caught him squarely through his chest, like an arrow fired from a divine bow.
Time's passage slowed to a trickle. Raidon's momentum drained away, and he hung suspended by nothing save fiery pain. Something tugged at his neck. His amulet fell up and away into the sky as the links of its chain flamed blue and melted.
He strained, body and mind, reaching for the glinting stone. He couldn't afford to lose it! It was more than the Symbol of the Cerulean Sign; it was the only tangible effect left to him by his mother. His finger tips brushed its fleeing edge. The normally cerulean blue surrounding the white tree changed, as if infected with the blue fire.
'No!' he yelled into the timeless moment. He saw the amulet, like its chain, begin to flare. A moment later, it dissolved as it fell upward.
Left behind was an image of the symbol surrounded by a roil of insubstantial glyphs. He continued to reach anyway, straining against the temporal pause. If he could just touch the lingering glow of retreating energy, perhaps…
As if responding to his desire, the remnant flared. Its upward trajectory slowed, then reversed. The disembodied symbol slashed back down, striking Raidon's chest. Fire burned through his new coat and consumed it in an instant. The symbol's cerulean blue now fully matched the cobalt blue of the surrounding calamity-a subtle change, but enormous for what it implied. Not that Raidon was permitted any more time to think. The insubstantial symbol seared into his body, his mind, and his very soul.
Ali faded to blue, then to nothing.
CHAPTER TWO
Ten Years After the Spellplague The Year of Silent Death (1395 DR) The Depths of the Sea of Fallen Stars
The sea coach veered toward the wall, and then sawed away just as abruptly. The gargantuan nautilus shell shuddered and nearly collided with stone. Braided kelp reins strained as the beast pulling the conveyance through the inky water attempted to shake free of its harness.
Nogah was lightly tethered to the sea coach's deck at the open mouth of the nautilus. To the eyes of a surface dweller she seemed bloated, but no more so than any other member of her amphibious race.
Nogah's finely scaled, webbed hands pulled sharply on the reins that stretched down into the murk. Some of the cords were attached to the whisker-like barbels of the beast pulling the sea coach: a catfish the size of a small whale.
With the reins so attached, Nogah could steer the great fish up, down, left, right, or in any combination of directions. Now she pulled back on all the reins at once, sharply enough to inflict pain.
The creature's great flukes ceased their agitated movement. The fish drifted in the center of the vertical vent, waiting for either food or the next tweak on the reins. In the absolute darkness of the water-filled shaft, Nogah could only dimly make out the outline of the great beast, even with her keen, water-adapted sight. They were already far deeper than her kind were ever meant to descend.
The titanic catfish was rapidly becoming a troublesome liability for her expedition. The fish was not happy about being directed to swim so deep, so far past the bottom of the Sea of fallen Stars, straight down a drowned earth vent whose depth was unfathomed.
But the beast would serve. It had to. Failure was not an option for Nogah. If she failed, her status as a senior whip of the Queen of the Depths and Sea Mother would come into question, and the few kuo-toa who still followed her would reject her aberrant teaching and return to the traditional dogma of the majority. Nogah would become a wanderer, declared heretic by the other whips. She would likely be hunted for sport and possibly vengeance. Nogah had her enemies. They worked even now toward her undoing back in the shallow city of Olleth.
With one hand still grasping the reins, she pulled her pincer-staff from its holster and rapped sharply on the nautilus shell behind her tether post. The mammoth shell's winding interior was large enough to hold pockets of air, capable of serving as living space for six additional kuo-toa, though only she and one junior whip inhabited it. The few who retained enough respect to have accompanied Nogah on her journey of discovery remained in Olleth. She had set them to propagandize the expedition, lest her enemies sink her reputation while she was absent.
Curampah, her junior whip, slithered out of the opening, his bulging, silver-black eyes blinking a question. She had sponsored his study and apprenticeship to the Sea Mother's worship, and he owed her direct service, regardless of his opinion of the expedition's worthiness. This close, the tingle of electric affinity all whips shared danced on her scales.
'Curampah, what ails this beast?' she asked, tiny bubbles escaping upward with each word. 'It fed according to its usual schedule, yet it continues to balk.'
'Daughter of the Sea,' he replied, using the honorific due her, 'if I may, you have urged it downward past its span of strength. It grows weary. Even with the protective prayers enclosing us, some hint of the growing pressure beyond leaks inward. Can't you feel it, Nogah? I can, and it wearies me. My dreams are troubled.'
Nogah allowed her translucent, inner lids to half close, blurring Curampah's image. It was her conscious look of calculation, useful for cowing subordinates. It made them wonder if she would respond civilly or curse them to a literal, painful death.
The junior whip trod precariously close to disrespect. She knew to what he referred, and to lecture her about it was insolence, should she choose to view it as such. Even with the fortitude provided her by her connection to the Sea Mother, a fortitude that Curampah's fledgling association couldn't hope to match, she sensed the unrelenting grip of the sea. Beyond her magical barrier, it obstinately tried to crush them- catfish, nautilus shell, and scales-in one final spasm.
But she would not sing poison into his blood or cause his heart to explode, which he also knew. She had too few resources to throw away subordinates without greater cause than simply reminding her of unpleasant truths.
Under such conditions, any other senior kuo-toa whip would turn back or find another way downward.
But her tenacity was born of divine decree, or so she chose to believe.
True, no direct communication had occurred between her and the Sea Mother or any of the Sea Mother's exarchs… but what of her dreams? She knew the Sea Mother wanted something of her, something the divine being was somehow unable to articulate directly.
A frightening thought! If something prevented the Sea Mother's clear communication, it must be a dire threat indeed! At least, so Nogah interpreted the signs. Others, untroubled by dreams, declared Nogah unstable.
Despite the risk of being outcast, she persisted in her claims, describing how her visions revealed a taint welling up from a near-bottomless trench, a hole in the earth where none had been before.
And hadn't she been vindicated with the discovery of a newborn vent's existence? And how else could she have predicted its location in the dim, uncharted depths?
Despite her successful predictions, or perhaps because of them, Nogah remained alone in her conviction that the Sea Mother had revealed the cavity for a reason. She was convinced the newly opened vent must be plumbed, and no argument could sway her. The other whips of the Sea Mother told her the cavity was just one more altered feature of the landscape left in the Spellplague's wake a decade earlier. By every estimation, this particular seafloor vent numbered among the least remarkable of the changes wrought by the Weave's collapse. When compared to whole kingdoms erased, continents rearranged, plaguechanged monstrosities, floating motes of water and land, renewed contact with Abeir, and the real threat that the Sea of Fallen Stars would drain completely into the Underdark… yes, this particular vent seemed a minor issue. The kuo-toa were more concerned that even the celestial and infernal realms themselves still fluctuated. The Spellplague had chewed through earth, stone, magic, and planar boundaries as readily as through fallible flesh. Empty, drowned crevices that apparently led nowhere were judged a waste of attention.
Thus, the senior whips decreed Nogah's plan would divert resources that could be better used elsewhere. Threats to the people were always gathering. The Weave's failure, combined with the ongoing realignment of the celestial dominions, put even the Sea Mother at risk!
Nogah growled. As if her current task were not meant to stem just such a threat! Hadn't the Sea Mother directed her on this venture through her strange silences, as if urging Nogah to investigate the mystery? The other
