He even counted among his followers a lone Elven woman, an exile from her people who refused to disclose her reasons for joining the Almovaads. It was enough for Kyroun that someone from the most elusive of all the races of Cym Dinath would choose to join his cause. He suspected that the woman possessed qualities she kept hidden from him. In due time, he would learn what they were.
As the ascendance of the Almovaads increased, so did the jealousies of the other gods’ priests. They could not oppose Kyroun openly, for he had gained the favor of Lumaron’s rulers. Instead, they plotted in secret, pooling their resentment and their resources for a swift, sudden strike.
But Almovaar warned Kyroun of what was to come. The deity spoke to him through the medium of Ishimbi statuette the Seer kept with him at all times.
These people are unworthy of you or me, Kyroun, Almovaar said. I see now that our destiny lies in a place far from here.
“What is this place?” Kyroun asked.
Your true homeland.
“But this is my homeland,” Kyroun protested.
No. Your family forsakes you. And even now, those who serve other gods are coming to slay you. You and I are not wanted or needed here. You and I are needed in the home of the one who made this object.
Kyroun shook his head in disbelief. Family history had told him Yekunu had been forever separated from his faraway homeland by storms that never ceased. Yet now his god was telling him that was where he needed to go.
The Seer’s hesitation lasted less than a moment. Almovaar had not yet failed him yet. And he would not fail Almovaar.
“We will go,” he said to the sculpture in his hands, even as Almovaar’s presence faded yet again.
When the mob the rival priests had incited arrived, bent on destroying the Temple of Almovaar, it stopped short in fear and astonishment.
What stood before them was not the restored, resplendent house of the elder god. Instead, they saw the temple as it had been before the Seer Kyroun had returned from his time among the Yaghans – crumbling, deserted, spider-haunted.
Of Kyroun and the Almovaad congregation, there was not even the slightest of signs ...
Kyroun had gathered his remaining followers at the edge of the Bashoob. There, he told them of the new mission Almovaar had revealed: a journey to a place that no longer existed on maps of the known world.
He offered them a choice. They could join him in his quest for the lost homeland of his ancestor. Or they could go elsewhere – anywhere other than Lumaron, where the Almovaads were clearly no longer welcome. For himself, the choice was inevitable and irrevocable.
“I will go to Matile, as Almovaar commands,” Kyroun told them. “Almovaar will protect us from the storms. If necessary, I will go to Matile alone.”
Only a small fraction of the Believers refused to follow their Seer when he began to walk westward across the Bashoob. The rest – a congregation numbering nearly a thousand – joined him on the long journey to Fiadol, greatest of the seafaring kingdoms in Cym Dinath.
Along the way, additional Believers had deserted, frightened by the prospect of sailing into the teeth of an endless storm. But others – outsiders who listened to the sermons Kyroun preached whenever the Almovaads stopped to rest – became Believers and took the places of those who had fallen away, so that in the end their numbers became larger than ever.
Finally they reached Fiadol, a swaggering coastal city laden with the wealth of the world gained through trade. There, Kyroun searched for a ship-captain willing to undertake a seemingly suicidal voyage into the Sea of Storms, an area even the most foolhardy seamen shunned.
With the treasure his sect had accumulated and taken from Lumaron, Kyroun could have purchased an entire fleet. But none of Fiadol’s captains was willing to sail into a maelstrom of wind and rain that had no known end, regardless of the Seer’s repeated assurances of protection from his obscure god.
“For all you know, this Ma-teel place of yours could be nothing more than a bunch of washed-out ruins,” one grizzled sea-dog told him. “It might even be under water by now.”
Kyroun knew that was not true. He also knew Matile was better-remembered in Fiadol than the skeptical captain had indicated. But all he could offer for veracity was the Ishimbi statuette and the word of Almovaar, neither of which meant much to a non-Believer. Even demonstrations of his hard-won skills at weather-control magic failed to impress the seafarers. But they did bring down the disapproval of Fiadol’s established priesthood, whose members warned him to cease his encroachments on their sphere of influence.
It seemed Kyroun’s voyage had ended before it could ever begin. Some of his followers even began to question the wisdom of his determination to find the lost land of his distant ancestor.
Then one of the Believers found Pel Muldure, a captain who was down on his luck and landbound. Lured by a promise of wealth, Muldure had undertaken a privateering venture that had gone awry. Disavowed by the Fiadolian noble who had hired him, Muldure had been judged harshly by the seamen’s tribunal, losing both his ship and captaincy credentials for his troubles.
The latter he had regained after a period of penance, and the payment of a large
