Sign's radiance instantly failed.
Raidon fell back, holding his focus. He released a flurry of fierce kicks to the ghoul's knees even as it clawed and tentacle-lashed him. While the creature couldn't feel physical pain, its body could be broken with sufficient force. Unfortunately, he couldn't kick with his ravaged leg.
Simultaneously, he shuffled left as he dodged, slipped, and blocked the ghoul's assaults. His adversary was too intent on sinking its teeth into Raidon to worry about the terrain. When the ghoul was in position, Raidon feinted, and then pushed. It tripped backward over the ghoul who had nearly bitten off the monk's leg, who was just rising from its dazed fall.
Raidon took advantage of the reprieve to glance down at his chest. A bloody stripe bisected the symbol blazoned there. He closed his eyes and dragged forward his healing visualization yet again. There was no time to deal with his foot-but that was the lesser issue now. He concentrated on his upper body. He saw the partially severed lines of his symbol within the greater model of his own body.
In a manner no different from the method he used to heal other minor hurts, he imagined the severed lines growing closer, bridging the gap, and rediscovering
the connection just severed. Coolness returned to his chest. Not as strongly as before, but enough.
Raidon's eyes opened. His opponents were already on their feet and advancing.
He pulsed with cerulean light once more.
Both creatures screamed when the light touched them. This last radiance proved too much for them. Shrieking and crying, they retreated backward toward the gates of Starmantle.
His reserves were exhausted. He turned his back on a chilling, rain-laden wind from the north. He looked south toward Gulthmere Forest. Black smoke furled into the sky, and he caught a whiff of burning pine. The already blasted forest was burning, again.
Without a word, Raidon hobbled west. He wondered which would be the agent of his death: his wound, pursuing Starmantle ghouls, fire, or freezing rain?
CHAPTER FIVE
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) Olleth, Sea of Fallen Stars
Nogah regarded the Dreamheart with unblinking eyes. She clutched the stone in both webbed hands. A year ago she'd pried it from the earth's nadir. Since then, she'd not allowed a day to go by that didn't include spending time with the orb.
The not-quite-spherical chunk of unfamiliar mineral was her all-encompassing passion. Though unimpressive to the eye, its presence was more than merely physical. It existed on the plane of mind too. There, the Dreamheart was a scintillating font of color, dreams, and possibilities. It was a beacon of power and a literal promise of knowledge and dominance to any kuo-toa with the temerity to take heed and listen.
Nogah listened. Oh, yes.
At first the influence was felt only when she slept. Images capered in time to unearthly sounds, nightmarish but also fascinating. But the stone had learned to reach her waking mind too. More and more lately, phantasms of glory visited her while she was fully conscious. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes eerie in their beauty, the visions always left her dazed. It frustrated Nogah that once the visions faded, she couldn't quite recall their full consequence.
Subconsciously, she retained more. Sometimes she would inadvertently refer, without the least forethought, to ancient events about which she couldn't possibly know anything. Only after the words escaped her throat did she pause in surprise, trying to pin down the origin of her own comment. Swirling images of a churning void and atonal vibrations were all she could consciously access.
Such gaps seemed an easy price to pay for the arcane secrets she slowly teased from the Dreamheart. From these abilities did her own aspirations spring. She imagined Faerыn shaped anew, under kuo-toa sway!
Of course, many of her too timid compatriots did not yet share her goals. They were too used to the old ways and reliance on old allies. Nogah smirked. Despite themselves, she convinced more and more to her way of thinking. They were beginning to accept the better place kuo-toa deserved in the world. In a world where Nogah would be transcendent. But first, she must bring all of Olleth to her side.
The city of Olleth was once a watery realm ruled by spell-savvy morkoth, who called their magocracy the Arcanum of Olleth. These cruel creatures ruled a city built on the labor of slaves. Morkoth slaves included captured individuals of several other aquatic races, including uncivilized locathah and even vicious sahuagin. In their arrogance, the morkoth ambushed a kuo-toa delegation that traveled beneath the Sea of Fallen Stars under a truce vouchsafed by the Sea Mother herself. Half the kuo-toa embassy was slain and eaten, and the survivors were brought to Olleth to serve morkoth masters forevermore.
The Arcanum erred when it failed to purge the surviving whips from their new contingent of kuo-toa slaves. Whips pledged to the Sea Mother make poor slaves, for their resources are only a prayer away. Within a decade, the Arcanum suffered so many, setbacks, uprisings, and disasters, secretly orchestrated by kuo-toa whips both within Olleth and hidden outside the city, that it teetered on the edge of collapse.
Thus most believe that even in the absence of the Spellplague, when one in three morkoth mages dissolved in blue flashes and the remainder lost their grip on slave-taking spells, Olleth would have fallen to kuo-toa anyway. Regardless, in the aftermath of that day, the kuo-toa rose up and claimed the city for themselves.
Surviving morkoth of Olleth were purged, though a few escaped. Other creatures were allowed to remain, slaves still, beholden to new masters. The kuo-toa of Olleth called out to their kin, and so it was that kuo-toa came to the Sea of Fallen Stars in large numbers for the first time. Of the Arcanum, only bitter memories remained, as well as a few morkoth specimens preserved in pickling fluid to remind future kuo-toa generations of their past trials.
Nogah wondered how the old morkoth Arcanum would have reacted if they had found the Dreamheart?
They would have pursued the very stratagem Nogah had chosen, she supposed, and probably more successfully. They would not have had to put up with resistance among their fellows, who feared breaking tradition more than anything else. The Arcanum hadn't been tied to the dogma of a progenitor god like the kuo-toa were.
She blinked away fruitless comparisons and dead memories. The Sea Mother's creed would crumble soon enough, and she would usher in a new age of greatness.
Nogah rose from the lounging pool. She retained her hold on the Dreamheart with both hands. For all her familiarity with the relic, it remained an awkward size.
Rivulets of clear water trailed on the tile behind her as she moved from her quarters to the outermost chamber of her hall.
There, under a great dome, her growing congregation would hear Nogah speak, as they had done for many previous tendays. Today, Nogah thought, I will show them something so extraordinary their souls will be mine forever.
An audience was already gathering in the chamber, some murmuring in anticipation, others looking timid and uncertain. Many she recognized, but as with most days, she saw several new faces too, who'd heard rumors of her sermons. There were even a few sullen locathah. Word of Nogah's creed was spreading. Soon enough, she'd have to find a larger place to conduct these gatherings. She'd already moved three times to accommodate the growing crowds. This spacious hall, half submerged under a mother-of-pearl dome, was located at the very periphery of Olleth.
Nogah's popularity grew despite her excommunication. The disruptions following the Year of Blue Fire were ongoing, and theocratic control over the city was still unsteady. On the other hand, things were much better than they had been a decade earlier, when random outbreaks of spellplague might suddenly ignite and burn away a kuo-toa or mutate him into a monster. Nogah's timing couldn't have been better.
When she began preaching her new creed, the church stripped Nogah of her status as a whip of the Sea Mother. Nogah's ability to utter prayers in the Sea Mother's name failed. They thought her helpless. They moved to strip her of life and limb too. But the Dreamheart trumped their power. Nogah's doctrine proved stronger that day. She had killed two whips with the power of the relic and sent the remaining priest fleeing from her hall.
The Sea Mother's influence was on the wane, while Nogah's strength was bolstered by a power more ancient! Her flukes warmed just to think of it. Her growing power emanated from the Dreamheart, or at least, was channeled by the stone from some strange, grim source.
The corpses of the three additional kuo-toa whips who'd returned later to slay her for blasphemy were proof enough that Nogah's claim of approaching transcendence was no idle boast.
These stories and other similar accounts of Nogah's defiance were galvanizing interest in her sermons. She couldn't have planned it better if she'd tried.
The ex-whip walked out onto a dimly lit dais beneath the humid dome, buffeted by hundreds of kuo-toa voices immersed in excited speculation. Only a few saw her.
"My children," Nogah said to the gathered crowd. They quieted instantly.
"My children, you have come to hear the truth. The truth! After a lifetime of lies, you deserve to know."
Whispers skirted the chamber's periphery. Illumination began to leak away, but around Nogah, the light intensified like approachi
ng dawn.
Nogah continued, "I, like you, also believed the lies. I believed them so much, I entered the service of the Sea Mother. Like many of you, I was willing to sacrifice everything to her, regardless of the cost to myself. It was our way! How could I do otherwise?"
Eager murmurs rippled through the throng, reflecting off the knee-deep, clear water that filled the chamber. It was almost completely dark, even to kuo-toa senses. But Nogah shone like a star come to earth. Their attention was rapt upon her; she could feel their combined gazes like a caress:
Despite the sermons being declared taboo by the hierarchy of Olleth, the curious still found her. After all, what other kuo-toa had ever disregarded the commands of the combined opinion of the Sea Mother's whips with such impunity without being immediately expunged?
But she commanded their attention with more than spectacle; as Nogah spoke, she leached subtle dream magic from the relic she clutched like a talisman, and broadcast it into the receptive mind of every creature present.
"I, like you, accepted my lot. Even as a whip of the Sea Mother, I was below Her notice. To Her, I was as a slug-useful, barely, but worth not one bit of regard. I gave Her my undying attention and service. In return, She gave… what?"
A twitter of angry voices sparked in answer across the darkened audience.
Nogah interrupted, "Nothing! Nothing but more demands, still more commands for sacrifice. I obeyed, for what could I do? What could you do?"
Nogah raised the Dreamheart over her head. The light around her shone twice as bright from the relic. Twisting and twining strands of radiance burst out of the stone to extend up and over the heads of the audience.
"I have an answer for you."
A sound, low and rumbling, began to beat from the relic, like a dead heart shocked and stuttering back to life.
Nogah spoke, "You have a choice. Will you stay shackled to the Sea Mother and Her stagnant servitors, or leave Her behind? A new way beckons, right here, right now! I offer you a new vision to pursue. If you pledge yourself to me, your sacrifices and service will not go unrewarded."
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