Book I..........................Temos
Book II........................Adas
Book III.......................Daenland
Book IV.......................Dromia
Book V........................The Empire of the West
Book VI.........................The Holy Mountain
A fisherman slept by the sea. On a slab of stone he slept, covered with old carvings, with signs and sacred symbols now almost worn away. Cracked and grey, the slab lay halfway in the sea, which crept along its angled mass, crawling ever higher--a million tiny fingers clawing paths from the abyss.
The hands of the fisherman twitched. His eyes rolled in their
lids. His lips, silent, trembled as water climbed the latticework
of runes, and softly touched his toes.
The fisherman was dreaming of fish.
Flickering through darkness sparks of silver shone, gathering
in balls of spinning rainbows then bursting, flashing free, in
shards of living flame. Like swarms of bolts of lightning they
hurtled down the deep. And the fisherman was falling, too heavy
and weak to rise, surrounded on all sides by countless glittering
scales and eyes.
In desperation, freezing, his swelling lungs aflame, the fisherman
swam for them, his unfeeling icy fingers cracking open for a grasp.
But always, every one, with twitch of blinkless eye and flick
of veined-glass tail, evaded his embrace, and headlong hurled
itself along upswirling bubbled columns, slashing out of sight.
Blinded and alone, the fisherman continued his descent toward
the foundations of the world. And as he sank a cold like he had
never dreamed arose, slithering to his head up from his toes to
wrap him tightly in a winding sheet of ice.
Suddenly, from everywhere at once, a vast inhuman groaning filled
the lightless void.
The fisherman unhinged his jaws to scream--but then the depths poured in, engorging him with ice that burst through every organ, limb and vein like a thousand deep-struck knives. In a single surging instant his eyes exploded from his head into a broken double gauze of layered clouds, while his fingers, trembling madly, split off from his hands, and trailing beads of frozen blood hissed free into the sea. His human heart convulsed--and then collapsed: its broken substance stiffening into passionless, gelid stone.
A single livid flame exploded through his brain.
Then there was nothing. And less than nothing.