Earth-shaking emanations from the Underworld spread throughout the Cyclopean Bones, but the tremors were felt for many miles beyond the boundaries of the great mountains.

To the north the Cyclopean Bones sank down into the lush blanket of dense jungle that was the Bloodsucking Forest, stretching on for many more miles before it gave way to the clear grassland and more modest woodland of the fractious human and demi-human nations.

There the people of Bellwood felt the ground move underfoot and felt the pressure of an unseen force moving over them. For once the superstitious and learned were in agreement; lay folk proclaimed it an omen of disaster, while learned mages and skilled adventurers sensed the powerful wave of magic to come with the shudder of the land, and drew their own troubled conclusions about what menacing power could cause such a phenomenon.

~~~

To the east of the Cyclopean Bones the peaks stretched out into the ocean, their slopes forming the Rootflood, a broken coastline of deep branching inlets many miles long, with steep valleys for sides. The land and sea were regularly swept by rainstorms and dried by intense sun.

Here too the Harpy Empire held sway, but those who flew the saline skies of the East were strange, as at home in the water as on the wind, with their own customs and traditions. Even their beliefs were odd – they revered Nemoi, the mother to all Harpies, but it was Thalassa to whom they prayed most fervently, for she provided them the riches of the ocean.

Fishers they named themselves, contrasted with the mounters, as they called those of their people who made their roosts in the high mountain peaks. To them the mounters seemed just as strange, just as distant. The Rootflood was a far reach from the capital on Skycrown, and news came slowly if at all.

Yet not so the report of the great event beneath the mountains, for no wings were needed to convey it.

Those out for mid-day fishing in the hot sun were astonished as the mountains shuddered and the sea bubbled and foamed. In the great harbor of The Weal fish leapt from the water and birds joined the fishers in collecting the easy catch.

The strange sight grew sinister as the final shockwave flashed out, an ominous front of supernatural force which swept over all present and out across the ocean.

Many were left wondering what news could come, in time, of the surreal event. It was in a way reminiscent of the arrival of the Stormqueen’s consort some weeks past, but on an entirely different scale.

~~

The southern reaches of the Cyclopean bones were dryer than the North or East, yet grew ever hotter as one descended from the taller peaks of Southtown into sun-baked rocky mountains, denuded of greenery.

These in turn gave way to scorched, rocky foothills, where few plants clung to life.

Finally these flattened into the shining golden sands of the Thabian Desert.

For countless leagues thorny glass grains coated the land, emerging in great plumes from the Desert Mothers which lay in the heartlands of the sand sea. The Mothers were giant sand geysers, ever producing a steady supply of new, lethally sharp silica, enough that it was thought that the desert would one day swallow up everything south of the mountains.

The Thabian Desert was strange place then, to find Eapra, the City of Waterfalls.

Paradoxical as the name and location might seen, none who saw the city could doubt the appropriacy – if they could reach it, at the centre of the great dunes.

Visitors must cross the searing, piercing sand that surrounded Eapra for many miles in all directions, braving that monstrous wildlife which could eke out a living in the barren, brutal heat and painful desiccation. If they survived the trip, weathering the sandstorms and eluding the beasts, they would find temporary shelter in the narrow, winding canyons which warded the city against the worst of the desert.

Yet there too they faced a trial, for the canyons were a shifting maze, hunted by cunning predators which cleared or choked shut passages with drifts of sand, trapping even the experienced traveler.

Even negotiating that labyrinth of stone would not suffice however – a traveler must at last win admittance from the stern guards, given orders to drive off any unknown to them. Those who did so would be ushered through the blinding white walls into the city proper, and into another world.

Water flowed from every whitewashed surface, bubbling between rooftops in miniature aquaducts and cascading down the sides in sheets as if to enclose each structure in a protective veil of liquid, cooling the air to a soothing degree. In places it collected in pools, ponds and all manner of waterwheels and fonts, fountains and other decorations beautifying even the simplest homes.

Most structures were a single level only, but at the city’s heart rose from taller buildings, of two or three floors, around a central tower that rose a full five. It was from this palatial tiered structure that the waters emerged, a glorious wellspring that spread out from the centre to every corner of the city.

Those central waterfalls were magnificent, throwing up a dazzling rainbow spray of glittering droplets that dried in seconds in the sun. Often people stopped to admire the beauty and cool themselves by bathing in the pools, or simply lounged in sunny open plazas and atop the flat rooftops nearby and enjoyed conversation – for the falls were near silent despite their great size.

At the base of each structure, large or small, the flow irrigated planters teeming with life. It would then journey on through channels sunk into the flagstones, gathering into streams that ran down the centre of each street. Small bridges crisscrossed these waters, which in time drained on down into underground sewers.

A visitor overcoming the shock of the City of Waterfalls would be stunned a second time by the lush greenery exploding from every surface. Leaves of a thousand species of plant decorated the buildings, growing from planters built into the sides, ringing the windows, suspended in baskets and crawling up the walls themselves, every structure adorned with a beautiful variety of life.

Birds and insects flocked to beautiful flowers and furred quadrupeds dozed in the shade of the leaves. Smaller species frolicked in the tangles of fruiting vines which climbed the walls and fought over the choicest produce.

After seeing such wonders deep within the desert, a traveler might quite forget to behold the people responsible. That would be a mistake, for the people of Eapra were as remarkable as the city they had created.

A typical Eapran native stood five feet tall, a digitigrade humanoid with a thick coating of fluffy white and brown fur, with vibrant green patches most concentrated on the shoulders and limbs. This fur puffed out into fluffy tails and bulged at the tops of their heads like human hair, but there any similarity to other demi-human species ended.

The green patches of fur grew longer, soft but thick, forming tiny blades like grass. The longest of these blossomed into dazzling lines and waves of flowers, petals moving, opening and closing with their emotions, the colors and shapes unique to each lineage.

Their dense covering of fur and flora left only minimal need for actual clothing, usually only to lightly cover parts of their torsos and upper legs. The form of this clothing was quite unusual for a desert species – they adorned themselves in green, vital leaves, wrapping around their bodies, growing from their flesh as did the flowers.

Eapran faces extended into short muzzles, with feline noses and long whiskers. Their eyes were large and reflective to light, shielded by double lids covering vertical pupils. During daylight hours darkened goggles or wide-brimmed hats were popular accessories to shield them from the glare of the sun. Such accoutrements were tailored carefully however, to fit around the giant mobile ears which twitched and rotated independently atop their head, ever moving to pick up the slightest sound.

Their palms and soles were hairless, hands and feet not shaped entirely unlike those of humans, but in profile reminiscent of paws, with shorter digits and a rounder shape. They lacked no dexterity however, and with retractable claws to go along with their needle-sharp teeth they boasted impressive armament.

These claws were another sign of the exceptional biology at work within the Eapran body, for they were not formed by keratin, but hardened wood. These grew naturally from their fingers at will, while from their limbs and tails Eaprans could extend vines like whips.

Some could do more still, their hybridized forms boasting the properties and possibilities of both plant and animal.

Few, however, could do more than Prime Phytomancer Quercus, yet even they, with all their years and wisdom, trembled as the shockwave tore through Eapra.

Never had the aged phytomancer felt such a thing as that, a power they could not comprehend, reaching out across impossible distance. Phytomancy was not the magic of the hateful humans or the fearsome demons, but like all forms of the supernatural arts, it was one of manipulation of essence within a medium.

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This energy however… this was more than just essence.

That sensation was one Quercus had not felt in centuries, but it was one they could never forget.

They barely noticed the glass tube fall from their slim hand. It’s shattering went ignored, as did the slow ooze of acidic purple that ate into the tabletop.

The power of the gods was manifest on the face of Arcadia once more.

~~~

In the capital of Bellwood Earl Educar Randire had felt the distant shaking as he relaxed in the royal garden, but more disturbing was the report which came from the court mages the following day. After the tremors stopped he had returned to his palatial offices and issued the necessary commands for the investigation. He had not left them since then, collating reports and issuing orders.

His office was uselessly expansive, but in that uselessness was a purpose; a display of power and authority. The excess space was tastefully filled with elegant carvings and refined artworks, clarifying to guests both his wealth and good taste.

He leant back wearily against the plush leather of his chair, massaging his throbbing forehead. He would have dearly liked to retreat to the calm of the palace garden, or better yet the woodlands of his earldom. Instead he leafed once more through the written information on his expansive desk, fearful eyes scanning for some detail he might have missed.

The first sheet was one submitted earlier that day, along with a verbal briefing. Even knowing the contents his eyes strained to read the messy scrawl of Archmage Luthron’s hand.

Privately he regretted the appointment of the uppity old wizard – decrepit and erratic, the man was far from the archmages of old – but Bellwood couldn’t be seen to be without at least one archmages at court, especially with war brewing.

The vacancy had been unfortunate, but the last archmage had proved… inconvenient. With his early death the Order had wanted a young woman to lead them. She was, they claimed, an unparalleled talent, fiercely loyal to Bellwood and experienced in the practical use of magic from her adventuring days.

Naturally Randire had put a stop to that.

It was one thing to allow a noblewoman to hold the post, breeding could overcome the hindrance of gender after all, but a commoner, a former ‘adventurer’ who sold her spells for coin as though she were a prostitute selling her body… unthinkable.

Unfortunately, his interference with the Order’s first choice made the second harder to reject. Luthron was everything the woman was not, born of good stock, raised in rarified conditions and with the connections and graces expected of court. That his intellect was stunted, his mind avaricious and his graces dismal were the prices Randire had been forced to pay.

Luthron had a talent for drama at least. His careless writing made the event of that afternoon sound far more exciting than the tremors had suggested. Randire wanted to dismiss that as Luthron’s posturing and self-importance, but the others of the Order corroborated the observations. Even if they had not, the second report was ample proof of the dire magnitude of the event.

Conclusions were vague in the report from the wizard. The general belief among the court mages was that a spell of previously unimaginable scale had been cast, somewhere within or below the great wasteland that was the Cyclopean Bones. How, none could say – the pitiful savages eking out their lives in the barren mountains were hardly capable of it.

It wasn’t the report of the wizards that had Randire sweating unpleasantly in the cool stone chambers. For that he had the second report to thank, the one which had just arrived from the clergy.

The Solar Church in the capital had detected the event too, as had the others, but their experience of the disturbance was radically different.

All agreed the event was no spell. It was something more, something greater than mortal magic. They called it an omen, a portent of great danger, but they were afraid to openly name it honestly.

It was the power of the gods themselves.

What could have compelled the divine creators to intervene so violently in Arcadia none could say. There were countless guesses. Some churches said it was divine punishment, for the sinful demons or the monsters of the mountains. Others believed it to mark the advent of a new apostle. One cleric of the Temple of Thalassa insisted it was the paroxysms of a quarrel between gods themselves.

On one point all were certain; the gods were enraged.

The Mother of all Creation, The Goddess of the Sun, Soleil, had made known her wrath. In prayer the High Priestess of Bellwood had sensed The Sun’s anger, through the visions reserved only for those chosen by the Divine.

The Priestess had remained in prayer and contemplation since the event, hoping to learn more, but she had met no success. There were few, even among the long history of the Solar Church, who could interpret the will of the Goddess.

Educar Randire kept the faith of The Sun Goddess, as all sane men should, and prayed to a dozen more Gods beside, but he concerned himself far more with the mortal realities than the vagaries of theology. He had not risen to the post of First Minister through worship and piety, but through manipulation and pragmatism. Randire’s foes were like him, mortal beings with mortal minds, mortal motivations and weaknesses.

The Gods were real of course – their influence in the world was proof of that, and their protection was coveted by all – but the influence and the protection they worked were subtle and delicate. The Gods commanded the faithful, and the faithful acted as their mortal agents. Even in times of great need it would be the sacred Apostles, mortals granted the blessings of the Divine, who would intervene. Or so it normally was.

But the Goddess was enraged, as if she sought to punish those who had displeased her. That was something beyond Randire’s comprehension. Something outside of his control. That scared him.

He was far from alone. The churches were packed and even those walking the streets did so with prayers on their lips. All of Bellwood was afraid. The other countries must surely be the same. Who would protect the people from the anger of their own Gods?

Foolish voices in the churches were calling for the army to march south, to seek the source of the divine disturbance and appease The Sun, but that was impossible.

The Cyclopean Bones was a wasteland of savages, yes, but they were numerous and powerful savages. Bellwood had not sustained itself for over a thousand years by starting wars with subhuman monstrosities, or ill-fated crusades into the barren lands no nation claimed.

The clerics would be pacified, and in time the people would too… provided no more such events occurred. There could be no crusade to hunt for phantom devils. Leave such follies to men like Baron Faron.

Still, it was yet another source of strife and discord since the news of Ersetu’s attack.

That should have been the main business of the day, but the omen had reduced the demonic war against Tiron to a mere footnote.

Within the plains that stretched from the Cyclopean Bones in the South to the Son Mountains in the North, Tiron was the largest of the nations in what was named the Hronaram Gulf.

Separated from Bellwood by the detestable Arelat, the Tironians were no friends to the Bellic people, but the smaller nation had made itself useful to the larger. While Bellwood monopolized the Bloodsucking Forest no larger state could move in to lay claim to the riches of the region. The balance of power served both states well.

But with the military power beleaguered as they now were, Bellwood could expect no help should any of their more immediate neighbors choose to move against them.

That should have been unthinkable; the Gods themselves were angered and humanity was under attack by the foul demonkind. All right-thinking people should unite to destroy the demonic threat in the name of The Sun.

But to many the demons were Tiron’s problem now. There were many smaller states in the Hronaram Gulf with large ambitions and lingering grudges. They would use the opportunity to advance their power.

~~~

The tremulations of unspeakable power spoken flashed over the Hronaram Gulf in mere moments, passing on across all the continent of Aludor. Cresting the Son Mountains it raced down through the Mistwood, and on to the vale of distant Bosquerime.

In that far, frozen North the shaking of the land sloughed snow from branches in the Everwood, and threw up dazzling streams of ice from the impassable Eburnean Peaks to join the frostwind.

In the deep reaches of the South, beyond even the Thabian Desert, the recoiling quiver of Reality against the unnatural dispersed the thick clouds that poured monsoon waters on unknown rainforests, momentary sunlight setting alien leaves steaming and leaving more alien people to wonder at the event that had transpired.

As the shock of Safkhet’s transgression spread across land and water it shook mortals and stirred nations, a hundred courts meeting in dismay to discuss the momentous cataclysm, as though it were the mere spark of things to come.

Clear across the continent, every nation sensed the divine power of the Sepulchre – as did those beyond it, past the deadly seas and impassable mountains, until the supernal shock had ringed the great globe of Arcadia, and at last decayed, echoing and fading as the energies subsided.

But before it did it roused more than just the peoples of that planet.

The power of the Sepulchre and the spell of the one to command it were felt; heard throughout all of that great world. Words hung on the breeze, and wormed through the soil, vibrating in the rock and rippling the waters, the power of the divine permeating those distant, quiet places that were long ignored or dead.

In unreachable mountains the Words of Creation echoed through valleys where no human had ever set foot.

In ancient, impenetrable forests they were whispered by the deep roots of the trees as they drove ever deeper into the earth.

Beneath towering glaciers they hummed in the frozen stillness of desolation.

In the forgotten, sleeping places at the edges of the world, a voice shattered the quiet, an irresistible will calling antediluvian things to wake.

~~~

In his divine realm, Myr’s attention was called away from his project by a signal, one from Arcadia.

He had been scrying on the world of the hateful Sun God for millennia, watching ever for signs of her weakness, but of late his attention had been focused on the ridiculous antics of the human he had placed there.

It was a wretched being, aberrant in its capabilities and grotesque in its mind. No amount of patience or education had changed it, even after the long struggle it had faced to survive his divine realm. So it was that Myr had elected to take what satisfaction he could from the failure, casting it out with a parting curse upon its very soul.

The human, extraordinary as it was, determined and enduring though it might be, would die. That was the only destiny left to a being excommunicated from all fate, stripped of all wards against all the outrageous fortune of a chaotic Reality unleashed.

The best the human could do was to show him an interesting death, one to repay some measure of the great lengths the God of Darkness had gone to. Perhaps it would even cause a pleasing headache for Soleil in the process.

So he had thought.

The human had not disappointed him.

Although he could only peer down from high above, a god could make much of even the distant sights and dim sounds of the scrying tools.

He saw its flight from the monsters of the forest, although its resistance to the blades and curses of the place were disappointing.

Its failure to win over those of its own kind was most gratifying, and its subsequent battle with the so-called Stormqueen was better still.

Myr had watched with glee as the mortal worm made enemies of all it encountered. Soon it would earn the enmity of even Nemoi herself.

The fight would have been a pleasing, if abrupt conclusion; death at the hands – and tail – of the Harpies, but once more the human had defied his expectations. The thing was as disgustingly durable as it was arrogant, and somehow it seemed to have survived and won over the Harpies – and with them the foolish Sky Goddess.

For a time then Myr had feared that he had made a mistake with his punishment. Far from suffering, the human seemed to be thriving, expanding its powers and skills with the aid of harpy teachers. That was the last thing Myr wanted to see.

But he had worried for nothing.

The stupidity and arrogance of the wretched vermin won out, and Myr took a great, personal delight in watching the human’s downfall – in the most literal possible sense!

He had relished the pain and fear as the creature broke, as it realized its great folly and cursed its foolish existence, its defiance, its blasphemy against its rightful god. It was a fitting end to a miserable and unworthy life.

His only regret was that the chasm into which it plummeted was too deep for him to savor the final moment of demise.

The human’s soul would return to the Samsara, which even the Gods could not command, to one day reincarnate on another world, in another form. No trace of memory or mind would go with it. The being which had dared defy him had died there on Arcadia.

Or so Myr had believed, until this new signal came.

As he investigated the readings on his divine tools he discovered a shocking contradiction to all he had assumed.

The human lived. Somehow, impossibly, mutilated and cast into the bowels of the World, it had survived once more.

It had wormed its way down into the deepest parts of the godless Underworld, where even Myr could not look, and there it had come upon something that should never have been disturbed. Something Divine.

The God of Darkness could think of only one such object lurking beneath the Cyclopean Bones. The tomb of his savior, Cyclops, and the rift she had sealed.

Bitterness and hate surged once more, divine tools creaking as Myr’s aura erupted, pressing out on everything around him.

The human dared tread upon the site of his greatest humiliation, and meddle with the tomb of the heroic Goddess Cyclops?! For that vile worm to intrude upon the place of rest of one so beneficent was inexcusable.

Yet the defilement of that sacred place seemed no more than the newest of lows for the hateful mortal.

Burning rage simmered down to a colder hate as he contemplated the matter. To show such anger at a mere mortal was beneath him.

But… why would the mortal have done such a thing? Myr could not imagine what would motivate the human to interfere with the rift or tomb, or worse yet how such a thing could be accomplished.

Even if the human had known the language of Divine Creation, even the Elder Gods did not weave new realities lightly. A mere mortal would be destroyed even to think the words. Speaking but the smallest utterance in the Divine tongue would shatter and unmake such a flimsy being.

Yet… had the human not endured his divine aura?

It was an abomination, one unbroken by all his trials, one to withstand even the rage of the Great God Myr.

But even if there could exist a mortal capable of surviving the act, the language itself was the preserve of the Divine, known only to the Gods.

A horrible thought struck Myr.

A thought to make the divinity run cold through his corpus.

Fearfully he checked his tools, building dread presaging what he found.

There it was. The record of the knowledge he had injected each candidate with.

Arcadia was a world of countless tongues, mundane and magical. Myr had meant for his apostles to be unimpeded in communication or in combat, and thus he had given each his complete archive of all recorded languages.

Safkhet spoke the Words of Creation.