of a shattered city.
The scene before him blurred, light strobing erratically across it, as though the sun was racing through the sky far above.
Eventually the light stabilised and Silus could see survivors crawling through the ruins.
At the centre of the broken citadel sat the great black rock that he had followed into Twilight's skies. Dark tendrils were reaching out from the burnt and pitted stone, and where they touched the Calma survivors a horrible and violent change wracked their bodies.
The sheen of their scintillant scales darkened to a pitch black, while the fronds of their hands retracted and stiffened, razor sharp claws bursting from the flesh of their newly forming fingers. The process looked agonisingly painful and the screams of the creatures confirmed the torment they were in.
The creatures got stiffly to their feet as they changed, their toes elongating and sprouting vicious-looking talons that dug into the seabed; their jaws shattered and then slowly reformed, their mouths now lined with long sharp teeth. As the glowing nodes fell away from the creatures' faces, Silus knew exactly what he was looking at.
Chadassa.
The newly birthed Chadassa moved through the rubble, dispatching any of the survivors too weak or gravely wounded to make the change. As they experienced their first kills, Silus could sense their joy. Part of him — for the briefest of moments — even shared in it, but he bit down on this dangerous lust, burying it deep.
See the birth of the emissaries of the Great Ocean. See the first tentative steps of your kin.
Silus wouldn't have called their steps tentative. The Chadassa strode through the broken city killing anything that was not their own kind.
Now witness the rise of the Chadassa.
A great war followed, a wave of destruction wrought across the ocean by this fledgling race, Calma city after Calma city falling to their relentless onslaught.
But there was some resistance. Through necessity the Calma had to learn the art of war, but such a talent did not come naturally to a race who had lived in peace for most of their lives. Mistakes were made, more of their cities were lost and by the time they began to fight back with anything like success, their populous had been decimated.
Some Calma, in their desperation to save themselves, crawled onto land. But they soon found their hides drying out and cracking under the onslaught of the merciless sun.
The inhabitants of Twilight decided to take mercy on them.
Silus saw the shores of Nurn strewn with the bodies of Calma. Moving amongst them were lithe figures with pale skin and almond eyes the colour of Kerberos. Silus realised that they were elves — that ancient and beautiful race that had been dead for millennia — and, as the creatures of legend began to sing, he saw the birth of the human race.
Under the influence of the elven magic the Calma began to change where they lay. Their scales lost their sheen, gaining the soft pastel colours of flesh, their limbs shortened as hands and feet began to form, their tails withdrew into their bodies, their gills closed up and their jaws realigned as hair sprouted from newly shaped skulls. All along the Twilight coast the human race took their first breath and, looking up at Kerberos, they let loose their first cry.
With the change wrought, the elves sang one last song. The song of forgetfulness.
All knowledge of their brethren in the sea was lost to the human race. They forgot the Calma — their legends and culture — and began to form their own communities. In saving them, the elves had severed their roots. But they were satisfied that they had at least partly turned the tide of genocide. Only the few Calma who remained below the waves knew the truth concerning the human race and they guarded the secret as they continued to evade the attentions of the Chadassa.
However, it didn't take long for the Chadassa to find out the truth.
Silus watched as the sea demons built their empire on the ruins of the Calma's, growing in strength and breeding with an alarming rapidity. From infants, their growth to maturity took only a couple of years, and they began to reproduce almost as soon as they had shed their youth. Soon they ruled their submarine world with a ruthless efficiency, exploiting the ocean's resources, devastating whole swathes of seabed in the building of their cities.
As the centuries passed, the Chadassa began to feel that the conquest of Twilight's seas had not been enough. Jealously regarding the land that had been denied to them, they began to mobilise for an invasion.
As they strode from the waves, however, the Chadassa found that the humans had lost the Calma's propensity for peace, and they fought with an unbridled ferocity that matched the Chadassa's own.
There was, however, an even greater impediment to the Chadassa's plans for conquest of land.
As the Chadassa fought on the surface they soon found themselves sickening. They tried to fight on, but after only a brief time their bodies' shortcomings forced them to retreat back beneath the waves.
For generation after generation my creations brooded on their inadequacies, but despite their pleas to me I could not intervene. The voice of the Chadassa god told Silus. For my act of creation I was banished beyond the void, where not even the stars shine, by the being you call Kerberos. But in my absence my children had begun to put a great plan into action.
The Chadassa reasoned that just as their bodies' inadequacies were as a result of the adaptation of the Calma physique, then these same inadequacies could be remedied by taking on more of the physical attributes of the humans. They resolved to breed a new race of Chadassa.
They choose a human female — your ancestor, Silus — and in her they planted the seed of what was to come. Her child was born with Chadassa blood in his veins, but it was weak. And so, the Chadassa waited and observed. Through each generation of your ancestors the thread strengthened until, in you, we finally saw evidence of its burgeoning powers.
It is with your seed that the Land Walkers will be born and my children will take Twilight. Already they have pulled me out of exile through the power of their will and soon everything you know will become the one Great Ocean. The time of the Great Flood will be upon us all. All reality will be flooded with my dark waters until there will be only the Chadassa.
Silus found himself back on the surface of the dark moon, the three facsimiles standing before him.
The thing that looked like Katya reached out and took his shoulder.
The Great Ocean will bring about the end of death. The end of wars and suffering.
It would be the end of everything. Zac would never grow up to experience the joys of living. Silus would never grow into his dotage alongside Katya, would never see the seed of the family they had planted bloom and flourish. If this thing had reckoned that it would persuade Silus to side with the Chadassa, then it had failed. The blood of those creatures may run in his veins but it was his humanity that would overcome it.
'You already know my answer. I will never join with you.'
But you really have no choice Silus. I didn't bring you here just to share my vision with you. I brought you here as a diversion while the Chadassa finally caught up. It's already too late, there is nothing that you can do.
The Great Ocean let him go.
As Silus began to tumble back towards Twilight, his prayer was that he would be in time to save Katya and Zac.
There was an intense darkness for a moment, but then Silus opened his eyes and saw Bestion standing over him, his arm on his shoulder and a look of alarm on his face.
Around them the temple shook, fragments of stone beginning to crumble from the walls.
The door at the far end of the room burst open and an acolyte hurried in.
'Brother Bestion come quickly, something is destroying Morat!'
Chapter Eighteen
It took Silus a moment to realise that what was happening was not a part of his vision. The floor below him really was swaying like the deck of a storm-tossed ship and the masonry that was beginning to break away from the
