Stardeep

CHAPTER TWO

Stardeep, Epoch Chamber

Telarian saw what protruded from the thunderhead's belly. It was not alive-not quite. A glyph-scribed obelisk wrapped in eternal storm soared above the world. A writhing frieze was carved on the age-worn exterior depicting thousands of interconnected pictures. The inscriptions constantly shifted and changed, as if unseen carvers swarmed across the stone face, engraving atrocities to the beat of a mad drummer. The full meaning of the evolving image invoked a concept too ghastly for a mortal mind to comprehend and remain sane. Telarian jerked his gaze away, but felt understanding bridge the gap anyway.

Slime-crusted creatures crept within the obelisk's hollow interior. The vast object was inhabited, a primeval city regurgitated into the world that had forgotten its existence.

A squalid miasma altered reality in its vicinity, unfettering vast creatures of the deeps, giving them mastery of the sky as they before hunted the sunless seas. Tentacles slithered and crawled in cold rookeries encrusting the vast object's sheer sides.

But these were mere servitors, children compared to the sinful, gelatinous carapaces of those creatures within. Their minds churned with philosophies inimical to all beasts not part of their ancient Sovereignty. They waited for the call of mortal priests who perverted their souls and hollowed their minds to serve abominations.

Roused from the drowned depths, the fabled city was fable no more.

Telarian screamed and opened his eyes.

He lay on the floor in the center of a divinatory circle. The circle's periphery was decorated with skulls, hourglasses, butterfly wings, and unidentifiable sigils. A twelve-pointed star was inscribed inside the curved pattern. Smudgy lines of burning incense rose from each of the twelve corners. .

. . which meant the circle hadn't been broken. Telarian wished he could sigh in relief; instead, he wanted to scream again. If the pattern had been breached, he might have been able to convince himself he'd experienced a false foretelling. But his view into the far future, as chancy and unreliable as such arts were, remained accurate, unchanging, and too awful for Telarian to accept. The same scene had blistered his mind each time he looked so far forward.

He rolled to his stomach and pushed himself to his feet. Muscles in his legs shook from having clenched too long without ease. The scabbard of his new blade knocked awkwardly against his thigh. He wasn't used to carrying such a thing. But desperate times were the mother of desperate strategies.

Telarian walked the circle's exterior and carefully pinched off each burning stick of incense. With each glowing ember doused, he spoke a mental syllable designed to calm the mind and moor the spirit. When it came to the art of divination, ritual was important. Not so much for its own sake, but as a way to condition the mind against the rigors of peeling away the present to reveal the future. Most diviners could see heartbeats or moments ahead with relatively little effort, but days and years. . few could match Telarian's skill. He'd pushed the art forward by centuries during his time in Stardeep. But he wasn't vain about his accomplishments.

As a Keeper of the Cerulean Sign in the heart of the dungeon constructed to hold the Traitor, unmatched resources were available to Telarian for his research. He had tapped those resources, especially the singularly potent construct Cynosure. His interactions with Delphe, his co-Keeper, were few and far between. Her duties monitoring the Well were substantial, and thus her relative absence granted Telarian free reign in the Outer Bastion. Not that she had any direct authority over him, nor could he command her. Still, best to keep Delphe mollified. Delphe's problem was she didn't quite know what to make of his ability for prophecy, and thus often failed to appreciate the personal costs true visions of the future demanded. In the end, when he labored to pierce the veil of the far future, he kindly refrained from telling her, and she did not complain.

Of course, his lapse in telling Delphe of his construction of the Epoch Chamber, the chamber wherein he stood at that moment, might one day make her doubt him. Nor would she look kindly upon him should she discover that he often directed Cynosure to lie about his location. It was a risk he was willing to take.

The Epoch Chamber was smoothly spherical. Its lower portion sloshed with mystical fluid he'd distilled from years of dream-wandering. A disk, scribed with a twelve-pointed star, floated immovably on the surface of the fluid, and when Telarian reclined in its center, his divinatory ability was enhanced by orders of magnitude. He'd predicted fires, earthquakes, the deaths of kings, and the initiation of wars years prior to their occurrences. He'd never been wrong.

Was there anything he couldn't foresee?

Perhaps, but he cared to preview only a single event. He obsessed over it, and each time the vision thundered through his mind's eye, his despair grew.

Despair wasn't an emotion a Keeper could afford, so he converted melancholy to a desperate plan. He disavowed the future he saw. He would prevent it from occurring. If he did less, could he honestly claim to be a guardian of the Cerulean Sign?

And so, his arrangements proceeded-daring, appalling arrangements that, if successful, might prevent the horrid soaring city of his vision from ascending.

The city he had seen in the thundercloud was Xxiphu, and it was inhabited by aberrations of the ancient world, creatures known as aboleths that were old when the sun was yet young. While aboleth splinter populations persisted in the world, Xxiphu was the seat of the Abolethic Sovereignty, possessed of a malignancy inconceivable. If it rose from Faer?n's core, shorn of its supposed dependency on the depths.. could an age of terror and slavery be far behind?