Look to the west, sailor!
Cast your gaze into the rising wind,
over ocean vistas heaving,
over sunset-flashing waves!
Behold Zretaia, metropolis isle,
where volcanoes plunge their wave-sprayed cliffs into the sea,
and towers built on mountaintops reach up to cleave the skies!
Now the shadows of the minarets darken your sight;
the red sun peeks through iron columns like a prisoner.
Zretaia! Secret city where lair a thousand wicked sorcerers!
who pace the towers' crowns, looking down over clouds as vast as continents,
over endless leagues of wave-wracked horizons,
over city peons, insect-small, far beneath their feet,
and brood within themselves, thinking:
Have I not risen higher now
than laws of men can touch?
Are mortals not my playthings now?
For who would dare my wrath?
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THE SUMMONING
The call. A chance! The storm. Tonight! So fleet, the hooves of couriers' steeds, couriers' eyes flashing behind midnight masks. Who will come? they hiss in secret; Who will dare the wizard's keep? To select ears they whisper, We summon thee! To others they rasp, Now's your chance! Still more they coax with tales of rubies and iridescent dragon scales, severed heads with bounties worth a fistful of gold.
Tonight!
But none answer.
The couriers straggle back to Mathras, master of alchemy, by whom they were sent forth. In his twisting cellar of arcane experiments, amid troughs of white-hot acids that hiss with an unholy crackling, Mathras hears their tidings with sudden and ferocious wrath. Veins bulging upon his brow, he charges to the windows that jut steeply from the mountainside, grinds his heel on the sill, and hurls a bolt of sizzling crimson at the sunset sky, blasting the wind-tortured clouds with screaming thunder and a hellish light. "Is there no madman?" He cries, "Is there no grog-brained hero, no gallows-hunted criminal desperate for absolution or death? Have the terrors of Voua Azrain and his Tower become so absolute that not even the bravest will risk his wrath?"
"We spoke to everyone we dared!" declares a courier, the only one who has not fled before the alchemist's rage, shouting to be heard over the hiss and strobe of the cellar. "Should we have bellowed where we whispered? Surely then Voua Azrain would have caught some rumor of our plan!"
"Not tonight!" Mathras roars. "Tonight all his will is bent upon the working of a colossal spell. Send out your riders once again! Sound trumpets, brandish sword and spear! Shout from the gardens upon the rooftops, from the highest bridges among the towers! Strike chains from any slave who will come! Absolve any outlaw! Arm any youth! Now go!"
"Tonight!" from raw throats is screamed a declaration of war for all in that precipitous city to hear: the Tower of Voua Azrain is to be robbed! His notorious apprentice—Ulto—is to be brought to justice! The terror of that mountain-citadel, second greatest in all Zretaia, is to be defied!