The Tyranny of the Night

It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world faces an age of fear, of conflict, of grand sorcery, of great change, and of greater despair amongst mortal men. And the cliffs of ice creep forward.

Great kings walk the earth. They cannot help but collide. Great ideas sweep back and forth across the face of a habitable world that is shrinking. Those cannot help but fire hatred and fear amongst adherents of dogmas and doctrines under increasing pressure.

As always, those who do the world's work most dearly pay the price of the world's pain.

CHAOS SCRIBBLES WITH NO REGARD TO LINEAR OR NARRATIVE thought. Events in Andoray, in the twilight of the sturlanger era, when the ice walls are still a distant curiosity, precede those in Firaldia, Calzir, Dreanger, the Holy Lands, and the End of Connec by two centuries.

Events among the Wells of Ihrian seldom seem connected to anything else, early on. That region is in permanent ferment There are as many sides to a question as there are city-states capable of raising militias.

The just cause, always, is rooted in religion. The private motivation might be greed, power hunger, the lure of loot, or revenge for last year's holy mission by some old enemy. But the squabbling princes and primates are, in general, true believers.

The feud between the Grail Emperor and the Patriarch is nothing new. The penchant of the Patriarch to preach holy war is nothing new. The fratricidal mischief between Santerin and Arnhand is heating up again. Their great families have feudal obligations to both monarchies. Confused feudal ties generate absurdities. Father can face son across the bloody field.

The divine conspiracy is no great engine with goose-greased parts turning over smoothly. It is a drunken tarantella in a cosmic town square where the dancers frequently forget what they are doing and wander off drunkenly, bumping into things, before purpose is recollected.

And, like ants at their labors in the town common, those who do the world's work will, too frequently, enjoy the sudden, unpredictable strike of an inebriant's flashing hoof.